Many times I wondered where love and happiness come from and how can we love with a pure, detached, selfless, unconditional love? I even started an experiment with two friends, one week ago, to experience the detached, unconditional love, without expecting anything in return for 49 days in a row. Believe me, this is not easy. Because many times we expect from our lover the same kind of love we offer. We have expectations and we worry that we are not loved the way we would like to be loved. We have desires which transform into sufferance if they are not immediately fulfilled. We expect from our lover to make us happy, and we put our happiness in their hands. Is this real love or is just a mixture of desires, expectations and love? Is our happiness completely dependent on others or is entirely dependent on us? Is receiving love more fulfilling than giving love?
I started to look for answers to these questions and I found that my true nature is pure happiness and pure love; that my happiness doesn’t depend on the actions and reactions of anybody else, but me. I went deeper in this search, seeking for the essence of love and happiness and really wanting to experience them in their purest form.
So I did some research, reading the book “The mastery of Love” by Don Miguel Ruiz, in which I found a beautiful story about “The man who didn’t believe in love”.
In this story, there is this man who didn’t believe that love exists. He had his own experiences about love and he concluded that love is just an invention of the poets and of the religions who want to have control over people and make them believe. He even thought that love is addictive. When you get your daily dose of love, you feel happy. But what happens when you don’t? Then the fear that you won’t receive love anymore makes you controlling and even manipulative. So he told everyone he met that what humans call love is nothing but a fear relationship based on control.
Then one day, he met a woman who too believed that love doesn’t exist. She had her own experiences in her relationships and she also concluded that we look for love, we open our hearts and we become vulnerable, just to find selfishness. That hurts, so this will repeat no matter how many relationships we have, the same thing happens again, so what’s the point of looking for love anymore? So love doesn’t really exist.
So they realized that they are so much alike and they became the best friends ever! They respected each other and they never put each other down. They were happy exactly the way they were. There was no envy, or jealousy, no control or possessiveness. They loved being together, because they had a lot of fun and they were very happy!
But one day, the man had the weirdest idea: Maybe what I feel for her is love!
And he told her about his idea. She said that she had the same idea, but she didn’t want to tell him about it because she knew that he didn’t believe in love.
So they concluded that maybe love does exist, but it isn’t what everybody thought it was. So they started to live together and they became lovers and it was amazing that their relationship didn’t change.
Until one night, when the man’s heart was so full with love that a miracle happened: he was looking at the stars and he saw the most beautiful one, and his love was so big that the star started to come down right into his hand and his soul merged with the star. He was intensely happy and he couldn’t wait to go to the woman and put the star in her hands to prove his love for her. As soon as he put the star in her hands, she had a moment of doubt, and the star fell from her hands and broke into millions of pieces.
Now there is an old man walking around the world saying that love doesn’t exist and there is a beautiful old woman waiting for a man, shedding a tear for the paradise that once she had in her hands, but for one moment of doubt it was lost forever.
Don Miguel Ruiz concludes in his book:
“Who made the mistake? Do you want to guess what went wrong?
The mistake was on the man’s part in thinking he could give the woman his happiness. The star was his happiness and his mistake was to put his happiness in her hands. Happiness never comes from outside of us. He was happy because of the love coming out of him. She was happy because of the love coming out of her. But as soon as he made her responsible for his happiness, she broke the star because she could not be responsible for his happiness.
If you take your happiness and put it in someone’s hands, sooner or later she is going to break it. If you give your happiness to someone else, she can always take it away.
Then if happiness can only come from inside of you and is the result of your love, you are responsible for your happiness. We can never make anyone responsible for our own happiness.”
So here was the answer I was looking for! Happiness comes from inside of us, not from outside! As Eckhart Tolle also says, pure happiness is our true nature. We kind of look for reasons to be unhappy, many times in our life, but what we miss seeing and understanding is that we are truly happy right here and now, in the present moment! Really, if you take a moment and you stop everything you are doing right in this moment, you close your eyes and you merge deeply inside of your heart, what do you think you will discover there? That you are perfectly happy right in this moment! And the love you are always looking for outside of you, seeking and seeking and waiting for it to come in your life, is again inside of you! And you know what will happen next, after you realize these two important things? That when you give this love to someone and when you share this love and happiness with someone you love, just sharing, giving, without expecting anything in return, this love and happiness will double and even triple! Because now there is not only one happiness and love, there is more and even more, each day! And as long as you don’t put any restrictions to your love or happiness, it will flow uninterrupted forever and it will grow every day! So from this moment on, you are no longer dependent on the actions and reactions of somebody else, you are entirely responsible for your own happiness and you are in the flow of life, not beside it.
I honor the divinity within you! Namaste!
With love,
Delia
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