Love Weeps through Me

7 minute read

Some time ago, I no longer wanted to write anything. It was not because I had nothing to say. I could say a great deal about love, but living it is far more beautiful than selling - giving - dreams.

I saw that my brother had written a Christmas article about Father Christmas, whose mystery and charm begin to disappear from the child's soul at a certain age.

For me, Christmas and New Year are a time of reckoning, both spiritual and material, for the year that has passed. This year has been so tragic that I am sometimes surprised I am still breathing. At times, I pinch and slap myself to make sure that what I have endured is not a constructed dream like the one in Inception.

Perhaps, viewed from the outside, as though I were looking at my own reflection, everything remains well. My life is marked by the divine. For me, God is not a dream.

The world has gone mad - men and women alike, to say nothing of the next generation. We are passing through changes we do not perceive. When they finally strike us, let us hope we can carry what life gives.

The world is sinking ever more deeply into virtual life. In the near future, survival itself will require all of us to enter that virtual world, where dreams can be fulfilled far more easily than in reality because real laws no longer possess any value.

I like this virtual world, yet on several occasions I have felt so tired and so weary of online life that I needed to escape into nature, rather than admire a view on a screen dozens of inches wide in HD. Nothing compares with reality. In the physical presence of nature, you perceive it with the soul; in an image, you most often perceive it through thought.

Whenever life feels heavy and oppressive, escape this virtual world and its empty dream. Please your soul. If you wish to feel it and offer it a little happiness, take it into nature. Embrace a tree. Smell and admire a flower. Climb a mountain and contemplate the void of your soul's existence. Draw the air deeply into your chest and fill yourself with energy until the next existential cold shower.

You love. You love more and more. You love more than in dreams because you love in reality. Love makes you immensely happy because something you believed to be only a dream finds fulfilment.

Once fulfilled in reality, love is no longer a dream. It makes you understand that nothing above it is worth living or fulfilling, because when love blinds you and strikes the deepest part of your being, you understand the purpose of your life and your divine calling. You understand where the divine hides and where God has His dwelling.

For some, this real dream lasts until death. For others, it awakens unsuspected nightmares and pain. Yet these existential cold showers make you feel still more acutely the existence that chains your soul in the claws of the matrix of thought. You long still more intensely to escape this existential hell.

You do not know whether hell or heaven exists after death, but you can see hell each day within ordinary existence: on the news at five, at seven, or during any second in which you breathe. Hell exists everywhere around us.

When nature too - the one thing that soothes the soul - disappears, we will become like dead creatures eating flesh, like vampires longing to absorb even one moment of the energy and happiness we possessed when what once surrounded us has vanished, becoming only a dream and a virtual world.

Perhaps our existence is exactly like this. Perhaps The Matrix is not merely a film, but one possible vision of existence.

Once, the reality of my soul's existence, or the existential dream of my thinking, told me that there was no reason to suffer when struck by the decision or free choice of another soul whom I had allowed to invade my inner world. I should imagine that the other person's body had actually died and ask how I would have reacted, then continue living my life or existential dream.

Such consolation cannot resolve the pain of a soul suffering then or afterwards. Drink tea from an empty cup or spend aeons looking at nature upon a screen: neither compares with one moment lived at the breast of real love, perceived directly rather than through a reflection. When the heart comes alive, when thought ceases haunting the soul for one moment, or several moments, or...

During one period, I believed that at least I had a justification for allowing destiny to defeat me. What was called love within my life had contained too much ugliness and hypocrisy.

Following what my heart experienced did bring me still more love and fulfilment. Yet I made no real change. I merely put on a softer, warmer coat. When that coat wears thin, everything turns to ash unless the soul lives the mystery of love and understands its existence.

The soul to whom I successfully sold - gave - a real dream asked me to admit that the choice my heart made afterwards had been wrong. When you tell someone that you love them, but spit upon them literally and soil them with cruel words, then love them again - or say you do, or perhaps genuinely feel it - only to return again and again to the same filth, any soul will eventually surrender.

For that soul, the ugly moments erase the memory of the beautiful ones until only the shadow of a mystical lived experience remains. If, in the future, it heals its wounds, or at least dresses them, and becomes something like a friend, you can thank divinity for allowing you to taste what was once reality and has now become a dream.

In that case, at least, I escaped easily and understood why love made me bow my head and run as fast as my legs could carry me from the existential agony that soul gave. Even the coat was better than what I had been given. In the end, I reached hell, but at least my soul remained conscious of its existence. Before then, I had been ready to lose everything. I had almost fallen completely asleep within existence.

That is enough about this soul, which formed part of my existence through good and bad - bad, and trouble upon trouble.

Throughout that period, I made one fundamental mistake: making money became my goal, burying somewhere deep inside whatever had once made me happy, even for a single moment of prayer.

No one else is to blame. I could say it was destiny, that everything had been written, or that the other soul was responsible. It is not so. This was simply the veil of life, and I allowed it to carry me. The fault remains mine, just as it does later - meaning now - when the soul suffers, my heart weeps, or love cries without ceasing within my existence.

Yet I do not believe the choice itself was wrong because it was not made by thought. I chose for reasons of the soul, not material reasons. I chose what my heart gave me. The fact that it found fulfilment and lasted for some time meant that my dream became at least half real.

I seemed one step away from living the most beautiful dream of my existence. I thought I was about to say that heaven truly existed in reality, not only in dreams, ideas or conceptions that eventually become a religion for the soul.

I cannot invent or adapt myself to some possibility that would make my soul's nightmare easier to bear. In this way, I have managed to understand and accept that no one is to blame and that I should blame nothing beyond my own existence and the suffering smouldering like a volcano, always ready to erupt within my life.

For me, hell became the dispersal of the clouds called thoughts and the appearance of the sun called soul. Deprived of the reality of its lived experience, the soul remained alone with its lived experience: infinite and absolute love.

Religion is beautiful - pardon me, religions are beautiful. They are wondrous and mystical. Yet the reality we live makes religion grow pale and become only an existential dream, a pill for the soul that cannot replace the natural remedy capable of healing it.

Anyone who truly loves understands what I mean. The rest will continue running away, playing hopscotch through a destiny designed to make them forget their souls.

The strange truth is that no one will be happy: neither those who care nor those who pretend to feel nothing or call what they feel merely an emotion.

If you still care about the soul you drove from your heart, if its existence still hurts you or you still wish to know what has become of it, then understand that the feeling you merely "care" about is called love.

And remember that the soul you allowed to invade your life does not care for you. Sooner or later, it may cause you such suffering that you would do well to protect your soul through prayer. In the end, prayer is what will still soothe you. It is the natural remedy, not a pill that helps one part while causing greater harm elsewhere. The pill is whatever you are living now.

To conclude, Father Christmas has become Father Nightmare - not because that is what he is, but because that is how my soul perceives the reality I am living. The reckoning for this year is apocalyptic. Although the year has offered good signs, in the end, it is still the heart that hurts.

First published in Romanian on 24 December 2010. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Iubirea plânge prin mine.