I Love… but Only by Half Measures!

4 minute read

For as long as I can remember, I have felt a kind of pity for people who say they love while something appears to be missing. They want more, but that "more" does not concern love. It belongs to the material realm.

This is the thinking of someone who holds a diamond but treats it like an ordinary stone. When suffering comes, they ask why they suffer.

Some people need only a few moments to recognise their error or the path their life should follow. Others require an entire lifetime, and even that is not enough.

Love is treated as something ordinary, and this is why our lives contain so much suffering, sometimes spreading to the family and children.

When you begin to understand that "God is Love", life acquires a spiritual meaning. Life itself becomes mystical.

You believed Love to be something ordinary or without value, when in fact it is everything. This is why we place it upon the scales and why life gives us so much suffering.

You may possess so much money that you cannot find ways to spend it, yet you remain unhappy and feel something missing. That describes the fortunate ones. Others become money's slaves and trample many souls underfoot.

The category I find most interesting is formed by the "half-and-half" people. They want love, certainly, but material things must also be present, absolutely, at least to some degree. They do not ask for much: a house, a car, money in the bank, and a good job or business.

That is the precise value they assign to LOVE: the price of what they request in return.

If you gave love its proper value, you would realise that only God could equal it. Nothing else makes you happy except temporarily.

Eventually, you become bored with your car, your house and your life. You want something new. Nothing pleases you, and at last you even become bored with yourself because you do not understand why this is happening.

This occurs only when Love is regarded as ordinary, merely one feeling among others, even though it has liberated so many people and made them saints, founders of religions and spiritual masters.

I know it is difficult to perceive the divine reflected in ordinary love between two souls. Throughout our existence, only a few people have dared to declare love divine and tried to demonstrate it.

Anyone who has felt love even once knows what I mean. I am speaking about the impulse within the heart when simply being near the beloved makes everything joyful, when the eyes see the surrounding world in another light, when a flower is no longer merely a flower and looking into another person's eyes is no longer merely a look.

The moment you begin analysing, you have already lost love's beauty. How much do I feel? What future will it have? Will this person hurt me? Will it remain as beautiful later?

It is like looking at a flower and beginning to analyse it instead of truly seeing it. The miracle disappears. Mystery no longer has any place, and the flower can be torn apart without your feeling anything.

Yes... Love does not exist in half measures. It exists in everything and within all things.

When you suffer, remember that this is one possible reason: you placed love upon the scales even though love created everything.

Proof that complete devotion to Love brings nothing but happiness lies in all those before us who devoted themselves to the point of sacrifice, like Jesus, or to the point of death, like Buddha, together with disciples, apostles and the long succession of enlightened or liberated human beings.

Through Love alone, they created values and offered paths that neither technology nor any scientist has equalled to this day.

Stop regarding Love as an ordinary feeling, an ordinary thing or a danger. It threatens only your backward thinking, which senses something too elevated for it.

Do not fear that you will lose material achievement. On the contrary, Love itself will make everything possible for your happiness, but only if you follow its path completely.

Otherwise, Love too will think in half measures, precisely so that you may evolve. Sometimes it will slap you so severely that even the heart will be unable to endure it. Yet everything will serve the awakening of your soul, because this is the only way to choose rightly in life.

Thought alone will never choose the right path. It chooses suffering, not for itself, but for the soul.

If you choose the proper master, thought becomes far more useful because it is guided by the soul and by purity rather than impure thoughts. No one will then suffer. You will instinctively follow what is good and will no longer wish to harm your kindred soul, but will do everything so that both of you may be happy.

To love completely is not easy, but nothing of value in this world is achieved easily or without sacrifice.

Every moment matters. The path contains so many steps and requires so much practice that a single lifetime, sometimes many lifetimes, may not be enough to find or even encounter true love.

Never stop searching for or feeling it. When it appears, protect it as in the parable of the ten virgins.

Matthew 25:1-13 tells of ten virgins waiting with lamps for the bridegroom. Five wisely bring additional oil, while five do not. When he arrives unexpectedly at midnight, only those who remained prepared enter the wedding feast. The others return too late and find the door closed. The parable ends with the command to remain watchful, because no one knows the day or hour.

First published in Romanian on 27 May 2010. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Iubesc... dar cu jumătăți de măsură!.