Real Love

The idea of a thing, situation or person is often what is fallen prey to rather than experiencing the thing, situation or person itself.

We can see this especially at play in matters of love; in our lives, in our friends’ lives and in fictional characters on TV and in movies.  However, very little of what is offered actually leads up to us having an authentic experience of love.  It can be that when we grasp for what we think we want and fail to find it, we bring suffering to ourselves and to those around us.  We can feel that we’ve not found love, but something else…

Often the feelings of anxiousness, nervousness, and thrill in the area of love are actually romance, and not really love itself.  Romance can be a lot of fun as long as we don’t try to make too much out of it; if we do, it could become painful.  Romance may lead to love, but it can also fade without growing into anything more than flirtation.  If we cling to it and try to make it  more, we might pine for a fantasy or worse; find ourselves stuck in a situation that was never meant to last or be to begin with.

Real love is identifiable by how it makes us feel.  Love should feel good.  And its important to realize WHERE these feelings come from; from within ourselves – NOT from an outside source.  True love activates this.  Authentic love doesn’t ask us to appear in a certain manner, drive a certain car, live in a certain zip code.  When someone really loves you, their love for you awakens your love for yourself.  Its SO much deeper than just romance.  We realize that we have to trust ourselves, and not somebody else. They remind us that what we seek outside of ourselves is a mirror of what’s already inside of us.  Real love is empowering; reminding us that we always were, and always will be, completely enough just as we are.

Writing your own Story

When you reach a certain age and look back over your life, it seems to have had an order; it seems to have been composed by someone.

And those events, when they occurred, seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened, turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot.

So, who composed this plot?

Just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you.

Just as those people you met became effective agents of the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other’s lives. And the whole thing gears together like one big symphony; everything structuring and influencing everything else.

Its as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, and so everything links to everything else, moved out of the will of nature.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer