Every album, every film, and every novel, in almost all of culture, plays out the same idea of love. We imitate it in our relationships and families. Yet there is conflict in all of this. Breakdowns, betrayals, even murder and exploitation. Is that really love? Is what we speak about as love, actually that? Or are we lost not knowing, not even questioning, what love is?
We work for it, we cry for it, we even harm and kill for it, yet we never seem to get it. We might get a glimpse of it sometimes. But what is gained is lost again. It falls through our hands like dry desert sand. Is love really that fleeting? Is it that finite?
We seem to treat it like a resource. When we get the chance, we drink from it, only for it to be gone thereafter. We grasp for the next glass before being finished with this one. Is that love? Is it really something to search and seek? We seem to be looking for it like we do a lost phone. Desperate and nervously. Love cannot possibly cause that much pain.
What is love actually?
Thought cannot capture it. It is incapable, despite thinking otherwise. Love must be beyond it, for something so divisive could not possibly understand what love is.
If we are listening to the question seriously enough, that is quietly sitting and moving with it, allowing it to come and go naturally, we find that there is nothing… Because there is no thought left that could label it as something.
We invented many words for this nothing. Love is one of them. Peace, silence, beauty, or ‘enlightenment’ are a few of the others. But none of these are it.
As J. Krishnamurti said, “The word is not the thing.” What is made into something, can no longer be nothing. It cannot be love.
No writings can adequately capture it, yet many attempt to do so. Love is not an object to be described. Love is when thought is not. In fact, thought is the only thing that would make you deny this.
Watch every thought to discover the nothingness they arise from. That silence from which noise can be, is the fountain we call love.
Reader-response
What is love not?
It is not security, it is not an achievement, it is not possession, it is not jealousy or upset. It is not only between two people, the family, or friends.
It is that which cannot be said, stifled in a word and constrained in the limitation of the mind.
Dante in the Divine Comedy defines God as the love that moves the sun and other stars. And if what we call “God” is everywhere, even within us, what about love? The engine of the world. The heartbeat of the universe. The very reason for living.
Why is it so difficult to understand what love is? Many have tried to define it, but is that even possible univocally? Is the mind even capable of grasping it?
Can one define what life is? Life is everywhere, it is everything, and so is love.
Love is all there is. If we were to strip the mind completely of all its constructs, beliefs, ideas, what would be left?
– Angelica Carletti
