On Love

Question: What is the balance between detachment and love?

Aaron: I am Aaron. To love is not to possess. To love is to let go. The ego possesses. The soul loves. In meditation you learn how the ego self solidifies, how fear leads the ego or personality self into desire to possess. As you bring compassion and kindness to those fears, you find more spaciousness and less need to grasp. You begin to see the deepest interconnections between yourself and the beloved, and, also, the uniqueness of each of you. As you appreciate both similarities and differences, as you cultivate a spaciousness that works skillfully with its fear, increasingly you approach the beloved with a sense of deep reverence, and from this, this egoless space, you truly begin to love unconditionally and to let go. Does that answer your question? I pause.

Question: I experienced a sense of Divine love through heart opening and I'm not sure how that relates to emotional detachment.

Aaron: Divine love comes from and to the soul self, not the ego self. This soul level is an aspect of the being in which there is no heavy emotion. There is joy and sorrow, but there is no fear or acting out of fear. This level of love may flow between the being and that which it considers the Ultimate Divinity, or it may flow between the being and what it considers to be expressions of that Divinity, in other words, another human, animal or a flower. It's the same Divine love. When I use the word "love," in a sense I am implying Divine love. This is not to say that love is impossible on the relative plane, impossible for the ego self but fear must be separated out. When you look deeply at what the ego self considers to be love, you find one level of Divine love and another level of fear and grasping. For example there is loving the reflection it sees of itself in the other, loving the way the other cares for it, loving the sense of being somebody who cares for another. These inflate the self. They are ego's mimicry of love. But when you remove ego self's motives, you're left with what I could only call Divine love, egoless love. This level of being is never attached. To what would it attach? There is nothing separate.