What has Love got to do with it?

Tweet

A sneak preview extracted from Georgi's new book Nondual Trauma, where she describes how trauma reduces True Nature from feeling to abstraction.  

“Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.”

Maya Angelou

Nondual Qualities are qualities of consciousness. This means that where there is a traumatic association, part of the feeling connection with them is also blanked. They are no longer trusted. Where there is a will to forget, Nondual Qualities are also forgotten. They are on the other side of the rupture between consciousness and the sensory field, and through factualization they are desensitized. We talk a lot about love, peace and freedom, but our words become devoid a feeling connection.

That means that the qualities of True Nature play an integral role as bridging energies on the return journey to wholeness. They offer the potent field of resonance that can bring the whole traumatic field of memory back to life, thus enabling its recognition, validation, and integration as part of the deeper beauty and purpose of lived experience.

When as an effect of trauma, we factualize the qualities of True Nature, we retract our feeling connection with them. They become abstractions that are increasingly non-relatable. This is a tragic dissociation from the essence of ourselves that vastly reduces our sense of purpose, meaning, and general vitality. If love is a “thing” rather than a feeling, then it becomes an object of limited shape, size, and longevity. We have to work to deserve “it”. We have to search for “it” in the world. The thing called love becomes transactional. We give "it" only if there is pay-back. We feel indebted, so we deliver "it" out of obligation. We starve for "it", and it seems there is not enough to go around. When we find "it", we grasp it, to try and keep it. That means that wherever we find this thing called love, we immediately lose it through grasping. Because love is not a thing or a fact, we find ourselves clawing at the light, or mourning the passing of the morning breeze. Through factualization, we lose this thing called love before we even begin to experience its ephemeral resonance.

One way that the feeling connection with love is lost is through the reduction of the Nondual Quality to the dimension of duality. Love is the opposite of Hate. It’s a competition between love and hate. Others might declare that love is the opposite of fear. It’s a competition between love and fear. They cannot exist together. For love to be here, we first must rid our experience of hatred. We must have no feelings of aversion. We must never feel repelled. If there is any such suffering in the heart, then love is defeated. At best love becomes a mental precept, not an actual feeling. At worst, it becomes a standard of an ideal that we use to accuse, dictating love, and condemning others in its name.

If love cannot exist together with hatred, or together with fear, then we are truly doomed, because there will always be the suffering of fear and hatred in the world around us. It is there in the collective memory, in our history, in our present, and will be there in our future. So to feel love, we must separate ourselves from that world (which is also now a factualized “thing”). We must build a separate self that we can fill with separate love. And just as we build this separate love-filled self, we must shutter our sensory ability against any hatred or fear that is around us. We must isolate. But can love exist together with the sense of isolation from the whole? Perhaps love is only divine – belonging to the “other” world – it has no place here, among us. But does the divine exist? After all, it’s appearing now as a “thing” in competition with this world. (And into the wilderness of objects we go)

When love is factualized, it becomes a “thing” and this thing that is measured, divided, compared, split, abused, won, and lost, never feels safe. This leads to a repeat of the traumatic disconnect again and again. We are loveless. We are unlovable. Love is not there for us. Perhaps, love doesn’t even exist, at least not in this world. Love is for fantasists, fakers, woo-woo woke folk, and losers.

If we could make this conclusion, and if it would rest in peace, it might be a triumph of rationality. Yet love continues to be sensed, creeping under the doorways of divorcing couples, sneaking into funerals, infiltrating the speeches of politicians, fanning the flames of human passion and purpose, and beckoning the scientists back to the lab for one more attempt to uncover something new. It’s sneaks into our dreams and continues to inform and direct our primal drives. Just as we try and shake it off, it torments us with compulsions, neurosis, physical fragility, and the depth of longing. And just when we think we’ve nailed it to the cross, it hijacks us from behind through midlife crises or the bankrupting of the unnurtured nerve system.

We can cast love aside, but love will never let go of us, because it is part of who we are, part of our lifeblood, consciousness, and existence. It is part of our sentient ability, at the core of the sensorium of consciousness. It is here in the unrest that drives us to heal, in the disquiet that awakens reunion with what is true, and in the obscurity of suffering that leads to revelation. It torments us by its absence, reminding us of who we are if not through light, then through shadow.

In the words of our teacher Bob Moore: “Love is a force that cannot be dictated; you can only blend with it.”

And so it is with all Nondual Qualities.