Love Is Not a Feeling. What Is It, Then?

AVAlexander Volchek

It is an extraordinary exercise that changes the course of events in your life. It does not simply affect your perception; it changes what happens in your life. But what should I do if I am supposed to direct love toward someone who harms me, creates difficulties, or harms other people?

OSOlga Stolyarova

In the previous video, we touched on a controversial question: can you love anyone, even someone who has done things that violate social norms? Today I would like to go deeper. What needs to develop within a person, or be present in them, for them to have the ability to truly love another person? People often confuse love with attachment, the desire to possess someone, or using another person to satisfy their own needs. It still seems unclear what pure, genuine love is and how it works.

AVAlexander Volchek

Imagine wanting to meet every person—your husband, wife, parents, children, bosses, managers, employees, clients, neighbors, people in town or in a store, absolutely anyone—with the intention of remembering to communicate from the heart and from love. It is an extraordinary exercise that changes the course of events in your life. It does not simply affect your perception; it changes what happens. Of course, you can only do it for someone else's sake, not your own. Suppose you set yourself that task. Could you do it? Any sensible person who has genuinely tried, not just once but as an ongoing effort, will tell you it seems impossible. Not only because of the work involved; you do not even know how to keep track of it. It is much easier to make sure you brush your teeth, commute to work every day, or go to the same coffee shop and repeat familiar actions.

It is much easier to practice a musical instrument, learn a foreign language, or do any number of things. This action is harder to carry out than anything else, even though it seems so simple and understandable—so human, natural, alive, and real. We will look at the range of responses it brings up. What should I do if I am supposed to direct love toward someone who harms me, creates difficulties, or harms other people? Should I still direct love toward them? We will examine that separately; it is a serious subject. Just think: such an apparently understandable action, yet remaining in it is so difficult. If you have tried it, I would be very interested to read in the comments what the experience was or is like for you, when you remember it, with whom, and in what situations. How can you keep remembering it? For example, as I have been describing this action, I have immersed my whole spiritual being in it.

But I have not immersed my whole spiritual being in love for everyone watching, in the mental sense. This distinction is important. When I ask you to imagine directing love, I mean a particular mental quality. I do not mean that your system constantly radiates love; I mean that you are mentally aware of it. Those are somewhat different things. You can bring your system to a point where it radiates that state without your mentally feeling, recognizing, or thinking about it. It becomes automatic, like moving my shoulders without thinking about moving them, or blinking. There are many such automatic actions in human physiology and in a person's psychological state. There are also automatic processes at the level of the spiritual being: actually transmitting and existing in those energies.

We are talking about mental awareness: continually checking yourself. To reach that state, you need to set yourself a task. There is also the task of developing your spiritual being, which begins to answer today's question: how can you experience love for other people? There are two approaches. One is to set yourself the task of doing it mentally. The other is to develop your spiritual system, your spiritual being, so that this action lives automatically within you and within those energies. You see a person, and the response arises automatically. Yesterday I was doing something on my property while the children played with some classmates. I asked my son, “Bring me the ball.” I wanted to shoot some basketball, and he ran to get it. The ball had rolled a little way down toward the woods.

He ran after it, then came running back across our property shouting, “Snake! Snake!” I went over and found a rattlesnake, a big, thick one, more than a meter long. I was certain what it was; I could tell from its tail. What arises in you at that moment? Stress in your physical body or psychophysical system, or a calm reaction? It is not necessarily something you consciously prepare for. I could have told myself, “All right, a snake. Calm down,” and then gone over. That question did not arise in me yesterday; I simply went to look. What happens when you see it? It was not my first snake here—perhaps my twenty-first—so I am a little more at ease with one. But when I get closer, I am no longer so comfortable, because I do not know how it will react.

First, it can move very suddenly and quickly. It will not move toward a person, but it can move abruptly; just try getting away from it. It can also leap a certain distance, make a sudden lunge, especially when coiled. This one was coiled, ready to lunge, possibly toward you. I approached with a blower, something that blows air, and understood that it would not be so easy for it to move forward toward me. Still, there is your own internal reaction. Mentally, the first thing I should have done was bring myself into a state of calm and perceive the whole space. Everyone would calm down, including the children. Because I was calm, the children came and stood beside me, watching it: my son's friend, my younger son, and the others. I gave it a blast of air, and it went off into the woods.

On the other hand, my system may already be prepared to perceive it calmly. I may have enough energy in the different aspects of my physical body, psychophysical system, mental state, and spiritual layers to understand whether danger is present. Essentially, the presence of danger can be read in the energies. If there is danger, the spiritual world tells you immediately. Always. If your perceptual system is developed, you are told and know in advance about particular dangers: that you should not go somewhere, that something is about to happen, or that someone you are talking to is lying, manipulating, or doing something wrong. Your vision is immediately directed toward that. The spiritual world tells you beforehand. Whether you are ready to hear your spiritual world is another matter. Even your spiritual—

Even your spiritual being may be telling you. The question is whether you are in a state to hear it when everyone is shouting, loud music is playing, and you are there with the blower: “Yeah, Borya!” Everyone is fighting. You are caught up in the periphery of that perception and may not hear the call to calm down. It is like the snake example. When you encounter another person, your system is working. First, there is your consciousness in terms of mental understanding. It is very important for the modern human soul to develop knowledge of its own actions and the truth of its path. You tell yourself, “I am communicating with this person from love. Whatever I am saying, whether it is right or wrong—I may not know—I am trying to see the human being in them, even if I am shouting, scolding, or angry. I hold that structure within me.” That is the first step. Since you ask mentally how to develop the state, it is the most direct action you can take. You ask how to communicate with someone from love.

