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If you were to ask me what makes “true love” true, I’d have to answer that love becomes true when it transcends or rises above self-interest.
If I love another person, my love would be true if I was consistently able to do and support things that went against my own interests. No, not leaping to my death or anything as drastic. The kind of selflessness, I mean, that every parent knows.
I’ve actually had the experience of loving people where it looked like the only way I could support them was for me to leave. And I loved those people so much that I was willing to contribute to their well-being by walking away.
I was not going to get what I wanted. This is a time when many people would lose it and make misery for the other person.
But such was the power of the transformative love that I felt that I found myself able to leave self-interest aside and allow the death of valued relationships. And I continue to love the people to this day. OK, you may not be amazed. But I am.
I know what I’m saying sounds a bit radical. And some people will think I’m being narcissistic. But I’m telling you what I see as the ethnographic truth of love for me, up close and personal to be sure.
None of this is about me. It’s about the power of what I call “true love.” This is a testament to love, not anything else. An ethnography, not a biography.
When love transcends self-interest, I call it true. When we can leave self-servingness behind and be selfless in our relationships, we’ve cleared the space for transformative love to arise.
Self-interest skews matters. Well, inordinate self-interest, I suppose. We obviously have a legitimate interest in things like staying alive, eating well, and having a roof over our heads. But I think you know what I mean.
When we relate to another out of our own self-interest, there’s dissonance, inner conflict. We’re of two minds. There’s a tremor in the force, to use Star Wars’ language.
When love is “true,” it’s faithful to design. There’s no dissonance, inner conflict, or divided mind. There’s no tremor in the force.
Perhaps let me illustrate this with an example from men. When men and women meet and connect out of interest in each other, many of us men switch on a conditioned program that has as its sole interest getting a woman into bed. Women of course have some choice words for men who think this way.
In the interest of winning at this game, we men will do a lot of things – dress up, buy fancy cars, throw money around.
As young boys, we talked about how far we got with a girl – first base, second base, third base. I don’t even want to think about it. This was our conditioning.
It became an interest of ours – an early and enduring self-interest – to “make it” with the woman we were currently chasing.
What we didn’t know was that, in the service of that interest, we skewed our love. Our love became conditional. If an action got us closer to making it with the woman, we supported it. If it took us farther away, we didn’t support it. You could hear it in our voices. Every woman, I’m sure, knows very well what I’m talking about.
As men, our love was skewed by this self-interest, but very few of us saw it. The sexual urge was so strong that we didn’t entertain anything that could turn us away from it. We were hip. We were cool. We loved sex.
But there’s nothing true about this kind of “love.” Well, it isn’t love, really. That’s the point. It’s at best a mutuality of self-interest plus chemistry. But not love.
As long as we did the male thing, so long were we bereft of transformational love. This was Third Dimensionality in the raw. This was everyday life in the molasses of 3D, this and other patterns of self-servingness. This program cost us access to real love, to true love.
I’m a stand for the life of the person I love working out. And I remind myself of that constantly. If that person authentically wants X, I’m a stand for X. If Y, I’m a stand for Y. I don’t let how I feel about things outweigh my being a stand for their life succeeding.
When I can support anything they want, without self-interest taking precedence, I’m willing to say that my love is true, faithful to its original design of selflessness.
You’d have to experience transformational love for this statement to really become self-evident. The galactics and celestials provide us with the best example of beings who support anything we want, even when it goes against their self-interest.
I once asked Archangel Michael if I should take DMT, the God molecule. And he said no. But, he added, if, in consulting my own soul, I determined that I wanted to do it, he would make it the best possible experience. I accepted his no. But how selfless of him to respond that way.
Unconditional, transformative love is selfless. And it’s naturally so. It’s selfless not because of something that we do, but because that’s the way love is.