What Love Is

Love is support for the movement towards wholeness.

After 50 years of pondering this mysterious and often elusive thing called love, this arrived a few months back, a jewel of insight that sits at the centre of the mandala of this life. Every time I remember it, it feels like rediscovering a diamond I found in the mud at the bottom of the swamp of our shared humanity. The longer I hold it the more precious it feels, so the time has arrived to share it…   

Love is support for the movement towards wholeness.

The long version rambles on about emotions, feelings, meaningful intentions, intentional actions, shadow work, spirituality and the nature of God.  The short version though will suffice if we can agree on the meaning of just three words. Let’s start at the end-point and work backwards…

Wholeness is the point of love. There are levels of wholeness (called  ‘holons’), in the way that a whole child is part of a whole adolescent is part of a whole adult is part of a whole mystic. Love is about supporting wholeness at the level of the one you love (including yourself). The highest level of wholeness is where nothing is missing, nothing disowned, nothing to be ashamed of, no potential unfulfilled, no question is unanswered. Nothing lacking, nothing to be afraid of. In a word, enlightened, standing upon the peak of the mountain of consciousness up which we all journey towards the summit of our potentials. For the rest of us, wholeness is the next milestone on the path that disappears into distant clouds. 

Movement is about progress on the journey towards wholeness. Movement is a verb, an activity that aligns with the goal of the wholeness of the one we love. If our love does not support movement towards wholeness, then it is something else … perhaps the intention to love, but not yet skilled enough to manifest as love. 

Support is an energy we offer in service to movement towards wholeness. The tricky aspect of love is there are infinite varieties of support we might offer, ranging from a strong masculine intervention to a passive feminine acceptance of the things as they are and 10,000 possibilities in between. Choosing how to support the one we love to move towards wholeness is the art of skillful means, where we are tasked to meet another where they are and respond in a way that supports healing and growth at their level.  

This understanding of love makes no distinction between self love and the love of another. It’s the same process. Self love is when you make an effort to support your own movement towards wholeness. To love another is to make a sincere effort to find a way to support them in their journey towards the next iteration of their own best self.

The ‘support’ aspect of love asks us then to meet another at the level of their wholeness and to choose wisely in how to support them to move to the next level of their wholeness. Like supporting an adolescent to become a healthy adult, or an adult friend to heal their childhood wounds to become a more whole version of themselves, free at last of old irrational fears or inherited beliefs about limitations and scarcity. 

One maxim implied by this understanding is that if you don’t first love yourself--if you don’t first tend to the activity of moving towards your own wholeness--then your efforts to support another towards their wholeness will necessarily be partial. You will be blind to those aspects of them that need to heal if you have not yet seen and healed them in yourself.

Notice that all of life naturally moves towards its own wholeness, its own fullest expression. A seed grows naturally into a seedling then a mature plant then, if conditions are supportive, it flowers and fruits. An egg hatches to become a chick that eventually leaves the nest, spreads its wings and flies with the wind in search of a mate with whom it can create a new egg. 

Another name for the movement towards wholeness is evolution. For all of life, the support to evolve at the most fundamental levels comes from the natural world. In this way, this understanding of love aligns with the notion that God loves us all in every moment in every possible way. The natural and man-made world offers us constant and relentless support to evolve, to grow towards our awakening as not-two with God, a soul on a human journey towards the divine source of all life. 

The apparent purpose of life then is to evolve. As we attain degrees of wholeness within ourselves, our purpose in the world becomes to support others to evolve towards their wholeness. As we evolve further, all of life becomes evidence of the evolutionary impulse of the cosmos dancing in the world of form towards its own highest potential, a sacred expression of love, another priceless thread in the  divine tapestry of creation.

When we align our thoughts and actions towards the evolution of ourselves and all the life we encounter, we align with God’s will, we do God’s work when we surrender to become an instrument within the cosmic current of evolution that brings all life into existence and fruition. Love like that is effortless, infinite and eternal, and the stuff of which the good life is made.

*

So there’s the short version. I have a dozen of pages of diving deeper into the implications of this understanding … about how it integrates biology, feelings, clear thinking, courage, surrender, faith, trust and more. If you have a perspective that challenges or supports this understanding, I would love to hear it, because the consideration of all such perspectives will support me (and perhaps you) to move a little closer to our own wholeness … and that is love in motion.