Love is not in wanting. Romance is the game or shell surrounding our actions toward the beloved and can be a fine game or a game gone wrong.
In true love, sex and its politics -- those needs and demands for another to make us happy -- are mere fictions in the air and we can see them as such. Love itself is the feeling of joy in the presence of or at the mere thought of the loved one.
Because that presence is always wanted, love is also the pain of loss. Unrequited love, the desertion by a loved one or the loved one's inability to love back as intensely are all examples of such loss.
Even with the death of those we love, however, loving energy -- a certain opening of one's heart and emotions -- is ever present. This is because there is a love that surrounds us. This sea is something we share. It can sustain us in and of itself; therefore, the object of love acts as a drawing on that energy, which is universal and endless.
This is why two who are really in love are so attractive. Even standing together, they resonate in a way that draws our attention to something we seek.
Forgetting about romance, one completely loving person will draw a following, and there is never a physical issue, sex not only being secondary but now completely irrelevant. Such folks are the highly resonating beings in our midst able to sustain this energetic level, bringing us all home by their mere presence.
This is the person you recognize by the way you are treated, with complete attention, respect, calm and joy, regardless of your faults. To such a one, your faults will appear to be mere blemishes in the periphery of your energy field.
We come close to experiencing this state of being ourselves whenever we truly love another. Unfortunately, feeding greed, need, lust, demands and other patterns of learned behavior interfere with our ability to love unconditionally. This is why our close relationships, wife and family for example, at their best point the way toward love for all. Universal love, since it alone cannot be lost, does not contain fear, anger and hate.
Religions often use our sexuality to inspire guilt, creating perversity instead of training us to use our bodies wisely, integrating our physical and energetic selves. The natural integrating tendency toward ecstasy, when subverted, can lead to destruction of the self and others.
Because ecstasy is embodied in compassion, its rejection can lead to hate and violence. Severely repressed people are more likely to follow destructive leaders. Look to the religious exploitation of governments, people and especially women and children to see the most obvious example of such patterns.
Higher love, or compassion, we see centered in the energy field near the heart, but is also very much connected to our entire energy flow. Basic, earthy emotion and sex are centered near the navel on down to the perineum.
A test to evaluate sexual impulse is to watch or feel the heart center. This center also receives information through higher centers of universal energy and consciousness. What does the sexual feeling, when felt so holistically, do to this higher love? Is one's concern mostly for self or for the other? Does the sexual impulse raise fear or compassion; personal desire or a sense of giving?
Negative feelings or sensations tell us to center back in the heart and wait. Most attractions to others, even if starting impulsively, should automatically transfer to feelings of interest, good will and compassion, giving up more basic impulses and usually setting us up for a net energy gain: lust transformed to virtue.
The heart and lower centers are integrated through the solar plexus, a place of personal power and will. Even more than sexuality, power is an energy easily misused. Does the power impulse move rapidly and freely to the heart center, to be evaluated in light of good will? Are we using our power to remain the best person we can be under any circumstances, or are we overly focused on desires for control over others and material gain?
Underlying such impulses is fear and the erroneous conclusion that we necessarily have to fight, even kill, to survive. Again, centering in the field near the heart can help us see where we are, assess our motives, and adjust once more to our higher self, connected to the heart from energy concentrations in the throat, brow and crown.
Such integration often requires some change: Coming out from suffering, purification, surrender, loss of ego, processing of emotional patterns through the body or perhaps something else. But such transformations can be instantaneous, without restriction due to magnitude or time. They can also take time due to our personal restrictions and needs for lessons learned. Here free will, when added to our true spiritual tendencies, to a universal intention, can help us develop.
How we love, or do not, influences everything. Misalignment to selfish lust and power instead of compassion and greater good contribute greatly to the problems we have in our world. Without energetic integration, always achievable through the heart, we will tend to see our surroundings in illusory material terms. Everything we see becomes an it or a that. Even nature itself becomes viewed as non-living or non-sentient, presumed available for endless manipulation and exploitation. Our connectedness to the earth as a loving place falters. Then, individually and/or collectively, our conduct falters.
Energetic integration is enhanced through proper conduct. Those who have died while doing their best to contribute to a loving society, doing their best to live together despite personal need, have died as the innocent. Those who have killed in an attempt, through abusive power, to buy a way into paradise have surely come, as close as is possible, to any hell which exists.
How we live and die, under the universal guidance of love or the personal downfall of hate, surely defines our future.
So will our reactions as a nation. No matter what we have to do, the health of our people, long-term peace on earth and a greater collective centering in the heart must guide us.
