Katie Davis is a female mystic, fellow traveler of Eckhart Tolle’s and teacher of the kind of love that makes relationships last
GUEST COLUMN: KATIE DAVIS author of Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment— All love is one Love and when we fall in love with one another, it is said that we are experiencing the divine. Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi poet, defines love as a mystical moment, when two spiritually-connected individuals meet.
We call it love at first sight.
In this meeting of eyes, Rumi romantically writes, we not only experience the union of two loving souls but also the Love that is the crux of the universe.
Whether ethereal or everyday love, such as mother for child, when this cherished moment appears, we often have the misperception that someone or some other thing caused this rising in Love. In truth, we lose ourselves. This disappearance creates a crevice through which radiant love shines. There is only This Love and it is ever-present.
Love requires no other. Kirtana, a lovely songwriter and guitarist, sings:
Beloved, I have waited throughout all time . . . to welcome you. . . into these arms of mine.
Free of any other, in an effortless, spontaneous instant, Kirtana dissolved, the present moment disappeared, and only beloved remained.
Beloved is the sacred substratum of our existence, which is free of lovers altogether. It does not reside within the confines of “throughout all time.” It is discovered in the twinkling of an eye of no-time. This self-discovery allows unconditional love to emerge into our lives, our relationships and into the world.
As time travelers, we are identified with being a lover who loves someone else. As long as this subject-object relationship remains, true love cannot thrive. We expect and demand this or that to satisfy our self-created sense of lack.
This lack is the ego’s belief in individuality as identity, and its separation. It manifests in this world as the never-ending search for personal love, gratification and acceptance.
The false sense of “me” hopelessly pretends to separate from totality, and then expects someone else to fill the resulting pain gap. It fears the loss of a lover; it feels jealous, competes and needs.
It voices its love for the divine and faithfully expresses deep longing. Yet, it stubbornly insists upon maintaining its sense of separation and of course, the result is suffering. Nonsensically, it then blames someone else for the pain. It is the divided one, who is longing and searching, that sustains our estrangement.
Love is not personal. It cannot be gained through any other. Love cannot be given to you, nor can it be threatened or taken away. It is essentially who you are. When you are seeking a lover, you are actually searching for love. You are overlooking that you are what you are seeking, which is why it cannot be found.
Before you continue this search, my invitation is to discover that you are love’s conscious fulfillment. In this discovery, you then have the opportunity to meet romantic love in wholeness. You are free of the pre-existing condition and pain gap. You no longer need to complete yourself.
If you are already in a problematic relationship — as personal relationships can only be — as true lovers, you can disappear together. Free of “you” and “me,” we intimately rise above the push and pull of personal relationship and preciously rise as the Pure Love that we genuinely are.
In its purity and wholeness, Love is synonymous with self-realization. It is the realized maturity of the human being. Then, romantic love does not need to bloom. When the perfect lover appears, the rose already is there.
Katie Davis is the author of “Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment.” In 1986, she radically and spontaneously awakened without practices or teachers. Since 1999, she has been traveling worldwide to share the message of conscious freedom, cause-less joy and perfect peace that is available for every human being right now through awakening and self-realization. Dig deeper on her site.