The Heart of Your Heart

Why Love is (Much) More Than An Action

A recent comment said (basically): “Love is an action, it’s a shame you don’t get this, see how much smarter I am than you etc etc”.

I get it. Pop self help says it endlessly. It’s easy and comforting to believe it. But it doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny (we’ll disprove it in a second). Believing that love is an action is a mistake that will deeply limit you, probably cripple you. Love isn’t an action. Love isn’t an emotion. It’s more, truer, and deeper than both. Let’s begin with why it isn’t action.

A robot can “act”. Robots do act. If I replaced everyone in your life with a robot, performing a scripted set of “loving” actions, how loved would you feel? Not very. If I replaced you with a such a robot, that wouldn’t be love, would it? Why not? We’ll get there in a moment. First let’s understand: to say that love is an “action” is a trivially disproven misunderstanding.

And it is a deeply damaging and destructive one. When we think that love is an action, what happens? Then we try to control people’s actions, don’t we? We equate love with action, so we conclude: this person must do this, or else they don’t love me. And yet, often, they do. But our need for control breaks apart that very love. So love can’t be action, control, performance — not just because of my robot thought experiment above, but because the lived experience of our days tells us so.

Love must be more than action. More pure, more full, more whole. And yet. The Western mind has divided being up into neat dichotomies. Self and other, object and subject, heart and mind…action and emotion. When we look at them carefully, though, we see them for what they really are. Just ideas. Not realities. The Western notion is that anything worthy in life is an “action”. But we can disprove that even further in a single paragraph. Just imagine you perform all the right actions, always, all the time, never making a mistake. Good and kind ones. You meet someone and shake their hand and smile. But deep inside, you are burning with hate. You hold someone close and tell them they are important to you. But deep inside, you are already betraying them. Where is love here? It isn’t here, is it?

So love cannot be just an action. There is more to it than that.

Action and emotion. Dichotomy and unity.

Is love, then, an emotion? Here’s a curious fact, that I want you to really think about. Emotions are your life. You use the word every day. These things make you you. And yet, weirdly, no matter how you try, you can’t define them, can you? If I say: “define an emotion”, you can give me the usual buzzwords about neurological correlates and physiological correlates. My heart rate goes up, my muscles tense up, and so on. But that is just a description of your body, not a definition, and your body is not really where the emotion is felt at all. So these things that make up so much of your life you can’t define, capture, hold, at all.

Emotions are like smoke. You are like smoke.

But where is the fire? The fire is in the heart of your heart.

You think that I mean that in a poetic way, and maybe I do, a little. But mostly I mean it in a pure way. You have a heart, which is the locus of the experience of “you”. “You” feel happy, sad, glad, bad, good. There is a “you” attached to these “emotions”, the subject that is feeling them.

The heart of your heart is not that heart. The heart of your heart is the universal heart in you. It is where the observer in you is. The heart is like the wave. The heart of your heart is the ocean.

The observer is there in you, always watching, just witnessing. It is witnessing “you” falling, rising, struggling, suffering, triumphing. Therefore it is the greater one. Those times when you become pure awareness — you are walking on the beach, you are falling in love, you are really there in the moment — there is nothing left but the observer. And in those moments, life is impossibly pure, beautiful, simple, true. Why is that? Because now you are experiencing love.

In those moments, the heart of your heart opens. It reveals itself to “you” — that’s how you put it later. But in those moments, that’s not how it feels, is it? It feels as if it has revealed itself as you. Doesn’t it? As if there’s nothing outside you, or inside you, but only pure connection between you and this this person, this place, this impossible instant in time and space and being.

That is love, isn’t it?

So. Love begins with intention. In every instant, there are many ways to act. But it is intention that makes the difference. I can shake your hand, with hate burning in me. Or I can shake your hand and genuinely wish you the peace I mean when I say “Shalom”. I can hold you close and despise you. Or I can hold you close and destroy myself in the aching beauty of you. I can tell you that I love you, and hope only to hurt you terribly, and still call it love. Or I can tell you that I love you, and really mean it.

Mean it. With the heart of my heart. Not just my heart. The little heart is “my” heart. The big heart is not my heart. It doesn’t belong to me, but to the observer. There is no me in the big heart. There is only me in the little heart. The flower and the sky. The ocean and the drop. The fire and the smoke. The little heart clings, attaches, craves, needs. And so we can never really rely on it to love.

When I mean what I say, think and do with the big heart then there is love. Then the dichotomy between emotion and action vanishes. There is nothing false or ugly left in me. I am the fire now, not just the smoke. I am the sky, not the flower, the ocean, not the drop.

That is love, isn’t it?

What is the word for all that? There are many words. Attitude, predisposition, approach, orientation. But these somehow miss the truth. Love is all those, but it is still more. Love is a way. A way of relating to, being in, lifting up this world. On the weary and frail shoulders of this little tiny being that you call you.

Think about the miracle of that for just a moment. That you, just breath and bones, water and air, can lift up the world on your shoulders. If you choose to.

The heart of your heart opened a little when you read that, didn’t it?

There. That’s love. There’s no need to try to capture it, keep it, hold it. It is already holding you. The way the sky holds the flower, the ocean holds the drop, the fire holds the smoke.

Just live that way.

Umair
April 2017