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“How do you find the love within? Easy. You must look inside, and become one with the love within. Before looking elsewhere to understand love, you must first look within, for the whole focal point of love is to come into your life and teach you to be extraordinary. This is the universal truth: The love within must speak to the love without.”
— Mickie Kent
Life is based on love. Love - or the absence of it - will be a part of our lives from the day we are born. Sculpted out from our formative years, in adulthood we will live out the love we were shown as children. How strong its touch when young often decides how weighty its hand as an adult. And even though our love isn't always rewarded, when we make our decisions based on love, we feel it has a kind of rightness to them.
Naturally, if we don't get the expected payback we may feel hurt, or foolish (especially in dealings of a romantic nature), but then sometimes just doing something can be its own reward. One of the 20th Century's major poets, T.S. Eliot wrote that there was no vocabulary for love within a family, for instance, that this love was silent. From his 1959 play in verse, The Elder Statesman, to Eliot it was love "that's lived in but not looked at, love within the light of which all else is seen, the love within which all other love finds speech".
Arguably it is this "silent love" that speaks to all the other loves in our lives. We take our childhood within us; we may grow up, but we never grow out of those days in a way. When I was very young, I remember a family friend tell me that, when it rains, raindrops never hit one another because angels carry them down, and if they were to collide, they would disappear. Whenever it would rain after that, I would always try and watch the rain, fearful that they would collide and an angel would disappear. Even now, whenever it rains, I remember that story, and smile at how pliable and imaginative young minds are.
It's thought that our identity is partly shaped by the way we are treated by other people, as children and in adulthood - a concept psychologists call the "looking-glass self" - and it has the potential to colour our interactions with society. Many believe that childhood is one thing from which people never recover from, and that over time - the one thing that never breaks - for better or worse - is family, but it's not only family that deeply affects us; the long-term scars that childhood bullying can have on someone when they grow up is well documented. Of course, even if these obstruct the way to inner love, we can get back on track again. It can be hard, sometimes it will be hardest thing you've ever had to do, but it IS possible.
Nevertheless, Eliot's term - this "silent love" will help form what love means to us, and certainly we all have our own personal fantasy of what love should be or do. One of my favourite quotes on love is from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, because it's close to my own personal vision. It's where he says: "Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself, Love possesses not nor would it be possessed: For love is sufficient unto love". Gibran's words are not a lesson, as such, but a reminder that we can't direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But to really understand love, we need to go inside ourselves, because that's where our personal of vision will have formed - more importantly, before we had a chance to connect to our true self. Thus in love - and in life - when we are disconnected, meaning can elude us. Imagine love to be a book we read; disconnection from the story will mean the content doesn't always immediately offer itself to us as the reader. Sometimes the reader is required to work a little, if anything the story or message it portrays unclarifies - and so, before we can get to the stage where we can easily grasp our story and its complexities, we need to first break them down to our basics.
Before we opt for the poetic over the declarative, we first need to know where we stand. And where we stand will be a constantly evolving thing; it will change as we age. We are still in a stage of evolution not only as an individual throughout the stages of life, but as a species, too. We need to connect and reconnect with who we are, and who we are becoming, constantly. Any starter route to love, therefore, that is disconnected from your authentic self will cause conflict and, often unwittingly add to the confusion by trying to define love solely from another viewpoint that may conflict with us spiritually. And that's why we need to take a step back, and take a good look at ourselves, before we decide what love means to us.
Understanding the story of love
We may think we know what we want of love, but do we really? We can often get confused between love, liking and attraction, because there are so many different "types" of love. You can love someone as a friend, you can love someone as a cousin or sister or brother. You can share a platonic love.
Often we don't believe that men and women can share a platonic friendship, and this is reflected in popular culture. Rarely do we see such relationship depicted on the big screen. It does not exist in film unless it's about a girl and her best gay guy friend. I cannot think of more than one film where there are two main characters of the opposite sex and neither one is carrying a torch for the other.
