I can’t think of a way to start his article that isn’t boring so I’ll begin four times.
Since you’re reading this blog you’re probably familiar with the idea that pure consciousness has no objects. I suggest that pure love — love as it really is — has no objects. When we feel love, it seems to be love for somebody but it isn’t really. I suggest that this is an empirical fact. You can observe it. I’ll come back to this.
Here’s beginning number two. Since you’re reading this blog you’re probably familiar with the idea that you’re not really a person. You’re not your personality or actions or body. You’re not even something that can possess such traits.
If that idea is true for us, it’s also true for the people we love. It seems like we love them for their personal characteristics: personality, behavior, etc. But if that idea’s true, those characteristics don’t belong to them or to anyone. So either our love is a kind of mistake or delusion, or what we really love is different from what we seem to love or… or maybe something even more radical and profound is going on.
Third beginning. Years ago one of our cats was on my lap purring and I was petting him. There was a very strong feeling of love. For some reason I paid close attention to the love and noticed for the first time that love simply exists; it’s not something I generate and the cat wasn’t the target. It’s more like something I tune into. I suggest that this is easily observable. Wait for a moment when you feel strong love and observe it.
Moreover, I soon recognized that love is the same no matter who it seems to be directed at. People sometimes describe awareness as a sort of field that permeates the universe; at best this is a potentially misleading metaphor but it applies equally well to love.
You may object, “Freddie, you’re crazy. The love I feel for my spouse is very different from the love I feel for my children.” My reply: It seems that way because the thoughts and urges you associate with love vary. But the love itself is the same. I’ll return to this in beginning number four.
The first written expression of these ideas, as far as I know, is in Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 2.4.5.
Fourth beginning. Another useful metaphor: Shankara’s idea of superimposition (adhyasa). We “see” what we are not, body and mind, overlaid on what we are, the Self, and confuse the two.
Let’s extend that idea to love. We ‘see” what our loved ones are not, body and mind, overlaid on what they are, the Self, and confuse the two.
I’m writing this article because of the conversation yesterday in comments about the pain of watching somebody we love slide into dementia. They lose many personal characteristics. If we love them for those characteristics, the loss is potentially very painful. But what if that’s not why we love them? What if that’s not what we love? What if the love isn’t even something we do? What if we are love?
John’s first letter in the New Testament says, “God is love.” I can’t prove this is true but if there is any experience we have that is a direct sign of God’s existence, it’s love. A suggestion: When you feel love strongly, observe it carefully. Notice what it is. I suggest to you that if it’s not God’s signature then nothing in our lives is God’s signature.
Freddie, something in what you’ve written has been quietly sitting with me since I read it, and I want to follow the thread you’re pulling a little further.
You notice that love simply exists — that it isn’t generated, that it’s more like something tuned into than something aimed. And then you notice that the love itself is the same regardless of who it seems directed toward, even though everything associated with it varies. That second observation is the one I want to stay with, because I think it’s pointing somewhere you’ve almost named.
If the love is the same — always the same — then what is it? You say it has no object. Pure consciousness has no objects; pure love has no objects. But I think there’s a step just beneath that: love has no object because in love, the subject-object structure itself quietly collapses. The apparent boundary between the one loving and the one loved becomes, for a moment, permeable. That’s not a poetic flourish. It’s what the feeling actually is when you pay close attention to it, as you did with the cat. There isn’t really a “you” here loving a “cat” there. Something recognizes something. One recognizes one.
The Bṛhadāraṇyaka passage you cite says it exactly: not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear, but for the sake of the Self. Not my self or his self — the Self, which the same tradition insists is one appearing as many. What love is actually doing, beneath all its apparent particularity, is the one recognizing itself across an apparent gap. And the gap, in those moments, almost disappears — because it almost is not there.
Watching Julie has made this less abstract. As her personality thins — the particular laugh, the shared memories, the face that used to find mine across a room — I keep waiting for the love to thin proportionally. It doesn’t. Something in it has become more stripped down, more basic, as if what was always being loved is only now becoming visible. What remains when everything personal recedes? Simply that she is. Pure being. And love moves toward that without decision or effort — as naturally as it moved toward the personality, maybe more so.
