In the image of God...

YOU ARE THE ONE

Do not seek love. Do not leave yourself for love, and search for love in the other. Love is not an object, it cannot be given nor taken away. It cannot be found nor lost. Love is not a feeling, a state, or a peak experience, but what you are, PRESENCE ITSELF.
Do not confuse love with attraction. Attraction comes and goes, can fade over time. Do not confuse love with longing. Longing is impermanent, transitory. Do not confuse love with feelings of bliss, pleasure, an excited nervous system. These passing states cannot last; it is not in their nature. Even promises, given with such certainty today, with the best of intentions, can fade tomorrow, or be broken.

Love, however, does not fade. Love cannot diminish over time. Love is not a commodity, a shifting form. Love is a field, a field within and without us, a field in which thoughts, feelings, even the most seemingly solid plans for the future, can appear and disappear. Love holds hope as much as loss, excitement as much as boredom, crushing disappointment as much as bliss. Love is the field for the shifting forms, the ground that holds us as we walk, sit, talk or do not, feel what we feel in each other's presence, go about the business of our day, plan, eat, hope, say goodbye, try to love. Love is greater than us. We do not generate it with words and deeds, or even intentions, but we are continually embraced by it, held in its vastness, no matter what we do, or do not. We are married, we divorce; we are friends, we are lovers; we break up, we break together; we are born, we die; the field endures.

Nobody has ever given us love; that is the great illusion. We have simply remembered the field in each other's presence, sometimes, recognised eternity in the midst of the everyday, then credited another. Love never came from outside of us; we simply touched our own presence, fell into the love that we are, and cannot not be. And nobody ever took love away from us; we simply forgot the field, and 'blamed' the other, and looked for love again, feeling its absence, lost in a narrative of 'lost love'. Yet love was there, even in its apparent absence; it was present, even in the loss. It cannot be broken; a wave cannot crush the Ocean.

Do not seek love, do not look for the light, but be it, offer it; the joy of loving another is infinitely greater than the joy of fearfully clinging to another's love, for deep down you know it is only an illusion that what you have always longed for could ever have come from outside of you. You are the One; you have always been the One.

The search ends exactly where it began - in presence.

You realise you are love itself, and this changes everything; love is yours, forever... even when it's not.

- Jeff Foster