The best example I can think of is Harry and Hermione in the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. They dance. They get each other through some hard times. There's never even a hint of romantic love that the author J.K. Rowling now regrets not adding into their relationship. However, it shows a different kind of love. Sometimes the family you need isn't the one you're born into.
And then there are different intensities of love. You can love someone with the love of the divine. You can love someone as a superstar you adore. You can love someone as the love of your life. The amount of passion, the amount of fire and the amount of energy that you have in your love for that person determines the intensity of that love. How much force is there, how much power and how much focus? Is it like a flood of warm sunlight shining on that person or is it like a laser beam completely targeted and burning ferociously with such intensity and fire?
There are different depths of love. How deep does that love go? Is it so deeply in rooted layers within layers that it’s almost next to impossible to remove? Can it come one moment and go the next, or will it remain forever even to the very ends of time and space? Whether short, sweet or passionate, in some ways we want our love to be like a sonnet, a short poem made up of one verse and 14 lines which is seen as the perfect love poem. Something that can express the true complexity of its emotion in an extremely condensed form.
Others, however, see love as less spiritual and more pained in its passion, and thus possibly more obtainable and human. For who, ultimately, hasn't felt loss, rejection and heartbreak? Sixteenth century English ambassador and lyrical poet Thomas Wyatt, whose sonnets were often about rejection, wrote, "I love another and thus I hate myself".
This unglamorous realism to love is really the absence of love in my opinion. We often mix our own human feelings of frustration, entitlement, bewilderment, rejection, abandonment in with our own failed expectations (which often have nothing to do with love itself), but Wyatt captured this messy quality of life as lived, and in doing so transformed English literature - setting the tone for English poets from Shakespeare to Philip Larkin.
Yet, how can we seek love in others, if we cannot find it within ourselves first? It makes love elusive not only in its manifestation, but in its definition as well. But what does love mean to us? What does it mean to you? In a perfect world, love should be the constant companion that sits down with us, talks with us, and teaches us. It should make our smile as warming as a sun. It should help us over the ditches in our lives. It should be that favourite sofa chair we move from house to house. The one object we can never do without.
From the minutiae of daily living to the magic of being, maybe the point is that love should be such a fantastical spiritual experience - at moments fun and frolic and at others terrifying - that we have difficulty understanding or describing exactly what love does to us. Some would say the very nature of being indefinable is what makes love, love.
What does love mean to you?
Of course, love should take us to a whole new level. But for a few it goes one step beyond to the esoteric. They believe that love is something far more that just a hormonal mind tool the body uses to propagate our species. They believe love has a reality of its own; its purpose is to teach us lessons already agreed to prior to this incarnation. Thus our destiny in life is not simply to marry and to have children and to do well in life, but to evolve the materials we have been given - in mind, body and spirit - to a deeper (or higher) level that gives us an inner understanding to existence itself.
Whichever way you pull it, love does indeed elevate. It can make you overcome differences in your chosen profession, make you an influential artist, or make you push a glittering career aside to concentrate on family instead. Love can help guide an individual when making those difficult life choices, and even influence political policies that aim to boost the well-being of a nation. In a recent survey when asked to choose the kind of society they would prefer to live in, 87% of adults in the United Kingdom picked "greatest overall happiness and well-being", over the 8% that said "greatest overall wealth".
Conversely, if the statistics are right, in the UK we seem to feel a lack of purpose more than any other Western society, although this is predicted to decrease. Possibly this is why we yearn for more well-being rather than money, and why we have begun to look for different ways to get value out of life. Across the world, history has shown that countries with virtually limitless wealth has not brought happiness to its people, and it feels like we in Britain - having so quickly forgotten our past post-war poverty - are only now starting to realise that.
Family lifestyles are also changing; we are all having to become more austere and family dependant in our economic outlook. Young people are settling down later in life, remaining in the family home for longer simply because it is too expensive to move out. The buttress of family is a protective layer during such times, and certainly, when we talk of attaining happiness or fulfilment, love is always part of the quota because it brings purpose to the conversation of life - and how you feel at any given time.
