Wouldn't it be much easier to simply love and live without the reasons why? And no, I am not suggesting the impossible. This is probably the key insight of this book and definitely the heartthrob of our existence. It is possible to live in harmony with life and to unconditionally love ourselves and all people and things. It sounds great to write or say this. However, accepting it and allowing it often seems to cause us great difficulty. Ask yourself these questions. Is the manifestation of love in my existence usually flowing naturally? Or is it manipulated and restricted by the burden of thoughts, emotions, details, and reasons? It will not benefit your experience of love by saying you love someone because of this or that. In the end it comes down to a universal simplicity. Do you wish to love? How do you desire to live? It may seem that this is an oversimplification of something that has always been a mystery. However, what do you have when you remove the excess baggage associated with love? This is a weight that has accumulated in our attempts to love and be loved by someone. Nevertheless, it was, is, and will always be within our power to change how we observe and experience love and life. The next stepping stone on this journey involves understanding deeply that because has nothing to do with love.
The mind wants us to think or believe that having a reason to love is necessary. It can use this logic to validate thought interpretations and definitions of love, at least temporarily. The mind deduces that there are reasons why we love. Therefore, the reasons seem to be practical. This may be convenient for the mind but doesn't necessarily allow you to freely experience unconditional love.
Rather, pure love is obscured by concept and expectancy. This is often not realized, and a person will relentlessly strive to love and be loved. The reason or because becomes the center of attention. These are misinterpreted because the love that you truly can feel is beyond the words, symbols, and ideas. How do we escape this vicious cycle? We intrinsically know love. Its essence and purity is the reality that we are inspired to experience. Therefore, are we being foolish because our search is for something that we have already?
The following is an excerpt from the Foreword in this book written by Iwi Liss, writer & teacher
I'm aware of how controversial this topic is. A reflection about it, however, could be life changing. Through inquiry and self-inquiry, I keep observing that what we commonly call love, especially the love for the closest partner, for the family, too often turns out to be a mixture of psychological, emotional, and even economic dependence. A fine web of agreements, habits, mutual expectations, automatic behavior, sealed by the memory of shared moments, usually salted with fear of losing the familiar, even if one feels lonely and not understood in such a relationship. And one favors this one partner, this one family still, makes her/him/them the chosen one, with whom one holds against the others, which is also encouraged in our society. Whether this subtle dependency on the favor and disgust of others is possibly a social and/or cultural necessity, whether it was naturally caused by fear of being alone and the need for allies, is less meaningful to me, if not uninteresting. I do not believe in connectedness through blood relatives anyway. Too often I have experienced families where there was no love, and too often I experience profound, unconditional connectedness that is not based on familiarity. Without condemning this psychological, emotional, economic dependence or declaring it as bad or unnecessary, I rather ask what love really is.
Is love, and especially unconditional love, this network of dependencies, the agreed and sometimes even involuntary togetherness, and the mutual interaction? Or is love something completely different, and if so, what would that be? Reflecting on this question, we can sometimes come up with amazing results. Like, for example, that love does not exist thanks to and through the above-mentioned relationships and dependencies, but in spite of them. As my friend wrote to me recently, "The beauty and purity of life and love is experienced in silence." I pass on this sentence as a tool for reflection to all who seek to discover the essence of love and thus of life.
- Iwi Liss