What Is Love? Understanding of the 3 Spiritual Levels of Love

What is Love? As much as we might like to, we can't force love to happen. But we can understand its many levels and connect more easily to its source.

Love Is a Many-Leveled Thing

Most of us have been confused about love all of our lives. In fact, we often begin the inner life as a search—conscious or unconscious—for a source of love that can't be taken away. We may have grown up feeling unloved or believing we had to perform heroic feats to deserve love. Our parents, the movies we see, our cultural and religious milieu give us ideas about love that go on influencing us long after we have forgotten their source. When we read spiritual books and encounter teachers, our understanding about love can get even more complicated, because depending on what we read or with whom we study, we get slightly different ideas on what love means in spiritual life.

Some teachers tell us that our essence is love; others say love is a passion, an emotion that leads to addiction and clinging. If we're on a devotional path like bhakti yoga, Sufism, or mystical Christianity, we're often taught that the way to enlightenment is to fall in love with God and let that love grow until it engulfs us and we become one with the Beloved. If we're on a more knowledge-based yogic path, we may be taught to look at the feelings of bliss and love that arise in practice, because, we're told, the spaciousness that is our goal is beyond such feelings.

We are soon left to wonder where the truth lies in all of this. When spiritual teachers use the word love, what kind of love are they talking about? Is Eros (romantic or sexual love) really different from agape, the so-called unconditional or spiritual love? Is devotional love the same as compassion, or love for humanity? Is love something we have to feel, or is it enough to offer kindness and direct positive thoughts toward ourselves and others? And how is it that some teachers tell us that love is both the path and the goal, while others seem to ignore the subject altogether?

In spiritual life alone, the word love is used in at least three ways, and our experience and understanding of love will differ according to which aspect of it we are thinking about. For the sake of discussion, let's refer to these three aspects of love as (1) Absolute Love, or the Great Love, which Ramakrishna, Rumi, and the teachers of the bhakti yoga and nondualism Tantra traditions tell us is ever- present, impersonal, and the very underpinning of the universe; (2) our individual experience of love, which is personal, and usually directed at something or someone; and (3) love as practice.

1. Absolute Love

Love with a capital L: That's the Great Love, love as the source of everything, love as radical unity. At this level, love is another name for Absolute Reality, Supreme Consciousness, God, Brahman, the Tao, the Source—that vast presence called the Heart. The yoga tradition often describes Absolute Reality as Satchidananda—meaning that it is pure beingness, present everywhere and in everything (sat), that it is innately conscious (chit), and that it is the essence of joy and love (ananda).

As ananda, the Great Love is woven into the fabric of the universe, which of course also puts it at the center of our own being. Most of us get glimpses of the Great Love at some time in our lives—perhaps in nature, or with an intimate partner, or in the moment of bonding with our children. We remember these experiences for years afterward, often for the rest of our lives. We remember the feeling of deep connectedness they give us, and the fact that even when the love we feel seems inspired by someone or something in particular, it has a profoundly impersonal, universal quality. And sometimes, the Great Love hits us unveiled, as it were, and changes our lives.

2. Individual Love

All of us, throughout our lives, constantly project onto other people and things the feelings of love that actually come from within. "It was the music," we say. It was the surf! It was my teacher's presence!" Yet the yogic view is that all of our experiences of human love are actually glimpses of the Great Love, God’s joy. It is only when love gets filtered through the prism of the human psyche that it begins to look specific and limited. It becomes veiled by our thoughts and feelings, and we start to think that love comes and goes, that we can feel it only for certain people, or that there's not enough love to go around. We can't help doing this.

Our senses, mind and ego are hardwired to give us the experience of separateness and distinction, set us up to think that love is outside us, that some people and places and things are lovable and others are not, and furthermore, that love has different flavors: mother love, romantic love, love of movies, love of nature, compassionate love, sexual love, love of the cozy feeling of being under the covers at the end of a long day.

In short, if the Great Love is naturally unifying, our individual, human experience of love is subject to change and loss, moods and tides, attachments and aversions. It doesn't matter who or what we love; at some point, the object of our love will disappear from our life or disappoint us or stop being lovable, simply because change is the nature of existence. So individual love is always touched with suffering, even when the love we feel is "spiritual."

3. Love as Spiritual Practice

The third kind of love, love as a practice is the medicine for the terrible discrepancy we sometimes feel between our sense of what love can be and the actuality of our ordinary experience of it. The practice of love is actions and attitudes that create an atmosphere of kindness, acceptance, and unity in us and in those around us. It is not only the basis of spiritual life, it is also the basis of civilization. We can't always feel gratitude, but we can remember to say thank you. We can't always like other people, but we can try to pay attention when they talk to us and help them out when they're in trouble. We may not feel good about ourselves all the time, but we can practice treating ourselves gently, slowing down and breathing when we want to rush, or talking back to our inner voices of self-criticism and judgment. When it comes to daily life, feeling love may actually be less important than acting loving.

This isn't meant as an argument for pasted-on smiles, or for the common game of hiding anger and judgment behind a mask of false sweetness. The practice of loving is never about presenting a false front. Instead, it's an active answer to one of life's greatest questions: How can I, in spite of what I may be feeling at a particular moment, offer my best to myself and other people.

If we pose this question to ourselves, how would we act if we were feeling love? We will eventually discover the practice that helps melt our frozen heart, so the love that always hides behind our emotional barricades can show its face.

How to Connect to the Source of Love

We may consider two practices that can help reconnect to the source of love. Both cultivate the feeling of unity. One is based on the insight to bypass the ego, which cuts us off from love.

The second is, the Great Love, the love that is the source of everything, is present in everything, peeking out during every moment in which we feel a spark of tenderness, appreciation, or affection.