Love without a Name

7 minute read

Telling someone 'I love you!' does not come close to the love of which I speak. Everything we live in this society is only a reflection of this love, for which no name yet seems right, not even the name God. God is a name invented by religions, by people who wanted to believe that a force existed which had created and governed everything. At first, 'God was not Love', and later became 'God is Love', with Jesus's declaration that he was the Son of God and with the religion that subsequently formed around him.

I am not speaking about what I feel regarding this. I do not know whether or not it is true in reality. I do not tell stories or speak about what I believe. I do not try to speak about dreams or books. The path I recommend to everyone is to listen to the heart, if they feel something there.

God has been Love since Creation appeared, and if we look more deeply we can say that the Unmanifest Absolute, or the Void, which gave birth to Creation, is the true source of this love. Everything that exists contains this Love. It is the essence and the bond through which all of us are connected to one another and to existence.

I hear many people around me say that they love, but their love is nowhere near what it should be. Yet it is certainly something it could become. When you truly love, nothing exists apart from the person you love. For that person you renounce yourself and everything you desire in order to be with them, because this makes you happy. The rest is merely a way of living life because life has to be lived.

Love takes you outside the pattern. It stops you from choosing a job at the price of renouncing love merely so that you can live better, and from choosing someone only because they offer greater material stability. If you are the kind of person who places the material plane above love, do not be surprised that you never encounter the love of which I speak. It reveals itself only to those who give themselves completely to living it.

I was watching the film The Next Three Days, and the valuable thing I saw in it was its ability to explain how I see human love representing Divine Love: total sacrifice for the woman you love, or the reverse. It is true that a child was involved, but the man could have continued on his way had he not listened to his heart and gone to the end, because existence without the beloved was not an option. It is only a film, but its message can truly be lived. Perhaps many of us live it or have already lived it.

To believe in Love is far easier than to believe in the idea of God. Most of us have lived love, so it is something tested and felt. You do not believe in it merely because you were told to or because you read about it. In the end, you will believe that Love is your inner God. It is what makes you feel that you are more than an animal upon this Earth, not reason, despite the praise heaped upon reason by our society. If reason distinguishes us from animals, Love draws us closer to the idea of God.

We can see how rotten our society is when it glorifies the idea that reason governs the world. The society of the future, in which people live in peace, will be the one in which the heart governs. The sooner we discover this, the sooner our suffering will disappear.

God, which is to say Love, cannot make our lives easier. It will not remove the taxes we must pay in society, the hunger we feel or the children for whom we must care. Some people have succeeded in fleeing the communities in which they lived, entering smaller communities or living as hermits. Yet this is only a solution for sick people, even if it is a different kind of sickness from the one we live amid in the world.

The sickness of which I speak is inward. It is the sickness of the soul, because the soul feeds upon Love, which is the source and essence of its existence. Those who withdraw do so precisely to heal their hearts. Those who have healed later return to the world to show others the path by which they too may heal.

For thousands of years, humanity has tried to heal its soul, but lies and stories will never heal a soul that needs practice, not words. Words will indeed soothe it for a time, but in the end only practice will completely heal the world in which we live. The solution is to understand the power represented by the love that appears in our soul towards another person, and to accept that it is not merely a feeling. It is much more.

Love does not save you from your duties in this world, but it can bring peace within. It can help you pass easily over material problems, because the love you feel washes away all these 'sins'.

For months I kept trying to find the meaning of what was happening to me, to understand why I had been given 'lessons' for so many years... I began by wishing to withdraw from this world and become a hermit, not a monk, because that did not suit me. I reached this conclusion after being sad in the midst of the world: nothing made me happy and nothing gave me even a direction. What I felt and lived was undefined and incomprehensible to me. I lived Love, but did not feel it fulfilled. Something was always missing from the equation.

After the army, I completely lost the sense of what had made me pure before, and which now makes me respect my adolescence. I do not bring childhood into the discussion because it was complete chaos and could have ended badly in every possible way. At one point, I believed money could fulfil or ease the life I had, but it proved unable to make me feel fulfilled. The thought that I had to dedicate my life to living well gave me no peace at all, especially within.

Then, at one point, it happened, after several years of wandering and loneliness. During that period I gave my whole soul to what I lived, and the book based upon what I felt appeared. That was when I received the vision of what love between a man and a woman represents. I had many experiences during that period. Perhaps the years of youth made it easier. Many things I said came true, many things that had been mere questions were confirmed, and what had seemed only a dream became reality.

This lasted until the first disillusionment, which wiped away everything that had gathered during that time. What I felt had made me blind to many things and able to struggle far beyond my strength. I should then have made a decision that I made much later. Yet lessons are not received when we want them, but when they are given, because otherwise I would not have received the later lessons, which were more valuable than everything I had received before.

When I grew tired of struggling and looked at what I had become, at how far I had moved from what I wanted in life, I stopped looking towards the future. Soon after that decision, I found another representation of what I was living, and the conditions and pattern chosen by the heart exceeded every representation from the past or imagined future. It was exactly the kind of pattern that, when you look at it, tells you that much suffering may await you.

And yet, in spite of this, there followed a period of peace exactly as I had always wanted. I now dare to say it was too long a period, equal to the madness that had preceded it. Throughout that time, I tried not to move away again from what I wanted from life. Yet it seems that if you do not dedicate your life to prosperity or material achievement, life slaps you whether you wish it or not.

One great problem remained after this beautiful 'dream'. I had found someone with whom I wished to remain until the end of my life, without question, but in the end I was struck in precisely the way needed for me to understand the causes and effects of living love.

Everything happens within love without a name, because we do not see the person or the representation. We are blinded by what we feel. We can see only what we live, and this makes us struggle and hope under conditions beyond our imagination, as in films.

Yet if some people live only the Love of a dream, disillusionment will appear when the vapours of the image that gave us that dream dissolve and the reality in which we live emerges; when we see that we are not perfect and that the person who seemed a god or goddess has become an ordinary human being. At that moment, we can lose our connection with the divine within, because we were not loving something outside ourselves. We were, in truth, loving what we felt and lived. If we do not see the divine within love, we can move away from what was given to us.

In the end, when destiny gives us a slap to teach us a lesson, we can lose love without a name forever if God is not Love upon the path we have chosen in life.

First published in Romanian on 25 February 2011. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Iubirea fără nume.