Zenju Earthlyn Manuel - Be Love: An Exploration of Our Deepest Desire

Be Love

An Exploration of Our Deepest Desire

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

copyright 2012 by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

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Whats Love Got to Do With It?

I love music and I love to dance. Many times I have danced in my car seat listening to the radio, singing along as if I were on stage. I especially liked singing along with Bob Marley trying to sound like a Rasta. And sometimes I pretended to hit the notes with Whitney Houston trying to capture her soaring heart. When I would hear Tina Turner sing Whats Love Got to Do With It , I'd turn up the volume because I love Tina. But every time after the second run of the chorus, I would stop singing and hear myself answering the question Whats Love Got to Do With it? My answer, Love has everything to do with it, my sister. Everything!"

I did not feel love was a second-hand emotion as the lyrics suggest. I felt love as an ancient primal way of existing as living beings. Mostly we are not aware of such love because of our preferences, desires, and emotions. Everyone one loves everyone but we just dont know it. We cant feel it through our pain, distrust, and our ever-vigilant ways of protecting ourselves from one another. And many of us have given up on love because the journey of finding it has failed.

Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken , Tina sings from the very heart she is questioning. We need a heart, if only to say, My heart is broken. We need a heart to ask why is my heart broken, what has happened? We need a heart to say, I am well again. Im good.

Once in a meditation class someone asked me, Why are you only talking about love in a universal way and not about the intimate love between two people, you know, relationship? My answer, Isnt it the same? How can you love one person or two without loving everyone and everything? How can you possess love and give it out like a reward to this one, that one and not that one? If we are only choosing certain people to love we are not in the act of love but rather an act of infatuation, preference or favoritism. She was puzzled because she needed some guidance on being in relationship with her beloved. She wanted some answers to the challenge of love and lovemaking. Perhaps she wanted love to be defined so that she could know it, grab it, or maybe use it to her personal benefit.

I believe the greatest question of all the centuries in which human beings have existed is What is love? It is our deepest desire to touch others hearts and be touched. We want to feel love. And of course this would be our deepest desire. Once we are born, we are held in the arms of someone at least our entire first year on Earth. Babies who are not held, tend to die according to many researchers. Breastfeeding is not only about being fed as much as it is about the baby being held while adjusting to the world hopefully feeling safe in someones arms. So we may go about life looking for that experience again and again, looking for love in that expression. However, what we have forgotten is that the baby arrives filled with love, before even falling asleep in the arms of another. And the guardians of that child, responds (or not) to the love the baby arrives with. It is the parents that are learning about love through the infants and the education can be challenging for the adults. I predict that when the desire for love and visibility arises within our collective hearts and minds there is a rise in birth rates. On the other hand I predict, when there is a gross lack of love the homicide and suicide rates increase.

At church in Sunday school, when I was a young girl, our assignment was to memorize a verse from the Bible and recite it when we came to class. Because of my fear that I could not memorize a long verse I would arrive many Sundays with the simple verse, God is love. Although, the teacher would look at me with much disappointment expecting more from me, I felt satisfied with the simple words rolling off my lips. Those three words gave me a deep sense of comfort for some unknown reason.

As I aged and despite my long walk on Buddha's path, I found myself still reciting God is love as some sort of inner mantra. Finally, when I opened up to the entire verse I began to see the true reason this verse stayed with me throughout my life journey. The whole verse is, Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love (1 John 4:8). Love is an act and it is simultaneously a description of the nature of God. When we love, we know God and we know love. And because I prefer to see God as a spirit within me, when I love, whether it is returned or not, I am still love. God is love, so we are love. God is love was the mantra I needed as a child in difficult times.

We come fully equipped. Love is our nature. What do I mean by nature? All beings, all things are nature. All things come into existence and they cease to be in existence at some pointthat is the nature of things and beings. We are born and we die. If you spend time in nature, you notice that the spring flowers disappear by summer. The green leaves change from red to yellow to brown in the winter season. It is transformation and magic at its finest. Our true nature is to be love and loving from birth until death. It just so happens that such love is detoured by obstructions on the road of life. We end up falling into ditches.

Hate is a distortion of our loving nature. In other words, love is still there but it is distorted. You have to care in order to hate someone or something. Something in your mind, in your much-needed heart is convincing you that the person, people, or thing you hate is taking away your sense of joy and love. Something in your mind says that, If I am afraid of that person or group of people, it is alright to hate them. When you say, I don't love that person, you are saying, I could love that person better if they were more like melook like me, talk like me, listen to me. On the other hand there can be an assumption a person does not love you so you hate them sensing at some point you will be rejected. These are distortions of love, a twisting of our true nature into a form to match what we think in our minds. We confuse love with the physical desire to touch and be touched. So, often we cannot imagine being touched by certain people or to touch particular kinds of people. Hate comes easy in such a limited understanding of love.

Most of our hatred is directed toward strangers. I hate that stranger because of this or that. The funny thing is, strangers, people you have never met, are recognized as being a part of your life when you spend time hating them. The recognition itself comes from your nature of being love. Many years ago, while waiting for a commute train, I once heard a young teen yell out, I hate fat people. I looked around because she was loud. And when her eyes glared at me, I realize she was directing her hatred towards me. And thats how I found out that some people saw me as fat at that time. Of course in the moment of the incident I began to hate the young teen because she was loud and rude. But mostly because she had hurt my feelings, she had tapped into this deep psychic wound I had at that time in my life. And yet, that encounter was an example that in our hating we recognize other living beings as part of our life. The recognition is love itself, but a love that is buried beneath the suffering. Mind you, I am not saying that the words of the young teen were an expression of love. Quite the contrary, her words were a distortion of the love she could not feel for herself. She had to hate me to feel love for herself---even though it was not the deep loving nature of her heart. It was a distortion, twisting in her mind, from her own struggle to remain thin, erasing any kindness towards herself and others.