Love is like a point of reference for us, we use love to measure our scale of happiness, and it intuitively influences our choices and decisions. For instance, have you ever noticed how you can tell a lot about a person and their current emotional state by the music on their phone? Are they in love? Are they out of love? And like music, according to a psychological study, even colours affect the emotions of the mind, while your food and drink preferences can tell a lot about your state of being. Your preference over the type of coffee you drink reveals a lot about your personality, so we are told, and all these intuitive choices that subconsciously echo our frame of mind, some say, are signs of a disconnected self trying to get through to us.
Love also influences our outward actions; there is no motion without emotion that can help you get back on track to you again. Often if someone has shown us love, we want to reciprocate in kind; a selfless act of kindness that saves your life is an act many of us would hope to return to the sender. Furthermore, this chain forges stronger links between us; it gives us purpose and meaning.
Human beings need purpose, or a philosophy to love their lives by. Down the centuries, we have many to choose from, as diverse and driven as love itself. Although we need to all make our own way, sharing such wisdom is one good way to accumulate our own - keeping in mind that greatly differing philosophies WILL conflict.
Besides, searching for wisdom isn't about avoiding conflict, it's about getting you through it, and conflict based on civilised debate and respect can help to raise questions and ideas that may not have been otherwise. I often believe that reading stories about good motivational speakers and their techniques (or, my preference, radical thinkers) helps to get people to think in different ways - without necessarily having to buy into what they want to "sell".
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One theory on how we should live our lives is based on an altruistic philosophy. This is the theory that if all people would stop and think about how they can help each other out from time to time, the world would be a much happier place. More importantly, recent science has shown it's this nature of sharing and working together that helped our brains evolve in such a different way from its primate beginnings. This philosophy, or story, of helping each other is based on love, and is a great way to teach us all to share, and that there is nothing wrong with relying on others from time to time (once we are sure in who we are).
But there are philosophies that take a completely different view; these theories put forward the argument that being so selfless is actually against human nature. We should not act like altruistic, sacrificial lambs (indeed it's to our detriment to do so) but must come from a completely self-serving view. We should help others only if it helps us, or if they are of some value to us.
Finding your own philosophy to live by
Harsh as it may sound to some of us, this view was pushed by Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand, and which was avidly followed in eighties America in the 20th Century. Rand believed feelings were not tools of cognition or guides to reality, but the consequences of thought and action - not the primary source but the by-product of what we do.
According to Rand, being "selfish" meant being self-aware, and that rather than doing something because we feel like it, we should do it because we concluded consciously it was the right thing to do - right for whichever goal is being undertaken. We decide and choose rationally what steps we need to take to pursue that goal. So that if you take a given action, you do so because you think it's right.
Rand's theories are founded in the argument that humans must train themselves to be rational human beings, putting the mind above all else, and that a person must help themselves first, and yet hinder no one in their pursuit of that same goal, too. Although a lot of criticism has been aimed her for supporting a selfishly driven form of self-determinism, she also believed that one of the greatest values of life was romantic love. The purpose of life to Rand was to find your own happiness, and if that was selfishly putting value in another (by being in love with them), then that was acceptable to her philosophy.
An atheist like Rand, but coming from a different perspective, Sam Harris' basic message is that the time has come to freely question the idea of religious faith. Harris consistently criticises Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, which he says tend to be monolithic and ready to harm others only for their religion - and this is something Rand would have completely agreed with, as she believed religion subverted the young mind. The difference between Rand and Harris is that for self-determination we need to work together, for our own self-interest, but also for the interest of our species as a whole.
In my "Love in the Shadows" post, I wrote about how our fixation with looking at love through one single religious doctrine had helped forge the ever widening rifts between us we see today, and similarly Harris feels that the survival of civilisation is in danger because of a taboo against questioning religious beliefs, and that this taboo impedes progress toward more enlightened approaches to spirituality and ethics. However, he tends to shy away from the using the word "atheist", offering instead new terminology for putting logic and rationality up as the keystones for human harmony; again similar to Rand, but where arguably Rand looked through a completely single, individualistic lens, Harris seems to incorporate a philosophy that shifts between an altruistic one and Rand's objectivism.
| Stephen Fry: "How Can I Be Happy?" |
Ultimately, the common ground between all these philosophies is common ground of allowing an individual to choose his or her own path. Whether that focuses on helping others, and bringing the value of love into lives that way, or whether that is focusing completely on yourself, and coming from that view - or taking a more humanist merging like Harris - the similarity all three share is that the choice must be a conscious one, taken freely, with forethought and insight. In short, it's about finding your own philosophy to life, because the meaning of your life is whatever meaning YOU give it.
