Love is Not a Currency of Exchange, Part I
I wanted to write today about that much overused and misunderstood four letter word: Love.
A beloved teacher of mine, Carolyn Elliott, is fond of reiterating the truth that real unconditional love is absolutely humiliating and excruciating - along with true full-bodied gratitude - you know, the sort that’s free of the armory of hollow, spiritual platitudes and instead opens you up to the visceral realization that you and all of life is one giant miraculous explosion-implosion of deep wonder and magic, and as profoundly fleeting as the blink of an eye.
Think about that for a moment.
If we were to really open ourselves to that, the humiliation of it would be a sort of dying. All of our attachments to complaining and controlling and fearing and whatnot would fall away. Or at the very least, we would engage with these apparent attachments as a funny little game of voluntary amnesia we play with ourselves to keep us from remembering our indigenous supernova-ness.
Opening ourselves up to unconditional Love is much like this - except on psychedelic plant-medicine steroids.
The current of Love - or Eros - is our innate life force. It’s why the glyph of the heart is traditionally depicted in red, the colour of blood.
Love, specifically that of the unconditional variety, is literally who and what we are.
Yet, we insist on playing this funny little amnesia-game with ourselves, pretending that the current of Love is a currency of exchange; which is to say that it is something that we have to earn and be deserving of, and something that we can withhold -from ourselves, each other - as a way of wielding control.
Outside of a game of make-believe, can you feel the absurdity of that?
First of all - Love (with a capital ‘L’) is unconditional.
Anything else is an imposter. Making Love conditional is putting a price tag on it and taking it to market to sell to the highest bidder, much like putting a price tag on oxygen.
The words of the wise courtesan-priestess Diotima in Plato’s Symposium always come back to me when I reflect on unconditional Love - or Eros:
“Love is not beautiful or good, nor is it ugly or bad; it is something in between.”
Oof.
What are we to make of this with our good-bad, right-wrong colonized psyches? I mean- love is good isn’t it? It’s all pure and holy, isn’t it? Only good people deserve to be loved, don’t they?
Well, first - let go of the need to grasp Diotima's words with the binaries of your ego-intellect.
Instead, I invite you to feel the courtesan’s words in your body.
If there’s a spark of recognition, follow me into the in-between.
(I make no promises of your safe/unchanged return.)
Now, become aware of the invisible current of energy from your third eye, to your chest, to your genitals. Breathe, and gently allow yourself to feel this current rising and falling like a circuit of electric-indiscriminately-loving-Eros.
If you’re still with me, keep reading and breathing and feeling.
This is the charged current of energy that creates, preserves + destroys. It is the unholy-holy dance of Kali + Shiva.
This is the current of indiscriminate, unconditional Love.
This is the cyclical life force of unconditional Love present in Life and Death.
Where is your awareness right now?
If it has wandered, gently bring it back to your innate current of excruciatingly indiscriminate Love.
This is what you and I are.
This is what the whore and the virgin, the murderer and the saint, the fascist and the freedom fighter, the abuser and the victim are.
What if we decided to put aside our childish games of forgetting, of turning the current of Love into chattel - of withholding it from ourselves and each other?
More soon on how to integrate and embody this in the world.