Have you ever had the experience of meeting someone and instantly feeling there was absolutely nothing that separated you?
It’s helpful to understand exactly what’s going on when that happens. First of all, there was no impulse from either of you to judge the other person, so both of you were able to see through any apparent differences between you.
Whether or not you’d put it in these words, you both recognized that you share the same being.
When we believe we can only love someone if we know them, we’re ignoring the nature of love. Love doesn’t require us to know anything about a person; our nature is to automatically love whatever we see until our thinking tells us otherwise.
You’re probably familiar with the sort of thinking I’m referring to. “They’re not like me.” “I have nothing in common with them.” “Their values and beliefs are different from mine.” “I don’t like the way they look.” “They’re from a different culture.” “They don’t know what I know.”
Thoughts like this are always based on our having made a judgment about someone. These judgments become obstacles that prevent us from seeing the truth, which is that you and I share our being with everyone and everything. Our common being is what unites us. Our common being is our fundamental connection with everyone and everything.
To use words like “unites” and “connection” is a concession to the mistaken belief that we’re separate individuals. While that may be true on a physical level, it is not true on the level of the common spirit, or being, that animates every one of us. That common spirit is who we are, on the deepest, most fundamental level.
You probably know what that feels like. It feels peaceful, which is how love feels. In that moment, your essence is revealed as love. This is the love that’s always already there, waiting for us to recognize it. This is the love I referred to earlier when I described our nature as loving until we think and judge ourselves away from it.
Consider for a moment what sort of feeling arises when we judge a person. It’s a physical contraction. We get tight. It feels horrible. Without judgment, there’s nothing to veil the love that you and the other person are both made of.
Contrast that feeling to how you feel when you recognize another person as essentially just you, in a different body, with different thinking. This is a feeling of expansion. There’s nothing to hold back, nothing to protect, and no impulse to project any ideas you may have about yourself.
In a sense, this feeling of love is a complete relaxation. Everything we do to “protect” ourselves and hold the world at bay vanishes. This sense of relaxation is much closer to who you are than any ideas or thoughts you’ve ever had about yourself. This sense of relaxation is a complete absence of otherness. There is only the sense of a single being.
This is how Rupert Spira describes it: “This utter absence of otherness is the experience of love. Thus, love is not a relationship, but the absence of relationship, the collapse of the belief and feeling of self and other, individual and God.”
You have countless opportunities to feel this complete lack of otherness every day. When you encounter someone, anyone, all it takes is you being curious to see who’s there, instead of focusing on what’s wrong or different about them.
If you’re willing to try this, you may discover it’s a tiny investment that produces a boundless gift.
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