What Is Love?

Being and Becoming

There are many forms of love—romantic love, parental love, love of friends and pets, love of nature, love of beauty, love of being alive. But the unconditional love we’re speaking of when we say that everything is love, that love is the fundamental ground of being, includes and transcends all other forms of love. Unconditional love has no object; it depends on nothing; it is the primordial awareness beholding (being and holding) everything that appears, giving it all space to be just as it is without clinging to any of it—allowing everything to come into being and to dissolve. Love is like empty space. It is the no-thing-ness (the freedom, the infinite potential) of everything, the aliveness that offers a new beginning in each instant. Ultimately, we can’t say what love is any more than we can say what THIS is, right here, right now.

Is love a practice or is it a realization of what is always already Here-Now? Perhaps it is both. By a practice, I don’t mean a result-oriented rehearsal or training for some future performance. I mean it here in the way we might speak of practicing medicine or law—as a vocation, a way of life, a form of devotion. Practice is the alchemy of transformation, of redemption and awakening, of finding the light in the dark, of recognizing (again and again, NOW) that we are Home. It is a lifelong contemplation, exploration, enjoyment and embodiment of here-now-being, just as it is, unfolding its infinite potential. It is both being and becoming Love.

It may seem contradictory that what is always already the case requires practice, or that life could become what it already is. But in my experience, love is a profound mystery that challenges our most deeply rooted ideas, beliefs, assumptions and feelings—and even after these are seen through and dissolved, they tend to reassert themselves. Awakening into love is a never-ending process in the eternal, timeless Now. It’s not personal, meaning there is no practitioner, only an impersonal movement of life itself—a waving of the great ocean. It’s not about attaining something that is not already fully present; it is about recognizing what is most obvious, most intimate. It often seems to require some effort or intention, but the effort is more about letting go into effortlessness. Reality is full of apparent paradoxes such as these, but only when we think about it. In simply being this one bottomless moment, there is no confusion.

When I occasionally have the thought that “we are not always already love,” or that “everything isn’t love,” I am inevitably thinking of the ways human beings treat one another or other living beings with extreme cruelty. This has been one of the great recurring koans in this life. I have no trouble at all seeing my own apparent misfortunes as blessings, but where I can still sometimes get caught is when I encounter horrific forms of human cruelty to apparent others—child abuse, torture, rape, genocide, factory farming, etc. I totally get that “good things” can come from such terrible things, but seeing these things themselves as love is not always obvious or easy. And merely holding that as a belief simply invites more doubt. Truly realizing it seems to be a lifelong koan that is still working on me, still unfolding—clear in some moments, dark in others.

What drives anyone to perpetrate such acts of cruelty? As I was contemplating this question, I found myself biting one of my fingers, ripping off a little loose end of skin. As I’ve written about elsewhere, since childhood I have had dermatophagia, an OCD-related disorder in which I compulsively bite the skin on my fingers and sometimes even my knuckles, often creating bloody wounds. I always know I’m doing it when it is happening, it’s not unconscious, but often I cannot stop. It has gotten better over the years—it happens less frequently and less severely and even sometimes falls away completely for weeks or months at a time, but so far, it always comes back. I’ve done various forms of therapy, tried a multitude of cures, not to mentions years of meditation, but the compulsion and the resulting injury to my only hand persists.

So, there I was, compulsively biting off a piece of skin while simultaneously contemplating why people commit acts of cruelty. And it hit me, was I not committing just such an act at that very moment, compulsively hurting and harming my own fingers, unable to stop? That realization brought it all down to earth very quickly. 

Is this compulsion a tragic mistake or is it simply something the universe seems to be doing? Many people over the years have had different theories about why I do it, but in the end, I don’t really know. I just know it happens. I also know that I’ve learned a great deal from it—it drove home the illusory nature of the me-thought that believes it has free will, and it gave me a compassion that I would probably not otherwise have had for others who are compelled to do far more harmful things, such as committing serial rape or murder or torture or genocide—or for humanity in our apparent compulsion to keep destroying the earth, even when we know we’re doing it. I know what it’s like not to be able to stop something even when you want to stop. So, as in the old Chinese farmer story, it hasn’t been all bad.

