Part 3 - Life in Awareness

What We Call Love

Love may be one of the most important words in human life. Almost every human being has touched it in some way. It may have arrived through another person, or through the presence of an animal. It may have opened through beauty, or through a moment so simple that it could not be explained afterward. And yet the same word is used for very different inner currents.

For one person, love may mean longing. A deep wanting for another human being. The feeling that life is not complete unless that person is close enough to answer the ache in us. Much of our music, poetry, and storytelling has been built around this kind of love. It is intense. It can fill the body, occupy the mind, and make ordinary life feel brighter or unbearable, depending on whether the other person is close or far away.

There is nothing strange about this. Human beings are relational creatures. We bond, attach, miss and hope. The body knows the absence of someone it loves. The heart can feel stretched across distance. But longing and love are not always the same thing.

What we call love is sometimes mixed with desire, fear of being alone, or the hope that another person will make us feel complete. Real affection and care may be present, but they can exist alongside insecurity and dependence. We may become possessive, look for constant reassurance, or expect the other person to take away our uncertainty. Without noticing it, we begin to make them responsible for how we feel. The relationship then carries a weight that love alone did not place there.

The other human being is no longer fully seen. They become the answer to our discomfort, the medicine for our loneliness, the guarantee that we are not incomplete. This is a lot to place on another person. It also places a great strain inside us. No human being can permanently complete another human being.

Romantic love is often shaped by everything we bring into the relationship. Our history enters the bond with us and influences how love is felt and expressed. What we call love is therefore rarely made of one clean ingredient.

When awareness of life becomes more present, this mixture begins to reveal itself. The bond does not lose its warmth or longing; we may still want the other person near and feel their absence when they are gone. But these feelings are no longer taken as one undivided thing called love. We become more able to sense where love is present and where the old search for completion has entered it. This noticing makes love clearer.

What happens to love when it is tied to the demand that it be returned?

There is another meaning of love that points in a different direction. It is less dramatic than longing, but perhaps much deeper. Love can be felt as the recognition of life in another. A direct recognition, not an idea or belief about oneness or a spiritual slogan.

We sense that the one before us is alive in the same mysterious way we are alive. Behind the name, the face, and the story we have about them, there is life. The same simple fact that is here is also there.

This recognition is not limited to human beings. It may be felt toward an animal or in the quiet tending of a plant. Even an object cared for over time can gather memory and significance through use. The object is not alive in the ordinary sense, but the way we handle it can still express reverence for life.

Someone who tends a garden may know this. So may a musician with an instrument, a mechanic with an old tool, or a child with a stone kept for no explainable reason. Love is not always loud.

When life is recognised in another being, the relationship changes. We are less likely to reduce the other to a function. The cashier is met as a human being, not merely as the person moving groceries across a scanner. The difficult neighbour may still be difficult, but is no longer reduced to the problem they create in our life. An animal is not only a pet, and a tree is not only useful as shade. Even the person we disagree with is no longer seen only as a position to oppose. Something becomes more spacious.

Love, in this sense, has nothing to do with sentimental weakness. It can say no and walk away. It can protect and refuse harm. It can remain firm without becoming inwardly violent.

The old instruction to love the neighbour as oneself can be heard freshly here. When the life in another is no longer felt as alien, the neighbour stops being only a concept, a problem, or an obstacle. We do not need to turn this into doctrine. We only need to notice what happens when it is felt.

The face of another human being changes when they are no longer seen only through our opinion of them. A difficult person may still be difficult, but underneath the surface behaviour, something remains visible. There is life there too.

This is where love begins to free itself from the demand to be loved back. Longing usually needs a response. Desire wants an outcome. Attachment wants security. But the recognition of life in another can exist even when nothing is returned.

This does not make us indifferent. It may actually make us more caring and honest. But it does not depend entirely on whether the other person gives us what we want. Love becomes less of a bargain.

Can you recognise life in someone without needing to agree with them, approve of them, or move closer to them?

In ordinary life, this may show itself very simply. We may listen without preparing our defence. Something may be touched with care because our attention is actually with it. A harsh word may be noticed before it leaves the mouth, and in that pause we may remember that the person in front of us has an inner world we cannot see. The living world is no longer treated quite so easily as if it exists only for our use.

None of this needs to be perfect. We are human. We forget, react, defend, and misunderstand. Then we notice again.

Love, in this deeper sense, is closely related to awareness of life. When we are lost in thought, the world easily becomes arranged around our desires and fears. People are quickly measured according to what they seem to offer. Everything is measured according to what it does to us or for us.

When awareness is present, even briefly, this measuring loosens. The other is not only an object in our story. The other is alive. That recognition is already close to love.

But love can also be approached from another direction. The word itself can be used as a pointer.

Like gratitude, love can return us to a state we already know. Almost every human being has loved in some way; the body and heart remember the opening before the mind attaches a story to it.

When we turn our attention away from the story and toward the feeling itself, something simpler may become noticeable. A person or a memory may come to mind, but what matters most is the affection we feel and the way the body relaxes when we allow it.

This feeling does not need to be dramatic. It may be very gentle. It may arrive as a small loosening in the body, a greater willingness to be here. Life feels a little more intimate without needing explanation. The mind may want to attach it to someone or something, but before it becomes a story, it is already a state. Love can be remembered as a state.

When you think of someone you love, how much of what you feel belongs to the person, and how much to the story you have built around them?

From that state, we see and treat the world differently. A person is less easily reduced to a role. An animal is no longer treated as a possession. Even an ordinary object may be handled with more care, because the inner state from which we relate to the world has changed. It does not need to be dramatic to be real.

Love may take many forms. Sometimes it appears as longing, sometimes as tenderness, sometimes as care for the living world. The expressions differ, but each can point back to the same inner opening.

Perhaps love is not only something we find in another. It can also be something we remember in ourselves, and from there recognise it everywhere.