Back to the Garden Part 1: Cultivating Love in Our Lives

by Curtis Lang		print version
		print version (graphics)

There are many books, tapes, seminars, TV shows, radio programs and websites devoted to the topic of love and sexuality.

You can learn methods to select the right partner, attract a partner, polish your sexual technique and divorce yesterday's lover.

There are many therapists, ministers, journalists and even politicians ready to discuss the moral questions surrounding sexual love and prescribe for others what they see as correct sexual behavior.

Painted Photo by Jane Sherry

But virtually nowhere can we learn the spiritual laws governing the many varieties of human sexual behavior. There is little discussion of the spiritual laws governing the physical, emotional and mental energies exchanged in human love relations.

We all agree that we want love in our lives. But love is a word that means so many things it may mean nothing at all.

We say, "I love to watch The Sopranos," or "I love my BMW." And we say, "I love my wife," "I love my kids," and "I love my mistress."

We all want something different from love, it seems. Some want power, some want money, some want security, some want children, some want to be loved. Most of all, we all want love to last.

And we are disappointed when we don't get what we want.

We don't get what we want because we don't know the spiritual laws of love. We must take a more spiritual view of love.

We must get in tune with love and then we will know what love wants. When we learn what love wants, we can invite love into our life and love will be happy to stick around for a while. If we continue to get along, we will have a love that lasts. But we need to adopt a spiritual point of view toward love.

From a spiritual point of view, love wants only to love. The lover wants to become one with the Beloved. As they open their hearts and approach closer and closer to one another, the lovers experience, for one moment, the Void, an ego-less state of universal mind.

All mental considerations drop away, and only love remains between the two.

For the spiritual seeker, love means the pursuit of the Unity underlying the apparent duality of our physical reality. The seeker begins in adoration of deities and other practices designed to bring the seeker closer and closer to a direct experience of the Source.

As the seeker draws closer and closer to the goal, there is an inevitable moment of ego-less bliss.

Only love remains between the two.