On my way back home in the airport, Miss Dior in the duty-free shopping area breathes at me; “And you. What would you do for love?”, which makes me wonder – moving within a crowd of people distressed and overstimulated by the onslaught of commercial offers – if anyone here right now is feeling any love? Songs from the 1970s or 1980s come to mind like ‘Love is in the Air’, but I can only recognise the smell of perfumes, money and stress. There was this one song in my teenage years sung by Meat Loaf, ‘I would do anything for love’, that left a disturbing question that still comes up now and then; are we really willing to do anything for love? And what sort of love is it actually all these songs, movies, books and commercials that chaperone us through our lives from young till old fill us up with from head to toe with all the pictures of how love looks, sounds and is supposed to feel?
For most the reality of love seems to be a rollercoaster of ups and downs, a multitude of emotions that only come as a package as soon as one is going to embark on the tumultuous waters of relationship. But of course we experience love already much earlier and in different kinds of relationships like child-parent, friendship etc., and for some there may be a sense or knowing of love in relation to God. Just the same for me, I have not been an exception but the average love seeking and hoping for the best ordinary guy like most. And that’s where all the trouble commences – the need for seeking love.
Although I grew up in a family that was loving by all normal standards society would define love to be, I knew from early childhood onwards that something was not quite right, somehow not the way it should be. But as it is, I learned the ways of the world, became the person that turned out to be a normal grown-up man with many likable attributes and troubled with self-doubt, self-critique, intellectually controlled and arrogant, pretending to be independent but underneath lonely, isolated and desperately craving for love, intimacy and confirmation in all the ways I knew to look for what I thought would deliver me with the ultimate salvation. A salvation that somehow was only to be found in either a passionate, sexually fulfilling relationship with women or the utmost opposite, a life in seclusion from the world. Basically, I was living as an intellectual monk, delving into passionate relationships with women to quench the burning thirst that nothing ever satisfied.
Normal story really, just one of the many men and women who are ruled by the variety of pictures that so-called life has generously on offer but never led us to the promised land, therefore forever lost and seeking… until the point of settling for what worked best so far, an arrangement with life ‘as it is’. Underneath, the troubling voiceless cry for help; “There must be more. There must be more!” At that point in my life, surrendered to not expecting more and making the frugal best of it, a friend of old returned back from about three years living in Australia and something was different about her, something that none in our circle of friends or whoever I knew had undertaken in the recent years. She had started to apply what today is known as ‘The Way of The Livingness’, a simple but profound way of living, rich of the love, truth, depth and meaningfulness I was somehow looking out for all my life from childhood on. But without any sign in the world that such a way of living was actually existing and hence possible, I had mostly given up on the inner knowing, a knowing that needed confirmation for it to not be dismissed as outlandish. And so it began, my way back to the true love my innermost always had known exists and as I would learn and realise later on, is to be found right within ourselves.
The fact that we seek love obviously shows that we are somehow void of it: an aching hole we seek to fill, an absence that longs for love to be present – once again. Yes, once again, as how could we miss something we haven’t lost beforehand and therefore know all so well? That’s the seeming conundrum – we had it, we know it, we lost it, we look for it – but why on earth do we not find it but instead are forever seekers, never fully satisfied and settled with what we get to? Simple answer; we look for it in all the wrong places, outside of us, because we once gave ourselves away to the outer world out of need to belong. To receive at least some form of recognition when being met, seen and confirmed for who we innately are was not at hand. Seeing my friend starting to turn towards her inner self and the simple changes she was able to initiate made me wake up out of my slumber of early retirement from life. Some months later I got to know Serge Benhayon and the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom that since have been the most gracious companions on my return to the one true love.
My friend and I became lovers, or more precisely students of love… as it turned out to be quite some work to heal and clear the false imprints of love in relationship, ingrained behaviours and patterns, hurts from the past carried into the present and a flood of pictures that in part are conscious but mostly subconscious and are exposed only when honesty and the willingness to let them go are applied. It was then that the willingness to ‘do anything for love’ turned into its true meaning, i.e., to renounce and get out of the way anything and everything that forbids true love to naturally be the only way to be. It is not that love was or can ever be really lost, but it gets buried under the pain, disappointment, rejection, expectations, hopes and substitutes and everything that a loveless world throws at us. The bitter pill is that the moment we abandon ourselves – the inner-heart where love resides – we become contributors to the lovelessness in the world, a lost seeker of love who feeds into and from the supply and demand chain of false love in the various forms we have created to fill the aching void; a perpetual cycle of regurgitation until we are fed up with it and break free by turning the only way we have avoided for so long – back within where we know ourselves to be love by essence.
The return to love is a passage of exposure and revelation, a forever unfoldment towards the unconditional boundless one love that is the only love there is. And that is one of the great realisations that occur – love is. Before we give love, receive love, make love, express love, fall in love… and even when we lose, miss and seek love – we are love. It is our very nature and it cannot ever really be taken away from us. It is the denatured ways and versions we have made life and love to be that make us blind by choice, eyes wide shut, in order to delay the inevitable return. Therefore, it can be an arduous task to restore love in one’s life, not because anything about love is complicated or difficult – quite the opposite, nothing could be simpler – but because we tend to hold on to the conditions, complexities and complications that give us identity and a form of safety and protection from the hurts we have created in the first place.
It has taken me some time to step-by-step let go and leave behind the old ways and imbue life more and more with love, starting with self-love, eventually discovering love for and with another – and in recent times, the beholding quality of love as a way of being with everyone and the sense of being held by the divine love that once breathed us forth. He or she who walks the path of love is deeply religious by the very nature of love itself. And although we are love, to fully know it we need to live it. That is The Way of The Livingness.
