"Love," this English word: like other English words, it has tense. "Loved" or "will love" or "have loved." All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is (ai). It has no tense, no past, no future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.
—Guo, Xiaolu
In a very real sense we will be attempting to examine the unexaminable and to know the unknowable. Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.
—M. Scott Peck
Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire.
—Teilhard de Chardin
This is the challenge: To let your view get so vast that your identity disappears. Then you realize that there is no other, and there is nothing personal going on. Contrary to the way the ego views such a realization, it is in reality the birth of true love, a love which is free of all boundaries and fear.
—Adyashanti
Another Look At Love
I don't believe love ever ends. Once having loved, you cannot, not love. I still love everyone I ever loved. It is just the tense of the word that places love in the past. It is our language which complicates love more than our emotions. Love is an absolute without tense. It is not "here today and gone tomorrow," and if this is your experience, love is not the culprit, believe me. When someone I love dies, I die too. In the same manner, the earth dies when a life or species is taken from existence. Romantic love, however, does end. Anyone who could possibly sustain the dreamy fantasies of hormonal romantic love would deserve saint hood, but that is not the kind of loving I'm talking about.
Love is the energy binding life to life to life. Think of it as being somewhat akin to gravity except that love's strength is not derived from mass or numbers as is the case with gravity. Gravity holds things together in the same manner our skin holds our insides in place. Now, imagine love as the force connecting all of life, holding all of life together, its skin. Be that life a singled cell organism or the billions of organisms inhabiting the space and time of our universe.
We tend to see love as being out there, all about the 'other' and it is. Except that the 'other' is not the beloved in the form of another person or object. That 'other' is merely a manifestation of love's energy, in the same way you are. The 'other' I speak of is the all of life's spiral of which we are each a part. This model of the universe is one which is continually manifesting itself, continually expanding. Even using the analogy of skin is restrictive because it makes us see something enclosed as opposed to something without limits or boundaries held infinitely together by an invisible force. We limit our view of love when it is solely concentrated in the beloved unless we recognize that the beloved is all. Each is all and all is one. And the force, gravity, energy holding all this together I believe to be love.
This is the basis of the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha but it's not about religion, it's not about a god in any form, it's about love. All the wisdom and spiritual teachings of the ages point directly to this model of the universe but man's ego, his need to dominate and control life to it's destruction prevents him from seeing life and love as one.
Photo Credit: Love, Simplified Chinese Calligraphy, SEPhillips, Brush & Ink, 2010.