In a society that has fallen under the spell of thriller and detective stories galore, consider this. The nature of love presents the most baffling mystery of all, one which for most remains unsolved.  A woman of admirable sensitivities, Anne Morrow Lindberg, describes the essence of our problem where love is concerned when she says:

People talk about love as if it were something you could give,

like an armful of flowers.

She recognized we wanted love to be like everything else we thought we knew—something objective, something we conveyed through touch or action, something we possessed to assure its loyalty through containment and control. Our disappointments with our supposed liaisons with love are not as a result of human failings where we normally put the blame, but rather our lack of awareness of love’s true nature as well as our own.

We further confuse ourselves by turning to sex, thinking we’ll encounter love through that act. But sex is neither an aspect nor an outcome of love. Sex is what it has always been, an act of potential creation. Where it takes on unimaginable dimensions is when it is enacted in the conscious presence of Love, for then it melds two people at a level of intimacy where the two exist in the company of one another as One. That is indeed an extraordinary experience, but not intrinsic to a sexual encounter unless the parties bring the consciousness of Love to it.

The Bible, in the famed 1 Corinthians verses, does what we all do when faced with trying to describe this state of consciousness. It uses various acts we accept as worthy, unselfish and wise as attributes them to the nature of love. But love is not an act or a deed, nor is it the result of those attributes.

Yet, while we insist on seeing our essential nature as one of individuals distinct and separate from one another and All Things, Love will remain for us as primarily a yearning, a dream and at times a despair. We must come to understand this basic Truth: Love is existent and is everywhere present. We are existent, and strangely, we are everywhere present. Our skin is a boundary for our bodies, but not for “us.” Coming to some level of familiarity and comfortableness with those facts is what we are here to do. Then can we see that Love is not contingent on partners or circumstances of any kind; it is always there within us as us. When we sense we are “in love,” we have allowed that cloying sense of ourselves as an individual to slip down like an unbuttoned pair of pants and let us stand naked to the truth of what all of us actually are, and that indeed leaves us in awe and wordless wonder.

Would you like to sense how love abides within you? Try this. Watch animals or very young children at play or go to some spot where you can watch nature interacting—anything totally non-threatening.  Then, just observe, until the spirit of what is happening there catches you up, engaging your attention wholly. Such absorption stops your internal conversation, and you “disappear” with it. At some point, you will lose that immersion, and the conversation will return, but before you get too far from having given yourself over to that moment, notice how soft and open you felt,  how fearlessly sensitive. Recall, as well, the whiff of freedom you felt, the expansiveness. Would these phrases come close to describing your experience: “my heart opened,” “joy owned me,” “peace was all I knew,” or “I felt full of love?”

That’s the mystery solved. At a certain level of openness, the truth is revealed: Life and Love are experienced as they are—synonymous. Those moments are referred to by sages of all ilk, as Reality. Have more of those moments where you become fully engaged such that you momentarily feel lost to your personal self. Each such moment is additive, each one revelatory of the true nature of Life, of Love.  For Love is all there is, and Love is what you truly are. Is it no wonder we so yearn to know it?

To see the expression of love in various forms, give my novels

a read, for every one of them is, in some way, a love story.

Please click the book cover to read more about Christina Carson and her novels on Amazon.