The Meaning of Love

November 25, 2023

Rose Tobin

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Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

The phrase “The Meaning of Love” refers not so much to a verbal definition of Love as it does to a living, experiential knowingness of what Love is.

The path of spiritual growth involves a progressive expansion of awareness from experiencing ourselves as a limited individual small “self “to embodying more of our true “Self.” The “self” is the part of us that thinks that it is alone and separate. It does not feel a living connection with its Source or God. It longs for Love but cannot feel it within. Thus it sees Love as something “out there” that it needs to survive. It expects outside circumstances or other people to “make it happy” or to help it to “find love.”

However, deep within everyone is an endless ocean of Love, even when the “self” feels painfully cut off from it.

“The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance back of love into our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth.” Marianne Williamson

Love as an Art Form

In his seminal book “The Art of Loving”, Erich Fromm described Love as a skill to be honed in the way artists apprentice themselves on the way to mastery. Like any art, expanding our capacity to understand Love’s meaning requires both knowledge and effort. To love someone is not just a feeling, it is a decision.

Love is an art. It is something that we have to learn to do.
We have to learn and practice love just like we have to learn and practice drawing or playing the piano. Erich Fromm

And Don Miguel Ruiz echoes the same approach to Love in his book “Mastery of Love.”

To become Masters of Love, we have to practice Love. The art of relationship is also a whole mastery, and the only way to reach mastery is with practice. We can talk about Love and write a thousand books about it. But Love will have to be completely different for each of us because we have to experience Love. Love is not about concepts; Love is about action. Don Miguel Ruiz: The Mastery of Love

Love as an Informed Practice

Approaching Love as a skill may not sound very romantic of course. But is it not also encouraging? It takes the meaning of Love out of the realms of something that may or may not happen to us or that we find “out there” somewhere (if we get lucky!). It is a recognition of Love as an informed practice and a way of being. Rather than Love being random or unpredictable, we can see it as an art form that we can practice and master. We can switch from being the passive recipients of Love to being the active givers and living embodiments of Love.

Our life can become a classroom in which to hone our capacity not just to love and be loving, but gradually to realize that we are Love. Every moment, every encounter, every challenge, can become the laboratory where we master our art. Ultimately, of course, it is not about having to learn to love or to attain a sense of oneness, but of remembering the essence of our true nature. But to get from forgetting to remembering does take practice!

If Love is an art form, as suggested by Fromm, how can we hone our art? Every art form involves practice. With enough practice, the art form becomes second nature. In the case of Love, it is more like consciously returning to our first, true nature. We have not left or lost this true nature; we have simply forgotten it.

Love is Waiting Within All of Us

Love waits within all of us, not just some of us. The Indian greeting of “Namaste” expresses this beautifully. The sacred in me acknowledges the sacred in you. Love is what we are. Your heart stirs when it senses the sacred in poetry, music, nature, other people. However, Love is also the great purifier, the great teacher, of where we still have work to do.

Remember Michelangelo’s answer about how he created his David sculpture, that he saw David in the marble and carved until he set him free? Love is already waiting within us to be recognized and expressed. It waits patiently as part of us fearfully clings to our sense of separation, while another part of us gradually relaxes our resistance to Love’s presence. What metaphor or art form appeals to you: painting, music, sculpture, gardening, poetry, design, drama, something else? Perhaps it could provide a helpful framework for your spiritual growth.

Seeing Earth School as Love’s Academy

We can look at Earth School as the perfect setting to re-learn and re-member the meaning of Love. Interpreting the path of expansion into Love in this way can also give us compassion and a sense of fellowship with our fellow students in Earth School. The fact that we find ourselves in human form implies that we are still artists-in-training.

With the rare exceptions of fully enlightened masters, none of us has Love down pat, as they say. We can accept that we are all in different classes, taking different modules. Some are in kindergarten, some nearly ready to graduate, many are in-between (in middle school). But while we are here we still have something to learn. We have much to learn from each other. We can set the intention to regard each other as fellow students, as team-mates, rather than as opponents.