Searching for meaning, you could say, is really just another way to eliminate fear. Of course, fear is relative, and depends on vagaries like the time, mood and the darkness, but it's been said before with great validity that the worse thing to fear is fear itself. There is great truth in that I feel, because reducing ourselves to our fears makes us tiny, but reducing our fears cuts them down to size.
How to find the love within
In dealing with our fears, the major ingredient of any recipe for fear is the unknown - and existence is filled with unknowns, far too many to mention. So, being frightened is a normal human reaction, then, like breathing. This means it's how you react to fright that counts, and not the reason for your fear. Character is not found or made in the fear itself, but in the reaction to fear. The most successful amongst us will face fear and terror like all of us, but the difference is they face it down. When we realise all we actually fear is the feeling of fear we feel, then the realisation can be life enhancing.
When we use these philosophies to form our own path - to help us get over our fears, to live better lives, or as a route into the key to meaning, and all those ways we believe we can achieve meaning, namely love - then it can be character building. We are looking inwards with the help of outer wisdom, and discovering the true measure of who we are. For the love we carry inside is the true measure of our self-stature; and it's only once we find ourselves underwater that we can discover how tall we can really stand.
The capacity to love is a vital, rich, all consuming function of the human animal, and you can find nobility, sacrifice and love wherever you may seek out - especially in the heart. Although the potential of human suspicion and hatred might never cease to amaze, no matter what the future brings, our capacity to rise to the occasion remains unaltered, and our potential for tenacity and optimism continues as always, because we feel that, somehow, like-minded people will always stand together at the eleventh hour. It's a current reality that we all face the remorseless truth that no law can be passed that can abolish cruelty, hatred, or desperate need, but neither can any law censor blind animal courage for facing fear in times of greatest need.
At least this is my philosophy, and the one I follow; blind courage, but not blind faith. It's based on science, and a rational logic that realises it need the balance of the spiritual to create a truly humanist view. We must think at times without clouding emotion, but unless we FEEL, nothing we think will ever come to fruition. The way to do this is by find balance between the two; as much of an oxymoron as it may seem, we need to emote with more logic, and add more feeling to our rationale to see the human aspect of our challenges. Achieving such a balance is difficult, and indeed, it may never be achieved, but the purpose, and the meaning of life some would say, is to strive for equilibrium.
Real love, in this respect, is the balancer of life. Its absence unbalances, which we may mistake for love, but true love - an emotion that works with a logic and rationale all of its own - brings balance. It illustrates a more spiritual philosophy to follow. One that tells us we need to connect to our inner self, and with others, with this type of love, otherwise no amount of altruism, or selfishness, on our part will give us value or make us feel happy.
To do this, however, we need to face certain truths, and I mean that literally as well figuratively, because a core component of real love is honesty. It's how we recognise real love from the absence of it; love does not thrive in dishonesty. When we lie to other people, and when we lie to ourselves, all we are doing is pushing ourselves further away from real love.
When we lie, the sages say, we disconnect from our higher self; our minds become confused, and we cannot trust ourselves. This doesn't mean that although it's healthy to be brutally honest with ourselves, or that everyone else is at our level of understanding of self-criticism to accept such honesty from another person. Belief in self is paramount to hear the truth correctly.
Moreover, in line with another philosophy, according to the wisdom of the sages, it is better to remain silent than to speak a harsh or cruel truth, too. If we keep in mind that the purpose is to strive for balance, then we must not overdo honesty so much that it ends up hurting ourselves, or others. Hurting people with honesty will happen in the delivery of that truth (and if it's generally unsolicited), but if we are coming from a place of love, we will take care to tell the truth in a way that causes the least harm.
