When you find love, hold on to it
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The Hunt For A Pursuit Love can be hard to find. Searching for your person to call your own. Sometimes it can be lonely out there. Cold, even. The currents can feel like they’re against us. But if you’re lucky, you find someone to be by your side. Someone who wants to share the journey with you. Someone who’s there for you. Even when the going gets rough. Someone who will put up with all of your madness and intensity. And doesn't just put up with it but celebrates it. Celebrates you. Finding that person isn't easy. Making it work is even harder. So if you’re lucky enough to find that person, well, never let go. To love worth holding onto. Forever. These are the opening words of Percy Fraser in the new movie adaptation of Carley Fortune’s book "Every Year After". "When you find love, hold on to it." This is just one aspect of how we recognize what love is. Expect love. Plan for that. Hold on to it. Forever. There are many pictures in our minds and ideas of describing what love is. Or what trust is. Any heart quality, actually. We come to believe that those experiences and feelings are love. But what actually is happening is that we are searching for conditions, not the quality itself. It is a hunt for recreating conditions. It is like in a dream, a pursuit, or wanting of something in a place where that thing is not. What do we think we need to do? We need to recreate the conditions. And so we think, "If I cannot recreate what gives me love, I cannot feel love." In our pursuit of recreating conditions, it can feel like it is really hard to find love or trust. This search can truly often feel very lonely. If we fail in our ongoing pursuit, we can come to the conclusion that we are a failure, or we simply are unlucky and others are the lucky ones who found love and keep love. We can also believe that we just need to work harder. We might even believe we are not sincere enough in our pursuit. In Chinese culture, there is a term very commonly known: This term is mostly used in the context of religious practice. So people, for example, go to a temple or a place like that to worship. And often they will buy some incense, and they will pray to the gods there. And here, this is how they use it. "If I am sincere, then what I pray for, or I wish for, will be delivered, will come true." Most of the time it would be fair to say, when people are doing that, they are really sincere. But this is working on the basis of a transaction. It's very transactional. People do what they think will help them get what they want. "I need to find love". They donate money to the place, they even do some volunteering work, and they worship and pray to God, and they expect that their wishes will be promised, that they will become true. What if the wishes are not to come true? Often people would say, "Maybe you're not sincere enough". Our experiences of what trust or love are built through the processing of information by the five sensory organs–through the external and through conditioning. Yet our sensory organs are restricted to a tiny, tiny fraction of objective reality. The world we perceive is an interpretation of what we think we see, hear, touch, and smell, and we build our reality around it. And then we believe this reality is true. Under these conditions we experience love. But is that the true nature of love? Love is unconditional, without any conditions. Love is the essence of the infinite wisdom of the universe. If we’d truly trust this information that we cannot perceive objective reality, we’d come to the realization that We cannot see things clearly, Love can be hard to find. When you find love, hold on to it. The identification of our five senses, to what we see and what we feel, is so strong that we don’t trust in something that we cannot see and that does not feel "right". We do not have a reference for the true nature of love. But the essence of the universe is love. And love is something that brings benefits to everyone. The laws of the universe are made for that; they are made to improve and uplift all the beings and all the structures that exist in the universe to evolve in a positive and beneficial way together. We know we can’t see things clearly, and still we keep on pursuing what we can see, feel, touch, and smell, and we think it is love. A hunt for a pursuit that is futile. Over thousands of years, humanity has created a strong drive of visual culture. Fears of all kinds are behind the drive of visuality. Our fears in the continuous vivid dream are manifestations of ignorance. Because something is being hidden. The incompleteness. Our lack of true understanding of objective reality and the laws of life. What part are you hiding so that you need the love of the others to allow yourself to give yourself love or to justify that you are loveable? Everything the fear is hiding is a piece of your pure, true heart. Waiting for you to see all the layers of our self-imposed conditions. XOM P.S. Have you also been so curious about what is behind that Chinese term: "When you are truly sincere, what you wish will come true"? It’s a true statement, but it will only be true when it is practiced in full alignment with Dao, which means what we wish for, what we want to achieve, cannot be just self-serving. It needs to be beneficial for others as well. That’s how it works. Mirjam Blank |