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Relationships: Knowing if it's Real



Posted: Wednesday, May 09, 2007

by
Dhammabucha Rocksprings Meditation

How do we know if what we feel for another is true love? This certainly is an important consideration, because if we are wrong about it, there could be serious, long-term consequences.

Real love transcends the petty love that we sometime mistake as the real thing. When we fall in love due to sexual drives, loneliness, or even our insecurity, then the love we feel is a dependency. We could be dependent upon our partner to provide us endless intimacy, or constant company, or we could actually insist that our partner steadily feeds our self-esteem. None of these kinds of dependency is true love, except maybe a love of ourselves.

Our love affair with ourselves can cleverly conceal itself as a devotion to another, however this devotion is no more than a ploy by a clever ego — a plan to boost itself with the anticipated attention, real, or imagined, that it will receive from the other. This happens in physical relationships as well as spiritual ones, the only difference being a real person vs. an imagined savior.

This is not true love; this is purely a manipulation in order to receive attention. When the attention is withdrawn, however, such as when a real person loses interest, then hatred results. In the case of an imagined savior, the attention can be sustained as long as the savior can somewhat answer our prayers, and therefore, a spiritual relationship is always safer, even if it is a figment of our imagination.

None of this is real love. Real love would not be crushed, or even touched, if the other person, real or imagined, didn’t perform for us; real love would endure. Real love has nothing whatsoever to do with ourselves, but everything to do with the other; whomever, or whatever that may be.

Real love is universal. It is not possible to truly love one, and then hate another; love could not survive this kind of dualistic environment. Real love can’t choose between its objects of affection. Even though it may choose one individual over another to be with, real love will retain affection for all individuals. Real love never comes from the mind, or from thought, real love happens when we touch that something so special that our heart soars.

However, we can never know that “something so special" that we may call God, or the ineffable, or the ground of all existence, but we can touch its magnificence through the images of its earth; the mountains, the sky, the vast ocean — a baby’s smile, a puppy, a kitten . . . that special one we love. And if these images all fail us in one way or another as we make our way through this uncertain journey called life, the ones who know true love in their hearts will forgive.

Because we never expected the ones we love to be supermen, only human beings . . . like ourselves.

E. Raymond Rock of Fort Myers, Florida is cofounder and principal teacher at the Southwest Florida Insight Center, www.SouthwestFloridaInsightCenter.com His twenty-eight years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents, including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Theravada Buddhist monk. His book, A Year to Enlightenment (Career Press/New Page Books) is now available at major bookstores and online retailers. Visit www.AYearToEnlightenment.com

E. Raymond Rock (anagarika eddie) is a meditation teacher at the DhammaRocksprings Theravada Buddhist Meditation Retreat Center: http://www.dhammarocksprings.org and author of “A Year to Enlightenment: http://www.amazon.com/Year-Enlightenment-Steps-Enriching-Living/dp/1564148912

He lived at Wat Pah Nanachat under Ajahn Chah, at Wat Pah Baan Taad under Ajahn Maha Boowa, and at Wat Pah Daan Wi Weg under Ajahn Tui. He had been a postulant at Shasta Abbey, a Zen Buddhist monastery in northern California under Roshi Kennett; and a Theravada Buddhist anagarika at both Amaravati Monastery in the UK and Bodhinyanarama Monastery in New Zealand, both under Ajahn Sumedho. The author has meditated with the Korean Master Sueng Sahn Sunim; with Bhante Gunaratana at the Bhavana Society in West Virginia; and with the Tibetan Master Trungpa Rinpoche in Boulder, Colorado. He has also practiced at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the Zen Center in San Francisco.
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