But is it Love? Well, in a sense, it is. It is an attempt to stop something disturbing, an attempt to soothe some kind of distress, and even though it creates more pain and tension and distress, it comes from a longing to feel okay, to be Home. And perhaps it has been the only way the universe, moving as Joan, could have certain insights and realizations.

Perhaps it is even part of a larger exploration about being wounded and yet perfectly okay and complete. This Joan whirlpool is, after all, not just a compulsive fingerbiter, but also an amputee, a cancer survivor, a person with an ostomy, a former drunk who had violent rages and did IV drugs. There seems to be a storyline here about woundedness and redemption, about finding perfection in imperfection, about seeing wholeness in what is broken.

The primary symbol of Christianity is the cross, a torture instrument on which the son of God was nailed and hung up to die a slow and excruciatingly painful death, after being falsely accused and betrayed. That horrific event is at the very center of the Christian religion. And of course, in the story, the crucifixion culminates in the resurrection, which I see as a mythical revelation about the alchemy of transformation and redemption. Somehow, the crucifixion is a necessary part of the resurrection, the wound is essential to the healing, the anguish of apparent separation is connected to the longing to return Home that brings us Home. You can’t have nirvana without samsara. As Rumi says:

“Whatever you break finds itself
more intelligent for being broken.”

Experientially, I notice that love feels like a deeper truth than hate. Love feels like Home, while anger or hate feels like being lost. When I am knowingly being this aware presence, it is clearly Love, without a doubt.  When I am overcome with anger, resentment or hate, there is a felt-sense of being lost in delusion, of being out of sync with reality, of being in pain. I feel separate, contracted, small, identified as the little “me.” It hurts. I’m like a clenched fist. When that fist finally relaxes and opens, when the anger dissolves into boundlessness, when the tightness disappears along with the me-sense and the me-story and the fear and hurt under the anger, that boundless openness that remains feels like the deeper truth. I no longer feel separate. I feel whole. There is no “me” apart from life itself.

This isn’t a belief or an idea, it’s a palpable experiential reality. Love is the natural state, the default state, whereas hate is a reaction of some kind that springs from delusion. I suspect this is why, in the mythology of the Bible, the devil is an angel created by God who turns away from God. Satan is that aspect of creation, or of God, that is lost in delusion, and he is a necessary part of the story. Opposition, friction and difficulty seem to be in some way essential. They are not really other than wholeness. That is the most liberating realization, that even what appear to be delusions and flaws, my own and those of others, are none other than radiant presence, love itself. And in that realization, there are no others.

When I am knowingly Home, when I am awake, I see the perpetrators of cruelty with compassion, with Love. I see them as myself. I understand that they are in so much pain and delusion, that this is all they can do in this moment. But when I am in delusion, I see them as other than myself. I judge them and feel hate or fear or anger or a desire to punish them, to make them suffer. And the same applies when seeing my own apparent faults. I know which of these two possibilities feels like the deeper truth—again, not as an idea, but as a palpable experiential felt reality. I suspect everyone reading this can also feel this difference between love and self-righteousness, between clarity and delusion, between contraction and expansion.

Years ago, I once did The Work with Byron Katie. I wanted to explore her assertion that everything is good. Since you can’t have an abstract philosophical conversation with Katie, I had to pick a concrete example. The Littleton, Colorado school shooting had just happened, so I did The Work with her on that. I wrote out my worksheet about how this wasn’t good, it was cruel and horrible, and so on. And we did The Work on it, and I saw something about how we can perpetuate the harm by seeing it as harmful, and how we can contribute to the healing by seeing the wound as God sees it—from unconditional Love, as perfection itself—as Christ (or God) on the cross.

