Jan 4, 2024 (Medium.com)
An in-depth analysis of the only quote you will ever need to read and understand about love.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Rumi
I know, we hear this all the time, ‘love is not found outside, but within.’
It has become a cliché in the spiritual community, but what does that really mean for our everyday lives? I have yet to read something to truly explain the depth and significance of this sentence.
Let us first begin by examining what is love for most of us.
Many of us approach love primarily from an egocentric viewpoint. Our chief concern often revolves around being loved by our partners, friends, and family.
The central issue is about being lovable, which typically involves being admired and accepted in the external world.
Our quest for love is a quest for acceptance.
And acceptance is always something external. Even if you struggle to accept yourself, the aspects of yourself that you find difficult to accept have been rejected by your external environment. Without external rejection, self-acceptance becomes obsolete.
Romantic love: Conforming to ideals
We often see love as something outside ourselves, something that can be given by another, possessed, and clung to.
In our quest to be loved, we tend to adhere to external expectations.
For many men, this involves striving for success, ascending the social ladder, and accumulating power and wealth as a means to gain love and acceptance.
On the other hand, a path frequently pursued by women centers on enhancing physical attractiveness. This pursuit encompasses meticulous attention to appearance, fashion, and beauty routines, all aimed at maintaining youth and allure.
In this context, the concept of love becomes conflated with notions of power, popularity, and physical attraction.
Explore YouTube, and you’ll notice a trend: channels appealing to men frequently emphasize hustling, and wealth accumulation, and are centered around themes of relentless effort and motivation. As for women — just take a look at the beauty industry.
Consequences
This adherence to external standards of success often leads to an unhealthy attachment to these ideals, fostering anxiety and fear. The underlying fear of not being ‘good enough’ and consequently not being loved can lead to profound distress and sorrow in life. Individuals who feel they fall short in these domains might experience depression, rooted in a belief that they are unlovable.
It’s important to note that these emphases are also biologically driven. Women are naturally inclined to seek traits in partners that promise security and care for their offspring. Similarly, men often view beauty and youth as indicators of a healthy lineage, ensuring the survival of their genetic material posthumously.
These dynamics of biological attraction result in a cycle of mutual exploitation, where men objectify women for sexual gratification, and women view men as providers of security and means for procreation.
Is love something to be found outside?
Yet, Rumi points out that our attention should be on addressing the internal obstacles that hinder our capacity to love.
The primary barrier to experiencing love is not the lack of external affection, but rather the internal defenses we erect.
Love is not an external pursuit but an internal transformation. It is not something we can get from others but something that flows naturally from within ourselves.
We desperately long to be loved because our hearts are empty. An empty cup wants to be full; however, a heart that is full of love never seeks someone to fill it up. Instead, it radiates love, never asking anything back.
Rumi encourages a shift from seeking conditional love — based on the specific criteria and expectations outlined above — to cultivating a more unconditional form of love that is accepting and all-encompassing.
We love because hence we do not love at all.
“Why do you love me?” we tend to ask our partners. “I love you because you are smart, beautiful, hard-working, and take care of me,” are some of the usual responses.
Our love is not love, but a transaction, an exchange. In the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti:
If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something.
As long as this transaction meets the conditions set by both parties, we say we love each other. Yet, the moment there is any deviation, there is great pain and frustration.
This phenomenon is not limited to romantic relationships; it is also prevalent in friendships and parent-child relationships. Upon careful observation, it becomes clear that the conflicts and the ensuing pain in these relationships stem from one factor: expectations.
This pain is there to wake us up to the fact that what we seek is not love, but attachment. We seek someone to cover up our feelings of utter isolation. We seek someone to fulfill our desires.
Rumi’s quote is a call to turn inward and do the necessary inner work to remove the obstacles that prevent us from being love itself.
The only barrier to love: Time
All these barriers are products of time; they are the past with our traumas and the future with our expectations.
Our past traumas close off our hearts to avoid being hurt again.
Yet, as Rumi said:
“The cure for pain is in the pain.”
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
The pain from our past holds the answer, the light, the wisdom. We get hurt because we expect, and we expect because we are selfish, hence having no love in our hearts, only desire.
Love is the ending of time. And with time, fear ends.
Even if one finds ‘love’ externally, that love always comes with fear — the fear of that love coming to an end. That fear is the future, the expectation, the demand for permanency in an impermanent world.
Yet, love has nothing to do with all that.
Love is pure presence. It is a state of constantly letting go, meeting every person with a fresh, clear mind, not chained to past trauma, memories, and grievances.
Love is truly a state of being — being truly alive, here and now.
The question then arises:
Can an ambitious person, who is constantly living in the future, ever truly know love?
What about an overthinker, someone riddled with anxieties and fears?”
Written by Michalis M.
I write about Non-duality, self-knowledge and the human condition. Follow my IG for more: Freedom.from.the.madness