Communicate that way. Set yourself that task every time. We will examine the development of the spiritual system separately. Suppose you try to direct love toward someone, but it does not flow. People constantly ask me: “Someone hurt me. Am I supposed to send them love?” I always explain that whatever a person does, whatever happens, it is part of the structure of cause and effect in the world and the Universe. You do not control it. It is not for you to decide whether it is good or bad—especially good or bad for whom? For you, or for someone else? First of all, that is not yours to decide. You must allow that, even if someone is truly doing something bad, they have their own reasons. I do not mean social or mental reasons, but spiritual reasons for their actions. Perhaps they do not have the strength to do otherwise. There is always an area of purity in the spiritual system of a human being, in human consciousness, even if it has fallen into darkness. First, you would have to recognize that you are speaking to a demon. Usually, when you mention darkness, people say, “Well, they are not that dark.”

Then it is easy to attune to the light. Even if you cannot do that and see only a demon in front of you—only a demon—with nobody else present—and such structures do exist today—you should always remember human love. Human love. It is not something you can seize and possess. Someone asks, “Why should I send out love?” But it is not yours. It is a bottomless, immeasurable, infinite amount of energy. If you are truly in a state of love, that energy cannot run out. It cannot run out. You can pour out infinite love; it cannot end. We are talking about love, not all the other attachments and qualities. Simply remember this quality of human light. You can detach from that particular person and remember human light. Even when speaking with a demon, you do not need to direct love at the demon at all. You need only remember that human light exists. Just remember it. Just remember it. In most cases, though, someone will say, “They probably are not a demon after all.

“There are probably points of light in them.” Then you can always attune to the light at the core of that person's spiritual being. Someone familiar with certain terms, or who sees different worlds, can attune to the human “I,” to the person's spiritual being as a whole, or to the connections between spiritual beings and between people and the world's spiritual hierarchy—the whole Universe and life, all the worlds. Attuning to that immediately provides a solution. Afterward, you act as you act socially. Someone might say you need to find the right words, but the point is not the words. You do not need to think about the right words; you need only remember this. Just remember this. Why do people mentally forget? Remembering is the key. It seems simple. Someone may want to see more through that action, to expand much more. But this is precisely why they forget: if they kept remembering, their system would continually burn away their personality and ego.

Continually. They would merge more and more with the unified energy of creativity and light—merge more and more with that unified energy—instead of remaining in their own personality—or their fifteenth subpersonality—and thinking once again about how the world is harming them. Thinking about it yet again. That is the whole paradox. Now consider the other side: how can this work automatically, all the time? Can you do it without these mental structures? Access to such structures itself depends on how developed your spiritual system is. If it is not developed to a certain stage, you will not even approach them or have the impulse to hear that they make sense. There would be no impulse to hear it. Some people say, “I think it is okay to harm people. That is normal.” Whatever you explain, they do not understand what you mean by approaching people from love. You cannot bring that into them.

A great many people will therefore never approach this question in their current incarnation. They will have to approach it later; eventually, they will have to. Everyone's life will contain opportunities and situations in which they can see it. The question is whether they will grasp the opportunity. If the spiritual being needs to develop in a certain way, that inevitably raises the question of how to develop the spiritual system as a whole. It takes a great deal of work. I talk about this here, on my meditation channel, in other blogs, and in my classes. It takes a great deal of work. You explain what you can, or what you know how to explain. You can read about it and learn from different books and through your own life. Fundamentally, daily work with attention properly directed toward the need to work and relate truthfully to people will develop your spiritual system in any case. In any case. For example, my separate meditation channel has a numbered series of more than fifty meditations.

Those meditations aim to expand your consciousness and perception. What does expanded perception make possible? At the right moment, while you are speaking with someone, it gives you the energy to perceive them from the truth of love, rather than only from a tiny current of your personality or a subpersonality interested in getting money, gratitude, something else from them, or asserting yourself. It lets you see yourself a little more broadly at the necessary moment, in some unknown way. You do not understand what is happening. People who undertake these broader practices, read books, study the literature, and direct real attention toward genuine human development start noticing strange things in their behavior. They have an idea of what a spiritually developed person is supposed to look like. As they practice, they find that this picture does not match what actually happens. They may—

They may start experiencing much worse things. When speaking with someone, alongside the impulse to manipulate them, they may suddenly see how bad that person is, for example, or how badly they themselves relate to the person. Instead of the good attitude they expect, they feel their own negative attitude, or an inability to interact with people at all: hopelessness, no understanding of what is happening, complete loss, suffering over what is taking place. This is probably one of the main difficulties on the path of discovering truth. A person has some knowledge or feeling about spiritual development. Where did they get it? From society, school, genetics, upbringing, a particular time and place, and social discussion. They expect a pleasant buzz or something positive, rather than seeing the world's hopelessness, an absence of causes and effects, or humanity and themselves lost, sinking into an abyss they cannot swim out of.

Of course, that brings a very particular state—a very particular state. And, of course, you have to fight it.