How can we love beyond common sense?

Love is a mystery. It cannot be explained or rationalized. It does not obey reason, logic, cause or effect. It cannot be controlled or directed. Love IS.

Being so, of course it directly dethrones Ego-self.  ‘What do you mean I did not create or destroy love from free-will? What do you mean that love is an external force that does not depend on what I say or do?
My late husband and I met half way between a falling angel and a rising ape (I needn´t say who was who!). We had a totally different understanding of life and love. Where I was always yearning with an instinctive longing for fulfillment from Love at a higher realm, he was proudly bragging the love he could generate. One lived an ethereal reality, while the other was earth-bound and totally physical.
Those who identify with the capacity to see beyond what the eyes perceive,  sense a reality yet un-manifest, understanding Love as absolute. Those who limit reality to tangible truths, proved by deeds, need bodies to love.
Of course, experience integrates multiple realms of: a physical, psychological, rational and spiritual nature. Love encompasses all. It cannot be fragmented, though our limited perception distorts that subjective understanding of it. But even so, it is ‘lovable’. It rings a bell as if tapping into our unconscious knowing that love IS, far and beyond our experiencing of it. So when I love, I am isolated, separated from other’s experiencing of it and yet merged into a flow where I lose my self-conceived identity and become ONE with others. I can feel totally alienated, when I perceive such unfathomable love.
Common sense cannot contain love. It cannot understand it. No matter how it tries to define love, it ends up limiting it. Love cannot be held or contained in the present; nor in the past. Only the future can hold the ethereal possibility of love, held in HOPE.
The challenge is not to give way to doubt but Be-LIVE it.

Learning to Love: Reality Check

Gloria Ornelas

Today I went out for a drink with university colleagues and while talking about ‘qualitative research’ for an educational protocol we’re doing, the term “context” struck a note.
“Context determines what happens”, they were saying….
I suddenly realized, how unattached I was from my external ‘context’…as I focus solely on my subjective internal experiencing.
(This is how uneventful stirrings catalyze reflexive thinking.)
‘Context’- defined as the external reality; the conditions  that determine existence, is for me, as follows: the external ‘context’ of experience, is the ‘glass’, the container; while the internal ‘meaning’ of the experience, is the ‘liquid’. The context gives shape to the meaning with which we signify our experience. The gist is trying to live both and align external reality with inner Truth. This is particularly difficult when changes in the external context have a different timing to those of internal experiencing. In linear causality, ‘meaning’ before the experience, is called ‘intention’; whereas the meaning given after the experience, is ‘justification’…all within the same context.
Lovers are contextual. They determine the external conditions for the experience of loving. However, love, before the actual loving, may be defined as the intention or desire, a priori. Love, after the actual loving, is the justification we give to the experience of loving, a posteriori . It sounds bizarre but as fragmented as it sounds, my experience in the Monastery gave my understanding of love a subjective quality, loving blindly, through prayers. The intention behind our loving then, was to send good vibes in wishful prayers, and the justification was believing they were actually helping someone. However, the ‘one being loved’ in the external context, was  unknown, being un-accessible to us in the cloister. Thus, the loved one was an abstract; unreal to the senses; and the loving, merely subjective.
Perhaps, for love to become real, there must be a lover…or as the metaphor of the “one who yells in the woods”, goes:  “you must have someone hear you, to actually acknowledge you exist”. So I must have someone feel my love, for me to exist as a lover, myself.  Amo ergo sum.
All this pseudo-intellectual gibberish boils down to..having to ‘touch base’ and make a ‘reality check’ in love. First, we have to make sure we have a lover, and funny as it may seem that’s where I’m at…wondering if I can actually love, when the only contextual contact is a long-distance phone call….

 

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