How Love is Awareness

Three Steps Upwards

I often say: “love is awareness”. I think many of you get this on an intuitive level. But it’s hard to practice, isn’t it?

So here are my three tiny steps, and how to take them.

To see you, I must see through me. Here you are, here I am. I look at you. What do I see? Mostly, I see me. Don’t I? I see my own preconceptions, judgments, biases. I see my hopes and my fears inscribed on you. I am seeing through the lens of what psychologists call “cognitive distortions”. But it’s better just to call them “selves”. Our “selves” are one big distortion. They are history, memory, the shackles of the past and the handcuffs of the future. But they are not now.

Seeing me is not seeing you. So first I have to see through me. I have to let me go if I am to really see you. I have to forget myself.

The me in me must melt if the river of love flowing through me reaches the ocean of you.

How am I to do this? I will give you my own story. I never saw people at all. I just saw me whenever I looked at people. I saw rivals, antagonists, allies, enemies — but I never saw people. So what happened? Death happened. I spent many years dying, and the gift of death was that there was nothing of me left to see at all. Now it’s natural for me to see you. I can’t see me anymore at all. So take a little step every day, in every interaction. You don’t let go of yourself suddenly. You let go day by day — by coming face to face with all your own biases, judgments, preconceptions.

Where do they come from? From all the hurt you have ever had. Every time you are hurt, a new preconception grows, doesn’t it? You are hurt by this person, so now you avoid this kind of person. You never had that kind of partner, and you burn with jealousy. And so on. So learning to let go of your preconceptions is learning to let go of yourself in this pure and true way. You must forgive the hurt in you, you must bless the hurt in you, if you want to truly see yourself.

Even the hurt in you is a miraculous thing. It is a searing experience, which is awareness, which is life, which is love. There’s no need to fear or damn or worst of all, hate it. It is more beautiful even than what’s pretty and pleasurable, isn’t it? Because in it is the spark of love. How could you hold someone if you had never been hurt? You wouldn’t even know what it meant to be held, would you? So only when you light the spark of blessing the hurt in you can love really arise.

That is how spring arrives. The frozen winter of your heart begins to change, day by day. You, the old you, is melting. The hurt and the pain aren’t frozen, stuck, numb anymore. They are flowing, becoming, transforming, changing. The river in you is roaring. Love can reach the ocean at last.

To see, I must go blind. So now I can see you, because I can see through me. But what am I “looking for” in you? Nothing.

The moment that I am looking for something is the instant I stop seeing you, isn’t it? I go to the same cafe every day to make music, to write, to celebrate life. I see lots of first dates. What I really see, though, is this: preconception. A girl has some idea of the perfect guy, a guy has some idea of the perfect girl. What don’t they see? Each other. How can love arise this way? Even if you “find” the perfect person, you are only projecting your ideal onto them, aren’t you?

So. When we really see people, we are blind. When we “look”, we are “looking at”. And looking at is looking for. I go to the museum, I look at artwork. I’m looking at it — and therefore I’m also looking for. What? I’m looking for color, shape, form, texture — I’m looking for subject, object, meaning, purpose, story, theme. It’s OK to look at art this way. Art is made to be looked at. People aren’t.

To genuinely see someone, we can’t look. We must really see. We can’t “look for” them to live up to our checklist of desire, the one we carry everywhere with us. We can’t “look for” them to save us from our fears and worries and flaws. We can’t “look for” their flaws or virtues and so on, either.

We are seeing, not looking. Seeing is building a genuine emotional awareness of someone. How do they feel? Not just in this moment. But about themselves, the world, this great and beautiful tragedy of being human, alive? What has it all meant to them so far? Not in an intellectual sense — “live means this many dollars and accomplishments!”. But in a genuine human one: what has it meant to the soul of them, the heart in them? What are they, deep inside?

We can’t ever see people in this way if we are looking with our eyes, can we? Seeing is something that our hearts do. A blind person can see. But a person with working eyes often doesn’t. In that way, seeing is being blind to looking, the way that we look in everyday commercialist, consumerist life.

The truth in you is the truth in us. I won’t say so much about this third step in awareness. It’s the fullest, the highest, and I don’t think many of us are ready to take it yet.

We are all different. But we are all the same. I live, I love, I suffer, I desire, I hurt, I rise, I fall, I laugh, I cry. The pattern is different between you and me. But the experiences, the substance of being, is precisely the same.

So. The truth in you isn’t just your truth. Sorry. You don’t own it, do you? That’s emotional capitalism again. Your truth in a genuine and profound sense, is yours, true. But not just yours. It is one that every being has lived, in some way, big or small. Here’s a superficial example: one truth about me is I’m disabled. But I’m not the only one, am I?

So to really see you, I must see your truth in that light. Not just in the light of the individual before me. But in the light of the universal journey of life. Then I can really hold them, can’t I? I can say: “you are not alone. Here is how your suffering, your pain, your hurt, your fear, is universal. And in that universality lies the might of grace. Because what is universal is one. We are one in that genuine and profound sense. The beauty and suffering of our lives is the truest truth of all.

I see you that way. Not like a part. But like the whole. Not like a season. But like the sun”.

That’s love. In my eyes. It took me many years, half a lifetime, standing arm in arm with death, to learn how to love. Still I fail at it every day. There is always a better and truer way to love, isn’t there? And yet. I’m not frozen anymore. I was so hurt, so bruised by this thing called life. Until one day it became so crystal clear to me, that even at death’s edge, I remember I laughed. The spark that melts the winter in us lies not in our desire, our need, our anger, our fury and rage and longing, but is always right there, in the tiny, lonely, hurt parts of us. Because all that I’ve written here says: the broken heart in you is the great teacher of love to you. It is the force that makes the river of love flow to the ocean of life at all.

Just let that river flow through you a little more mightily every day.

Umair