What is love at the spiritual level? It is not just an emotion, though it does have affect like our emotions have affect. That affect is sweetness, goodness and happiness. But it is much more than emotion. It is an actual presence that fills our consciousness and pervades our being and our whole atmosphere.
This presence is an actual substance that is expressed through the heart. Love at this level has many facets, and each facet has its distinct flavor of presence. There are three particular types, or facets, of essential love that can be known at an emotional level, which makes them more approachable to us at a spiritual level.
• Pink, or personal, love is what manifests when we like someone or something. There is a feeling of appreciation, fondness and an enjoyment of someone for who and what they are. When we experience personal love, there is an opening in the heart, an unfolding into a softness and fullness that also feels pleasurably fluffy and light. When personal love is manifesting, its affect approximates the texture and taste of cotton candy—pink, sweet, cloud-like—and that affect permeates the field between you and the object of that love. We have all felt it in relationships that we experience as easy and comfortable, where we are bathed in the sweet pleasure of another’s company.
• The presence of gold, or merging, love is more intense, characterized by a deep connection and bonding. It has a sense of intimacy and nourishment, where boundaries dissolve so that we can feel union with another in a profound sort of way. This presence has a more substantial viscosity and fluidity than personal love, and it elicits a sense of fullness and abundance that feels infinite. Think of honey with light shining through it—warm and flowing. It is the type of love that a mother and child share (though the child is not cognizant of it in the same way), where they are so intimately bonded that it feels as though they are not separate people, but one living organism.
• Pomegranate, or passionate love is even more intense and, at times, ecstatic. It is the kind of love that manifests when we fall in love with someone. It is also fluid and pooling, but it has spark and zest. We are possessed of a desire to devour and be devoured by love. It is the love that is arising between us when we feel we want to know everything—down to the minutest detail—about someone, when we feel as if time is suspended and we could talk to that person all night long and still not be satiated. At a deeper level still, it is our desire to be one with the Beloved, to be ravished by it, utterly consumed and lost in it.
There are many other types of love, of course. But these are most easily understood and experienced by most all of us. Welcome to the journey into love.
Join us as Diamond Approach teacher and lineage successor Zarina Maiwandi leads a 3-part exploration of what love really is, the ways it shows up in our human experience, and how we can move through inner obstacles to realize its full expression. We will also be joined by special guest, A.H. Almaas, who will teach the opening session.
This live course is experiential in nature and offers a practical methodology for identifying and working through our psychological and cultural conditioning and historical wounds that create barriers to love, all with the support of a spiritual community.