Renounce Yourself, but Do Not Renounce the Lived Experience of Love

4 minute read

In the previous article, I spoke about the dreams of love each of us had in adolescence. As I said, we dreamed of Prince Charming and probably of princesses too, though today people dream of celebrities and footballers. Later, when we come to live love in reality, we forget that we have arrived where we once wished to be...

And we want still more... Now we also want material achievement, because money does not bring happiness, but it sustains it...

A moment comes when we must choose between professional achievement and the lived experience of love, which it seems we have already fulfilled. It would have been beautiful and ideal for professional achievement to come before love, but true love does precisely the reverse, because otherwise we would receive no lesson in life.

I do not mean the 'cardboard' love many people experience before finding true love. I mean the love in which you feel that you want this person beside you until the end of your life, not because you have lived it for a few moments or months, but for years. It is the love in which you feel that the divine could offer you nothing more in existence, and for which even the angels envy you because you found it. It is the love through which, more strongly with each day, you wish to melt and become one with the beloved, when two voices no longer exist, only one. It is the highest summit human consciousness can reach between two souls, which I consider higher even than religious experiences. I say this because, to put it simply, a religious experience gives you existential reasons to surrender yourself completely. In love for an ordinary human being, those reasons are surpassed; they do not possess the same value. And yet it happens...

What reasoning makes us diminish the importance of something for which, in adolescence, we would have given everything and often suffered in our desire to attain it, only for it later to become ordinary? I believe I have found the answer: later, we stopped believing in dreams. To believe in dreams is equal to believing in God, because the idea of God is also a dream.

Yet this remains difficult to understand. Love was a dream, but the dream came true. The problem is that once you live it, it becomes like any other thing you wish to accomplish: material success, a good job, a car, a house, a child. Many will say that a child does not belong in the same category, but I say that it does, and I have evidence. How many parents are so happy and grateful to existence for this gift that they give everything to the child, their whole life and all their time?

This is why Hearts of Love describes the existence of love itself. It considers that the only existence of God upon Earth is not the figure described by religious people, an old man with a staff and long white hair and beard. The only perception of divine existence lies precisely in the lived experience of love, up to the highest level at which you become Love. Perhaps, in future human evolution, the complete union between a man and a woman, or why not between two people of the same sex, will represent the highest degree of evolution. I include two people of the same sex because this union does not take place at the sexual level, but at the level of the lived experience of love.

Because love becomes something simple and familiar, we do not respect its experience and place it on the same level as other things. Otherwise it would be like insulting what is sacred, to speak in terms familiar to those who respect religion. If all of us came to see the divine within love, we would suffer far less and certainly cause less suffering to others. We would no longer be able to harm nature either.

I have always wondered how some people cross the psychological threshold of weighing the experience of love against material achievement. These people are usually the so-called dreamers. Their power to dream, to live inwardly as though they could already see the dream fulfilled, allows them to perceive what they will feel when they attain that thing. It is like a three-dimensional dream in which everything happens virtually and you can enjoy, in the smallest detail, desires that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to fulfil. Dreamers therefore make far fewer mistakes than others in the lived experience of love, although sometimes they also suffer the most. Love cannot be tested virtually. It cannot be programmed. Love happens and appears unexpectedly, when you least expect it. Once you have lost it, you may run after its experience in vain for the rest of your life. Yet testing other things in your dreams allows you to see what love truly represents in existence.

The lived experience of love is like enlightenment. You run for enlightenment throughout your life, sometimes through entire lifetimes, yet enlightenment happens when you least expect it, or you may wait aeons before it occurs.

You may renounce your routine life, but never renounce the lived experience of love. It is like wearing glasses upon your nose without being conscious that they are there. You then fail to recognise what allows you to see what is real in life and what gives you happiness.

First published in Romanian on 8 May 2010. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Renunță la tine, dar nu renunța la trăirea Iubirii.