The mind will never Experience love

January 3rd, 2004

In the last few days I was driving somewhere with my brother.

For some reason it suddenly came to my attention that "the mind can not experience love". I pondered on this thought and explored it — I concluded that this was in fact how it is. Here is the realisation as it presented itself to me.

The mind can not directly experience love. The mind can have an understanding of love. It can have thoughts about love. It can even recognise love based on reasoning, recognition etc. But it can not truly KNOW love - as in fully experience the state of Being referred to as Love — it can not directly experience love it can only watch the effects of Love, if it is still around to do so.

I would go so far as to say that so long as the mind is at the forefront of ones experience or perspective, then the experience of Love will remain distant and intangible. In fact, I suspect that for many people who spend a lot of time in the mind and are very identified with the mind the tangible experience of love will always be somewhat of an enigma. It will be something that they can think about, seek out, grasp for, try to create etc, but never (or seldom) experience directly.

For such a person the mind may actually invent a sense of love or invent what it "thinks" love is and what love feels like. Such a person could go through life with very little experience of REAL LOVE and never even recognise that this is in fact how they are. Such a person may even think they are "loving".

The heart, on the other hand, has a great capacity to experience love. The degree, however, to which one will experience Love through the heart will coincide with the degree to which one is willing to surrender the mind (attachment to the mind) and surrender one's limited sense of self-identity for a greater experience of God-Identity. For those that don't know what I mean by that, I guess the key then is to continue exploring the nature of Love, Life, and Living until such time as you do understand.

With love and blessings,

Jonathan