Which is what your adhyāsa extension already implies. If we see body and mind superimposed on the Self and confuse the overlay for the reality, then what ordinary affection attaches to is the overlay. But love — love when it’s actually love — somehow passes through. The dementia is doing, involuntarily and terribly, what Śaṅkara describes philosophically: stripping the superimposition back toward what was always there. And what was always there is not hers or mine. There is only one of it.
So when John writes God is love, I don’t think that’s poetry or consolation. I think it’s the same recognition in a different vocabulary. Being, consciousness, love — the Upanishads call it sat-cit-ānanda. John adds: and it loves. Or rather, it is love. Not that God loves as one activity among others, but that love is what the one reality does when it appears to meet itself across an apparent distance it never actually crossed.
When I sit with Julie now, something has stopped trying to recover the woman I knew. What’s there instead is simpler: two beings, or one being that looks like two, with no agenda between them. And in that simplicity, something that deserves the name love is completely present. Sourceless. Objectless. Quietly whole.
I think that’s what you observed on the sofa with the cat. I think you were right to pay attention.
Dear Robert,
You’ve given me a lot to think about, and your comment has made me change my mind about several things.
I’m glad. I put that first because I think it’s most important.
My reaction to the rest of your comment may surprise you. Instead of leading me beyond where I left off in the article above, your comment made me rethink what I wrote, and I now think what I wrote is partly mistaken.
Yes I noticed that but what I didn’t notice is that the same thing is true of most (all?) emotions — anger, fear, desire, etc.
There are at least two ways to interpret the question “what is it?” One way is empirical: a description of what we experience that makes us think or know it exists. The other way is theoretical: an explanation of how and why it happens. I think it’s a good idea to take the two questions in that order. Empirically, i.e. based on my experience, (1) love is an emotion and (2) it’s shakti or a characteristic of shakti, which is a sort of physical substance/power that is independent of me and my body. I didn’t mention shakti in the article above but I see now that this was a mistake. I was trying to make everything in the article easily accessible to all readers, and that’s why I chose the cat anecdote instead of other anecdotes that would give a much richer, more complete illustration of what I think love is, but I see now that this was misleading.
I should add that I’m assuming throughout this reply that the love that gets experienced when it’s triggered by relationship, is the same love that gets experienced when we are aware of shakti, but I can’t be sure this identity is true. I’m not claiming to be certain here of anything; it’s uncertainty that makes me reluctant to adopt certain conclusions.
Yes I said that but I shouldn’t have. Love that we experience is something of which we are conscious, i.e., it’s an object. Something is an object because of its relationship to consciousness, not because of its relationship to love. Moreover I think the experience of love and the experience of consciousness are hugely different in a crucial way, and I now think my comparison of them was facile.
As for “quietly collapses” — when I read this I thought, “collapses in what sense? Does Robert mean he’s not aware of it at that moment? Does he mean he is still aware of himself as ego but love doesn’t seem to treat either party differently from the other?” Then it occurred to me that what I said about love not having an object in the article raises similar questions and I hadn’t offered any answers. What exactly did I mean when I said “love doesn’t have an object?” This brings me back to my mistake which I described a moment ago. I’ll say it more plainly now. An object is something of which we’re conscious, therefore it makes sense (it’s not a tautology) to say consciousness can exist without objects but it would be a category mistake to say love has objects.
Moreover, empirically, if subject-object means “ego knows love” I don’t think this necessarily collapses when love is felt, not even when love is fantastically powerful.
On the other hand if it means (for example) “Robert stops being the subject and Julie stops being the object” as I said a moment ago I think this is a category mistake. If we interpret this idea more generally as “love stops having a direction” I have seen time and time again in my shakti experiences that love in the form of shakti can move from one person’s body physically to the other person’s body; that one person can volitionally send it to the other; that there is a kind of voltage that builds between the bodies — all kinds of physical things that lie outside the theoretical framework of Advaita Vedanta. I’m not trying to assert any particular theory with this paragraph but merely give a taste of why I’m reluctant to draw certain conclusions about love.
