01.01.2002
Love, Connection, Sex
I
was thinking about what love is. We speak of love too often without fully understanding
what we're really saying. Love is feeling that we can have. We often think of
it in terms of actions or caring, but I think it's most tangible as a feeling.
We associate those feelings with certain actions and so we begin to think of actions
as loving or not, because some actions help us feel love and some don't. I've
noticed that I feel love when I feel connected to a person.
What is it to be "connected."
For me is like feeling safe with them in such a way that I know that they want
me to be happy and will not intentionally do something to hurt me. I want to be
with them. What happens to them affects me. Their happiness affects my happiness.
I feel that I understand them in deep ways, usually understood as heartfelt understandings.
There is the sense that they feel the same way too. Those feelings together are
what I think of as a very meaningful connection. They are attributes that I can
point to and notice.
Love is not really
a thing or an action. Like a connection we can point to things that help us feel
love. Feeling love is not something that can be described any more than a color
can be described. We can name things that we associate with love, but love remains
a feeling.
When
we feel connected to a person, we feel love in some fashion. Many people confuse
love with sexual attraction. Sex is often referred to as making love, with individuals
having slightly different views about that. If we're having sex with someone and
not feeling love, then it's really not making love, is it. It's something else.
Making love means doing something to make you feel love. Sex is a great way to
do that because sex is a very physical connection. Connections are what we do
that yields the sense of love.
Some say that god
is love. If so, then love is god. I believe that this is so. When I'm with someone
and I feel a deep sense of love, I interpret it as being with god in a direct
way. I want no more than that moment to last forever. It has never lasted forever
for me. I believe this is because this life is about doing things. The world that
I see is filled with doings that don't inspire the sense of love. It's also filled
with many doings that inspire love.
I believe that we
are all connected in ways that the mind has difficulty in fathoming. The mind
has difficulty with fathoming how existence even began, so the mind as we experience
it, has it's limitations. Connections exist between all that exists. This can
be seen in many contexts, from the house blocking your view to the love of a beloved
partner to the mystical connection with what we may think of as god. Connection
as I have used it is referring to matters affecting the heart. The house blocking
a view is not a heart connection in that it is just there. A beloved is something
more. The connection is deeper and felt like love. True and deep connections will
engender feeling love.
I like to feel love
more than any feeling that I have known. The details of living life as we do in
western culture poses many obstacles to feeling love. Love is so powerful that
feeling love is always available and so we also have many loving actions taking
place and many people experiencing love. Fundamentally, though, western culture
has not focused on the heart as much as the details of making and acquiring things.
Again, there are many heartfelt actions taking place, but that is not so much
because of our political and economic system, but because of the great number
of loving souls in the west.
We can love each other
without feeling love. We can see that in families most easily, especially between
parents and children in today's world. We see arguments and hurtful words being
expressed parent and child as children wrestle with the views being presented
through the media and amongst their peers. Love is not the feeling felt in that
moment. It may even go so far as to be quite the opposite. But the connection
remains strong. Undeniably strong as is evidenced by the suffering that follows.
Suffering results
not from disconnection, but from the connection itself. Any disconnection is not
real. That is, the child running away and the parent saying "good riddance" is
not a really a disconnection at all. It is a parting where the connection remains
deep and strong, even though the memory of each other may fade. Feelings between
them may arise of a variety of kinds, but all relating to a connection that was
never severed, only seemingly so.
So people who love
each other can feel not loved. The connection is there, but their awareness of
the love within that connection is not. It can be due to misunderstandings or
misinterpreted events. It can be due to frustration that is released with the
one's we love. We are often more willing to say hurtful things to a loved one
that we would never say to a stranger. We are sometimes more able to forgive a
stranger for something he has done as we recognize his weakness in a compassionate
light and yet not exhibit the same level of compassion towards the ones we profess
to love.
So lovers fight and
hurt each other while the love still exists. The connection certainly exists.
So that's what I believe is all around us. Love. Connection. It's just not within
our awareness sometimes, or perhaps most of the time.
If there really is
a love-based connection, why is it sometimes not felt? Because love is nurturing
and we do things that may not be taken as nurturing. We do things out of stress,
frustration, misunderstanding that may even be hurtful, intentionally or not.
These things are done out of carelessness, ignorance, frustration with our own
selves, and learned or copied behaviors. So when such things happen, the love
underneath, that flows to make this experience even possible, is not felt. I'm
speaking of the love that I take to be god. If we believe that god has created
all things then that love created the world that we experience and that love is
ever present.
Because we are focused
here, only here, it's the doings of here that affect us most directly. Love for
us as people, humans, is most directly a reflection of what happens to us here
as physical beings. Our thoughts can cultivate it, but we rely on the tangible
events in the lives that we are most immersed within. So the tangible is more
real that the intangible. The street is more real than god. This is not a bad
thing or evidence of a problem with us, as some might feel. It's evidence of the
majesty of creation. Creation of the seemingly tangible out of the intangible.
Physical out of nothing. No-thing to some-thing from some-one.
If someone were to
suddenly hit you over the head with a stick, you will probably not feel love for
that person. But if that person told you that he just saved you from being bitten
by a poisonous scorpion and you may be alive because of what he did, your not
feeling love would likely turn into feelings of love. So our perspective plays
perhaps the ultimate role in feeling love.
Back to sex, my favorite subject. Sex for
men and women is tangible. The tangible tends to overshadow the intangible. Sex
gives us some form of connection, which I believe is partly why it is such a powerful
drive. Connection is a powerful drive. Loneliness is a lack of sense of connection.
Sex is a way for many people feel connection of some sort, which is
a step towards finding the feeling of love. That's one reason it's called "making
love," and could be called "making connection." So connections are good and therefore
a good sexual connection can be a wonderfully spiritual experience.
Close
Page and return to Musings Main Page