Seeing ourselves and everyone else as Love’s students can take the personal edge out of conflict, rejection and challenging behavior. If we are still in Love’s Academy, our capacity for Love is not yet 100%, or we wouldn’t need to be in school! Neither would anyone else need to be in school with us!

Stepping Stones

All the experiences of life are opportunities to learn both what Love is and what it isn’t: family, friends, falling in love, the workplace. Each of life’s challenges is a lesson in some aspect of Love’s meaning. Because Love has such power, we come to know this energy in stages. Each stage presents a lesson in Love’s intensity and forms: forgiveness, compassion, generosity, kindness, caring for oneself and others.

Human loves are the trial runs. Divine Love is always the goal. But it builds on all the stepping-stones of relationships and life experiences. Eventually we see that Divine Love permeates them all! Divine Love is, of course, the template and model for such human love. And yet, human love and life is the necessary school for our gradual living embodiment of Divine Love.

First Steps

One of the first steps in learning the meaning of Love lies in not seeing someone else’s interests as separate from our own. A light is entering the darkness. It may be a single light, a tiny candle, but that is enough.

The tiniest expression of Love is then a major step forward. In Love’s kindergarten we may be still very ego-based. The kindergartener who shares their toys or their candy is beginning to stretch the muscle of Love, as it were. That can initially feel very hard. They may then learn to care for a pet or a younger child. Now the pet’s or other child’s wellbeing is as important as their own. The first expansion into not seeing someone else’s interests as separate from one’s own is far more significant than it may first appear.

Through the Eyes of Compassion

On the spiritual path it pays to be kind and loving. Nearly everyone is fighting a hard battle of one kind or another. If they are behaving unlovingly, can we respond with Love? When I feel triggered or judgmental about what I regard as someone else’s negative behavior or attitudes, I have found it helpful to remember a time when I behaved in the same way. I nearly always felt awful inside, usually awful about myself. Maybe that’s how they’re feeling.

Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appeal for healing and help, regardless of the form it takes. ACIM T-12.1.3

Can we see the people who challenge us through the same lens of compassion that we would like to be seen through? Most negative behavior arises from fear, emotional immaturity and lack of self-love. If the behavior is seriously damaging to others, Love will need to be expressed firmly. But underlying the firmness will be respect for the person’s innate worthiness as an expression of God, just as we are.

Much of their outlandish behavior will have seemed a good idea to them at the time. Just as we can look back at some of the foolish or damaging things we’ve done. They also may have seemed a good idea at the time, or we may have felt cornered and powerless. And it’s because we did them at that time, and learnt from it, we wouldn’t do them now. Can we let that be also true for others?

Allowance and Acceptance

Being willing to be compassionate and forgiving towards others benefits us even more than it benefits them. Looking at their struggles and faux-pas through the eyes of Love also helps us to be compassionate towards ourselves. Forgiveness is an earthly form of Love. If we can realize that under someone’s arrogant persona or gossiping lies a deep sense of not being good enough, we can be kinder to ourselves. And vice versa.

“Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.” Desiderata

As fellow-travellers, we can learn much about the meaning of Love by seeing each other as fellow-pilgrims rather than competitors or antagonists. We are not here to “fix” anyone under the guise of Love.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Thomas Merton

“The Meaning of Love”: A Vast Epic

One way of looking at our spiritual journey is as though we are in the final chapters of a vast epic called The Meaning of Love. We can finally see what types of actions lead to which types of consequences. Every character in our “story” has a gift to give us. If we give some time to nurturing our inner connection to Source right within our own beings, we-as-Source can learn to re-perceive our holograms as expressions of the One-Self exploring both the path of Love and the path of non-Love, in order to understand the meaning of Love even more deeply.

This knowledge of Love will not be something truly new. It will be the remembrance of something we knew from before the foundations of the world. Something deep in our hearts recognises this Love and, upon encountering it, stirs to life. How could it be otherwise? Love is not something we have, but something we are. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.

We gradually realize, from the core our being, that Love truly is a many-splendored thing, as is Joy. The splendor lies within the depth of our own Being. Love is our true home. As described by Noel Tobin: “Our true home is where our Love is and where it resides eternally.”

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