Love stories surround us. Popular songs, love movies, romance novels, grocery store tabloids all sell “love.” However, these star-studded dramas, full of reckless and chaotic emotions, do they really portray their ways? Passion and possessiveness, jealousy and falling in love: can they be love? Does this not really reduce the expansive love of the Spirit to the greedy desires of ephemeral flesh?
To truly love, we must discard common notions, dispense with the appearances of love, and discover where true love lives. Then we will find that although true love is freedom, popular styles of love are golden bondages. I know this from my own experience: when I first fell in love at the age of nineteen, every time my beloved left me in India to return to the United States, something would be ripped from my body.
I walked around in a daze for months, crashing into walls and tripping over curbs. In those rare moments when I wasn’t obsessed with my beloved, my thoughts were confused and my actions weak. For four years, I wrote her at least one letter a day, filling it with poetry and romantic thoughts from my heart. He needed to love her, and he needed her love in exchange for her; only then did I feel complete. People thought of me as a romantic: passionate, loving, and wonderful. But this intense need, this desperate desire, was nothing wonderful! It was sheer helplessness.
The emotional frenzy called love is completely alien to true love, the liberating, non-possessive embrace of another. When we truly love, there are no attachments. We do not expect anything in return. Love is just joy.
What is this rare kind of love? How do we find it? Are we prepared for it? Isn’t it easier to just dismiss this as New Age hoopla and go back to the familiar mediocrity, back to the way things were, to passion and pain, love and frustration, desire and despair? Yet when we pause, when we listen deeply, our hearts tell us that we are tired of the old game, that there is so much more.
Aadil Palkhivala Copyright 2008
