Atisha, a Buddhist monk in the 10th Century echoed what love really is:

“Love is the wish for others to be happy.”

Do you really love your mate, spouse, parents, siblings? Honestly? The moment you aren’t wishing for them to be happy, that’s not love. And if you only wish for them to be happy some of the time, you don’t really love them, you need something from them.

A headline yesterday from India reveals the kind of addiction people think of as love: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=13475321 It should be clear this man did not truly love his girlfriend. It’s the same kind of addiction and suffering promoted by Romeo & Juliet. Love defined by wanting to die. These two things don’t go together.

You can actually feel love even when you are alone! Do you wish happiness for yourself? Try it now, see, hear, feel yourself happy. Now, wish for someone you know to be happy, see it so. Imagine now everyone around you, in your city, on the planet, to be happy. Just see them as happy and notice how you feel. This is what love truly is, wishing all beings, including yourself, to feel happy. Not from what they have or are doing, but to simply be happy now.

From this place of wishing & seeing all beings as happy, now act. This becomes the action of love. You become an act of love.

Instead, practice this new matra, “I am love.” What does that feel like in your body? Love does NOT exist outside of us! That is a false notion. The only love is within you. You ARE love. From this place of “I am love”, what do you love?

You may find that from “I am love” you love yourself. When you don’t judge or hate yourself, you now judge others less. You can love others. When “I am love”, I experience love with the sky, ocean, people around me or the world, the universe is available. Love simply IS.

So practice this week your new mantra, “I am love” and the beingness of love. You don’t need to talk about love, people will just feel it. Then, just maybe, they will remember THEY are love. And what if all humans remembered that they ARE love, not that love is some commodity, some external quantity, what would be possible?

Say inside, “I am love.”

A tweet from Dr. Wayne Dyer on Wednesday raised some great chatter about love in the community. Here’s his thought:

“In any relationship in which two people become one, the end result is two half people.”

The great challenge in the world is that most people are walking around asleep but they think they are awake. They are looking at the world through unconscious programming, “models” of reality. The key model exposed here is that men and women are half people, incomplete until they find their “soul mate”. This is a dangerous model that leads to disappointment and so much divorce and resentment in couples.

We can trace this model all the way back to Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. You see, we forget that this story is NOT a love story, it is a TRAGEDY! Shakespeare wrote with incredible depth, not superficial motives. We forget his play is about a girl who is almost 14 and feels that she cannot live without her much older love (he’s maybe 15). Is a 13-year-old our model for love?

Now let’s look around at couples today. They meet and act like 13-year-old children, feeling torn apart if they can’t “have” the other person. If they can have them, they start to want to dominate them, as 13-year-olds do. The model commands that each feel like dying if they can’t be together. This is the test to know if they are feeling “true love”. This is so deep and unquestioned, some will even argue that you are “cynical” for not believing in “love”. Feel like dying or feel nothing, that’s choice the model gives us. Thus, if we are not creating a co-dependant relationship, it must not be love?

With the release of the latest Twilight movie, we are perpetuating this model to generations of girls and women. These women will be mothers and teach their sons and daughters this model of “true love”, which again is really a tragedy. Death or being a vampire that feeds off blood? Is that the choice of true love?

The first step in transforming, in awakening to true freedom, is awareness. As we step into Independence Day in America, let’s be aware of the bondage of tragic love and awaken to spiritual love. Spiritual love is whole people coming together to awaken the world in love. Whole people who see that more love can be awakened in the world with their partner by their side. Focus on being a whole person first!

If you can go on growing in this intimacy, which is no more excitement, then the joy will arise: first excitement, then love, then joy. Joy is the ultimate product, the fulfillment. Excitement is just a beginning, a triggering; it is not the end. And those who finish at excitement will never know what love is, will never know the mystery of love, will never know the joy of love. They will know sensations, excitement, passionate fever, but they will never know the grace that is love. They will never know how beautiful it is to be with a person with no excitement but with silence, with no words, with no effort to do anything. Just being together, sharing one space, one being, sharing each other, not thinking of what to do, what to say, where to go, how to enjoy; all those things are gone. The storm is over and there is silence. And it is not that you will not make love but it will not be a making really; it will be a love happening. It will happen out of grace, out of silence, out of rhythm; it will arise from your depths, it will not be bodily really. There is a sex which is spiritual, which has nothing to do with the body. Although the body partakes in it, participates in it, it is not the source of it. Then sex takes on the color of Tantra, only then.”

LET GO! DARSHAN DIARY – Osho

Thus we seek excitement, which is good. Go dancing, learn rock climbing, have passionate sex. Find what you can be excited about in your work. Take your son to a baseball game, just you two. Do something exciting, just one-on-one with each child individually. Plan something that would excite your spouse and surprise them. Or maybe start your first company. Be excited!

Now that you are getting excited, add love. Love is unconditional giving. it’s giving from a place of knowing there is an unlimited source of good within you. Your heart is wide open like the ocean, undefended. It’s the place where there is no mind. Sex now becomes just giving to each other, with no mind involved. Not trying to get anywhere, because you have experienced excitement. Mind is not tricking us into “thinking” we don’t have enough to give or we need to get first.

From this place, true joy emerges. It is the bliss of feeling alive with no mind, purely giving. You take risks, like starting a business, from the pure joy of giving of yourself in connection with others. You’re flowing, like water, because mind is not necessary other than to be a servant to who you really are.