Tag: love

One Apple A Day #468 – Choose love

About ten years or so ago, I was sitting in my grandma’s kitchen with her and her brother. They were sharing funny stories of their childhood when my great-uncle, out of the blue said “Fabio, you know what the problem is nowadays? There is not enough love in the world“.
I still remember vividly that moment.

A few years after, my girlfriend took me to a talk by Sujith Ravindran. At that time I didn’t know him, and I didn’t know that it would be the beginning of a life-changing friendship. I don’t remember all the details of that evening, but one sentence remained with me since that day.
“Fear is the opposite of love.”

This morning I picked a Be The Change card saying “Power + Love.”
I immediately recalled those two moments.

When I read the news, I realized that too often power is driven by fear and as such, it is used to divide us.

And I’m honest, sometimes I feel there is nothing, as an individual, that I can do.

I feel powerless.

But this card, this morning, reminded me that maybe, there is one thing I can do.

I can choose love.

“Love is the experience of that oneness of being” — Rupert Spira

One Apple A Day #456 – Love, and do whatever you want!

Who do I serve?
Last week, during a compelling conversation with a dear friend, this question came up for me.
This is not an easy question yet I feel it is a fundamental one.
We all live and work in this tension between our inner purpose, needs, desire and the purpose, needs and desire of the world outside.

At the beginning I thought that I should be able to sacrifice my own needs for a greater good; to move from ego to eco. But then I realised that the answer was coming from my desire of feeling one of the good ones.

My second stage of this self-inquiry brought me back to the self. To serve others, I must serve myself first. So, through serving myself, I will be able to serve others.

Still, I wasn’t satisfied. Why does it have to be either/or? What if it’s an and? What if I can serve both myself and others at the same time? But how is this possible? What does it mean when my purpose and the purpose of others is different? Should I dedicate myself only to causes that are aligned with my own needs and desires?

Something was missing so I kept exploring, and then I read this sentence from Rupert Spira: “If we understand and feel that every animal, person and object is our very own self, we cannot go wrong.”

If I remove the boundaries between myself and others, that tension disappear. It’s no more about helping one or another. It’s about serving a higher vision. One the goes beyond this tension.

But how?

Rupert Spira wrote that “love is the experience of that oneness of being.”

Then the way forward is through love. Or, as Saint Augustine said:

‘Love, and do whatever you want!’

One Apple A Day #449 – One love

“Our longing for love comes from the intuition of our shared being.” — Rupert Spira

What is the shape of love?
What is its form?
What objective qualities does it have?

Because, if we want to hold or own something, then that thing must have a form in time or space, some objective or material qualities.
Only when something can be objectively defined, we can perceive it as a separate entity. Something separated from ourselves and everything else. Something that we can observe.

But love?
Love has no shape.
Love is transparent and non-objective.
Love is formless.

How can you observe it? How can recognise it as different from something else? How can you say what it yours and what not?

So, if love is formless, then it can’t be divided into pieces.
The love I experience is the same love you experience.
Our experiences are different, but love is the same.
This is why our mind can not grasp it.
Our thoughts are objective and limited.
Words are limited.
So, we ask artists to describe something that cannot be explained but only felt.

We all are immersed in the same love.
But sometimes, layers or resistances and obstacles keep us away from feeling it.
The quest for love is not a journey to something.
It’s not about doing something.
It’s about sinking in our own being.

“The experience of love is precisely that experience, the experience of our shared being.” — Rupert Spira