When Love Is Like Air

5 minute read

I once said that you can deceive destiny, that you can even adapt it to what you want or think because free will exists in life, and that you can reset your destiny by renouncing everything.

Perhaps, in the end, you can succeed if you are capable of destroying what makes you happy. Yet perhaps you would be happier if the broken pieces joined together again, or if you did not destroy what you feel, because that feeling gave birth to everything that has happened and everything you have lived within.

A few days ago, quite by chance, I heard something on television - I have not watched television programmes for years. A little girl had died from longing for her mother. Her mother had left to work in Italy, and the child refused to eat.

Yes, life follows its course with or without the grains of sand that we represent in its universal hourglass. Yet the short- and long-term effects of being deprived of love, or of driving its lived experience away - to say nothing of respecting or adoring the source of that lived experience and existence - belong either to the realm of the fantastic or to that of a cruel reality.

What if this had happened during the childhood of those who later played important roles in the evolution of our society? What if the world in which we live, which we already consider to be shit, truly became unbearable? But wait - for some of our fellow human beings, it already is. A humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in our own time, when we claim to be evolved and to have reached an advanced level of civilisation, while tonnes of food are discarded elsewhere because there is too much of it. My grandmother told me a similar story about the famine in the years after the Second World War, when several of her children died.

Perhaps it is written that you must fight the windmills of existence while they watch the course of our lives without emotion. Perhaps some of us will live to see the next decade - hell, perhaps even next year or the next moment. Yet how many would possess the strength to renounce life because it lacked love? How many would have the energy to fight to the death for the lived experience of it? From the material point of view, we are merely figures on the board of life. In the realm of souls, however, this is unacceptable.

Whether everything moves towards good or evil depends only upon us. That is what the books say, and it is easy to construct optimism from words, but reality is far more tragic. In truth, nothing can be written or changed beyond what has already been placed upon the axis of time.

Perhaps the only possibility granted to us is to step beyond the limits of time for one moment and glimpse the eternity of our souls through the lived experience of Divine and Absolute Love. This is the divine energy that nourishes the soul's evolution and guides it towards freedom from the claws of destiny.

But that is all you are permitted. In the material realm, you can do no more than you are allowed to do. Even Jesus had to submit to His fate, although He foresaw what would happen. Seeing something is one thing; living it and passing through every moment in reality rather than as if in a dream is another. Weakened in His final moments, He cried, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" Yet, looking back, even this did not save many of us. Indeed, it brought great suffering at the hands of those who represented the Church and used it as an instrument for their own ends.

The conclusion is this: we may still save the soul, but we can never be certain about the body.

We should therefore fight more for the soul than for the body, contrary to what happens in our present society. Perhaps only then will the world become happier, purer and more evolved.

"Live the moment" - and how strangely most of us live it, through entertainment and self-forgetting.

You run from the deep wound in your life. You try as hard as you can to forget that your soul exists and that, one day, you will have to pass through suffering in order to meet it. At birth, at least, you are not conscious of the pain. To liberate your soul, however, you must consciously endure every moment of the pain caused by breaking your bonds with the material realm.

Yes... sooner or later, all of us will have to pass through this unbearable pain. Few will manage to bring the body into that rediscovery of the soul. This is above all because, for most of us, the soul merely tolerates the body as it is: dirty, corrupted, filled with desires and always ready to be eaten by worms.

Without love, even in its weakest form, we would all refuse to live for another moment upon this earth. And yet we treat it with indifference. We have not bowed our heads before its existence. We still do not see the seed of divinity within its lived experience. We still do not see that love is the god we have sought ever since we became conscious of our existence upon this earth. We still do not understand why we are sometimes sad, or why the emptiness within cannot be filled by anything, not even pain and suffering.

I was once told that I was fortunate to be able to experience love at such a level of awareness. I tell them that it is, in fact, a curse. I must live the life I do not want and accept everything that exists within my destiny, because it does not depend upon us alone. It also depends upon the choices of others, and above all upon that God who seems to flee our existence at such moments.

Worse still, although I experience love, instead of bringing happiness it brings suffering and a dull pain to this heart - a heart that, I sometimes wonder, has somehow not yet fallen ill. When you experience love, you cannot look with empty eyes at what happens in your own life or in the lives of those close to you. The pain multiplies when you see that suffering prevails everywhere in the world.

You are happy because you experience love, yet you feel pain. Happiness exists within, while outside there is only suffering. You are truly happy when you close your eyes for a moment and forget everything beyond yourself. But is that not similar to what others do when they close their eyes to the inner world through the lived experience of entertainment and self-forgetting?

What both have in common is only the forgetting of the self. When you do not forget, when you remain conscious, what you feel is an unbearable suffering - not so much for your own destiny as for existence itself.

It is beautiful when you can live only in silence. Yet when love is like air, peace will enter your life only when you have fallen asleep forever, or when the heart finds solace both within and in the material world.

First published in Romanian on 27 September 2011. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Când iubirea este precum aerul.