I saw that adding my suffering to their suffering, and seeing their situation as tragic and horrible, was only adding to and perpetuating their suffering—whereas what Katie was doing with The Work was opening up a different possibility. She wasn’t offering sympathy, or the reinforcement of the story of tragedy or of the phantom self who seems to be at the center of that story. She wasn’t trying to fix the problem of school shootings or figure out who or what was to blame. She was pointing everyone Home to the total freedom Here-Now.

And what we habitually do is resist that pointing. We cling to our suffering and our imaginary limitations, our opinions and ideas and identities—we fight for them, we defend them, we assert and re-assert them, we tell and re-tell the stories about them. In some way, we get off on tragedy and political conflict and all of that because it strengthens the me-story and the sense of separation. It seems to confirm the solid reality of the dream-world on which we seem to depend. At a deeper level, we long to let it all go, to dissolve into the no-thing-ness and freedom of Love. We long to step out of the familiar boat of habit, the apparent safety of our limitations, and dare to walk on water.

My friend J.C. Amberchele spent decades in prison for some truly horrible crimes. While in prison, he encountered Douglas Harding’s Headless Way and woke up to a larger reality. J.C. had to find a way to live with the things he had done, a way to leave the guilt and shame behind and live Here-Now. He wrote in one of his early books:

“I cannot fix or redeem myself at the human level; only at the level of Who I Really Am are my problems transformed. Nor is seeing and being this Source the easy way out, considering the profound commitment involved (Seeing Who I Am is the easiest thing in the world; living from Who I Am is another matter).”

This is the only true solution to our human suffering—being in Love, in Awareness, and living from that openness. And that requires a kind of devotion, or as J.C. puts it, a profound commitment. So it’s that seeming paradox again of both being and becoming what is always already Here-Now.

Another thing I have realized is that I cannot know what anyone else is experiencing—what people who are being abused or tortured are actually experiencing as it happens—and by imagining it, I am in fact creating suffering where it’s possible none actually existed. For example, many years ago, I was riding in a van with friends going down the interstate at night at probably 70 mph. I was sitting (foolishly) on the engine case between the two front seats, talking to the driver and obviously not wearing a seatbelt, when we began to swerve. I felt a rush of fear when I realized we were going to crash, but then, as it happened, as the van went off the highway and rolled and spun, I found myself in a completely peaceful state. My body instinctively went into a tuck and rolled around and around and around, and all the time that was happening, I was in this totally peaceful state, wondering in this very detached matter-of-fact way if this was how I was going to die—no fear, no pain—it was like an out of body experience in which I was watching it all from a place beyond.

So when my aunt died in a plane crash, or when we watched people jumping from the Twin Towers on 9-11, it occurred to me that they might all have been completely at peace, as I was in the van crash. And even if they weren’t at peace, their suffering was brief, while many others replayed it in their imaginations or watched it on TV over and over again for years afterwards. 

I once had a conversation with Peter Brown in the last year or two before he died, and I was talking about seeing a video on Facebook of animals suffering on a factory farm and how I couldn’t quite really see that as “radiant presence.” And what became clear as we talked was that my suffering over this had to do with the fact that what those animals were going through was apparently human-caused, and as a result, I saw it as cruelty. Even though I’d seen through all this many times before and even written books about it, I was once again unconsciously attributing independent free will and intentionality to the perpetrators. Whereas if I’d seen the same things befalling these animals as the result of an attack by other animals or a natural disaster, my feelings would have been quite different.

I don’t see the violence in nature, or in other animals, as cruel. Life feeds on life. Violence and conflict are part of it. I can feel empathy for the one being eaten by a predator, or even grief if it’s an animal I knew and cared for, but I wouldn’t see it as cruel and disturbing in the way I do human violence. I wouldn’t see the predator as bad or imagine that he could (or should) have behaved differently in that moment. Seeing the ravages of nature doesn’t make me doubt that everything is love in the way child rape or factory farming can.

