What is Love?

Love is submitting. Love is the cause of love. Love is understanding. Love is a kind of music. Love and the Gentle Heart are identical. Love is the poetry of the sorrow. Love is the tender soul looking in the mirror. Love is evanescent. Love is never having to say you are sorry. Love is a process of crystallization. Love is giving. Love is sharing a stick of gum. You can never tell about Love. Love is an empty word. Love is being reunited with God. Love is bitter. Love is encountering the angel. Love is a vale of tears. Love is waiting for the phone to ring. Love is the whole world. Love is intoxicating. Love is a monster. Love is blind. Love is listening to your heart. Love is sacred silence. Love is the subject of songs. Love is good for the skin.

Love is an urgency to hold fast to another and to be together in the same place. It is the desire to keep the world out by embracing another. It is yearning to find a safe harbor for the human soul. I acquired the courage to say this without letting myself be taken over completely by blind faith, but also without being swept away by a cynicism that would leave my soul homeless. So here I am adding my own ideas on the subject which come from my own limited but intense experience.

You see, I was not able to say anything new. But still, I managed to say something!

The Whole Truth

He left twelve years old;
came back at twenty four,
stiff with great regard
for what he’d learned.

His father said to him:

'did you ask for that teaching
by which the unheard gets to be heard,
the unknown gets to be known?'

'No sir, the seeds are far to small.'

So now his father says:
'And yet, within each tiny seed,
there is a subtle something which
your eyes don't see, something unseen
from which this spreading tree has grown.
That ground from which all things are born,
on which depends all that is born,
and into which all things return,
this ground is what you need to know.'

The world that happens of itself
has scraped outward holes,
through which perception looks outside
and does not see the self within.

But someone brave, who longs for that
which does not die, turns sight back in
upon itself, and it is thus
that self is seen, returned to self,
to its own true reality.

Truth is that which is desired
beneath all seeming goals of mind.
It's that which all desire seeks,
and it should thus be understood:

Seen where the mind turns back
to self from which it comes,
truth is at once both goal and base
as it appears through changing time.

It is each being's inner self,
the single guiding principle
that makes from its own unity
the many seeming things of world.

Beneath the many different forms
imagined by our partial minds
to personify the truth they seek,
It is the source of love.

It's known by those who see it as
it is: already standing here,
as one's own self. Just this, and
only this, brings lasting happiness.

It's grasped only by being it:
by coming just to what one is,
to one's own true reality.

But when one sees what's truly loved-
as one's own self, unlimited,
personal, beyond all else,
the source from where all help and
guidance comes, where everything belongs-
there one is freed from misery.

Then he can journey on, from place
to place, and get back home again.

So also, one who has a teacher
knows that he's delayed
only so long as he is not
released from ignorance.
And when released, he knows
that he's arrived,
entirely complete.