What is conventionally called love can be many different things, and there are many different levels to it.
Some people call it love when they fall in love with someone, which is a clinging, a needing that is partly usually physical, emotional needing of the other, and that’s called love. But that is a lower manifestation of what is love and can easily turn into its opposite from one moment to the next, as many people have experienced. How the person that you’ve fallen in love with, you hate that person a few days later, a few weeks later, suddenly.
But the love for your children is a different matter. There’s a strong emotional bond with your children, and I haven’t experienced a mother’s love, but I can understand that you might get a sense of losing yourself in the other. And that is that strong emotional bond.
And then there’s another higher manifestation of love that may already be also part of your emotional bond, but it’s probably a mixture of emotion plus something else, but that something else is spiritual love.
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So the foundation for that is not, I would say, as it’s conventionally called loving yourself. That’s a strange thing. Many people, quite a few, hate themselves more than they love themselves. It’s better, of course, to love yourself than to hate yourself. It’s something that people who practice positive thinking and want to shift negative mind patterns may put notices up throughout their house with little messages to themselves, which might say, “I completely accept and love myself”. Well, I’m sure that’s better than “I completely hate myself”, much better, but there’s still a duality there, and it’s a very strange thing. Who is loving whom? I love myself. Who are you, and who is that self that you love? People who say, I love myself, don’t think about it, what that really means, and there’s a little bit of a duality there. I love myself, so there must be two of me. There’s the “I” that does the loving and there’s a “myself” that’s being loved. Strange, really weird.
And then as you begin to awaken spiritually, awaken to the presence, then what gradually comes to an end is having a relationship with yourself. Until that happens, people have a relationship with themselves, which sometimes even manifests as dialogues they have in their head. One part of you talks to the another part of you. You are talking to yourself. “Now, you really should make an effort to do better.” “I know you can do better”, and the other part of it, “Well, I’ve done my best, but what else can I do than do my best?”
You have a relationship with yourself. Very strange. This kind of split that happens, and that’s sort of part of a normal state of consciousness. Everybody, unless they are awakened or at least awakening, in which case that begins to recede, but everybody else, they have a relationship with themselves, which is maybe sometimes good, sometimes bad, uneasy. They are proud of themselves, and then they are ashamed, and then they call themselves a loser or somebody else calls them a loser and they believe it, or all kinds of weird things, narratives and so on.
And as you awaken spiritually, what gradually comes to an end is having a relationship with yourself. So what is that replaced with? When you no longer have a relationship with yourself, you are yourself.
