Love in the 21st Century

by Philippa Merivale

“Who the person is that you love is really not the point – it doesn’t even matter very much. What is important is the quality of the love that you feel.”

These were the words our teacher was speaking, as I trained with a group of light therapists years ago. I was in love at the time: truly, madly, deeply. For months I had felt like the central character in a Shakespearean epic: I was suffering at the time with great, classical intensity, as it happens, but I wasn’t about to give up my drama and release the object of my grand passion to some kind of abstract idea; an energy field of etheric clouds and roses. Whom I loved – the single individual who could surely be none other than the soul-mate, the companion of my dreams – seemed to be very much the point just then; perhaps the only point.

This was a pre 9.11 world. Few of us, in that world which now looks pubescent, almost innocent, had begun to grasp the central truth of our humanity: this truth is that we are all one. What we knew then, what was truly familiar, indeed what had been familiar to our forebears through centuries and aeons of warfare, was a sense of separation. Conflict had been handed down from generation to generation: two thousand years after Christ had told us otherwise, we were each caught up in the ongoing legacy of our personal dramas, whose central illusion was based in our sense of individual, separate identities. And this was the root cause of our fears. Our woundedness, our deep inner terror – scarcely even apprehended by the conscious mind – that somehow or other we had found ourselves far from heaven, or from all that felt safe, was the thing that kept us apart from one another.

It is no wonder, then, that our grand passions have formed the mainstay of poetry and literature, drama and music, ever since our so-called civilisations began. Because what happens when we fall in love is that our personal boundaries dissolve; our energy fields give up their hard-won autonomy almost completely for a while, as we merge with one another, each of us glimpsing in the other person the ideal of perfection. So we feel at one with that other person because, for the time being, that is literally what we are. Our isolation vanishes in our ecstasy of oneness, and we breathe a sigh of relief as we glimpse the reality of our homecoming; we recognise something deeply familiar as we begin to remember what the oneness, which is our true nature, actually feels like.

It’s a trip, of course – the best trip life has to offer. Without it, the artists and the advertisers would be out of a job and we’d all be missing the spice that seems to animate our worlds. “In love” is the way we’ve been wired up on this planet: it’s a vital stage for every one of us in our personal evolution. And like everything else in this duality which is our life on earth, it has a flip side. If we look honestly at most of the times when we’ve fallen in love, we can see that we’ve also probably fallen in need.

There’s nothing wrong with that: it’s perfect, in fact. It’s perfect because love is the only context in which our woundedness can safely be exposed and expressed. When we fall in love, we hope we have found someone with whom we can share our grandest dreams; but also – though we’re hardly conscious of this at the beginning of any romance – we’re in it to heal our deepest wounds. I was lucky: the hero in my drama later moved into my life. That’s where the love stories end: the fairy tales, the Hollywood movies, the pulp fiction, would all have us sit back at that moment and dissolve into the seductive warmth of fantasy.

In the real world, of course, this is the beginning of a journey, not the end of one. What’s special about my story? Nothing – my lover and I experienced the bumps and hazards which temper every relationship, as little by little our energy fields regained some of their former, individual boundaries; he gently stepped down from the pedestal I had so grandly erected in my mind and as he did so he gradually became my closest companion and friend. No, my story isn’t special – but it’s important because it is the universal story, whereby we learn to love for real. Some of our intimate friendships are for life; others last maybe years or even only months. In terms of our learning, it doesn’t really matter: our goal is to use the challenges and opportunities in our relationships to move beyond a place of conditional desire into unconditional love. This was what my teacher meant when he said that what is important in our loving is not the person but the quality, our quality. As we grow in unconditionality, we move a step closer to our true, divine nature – and so grow our creative power, which affects everything.

The reality of our relationships, at a quantum level, is that they consist of energy in motion: they ebb and flow with the quality of what we offer and what we receive. And it’s the journey, or the process, that counts: the story that our relationships weave as the energy, which is the creative force of the universe, moves between us and through us in our personal interactions, is the golden thread that winds its way through the web of all life. It is the most important story of all, because it is through the training ground of close relationship that we come to know ourselves; and this is where everything begins – all of it.

The lessons of 9.11 are many-faceted. That first one, the discovery that we are not separate, means that whatever we do to another person we do also to ourselves. Here already, then, is an enormous stepping stone toward harmony in our relationships, if we choose to bring that knowledge into the way we interact with others on a daily basis. When we allow our relationships to show us what we are giving out by noticing what comes boomeranging back to us from those around us, we ease toward the fast lane on our road to enlightenment.

Another lesson that has grown out of the tragedy of the Twin Towers is subtly different from this one: it is the knowledge that what we see unfolding in the events around us, personally and globally, is the consequence – not the cause – of what each of us is on the inside. We start to see, for instance, that if we want peace on the outside we must have peace on the inside; that if we want to have love we must be love; if we want others to listen, we must learn to hear. Who each one of us is, on the inside, is crucial to the planetary story: if indeed we are all connected in a vast field of fluid, conscious energy, then it follows that every individual on this earth plane is affecting what will happen in the future, and this on a daily basis. We are all, in fact, in relationship with the all-that-is of the universe, all of the time. As the poet John Donne expressed it long ago, “No man is an island.” Communication is happening, inside, outside and ongoingly – even in a cave. The consequences of our communications, inner and outer, imply that each of us carries a great responsibility and also a great freedom: this double-edged opportunity has been with every individual since the beginning of time – only most of us didn’t know it. We thought there was some force out there which was responsible for what happened to us. We’re busting that myth: we now know that through every thought and feeling that we have, through every word that we speak and act that we do, we are influencing what happens in a vast energy field, which we know as the world we inhabit.