But in fact, humans are a part of nature, and people running factory farms, committing genocides, raping children, or anything else are doing the only possible at that moment given their nature and nurture, their life situation, their conditioning, their degree of sensitivity and insight, etc. They are a movement of the whole universe, every bit as natural as a predator ripping apart their prey or a tidal wave or an earthquake or a hurricane ravaging everything in its path. And nothing real is being destroyed. Life is boundless and seamless. It isn’t really divided up into “things” that are born and then later die. That is a story put together by memory, thought and imagination. Life is nothing but continuous instantaneous birth-death. In its wholeness, it is deathless and unborn, never actually broken or harmed in any way. Awakening from delusion is like waking from a dream and realizing that nothing in the dream story really happened.

The root of a great deal of our human cruelty is undoubtedly the belief in separation and the thought-sense of being separate and completely identified as the character in the dream-like movie of waking life, all of which gives rise to deep anguish. We long to come Home, to feel okay, to be at peace, to be loved, to know ourselves as the indestructible wholeness. We do know this, it is our actual experience in every moment, but we overlook it because the attention is on the story, the dream-movie that the mind constructs out of the kaleidoscopic Rorschach blot of bare perceiving.

In our search for Home, we take what seem to be many strange detours, although ultimately every detour is the path itself, and the path never departs from Here-Now (aka Home). This longing to come Home is at the root of all our addictions and compulsions and all our acts of cruelty. We are trying to get the pain out of us, trying to find the love. So, in a very real sense, these are all acts of love. They seem to be missing the mark, which is the meaning of the word sin, but in reality, it is impossible to miss the mark. In the words of Huang Po, “There is nowhere at all which is devoid of the Way.” Or as Dogen put it, “No creature ever comes short of its own completeness. Wherever it stands, it does not fail to cover the ground.” Not just because these addictions often end up leading us to Twelve-Step meetings or awakenings in prison or other places of redemption, where they become sources of insight and wisdom, but even when that never happens and we die in the gutter in a pool of urine—even that is the Holy Reality, life itself, and it is never really the way we are thinking or dreaming or imagining it to be.

This manifestation can only appear in contrasts and polarities. It includes both the light and the dark, both kindness and cruelty. As the old Chinese farmer story illustrates, we can’t really say that anything “shouldn’t” have happened or that anything was ultimately a “bad” thing. The light and the dark go together and cannot be pulled apart. You can’t have heads without tails or up without down, nor can you find where one ends and the other begins. It all belongs. It is all what is. And in openness, when the story drops away, it is all love. And we can’t really say what that is. But we can realize it. Not someday, but right now.

As soon as we believe the thought that “this isn’t it,” or that “maybe someday I’ll realize it,” we are overlooking it, although even those thoughts are it as well. Nothing is ever excluded. But instead of following those thoughts down the imaginary rabbit hole into anguish, what happens if we simply drop the thoughts and open to the sensory-energetic actuality of this moment: the sounds of traffic, sensations in the body, breathing—the simplicity of just this—and the openness, the spaciousness, the vastness of the awaring presence beholding it all?

Here-Now, is anything missing? Without thought, is there a “you” who lacks something and needs to find it? Or a “you” who needs to drop the self or change in some way? Or is there simply the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of traffic, the rise and fall of breathing, and the knowingness of being here now, present and aware, being and beholding this ever-changing experiencing, just exactly as it is?

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Thank you all for being here. We are truly one whole indivisible happening in which nothing is really happening, and yet THIS, right here, right now, is not nothing, but it is utterly ungraspable, inconceivable, unresolvable and unpindownable. Words are like water flowing past, gurgling sounds to enjoy, maybe something to drink or bathe in, and then it all flows on, endlessly changing while never departing from Here-Now, this Ocean of Love. May we be and become and realize this that has never not been so.