An Open Love Letter

I am in love with you. You. Reading this page. Right here. Right now. Tumbling through this moment in which all conceptions of past and present reside, all expectancy and desire and liberation, I take this time to sit and experience being in love with you.
 
We are all, each one of us as sentient beings, in love with one another. It seems odd that being "in love" should be considered an experience exclusive to a single, finite relationship. In a broad, expansive way, it is anything but.   Multi-talented artist Stuart Davis often says, "Love has no opposite." This is because love is our reality, the essence and "is"-ness of our experience. In terms of location, there is nowhere else to be but wide open love. In this sense, we are all "in love" together. We live and grow and act as love, in love, and through love. We are all in love with each other precisely there is nowhere else to be, nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.
 
The pure experience of our open existence has been called many things. It is the clear, unhampered, unimpeded nature of our being, and it is entirely impossible to miss. Though all descriptions of it are by definition inadequate, some descriptions, through history, have been more elegant and informed than others. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, this essence was embodied by the Over-soul, the source of all creativity and potential; all truth, beauty, and goodness. It is the Self of all selves, the observer of all reality that is intrinsically intermeshed with and existing as the observed, as reality itself. To some, it is best defined as God, Godhead, Buddha-mind, Brahman, Sartori; in essence, nonduality: the isness, suchness, thisness, I-am-ness, or beingness of the entire universe. The experience of this eternal, undying, unborn reality cannot be explained or contained in the words on a page, but speaks through the words on every page, even the one you are reading right now. Each word is laced with its essence as are all words in every language. As Ken Wilber likes to say, any statement you can possibly make about it is false, including this one.  

All such linguistic summersaults are inherently inadequate to convey the nature of this obviously and immediately available experience, but assigning it the name "love" allows us to highlight the juicy, delicious, warm, sensual texture that flows through its every fold. It is fitting that sexual intercourse, the act we often associate most with love, is literally capable of creating a brand new living, breathing being. Love is the creative force from which all concepts, all structures, all thoughts, ideas, images, feelings, intuitions, emotions, sensations arise.
 
In this sense, all human relationships are sexual. All things in the human world arise from deep, sensual, sexual love, both biologically and existentially. Biologically, none of the astounding variation in our species that makes the staggering, miraculous complexity of the human being would be possible without the evolutionary emergence of sexual reproduction. Add that to the fact that literally none of us would be here if our parents had not "made love". Love literally brings us into being, it is in love that we come and go, enter and leave this world.  

So when I say I am in love with you. I mean it. I mean it in the case of everyone reading this. I mean it in every way imaginable. Sexually, sensually, rapturously in love. Every sentient being in the universe is a lover. A lover to me. A lover to you. A lover to the universe. Love is the stuff of which we make our brittle molds of a day-to-day life. Our narratives of development and growth are made of love. If you're into AQAL Theory, all the Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States, and Types, along with everything they represent in an our expansive-yet-limited map of the Kosmos, our little experiment in attempting to describe some small aspect of this obvious, immediate totality, is composed entirely of love. Each one of us, no matter what map of life we study, are just barely dipping our feet in the great mystery of all that lies before us and in us and as us, and whatever we produce from this journey is imbedded in the entirety of its composition with the greatness and glory of that endless experience.  

What is a relationship, within this brilliance? Speaking specifically to the human condition, in what way could we possibly attempt to describe the relationship between two human beings? Divisions of "Romantic" and "Platonic" are arbitrary and inadequate. This, of course, is true of all divisions and distinctions in the face of pure, undivided, undifferentiated love, but in a relative world, where we can make distinctions and we do make words to define things, some things are more or less adequate than others. It seems to me that, at least in American society, we tend to make a hard and fast distinction between "Romantic" and "Platonic" kinds of love, terms which have almost entirely lost their historical, intellectual, and literary context in the frequency with which we toss them around in the contemporary lexicon. This strikes me as a horribly insufficient methodology for the momentous task we collectively face, together as a species.

What do I propose in its stead? Well, for now I propose a dialogue. Do you agree that we need a new methodology for human relationship in today's newly emerging present? Do you have any ideas of what this methodology might look like, in theory and in practice?

For my part, I would say that relationship, as a practice, is very similar to meditation. It is a mode of spiritual growth, a method of transformation in the spiritual line of development, a way of strengthening our spiritual intelligence. In meditation, we look into ourselves to find the face of God. In relationship, we see the face of God by looking into the eyes of another. In AQAL terms, meditation is essentially a practice for spirit in the Upper Left Quadrant, the interior of the individual, while relationship is a practice for spirit in the Lower Left Quadrant, the interior of the collective. Of course, both meditation and relationship exercise other lines of development or modes of intelligence than one's spiritual growth. They exercise our cognition, intuition, aesthetics, values, self-sense, psychology, and what have you. But it seems to me the spiritual line of development, our conception of what is "ultimate," is the essential focus in both practices. This is why, I believe, we often call our lover "The One".
 
I would like to conclude this post with my own interpretation of a particular scene in the film "The Matrix". The scene in question is at the very end of the film, so if you haven't seen it, stop reading here and please go see the film. (You haven't seen "The Matrix" yet? What's wrong with you?! Go see it now!) Appropriately, this text was first included in a love letter:
 







At the end of The Matrix Neo is shot to death and Trinity tells him, "The Oracle told me I would fall in love and that that man, the man I loved, would be The One. So you see you can't be dead, because I love you." Then she says, "Now get up," and he does. Now this was the one thing in the film I could never quite wrap my head around. It was an eccentricity I was willing to forgive because the rest of the film was so good. She loves him, so he's The One, so he can't be dead? What does that even mean? If his mind makes his death real then how can a word, even "love," bring him back to life? In the third film, Rhama Khandra says of "love" that what matters is not the word but the connection the word implies. It's a connection to the rest of the universe that brought Neo back, all the light and brilliance that exists in simply being because love has no opposite. And all this was embodied through one person, who told him she loved him, with the whole universe behind her eyes. And that's what it means to be The One, to embody the love that has no boundary in a single form. For the finite self to act in service of the infinite. And in this way love can conquer death.