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“The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.” ~Margaret Atwood
What is love? The definition of love, like the definition of God or consciousness, is a subjective thing. We can all feel what love is, what God is, what consciousness is, but none of us can explain them with any objectivity.
The best definition of love that I’ve ever come across is by Tom Robbins: “Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.”
When it comes down to it, love is tricky. It’s multifaceted. It’s both lost and found within the complex folds of our unique mind-body-spirit dynamic. It’s both a spiraling in and a spiral out. We all know the “feeling” of love, but we can’t seem to describe it. But oh boy do we try—in poetry, in song, in dance, in bed. Even in art.
If you need to visualize Love, think of it as a cross between a primal howl, a slow sunset, and a dribble of wild honey. But what it really is, as far as I can tell, is a packet of Soul. It’s a mind-body-soul-centric appreciation of cosmic entanglement.
Unfortunately, the predominant love paradigm in our culture is ego-centric, ownership-based love. We live in a world where relationships are mostly based upon materialism, ownership and immediate gratification. It’s almost like we’re conditioned to consume to the point that we “consume” each other. Even the words we use toward each other regarding love imply ownership.
It’s sad. But no condition is insurmountable. We can recondition ourselves. We can update the love paradigm into one of soul-centric, cosmic-oriented, relationship-based love.
As it stands, our language is dreadfully inadequate to do the ‘concept of love’ any justice. There are over eight-billion people on the planet and we each have a different psycho-physiological reaction to any given stimuli, however minute that difference. With abstract stimuli such as Love, Consciousness, and God, that difference is magnified.
The fact is: we all have our own definition for the concept of love (ego) but love itself is written in a language older than words (soul).
So, how do we better understand this language? The best answer? Curious surrender. We surrender to Cosmos. We remain open and curious. We renounce our Ego and sacrifice it to Soul (our unquenchable curiosity, our unconquerable passion, our indominable interconnection with all things). In short: we forfeit fear and embrace cosmic love as an accomplice of the Great Mystery.
Ultimately, love is a mystery. And cosmic love is doubly so. It’s the surrender of the conditional to the unconditional. It’s the complete victory of nonattachment over attachment. It’s choosing our soul’s absolute vulnerability over our ego’s false invulnerability.
Cosmic love teaches humility above hubris, honor above humility, and humor above honor. It teaches us that we are both precious and unique as well as fleeting and fallible.
When we sacrifice our culturally conditioned ideal of love to the Great Mystery, we become cosmic. We become Love itself. We become the personification of love. We become a sword of love that cuts through everything that is not love.
Which begs the question, what is not love? True love is never clingy, controlling, or codependent. True love is relationship-based not ownership-based. It’s not a product, but a way of being. It’s a surrender, a sacrifice. But most importantly, it is a letting go of the need to be loved. Or the need for others to love a certain way.
As Walter Benjamin said, “The only way of loving a person is to love them without hope.”
Loving without hope means allowing love to be free. It’s being in love with life as it comes. It’s accepting that everything is connected to everything else and then deciding to be in love with the whole thing—from trauma to drama to mana. It’s loving with curiosity and in an attempt to understand, to discover, and to co-create rather than to control.
Loving without hope is loving courageously, vulnerably, and honestly. Which is likely to hurt. Therefore, loving without hope is being open-hearted enough to be okay with having our heart broken. In fact, loving without hope is about becoming adept at adapting to heart break. It’s about overcoming the slings and arrows of life and becoming resilient, robust, and antifragile despite pain and loss. It’s fully embracing amor fati: love of fate.
As Atticus said, “Everything we love is well-arranged dust.”
Loving without hope is cosmic because it is loving without an agenda. It’s allowing others to love the way they must love. It’s letting go of our ego’s attachment to love. It’s agape-love, cosmic, transcendent, nonattached. It’s loving at the edge of the human condition: fallible, uncertain, hungry, and in a frenzy. Loving without hope is maintaining a cosmic connection to the energy that binds all things.
As Rumi said, “Love is the bridge between you and everything.” But we can only be shown the bridge. We are the ones who must walk over it.
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About the Author:
Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.
This article (Overcoming Ownership-based Love) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.
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