The Practical Aspects of ‘Love is Eternal’
Why Spirituality belongs in the World
Have you ever heard someone say that? Love is Eternal? Or God is Love? Or something like that? And you've been like “that’s cool, I guess.” and then went back to your daily living without any change happening.
It almost seems like talking about our spiritual nature never goes anywhere. The conversations don’t actually translate practically to the problems we face in our day-to-day lives.
Well, I know for a fact they do, so I’m writing this article to draw those connections so we can finally make the bridge between ‘Love is Eternal’ and ‘I need to pay my bills’.
Let’s get some stuff first.
What does Love is Eternal even mean to begin with?
Think of anything you want — literally anything you desire at this point in your life. A big house? World peace? A partner? Picture the form of your particular experience for a second.
Now take that form and unwrap it. By that I mean, there’s some superfluous stuff that doesn’t matter. What is the essence of it? If you play this game, you’ll come to find that the form like a candy wrapper. If you open the candy wrapper, you will find a feeling.
That may be a feeling of intimacy, wholeness, fulfillment, or fun. It doesn’t really matter. Behind the desire is a feeling. It’s important to understand that the essence of what we really want is a feeling. The form is the wrapper we put around it. It only shows us how we decided how it needs to come into being.
When I was in high school, a friend of mine asked me at the lunch table what I wanted most in the world. I replied, “happiness.”
At that moment I knew that everything I thought I wanted was simply just happiness in some particular form. Why not just take the shortcut straight to happiness?
This feeling is what we truly want. ‘Love is Eternal’ means that feeling is given to you. It means you are loved. You have been loved since the beginning of time. It means the feeling actually never left you. It’s your foundation.
Allow me to expand on this.
Because we have free will, we can put negative thinking on top of this feeling — ideas about ourself and the world. But while we think them, they look true to us. What we choose to make with our thinking, whether they be insecure or fearful thoughts, look like situations and circumstances to us while we think them. Since they feel so real, we often fall into the illusion, believing a thought passing through our mind is reality.
Because we fall so easily into the illusion of our own thinking, we attribute our feelings to circumstances. Whenever we are upset, we think it’s because of what’s happening to us. But if you’re really aware and you really look at that, you’ll see that every single time your upset it’s because you’re entertaining upset thinking in that particular moment.
We think our minds are capturing an outside world, really they’re projecting it from the inside. If you’ve ever played with shadow animals, it’s kind of like that. You can make a lion out of your hand, and if you see it really big on a wall you might get scared. It’s the same with our thoughts. We think a thought, see it blown up in all its sensory detail, and feel it completely.
So if you really get that, then it becomes clear that the only thing that can ever upset you is a thought. Even if in the moment it truly seems like a situation, it never actually leaves your mind and becomes something outside you.
This means that your state of mind, or how you feel, is not affected by a world outside you, but rather by the kind of thinking you’re having moment by moment. Your state of mind projects the world outside you.
If a change in thought creates a change in our experience, and a change in experience creates a change in feeling, that means thought creates feeling.
And if our feeling can change from moment to moment, that means Love is only when the next loving thought comes into your mind. Which means, love never leaves you, you leave it (or you try to at least).
So what makes Love so special then?
Here’s where things become interesting. While it’s true that an upsetting feeling comes from entertaining upsetting thinking, a positive feeling doesn’t require any thinking. It’s what’s left when there’s nothing there to cover it up. The positive feeling you’re looking for is already here, underneath a thought. It never actually leaves you.
Let me say that in different words: for your entire life, you’ve been sitting on a foundation of wellbeing, you just couldn’t see it when you were thinking upsetting thoughts.
Or even shorter: wellbeing is innate.
Love is what’s left when there’s nothing there to cover it up. That’s what ‘Love is Eternal’ means. It’s to do with your very essence before space and time. Before you played the character of being whoever you call yourself, you were this eternal being. But you still are! That’s the secret. You still are this eternal being playing a game — and you can rest from the game at any time.
“There’s a whole other part to this by the way, which is that when we tap into this feeling we can listen to what I refer to as ‘Wisdom’, which is a deeper guiding voice that helps you navigate through life — but I’ll save it for another article.” -Me
In other words, no matter what happens in life, you can always come back to the space of love and wellbeing inside you — it can never be further than one thought away.
Okay, the practical stuff.
So if wellbeing is not dependent on anything in the world, if it’s ever-present and can only be hidden temporarily underneath a thought, that totally changes the game. Let’s just bang off a list for fun here:
- Decision making: if wellbeing is innate, that means that any decision you make won’t have an impact on your wellbeing. Since wellbeing goes with you wherever you go, you’re totally fine either way. You’ll still sometimes think upsetting thoughts and feel upset, but ultimately your wellbeing will be there the moment you stop doing that either way. Imagine being free to make decisions without having to find the ‘right’ answer. Or even better — not having to even make the decision at all! Because wellbeing doesn’t go anywhere even if you don’t choose left or right.
- Security: In our society, we have so many means to keep us secure. We need money to keep us from going homeless, locks to keep people from stealing our possessions, and people to keep us from feeling alone. But since wellbeing is innate, none of these actually provide security, only the illusion of it. In fact, no circumstance can give us security because none can actually take away our security to begin with — because wellbeing is innate.
- Worry: you don’t need to worry about anything anymore because your wellbeing doesn’t depend on anything.
- Fear: you never have to be afraid again because nothing can take away what is eternally yours. You don’t even have to be afraid of being afraid sometimes, because fear is also harmless.
- Stress: what are you stressing about? your wellbeing is not on the line.
- You’re tired: take a break, whatever you think you need to do, you don’t actually need to do it. Wellbeing is innate.
- Anger: you think someone can take your happiness away from you? Jokes on you!
All these mean you can live your life completely fearlessly. You can make the choices you want to make and take the risks you want to take, for the sake of fun. Because in truth you’re never risking anything at all. Your wellbeing is established by — you guessed it — ‘Love is Eternal’ !
Peter Adrian is a Life Coach! Check him out
