A. H. Almaas - Love Unveiled: Discovering the Essence of the Awakened Heart

All you need is love. The message of the sixties still resonates, and people of all cultures are perennially captivated by songs, novels, and movies about falling in love. We eagerly seek for ourselves what can seem the only remaining source of enchantment in our increasingly secular and materialistic societies. But what is it that we seek, and why are we so often disappointed in what we find as time passes?

Some who are disappointed or frustrated by romantic love seek the healing power of love in the context of friendship, social communities, psychotherapeutic work, or spiritual devotion. Yet in all these areas it can often be a struggle to free love from our baser and more selfish instincts.

The problem is that love is poorly understood in reality. We may resonate with the word on a heart level, and we assume that its meaning is obvious. And yet in different contexts, love can refer to attachment, kindness, goodness, connection, attraction, intercourse, merging, beneficence, bliss, or transcendence. Spiritual wisdom describes love as inherently unselfish, yet many of us act with overt self-centeredness in our search for love, as with internet daters who tick the boxes of what they require from their perfect partner. And for all of its positive associations, love is also inextricably linked with uncontrollable desire, jealousy, envy, vulnerability, betrayal, loss, heartbreak, humiliation, and even hatred. It is possible to see that love is, in fact, at the root of all emotionspositive ones when we are enjoying the presence of love or negative ones when we are feeling cut off from it. It is so all-encompassing that it is hardly surprising we are hard-pressed to see it clearly and define its nature.

In this first book of a three-volume series, A. H. Almaas invites us to cut through all the historical and cultural veils around love and explore its essential nature. He is not interested in simply helping us find, manage, or navigate the common experience of love but rather to taste it in its purity, separated out from all the associations, ideas, and myths around it that have come with our cultural heritage. He shows us that love is not an idea or an ideal but a palpable experience of a particular state of consciousness, one that is sweet, rich, powerful, and satisfying. In fact, it is the most essential nutrition for the human soul.

In Love Unveiled, Almaas introduces the reader to three distinct flavors of loving consciousness: personal, merging, and passionate. They all share qualities that can only be defined as love, but each one feels recognizably different from the others in terms of the sensation and feel of it, the associations it evokes, and the effect on our experience.

Love Unveiled has been distilled from weekend teachings that Almaas gave to his students. As such, it reflects the immediacy of a teacher speaking directly to those exploring the subject with him. The freshness and aliveness of his words give you the sense of being there as the teaching emerges. Exercises at the end of each chapter invite you to engage with the material on an individual level, providing an even deeper personal impact.

As we tune in to the direct experience of these three forms of love, we come to understand a great deal more about the centrality of love in human culture. We also see how fundamental it is for human consciousness, and we explore the radical effect its presence, or absence, has had on our early development and its legacy. By connecting love as it is experienced in our personal lives with presence as its deeper source, Almaas bridges the two worlds of social and spiritual love, revealing the deep power of the latter without in any way demeaning the wonder of the former. He shows how the consciousness of love has a force and energy, which is a necessary fuel for our inner journey and can turn it into a passionate love affair.