Before we offer an unsolicited opinion or criticism, the love within will advise us to pause and consider: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it useful? Is it kind? This is how it acts as a balancer, and once we find ourselves on a proper footing with honesty, we'll realise that the truth, like our fears, can become our best friend when we embrace it.
The Greek philosopher Sophocles said, that, "truly, to tell lies is not honourable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonourably is pardonable". Furthermore, when we perfect the practice of mindful, loving truthfulness, then we gain the power of manifesting our speech, some believe. What we say comes true. Based on this philosophy, then, for this reason it's essential for us to put to be mindful that what we say is beneficial in a compassionate and gentle way. But if we are already linked up strongly to the love within, then we are strong enough to handle the truth, when taking it and when dishing it out.
Walking the journey within
“So, you know, Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is it? It is perfectly apparent that he is monstrous, utterly monstrous, and deserves no respect whatsoever. The moment you banish him, your life becomes simpler, purer, cleaner, and more worth living in my opinion.”
— Stephen Fry
Subsequently, the philosophy that works for you, to find the love within you, will be a deeply personal one, but for it to be the real thing, it has to be honest, so it can make an honest man or woman out of you. It's an uphill struggle to achieve, but the rewards are great. Because real love based on honesty, and the integrity that brings, truly can set you free. To give an example, I want to end by telling you about a long-standing male friend of mine who - acting from a place of love and caring - told me five years ago his tightly kept secret. He was gay.
I was honoured that he believed our friendship to be strong enough for me to hear and accept him for who he was. Being gay is certainly not the risk it once was, but it still comes attached with stigma - especially amongst so many people who believe themselves to be spiritual, and yet can't accept that same-sex couples can fall in love, too.
I respect the people that hold to that philosophy, but I can't pretend to understand why they do. I was brought up in a family where homosexuality was never an issue, but even so, it was an issue for my twin flame and his family. It shouldn't make a difference; but would it? Would we be able to accept my friend into our family home once he found himself a partner?
In my personal philosophy, romantic love is not restricted to gender simply because of religious dogma, not when it means ostracising a huge section of society and treating them inhumanely. It's not rational, it's not human, and I knew my twin flame (for all his masculine exterior) to be the most kindest and gentle man I had ever met. His outward thoughts didn't gel with his authentic self. Because my friend loved me enough to be straightforward with me, I decided to be brave enough to be straightforward with him about my fears over my twin flame. I asked permission to share his secret with my twin flame, and to acknowledge his actions.
During that time, little by little with my help, my twin flame released the truths stored in his body, unveiling the root causes of his mental and emotional behaviours towards same-sex couples. It also served my friend and I, who took the opportunity to get to know each other again - and last year, when my friend married his twin flame, my twin love was his best man at the wedding.
If I hadn't been ready to face this truth, my twin flame's beliefs could have damaged, or even ended, the friendship with my friend. But instead, my friend opened the way for my twin flame and I to start examining ourselves. Some patterns were easy to discern and change; others so deeply embedded that we will always be in the process of uprooting them - and that's how it should be. Because life is always about striving for that balance.
The more layers of untruths I unearth, the more I discover to work through. But each layer I dig up takes me deeper within, closer to my inner core. And I find that the more honest I am with myself - in a loving, playful, non-judgemental, accepting way - the more honest others feel they can be around me.
There is a great freedom in being able to be who we really are, rather than hiding behind a mask of what we think others expect us to be. It allows us to be more spontaneous, more in tune with our creative intuitive side, and, ultimately, more open to explore the deepest truth of all - self-realisation. As we remove the layers of our cultural conditioning, we expand our beliefs to allow new perspectives, and as we clear inner spaces, we catch more and more glimpses of our true self.
It's all a cycle really; to find the love within, you must first look inside with an honest love that brings stability and balance, thus allowing you to see clearly where that love resides. Once you find it, it will direct your course for the rest of your life - and I promise you, its journey will take you out of this world.
Yours in love,
