Love or not really love

I think I’ve lived my whole life with a mistaken definition of love. I believed love was something real that existed between two people. I believed my wife loved me, and that she married me because of that love.

But I’ve been proven wrong time and again. What I thought was 'love' turned out to be transactional. If I gave her what she wanted, I received her affection. If I stopped giving, the love disappeared. It wasn’t love—it was bartering.

Some say that pure love exists in the form of loving God. But even there, I’ve witnessed people who approach Him only to ask for things—praying not out of love, but in the hope that their wishes might be granted. And I’ve seen others turn away from God when those wishes went unanswered.

I believe true love reveals itself when it is given freely, without expectation. It is offered as a gift—perhaps even anonymously—so that the one receiving it feels no duty to requite the gift.

Perfect Love

Perfect love is without demonstrations.

Perfect sincerity offers no guarantee.

Vulnerability

Video: researcher Brene Brown talks at TED on “the power of vulnerability”

If you are really vulnerable, nothing is negative for you – because the negative is your interpretation. Nothing is harmful to you – because the harmful is your interpretation. If you are really open, then nothing can harm you, nothing can be felt as harmful. You feel something is negative and something is harmful because you resist, because you are against it, because there is no acceptance of it.

The enemy exists there because you are protecting yourself against him. The enemy is there because you are not open. If you are open, then the whole existence is friendly; it cannot be otherwise.

If you are vulnerable, it means you are ready to live in insecurity. Deep down it means you are ready even to die. You will not resist, you will not oppose, you will not stand in the way. If death comes, there will be no resistance. You will simply allow it to happen. You accept existence in its totality.

Have the courage to be vulnerable, open, true. Unblock your emotions so that love, creativity, life can flower within you.

Life is very shy

If you want to be happy you cannot move directly like an arrow towards the target of happiness; if you do, you will miss it.

Because life is very shy, it hides from people who are aggressive.
It reveals itself only to those who persuade it in a very subtle and indirect way. You need to be a little more poetic, you need to write beautiful love letters to life.

Devotion

Devotion is a purified love affair.

Free the butterfly

As soon as the honeymoon laughter is gone,

marriage remains a butterfly pinned down, unable to fly to a higher level, to a divine place.

Love's misery

The phenomenon of love - you come closer and closer and closer, but even in closeness there is a distance. That is the misery of all lovers.