During the last commune, the basic dilemma everybody faced was how to experience love. For many years, my friends who joined the commune have been experiencing so much pain, discomfort, frustrations, guilt, remorse, resentment and anything both the mind and heart can feel bitter upon. A friend in her mid-forties shared about her challenge with her ex-husband whom she "loved" so much, forsaking her own life, only to end up being betrayed. Another friend in her twenties, shared her frustrating relationship with her mom whom she felt careless to her. In spite of these bitterness, I am confident that they are brought in the right time and chance, for the commune provided them the moment to explore love and its true nature. Yet, the biggest ordeal is, after knowing what love is, how can one possibly experience it?
I also asked myself the same question. What is the experience of love? As a young boy, the answer seemed so erratic that I thought having a romantic relationship was the true experience of love. But later it brought emotional pain that I almost wanted to become a robot. I questioned God and life why should I feel emotions. If fleeting emotions are experience of love, then why they beget emotional suffering. It is not uncommon to hear people committing suicide in the name of unrequited love. And because of this elusive experience, many people find themselves living meaningless lives.
In the book The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield wrote a scene to describe the message of the fifth chapter: The Message of the Mystic. After being pursued by armed men, the nameless protagonist had ended up very stressed atop a cliff, overlooking an astounding natural panorama of rain forest covering the highlands of Peru. The next couple of minutes led him to experience kind of ecstasy. He began to feel buoyant, elated, and had a deep connection with nature. He cannot label the source of his joy, if it comes from the scenery or from himself, thereby blurring the limitations of his reasoning mind. All he had is a wonderful experience of at-oneness with the universe and of interconnection and harmony with life. This is a parabolic rendition of the experience of Love.
The same experience has been well-studied by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and he published the account in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Csikszentmihaly describes this experience as "focused attention" whereby a person experiences losing one's ego, distorted sense of time, dissolving self-consciousness, and being deeply engaged in the process of creating without any sense of worry. Apparently, flow has only been documented among artists and athletes. Although this is the case, the flow still resonates the undocumented experiences of thousands, without any labels, that these manifested criteria are the same criteria of experiencing love.
I am sure that you might have one experience of Flow: through doing artistic or creative work, or playing sports, or may be watching a wonderful natural scenery, or embracing someone, or praying and meditating. These experiences are valid, and they contribute to a much larger consciousness of the power of love. But, these are just tip of the iceberg. For the experience of love is so immense one can actually be incapable of describing it. Yet beyond this ineffable love lies the inner knowing that any human being can do it.
This is why most of the experiences of love are present in different spiritual traditions: satori, nirvana, rapture, fear(or awe) of God, kundalini, devekus, transcendence, wu wei. These and other sorts of terms can be easily enumerated and discussed each, but still the essence of these concepts stays perplexing to anyone unprepared. This is why Jesus Christ told his disciple to be like a child, for a child's consciousness is not judging, not labeling, not reasoning. Only then one can begin to experience love. And the experience will begin to liberate and bring the awareness of Oneness.
A new found friend told me about his most baffling experience when he was a very young boy. Together with his family, they went up a mountain in Northern Luzon where he grew up. As they reached the peak, everyone was so engrossed with taking their break and preparing to eat, but the boy went away from the group towards an unfamiliar area. It was his first time to be up in the mountains, overlooking steep highlands full of flowers vibrant in lavender, emanating with light. He felt unspeakable joy and awe, absorbed with the light flowing in and out of his being, and began to see interconnectedness. He later described to me that he could not define who was observing and being observed, as if the experience made him one with the scenery. It took him years to share this experience, for to tell to others adds to his bafflement. He had met a lot of people, all across the socioeconomic spectrum, and talking to them brought him no satisfactory answer. And it began to make sense, for our unintended meeting that day perhaps a completion of that personal puzzle. As he was telling me the story, I felt connected with him, started to establish the link of his experience to that of love. And the only answer that had sprung from my mind is he had a perfect example of the exact experience of love.
Many people thought that ecstatic experience like this is very rare, for their years of conditioned pain disabled them to learn how to experience love. An insight came to me after rereading Erich Fromm's book The Art of Loving. He said that the greatest fear and anxiety of man is to be alone. To compensate this, one enters an orgiastic state, achieved mostly in different ways: creative artwork, sexual orgasm, and alcoholic or drug use. No wonder why most people who are disadvantagely addicted can be seen in different light. They are seeking for meaning, seeking for love. They want to experience it, but unable to sustain it, thus they become addicted to something or someone. That goes the same with romantically involved people, who are dubbed as "martyrs," trying to sacrfiice everything, for the fear of being alone. This is also clear among drug and sexual abusers, workaholics, greedy with objects, codependents, corrupt officials, showbiz fanatics, narcissistics, mentally ill, sick and poor people and others who are still feel empty, unloved, unaware of the greatest nature of reality at the core of their beings.
How to begin experiencing Love? Awareness and calmness are the keys. This is how God wants us to have in order to see the Love within. Be aware of our deepest pains, to allow healing to take place. I used to be a hating person, always justifying of having deep-seated hatred. There were a number of people I used to hate, and they were emotional baggages to me. One day, I found them heavy, and began to utter this words: I forgive him, I forgive her, I forgive them, I forgive myself. As I became aware of my hatred, Love manifested as forgiveness, then became peace of mind. From peace of mind it became joy, and then harmony, and then detachment. The process is endless. Love manifest in different forms. So Love can also be experienced in a myriad of ways.
When we stop looking outside from something or someone for happiness and love, we begin to experience both. We stop asking God of giving us things and people, for to experience God is Love enough. To experience Love is to experience God. Seeing the Love within is the beginning, and we can let go everything that makes us miserable. The Love within that we see is the Love we see with others, and we begin to be more compassionate and that makes it easier to Love our enemies and everything that we think we don't like. For the world we see outside is the world we see inside. And from within, only from within, the experience of Love can be felt and realized.
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