Love, peace and happiness are simply the words that are used to describe the taste of our true nature. They are non-objective in the sense that they do not have any objective qualities. As such they are not experiences of the mind or body.
Seeking and resistance veil our true nature, present Awareness, and therefore veil the love, peace and happiness that is inherent within it or rather that is it.
As a result of forgetting our true nature of present Awareness and imagining ourselves instead to be a separate entity, we set out in the world looking for love in relationships, peace in situations and happiness in objects.
This seeking is, by definition, uncomfortable – it is the activity of suffering which defines the separate entity. In fact there is no separate seeking entity. The apparently separate entity is the activity of seeking/resisting.
When the relationship, situation or object is found, the seeking comes temporarily to an end and our true nature shines, that is, Awareness tastes itself, as it were, for a brief moment (actually it is a timeless moment, because the mind is not present there).
That timeless moment is what is known as love, peace or happiness. It is also known as beauty and understanding. That is our true nature.
When the mind rises up again, it misinterprets this non-objective experience of love, peace or happiness, during which it was not present, and attributes it to the relationship, situation or object.
With this appearance of subject/object thinking, the love, peace and happiness is again veiled and thinking then sets out again in search of a new relationship, situation or object hoping to re-enact the experience of love, peace or happiness that it mistakenly believes was produced by them.
However, it is not the relationship, situation or object that produces the love, peace and happiness. It is the cessation of the seeking/resisting thought which enables the underlying love etc. to shine. That is, the cessation of seeking/resisting allows our true nature to know or taste itself as it is, un-apparently-veiled by the activity of seeking/resisting.
The love you seek is not love – it is a state of the mind or body, however subtle. True love does not arise, it does not come and go, it cannot be found in the world, it cannot be found at one moment and lost at another. It has nothing to do with relationships or others. In fact, love is precisely the dissolution of all otherness or relatedness.
Remember Shakespeare: “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds…”
Every appearance of the mind, body and world is constantly altering. What is it in your experience that does not alter? That is love.
There is one ‘thing’ alone in your experience that does not alter. That is You. That is the love you seek.
You will never find it because you already and ‘always’ are it. Not ‘always’ in time but eternally, now. Therefore, seeking it is the very denial of its presence. In seeking it, you compel it to seem as if hidden or lost.
It is You that does not alter, You, Awareness. You are that for which you long and your longing is this very presence of love itself thinly veiled by the belief that it is absent, that it is an object that can be lost and found.
In other words, the love you seek is present right here in your longing. Yet your longing for it as an object in the future, however subtle, veils its presence in you, as you.
Whatever is not present right now is not worthy of the name love and is likewise not worthy of our desire. Forget it. Whatever is not present now will by definition one day disappear.
Rupert Spira, an English studio potter, is also a teacher of Non Duality
Rupert Spira
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