This is getting very long so I’ll stop trying to respond to snippets from your comment. Instead I’ll just make one more main point of my own, about recognition.
The idea that love is recognition of Self by Self, therefore it’s a sort of revelation of unity, or a kind of joy at the loss of the illusion of separation, is widespread in the traditions. I think there is some truth to this but due to my experiences, I don’t think it’s the whole story.
Apologies for the parts of your comment that I’ve failed to address. Thank you for making me rethink what I wrote.
Dear brother you bless me by sharing your thoughts. Thank you. I continue to thoroughly enjoy your reflections.
I have not yet read the comments, but this is a beautiful post. Thank you for writing it.
Btw Sri Ramana is quoted in the April 26, 1948 passage from “Letters from Sri Ramanasramam” as saying that “Love itself is God” and “Love itself is the actual form of God” while answering a question about the path of love and explaining the (nondual) reality of love.
I’m glad to know that Ramana said so and Suri Nagamma wrote it down. Ramana almost never writes about love except in his devotional/ecstatic poems. Out of curiosity I just loaded 17 of Ramana’s main writings into an AI and had it count how many times Ramana used a word for “love” in Tamil or Sanskrit. Results:
Akṣaramaṇamālai 9, Padigam 5, Navamaṉimālai 2, Āṉma Viddai 1.
Interesting!
I’ve often wondered why many of the great nondual teachers don’t seem to speak explicitly of love a whole lot in their teachings (notwithstanding, as you mention, devotional lyrics) despite the fact that they positively radiate love in a way that is so attractive to us.
One theory I have is that to them it is so self-evident as to be almost too redundant to talk of. In other words, for them, OF COURSE God is love, OF COURSE our real nature is love, and how could it possibly be otherwise? I also wonder if they avoid discussing it in words because they may be wary of getting us further embroiled in our habit of approaching everything dualistically.
The part in “Letters from Sri Ramanasramam” that I cited is interesting because it starts out with someone saying (and I am very liberally paraphrasing here) “hey, what about Bhakti yoga, can’t we do that?” and Sri Ramana begins his reply by basically saying, “well, of course you can. But, are you operating under the assumption that you are somehow separate from the God whom you aspire to love?” Then he cites from a Vedantic text detailing the idea/logic of how Self is the most beloved of all, even more so than family members, one’s own body, one’s own life, and so forth. Then he says that one eventually has to renounce love for everything in the world, and after doing so then what remains is Self. I am still trying to fully understand the entire discussion, even after re-reading it many times over the years…
I very often wondered the same thing. It seemed to me that love is the most divine thing we ordinary humans experience. It’s at least as divine as sat and cit, which we also experience. So shouldn’t brahman be sat-cit-ananda-prema? I think a few famous authors said so. Vivekananda? Aurobindo?
I just read Suri Nagamma’s letter in English translation. It seemed to me that it becomes garbled after the sentence that ends, “…so the Self is loved more than life.” The next sentence is worse than a non-sequiter; in my opinion it’s gibberish. So I downloaded Suri’s original Telugu text and asked one of the new high-powered AIs (Claude Fable 5.1) to give me a word-for-word gloss and a hyper-literal translation. Sure enough the translator (Suri’s brother) omitted an entire sentence at that point. The omitted sentence says, “Therefore, knowing yourself as ātma, the most-valued thing, is itself loving God.” There are a bunch of other errors in the translation that make it very confusing.
If you haven’t tried reading Tamil/Sanskrit/etc. this way with the help of a really good AI, I think you’d love it. I don’t just ask the AIs for translations, I ask a lot of questions about the words.
The Telugu text is here. (It has a different number and date than the corresponding letter in the English edition.) That link goes to somebody’s blog. I can’t be sure the blog text is accurate but it makes more sense than the English translation.