Love serves a higher purpose

Irish Rose

We all dream of personal love. Could this be the selfishness of the world infringing on the  impersonal love drawing couples together, each thinking that once the dream is realised, the other will also be happy?

​Have you noticed how the honeymoon seldom lasts, the test of time mostly always exposing the selfishness behind each personal dream? When the cracks appear in the relationship, we blame the other while failing to look at our own limited understanding.

This limitation is in personalizing love, in other words, taking love as a personal feeling, whereas the impersonal love bringing us together is not comparable in any way to feelings. Might the higher purpose of impersonal love be to smash this wretched personification, to free us from attachment to our worlds of misery? Could this be the enactment in the quarrelling and misunderstandings arising between couples once the honeymoon is over?

Have you noticed how in our trying to come together we carry with us our hidden baskets of pain and disappointments from previous relationships? Instead of waking up to the fact, we use our personal dream of love - the recurring replay of the old story - as a means for escaping from our wretchedness.

We all know there can be no escape in denial. Surely, the only way out of the mess is seeing it exactly as it is, which means letting go of the personal dream. But this can only happen when reality is seen. The couple at this point of vision in a relationship, rather than applying further patchwork to their shattering dreams, accept reality by allowing impersonal love complete the job. For the rare few, this involves going through the numbing following the death-blow to the personal dream. Logically, when the dust settles, this is followed by the couple either coming together in impersonal love or parting their ways in service to the same impersonal love.

Whenever we are in the warring stages of a relationship, we are given the opportunity for seeing what’s happening. Can both be courageous enough to surrender their personal stories? Obviously, this means letting go of the past, of all those events, dreams and expectations having landed us here. When I see the higher purpose of love bringing me to heel, my heart naturally fills with gratitude for all the pain it takes to awaken me from the wretchedness of my world. This being so, transcendence can only happen by allowing impersonal love be heard.

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