If we’ve not been used to such an idea, it is startling to confront the reality that we in fact create our experience. But open ourselves to what this really means and the opportunity within it is awesome. It is the opportunity to create a life of joy and prosperity, creativity and success on every level. And we can get to that place of personal autonomy and power through the wonderful mirror that is held up to us in all our relationships – with our partners, our spouses, our children; with all the people who matter. The crux of the issue is that mirror: it alone allows us to know ourselves, and it is only when we know ourselves that we can possibly grow to become truly responsible for what we create. We cannot be actively, dynamically or creatively responsible for that which we do not know: it’s not going to happen. What will happen as long as we remain in ignorance is that we shall create by default, as our unconscious patterns of need and fear are broadcast on the air waves. The results of this kind of creativity generally leave a lot to be desired.

So let us welcome with arms wide open the chance to look at all our relationships – those we have with loved ones, those that are easy, those that are difficult; even those we have with our enemies – as the great opportunity to turn our lives around and move back toward the love that is our natural state. Maybe part of our legacy from 9.11 is that we’re all growing up. Blaming someone else for what is happening in our worlds – even in the most extreme or horrific circumstances – is clearly not going to work. It’s not going to work because it doesn’t correspond with the natural laws of the universe. Quantum physics has shown that you can’t even have a universe without mind entering into it, altering some facet of it slightly with every thought that we have. It is our own thoughts and our own feelings that count. If we blame someone out there, if we judge another person for what we perceive as wrong, this means that we’re also sitting in condemnation of some part of ourselves.

If I find myself myself angry or irritated with my spouse, then, or my mother – for impatience, perhaps, or arrogance; for vanity or a lack of compassion – this is a perfect moment to take a step back, breathe deeply and ask myself, “What part of myself have I been judging? And because I have disliked this part of myself, what have I done with it? Where do I put my shadow, those parts of myself that fill me with fear and self-loathing?” The truth is that I’ve most likely hidden them: from others, of course, but also from myself. Charity, though, begins at home. So does compassion; so does wisdom; so does love. Their seeds germinate within us and it is as we tend them, promoting their health, that we grow the first and most important relationship of our life: the one that we have with ourselves. As we see ourselves through the mirror of those we love, we can forgive ourselves; as we forgive ourselves, we can love ourselves; as we love ourselves, we can step up to a higher vibration even than love: we can move into joy.

The events of 9.11 – just like those of Hitler, Stalin and all the other genocides of history – could only happen because the seeds of jealousy, violence and hatred already lurked within the breasts of the individuals who people the planet: that’s us. Sometimes it is the difficult times within our own family lives that show us what needs looking at; a confrontation occasionally moves things on. As we hone our awareness, communication becomes more fluent and loving: crises are no longer the stimulus necessary to progress. At a collective, planetary level we’ve not yet reached that happy state, but the intimate relationships in all our lives are the templates that set the energy and the tone for all of our wider relationships. How we relate to ourselves influences the quality of our intimate lives; how we run our intimate lives extends to the dynamics that are formed within the family; how we run our families reaches out to the way we live in community; how we manage our communities stretches way out into our politics, into the way we run the world.

The Age of Aquarius is spoken of as a time, among many other things, when we are moving out of dependency on outer authority: religions are losing their capacity to control us; the internet empowers us all through the explosion of information arriving literally at our fingertips; the large company is being increasingly replaced by the dynamic individualist. Self-responsibility is the great key to our destiny and it’s there for the taking. That great movie, The Secret, reveals – with a wonderful, visceral thump – the mechanism through which our “thoughts become things”. As we understand this great power that we all have to create life consciously and dynamically instead of suffering its effects, our relationships can be dramatically transformed. They are the ground within which we can come to recognise our fears consciously, and dissolve them; they are the context within which we can learn the true nature of love, and begin to live it. Love is the primary energy of the universe – but we can move even beyond that. Science has shown that plants respond to our thoughts: seeds cultivated in a pot labeled ‘fear’ grow very little; those labeled ‘love’ do better. But what do best of all are those whose pots are wearing the sticker called ‘happy’. Joy, it emerges, is a higher vibration than love.

As we look honestly at our close relationships, we can spot the places where we can replace resentment with gratitude; we can discard our negative lenses and notice the good; we can throw out anger and bring in forgiveness; we can dissolve all that comes from fear as we focus on love. We can take responsibility for what is happening around us instead of giving away our power in blame. Then comes the greatest opportunity of all: we can take responsibility for our own joy, the most empowering emotion of all. Its high vibration puts us in touch with the natural resonance of the soul. This allows a greater part of us to show up on the stage of our lives: our creative power grows beyond anything we’ve ever imagined. Through the awesome power of joy, we can create a veritable paradise on earth; all who surround us will be lifted and their lives will be changed.

Who would resist an opportunity like this? If we wish to dissolve the legacy of previous generations, with all their illusions of fear, then let’s take a fresh look at our intimate relationships: family ones, those we have with our workmates and those with our friends, and throw out the patterns that don’t serve us. Let’s abandon old habits that have shut down our minds and contracted our hearts, and opt instead for expansion. Let us see that as we work to change ourselves, everyone around us becomes magically transformed. As we grow the love and the joy in our relationships, then we can also do something else: we can visualise a world where people everywhere feel safe to do the same. Those visions, with their creative power, will influence the planet. One day, then, we shall reach critical mass: a point where the energy of positive change is so great that there will be no going back: then we will see – as we unleash the joyful creativity of our souls – just what we can create.

Philippa Merivale is a therapist and author, working with Light, Sound and the power of Spirit. Her latest book, "‘Follow Your Yellow Brick Road," is available via www.Color4Power.com which also gives information on books, and relationship & other workshops.

Added to InnerchangeMag.com April, 2007 as an online exclusive.