Love is our Being, Being is existence, so love is existence. Your essential state is love. What distorts that is that we look outside for love not realising that the love we experience outside is a reflection of the love we have for our deepest self. When I say deepest self, I don’t mean your ego, which is not yourself. The ego is a socially-induced hallucination. I mean your soul, which is beyond your self-image. It is your true Self. Your true Self is love.

The first secret to attract a profound lover or a soul mate into your life is to fully embrace, love and accept yourself just as you are. Loving you, with all your flaws and insecurities, turns you into a powerful manifesting magnet. By diving deep into self-acceptance you will find that it is much easier for everyone else to feel at peace when hanging out with you. When you are okay with all your parts, it is easy to open the door to intimacy with anyone.

Deepak Chopra

I must admit that I’ve been saying this myself for twenty years but never as beautifully as Deepak says it. ‘The ego is a socially-induced hallucination’. These are beautiful words. I describe this ego as a movie that we are busy producing, starring in and watching. It comes from our conditioning as we grow up and so I love his words ‘socially-induced hallucination.’
      ‘Love is our Being, Being is existence, so love is existence.’ It means this flower is love, this candle is love, even this chair is love, even I am love! We are all love! Everything is love. This is so clear and beautiful. I can also add that the normal definition of love that you get in pop songs and romances is a chronic disease that almost everybody suffers from. Avoid this type of ‘I love you’ because this is duality.

Everybody has some problem with relationships and the problem gets stronger the more intimate a relationship is. I’ve been giving advice about relationships and love for twenty years but now I understand that no advice helps, because relationships are driven by very, very powerful conditioning.
          We start off as a little child with our parents, before we even know the word relationship, and for many years we are brought up in the aura of our parents’ relationship. Day by day, without anybody needing to talk about it, we are absolutely conditioned by this love affair.
       When it comes to birthdays, Daddy buys presents for Mummy, maybe some flowers, whispering ‘I love you,’ and so on. So children grow up conditioned with the idea that love comes from the other. I would guess that very few people ever come across the idea that love in fact is our very existence.

Love is something that somebody gives me and when they give it I feel good. When they give it to somebody else I definitely don’t feel good. So everybody is looking for that perfect partner who will give them love. Even if the parents do not have a very loving relationship the children will still want to create something along the same lines, but better.
          As we grow up, of course, the hormones act as a strong magnet. If you are at the level of the hormones no advice is going to help, and, as I can observe, it doesn’t make much difference how old you are. So it’s going to be a strong issue for almost everyone, as probably the most difficult thing to deal with in your daily life is relationships with other people.
         When you are alone you only have to deal with your own stuff, but as soon as you have closer contact with another human being then it gets a bit more complicated. It can be anything from an acquaintance or a work colleague to something more intense and intimate like actually living together.

More intimate relationships between two people often lead us into a lot of suffering because the relationships usually serve the ego of each partner instead of being a shared, open, energetic connection.
          Very often, of course, the relationship starts full of hope. We have had other partnerships and we think we’ve learnt our lessons and now something new is happening. It’s a new beginning with a new partner and it’s very exciting and wonderful … and so on.
         But little by little, it’s very common to find that after some months, maybe after one or two years, things are less easy. This is usually because each person is attached to their particular story. When you live alone you’re dealing with only one story – your own  – and if you’re a spiritual person you’re trying to become clear of this one story. As soon as you enter an intimate relationship with another human being you’re also dealing with that person’s story.
         So now there are two stories and if this intimate connection continues you also have a third story, which is the story of us. There are usually all kinds of conditioned, repeating structures operating inside these three stories. It can even be that you’ve chosen each other because you reflect certain of each other’s structures, even if you’re not conscious of that.

After some months or some years, very often this weight of stories – your story, my story and our story– starts to take a toll and more and more time is spent on sorting out misunderstandings, different opinions, different beliefs, different desires. Very often these relationships break down and people may just split and try new partnerships or they may persevere, getting some counselling help to deal with all the issues that come up between them.
          If we are starting out on a spiritual journey and we haven’t had relationship experience then it can be very good to get caught up in some sort of sticky story. In this kind of situation you could learn a lot about yourself because one of the great things about partnership is that you end up as very strong mirrors for each other. Assuming you have a gutsy and energetic connection I’m sure your partner would be very happy to tell you all the things they find they have observed about you!
        In that way relationships can be very useful because they can really help you to know yourself. If we haven’t had much experience of living intimately with another person then we’ve also not really lived intimately with ourselves. What we can see by taking space from relationship and coming deeply to our Being is that actually we’re all one. There aren’t really two. There’s not really you and me. We’re all One.