The Love and How to Reach It
by Robert (Ibrahim) Jaffe

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Love lives within us and this is where we must look. The question is,
how do we find it, and where can it lead us?

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Many people today are suffering because deep in their heart they are missing love, connectedness and the peace that comes from love. Most people seek to find this missing love through establishing a relationship or, in some cases, by learning to love oneself through therapy. Personally, I have found that there is another way to find love that works in all cases and has worked for me. The answer came when I learned what love was, how to give this love and how to create an almost unending source of love within myself.

Many people think that love happens because we are lucky or attractive. That it is only the luck of the draw that brings us love. This is actually the furthest thing from the truth. Love has to do with the state of our hearts and how open we are to receiving and giving love ourselves. It also has to do with our understanding of what love is. For if we are to receive the real love, then we must know and experience this love within us. The more we experience this love within us, the more we will see it reflected in the world around us.

I have found that there is a source of love available to us at all times and in all places if we open our hearts to receive it. I have learned to do this each day of my life and since then my life has become more beautiful and fulfilling than I could have ever dreamed. To find this love and experience it is the fulfillment of every heart longing to know itself. We can learn how to reach and live within this love every moment of our lives.

When people seek love where the source of the love is either from one's personality or from the self of another, it is often not possible to receive the real love. This is because the selves of most people have not learned how to give the real love. Many times we are busy with or attached to other things when we need to be given the most love. This then leads to feelings of frustration, sadness and disappointment. Many marriages suffer because the partners cannot find love between them and do not know how to truly fulfill each other and give to each other in the way that each needs. If people can learn how to give and receive the real love, then hearts will be healed and life will become a garden of happiness. Unfortunately, many people live without this love and feel sadness and disconnection deep within in their beings.

Many people cover this missing love with a multitude of habits that give some of the love, but never reach to give the complete helping of love. For many it is like having a snack but never really having a meal. You get by but you are always hungry. In time you become sick because the snacks are never the substitute for the real food. Eating becomes one of the most obvious ways of finding love and many overweight people are so because they are seeking love through food, drink or other behaviors. The statement that chocolate is the closest thing to love is true for many people.

Many people turn to sex for love and hope that through having deep sexual experiences or multiple sexual partners they will find love. Most know that this does not work either. For the true love is developed by going deep with a person and learning how to hold a person and care for them in a deep and meaningful way.

Some seek to find love through drugs. Some drugs such as alcohol cover our pain but in the end lead only to loss and physical illness. Other drugs such as narcotics create an illusionary reality where the pain doesn't exist as long as one is on the drug. However these drugs in the end lead to great loss, dependency and a withdrawal of all that is important.

Finally, many seek the mind-altering drugs that can be used to expand awareness. The problem with these drugs is they do not hold the experiences of expansion and love and lead to illusions about God and one's inner state. These false illusions about love often lead to many problems that ultimately lead one away from love, such as addiction, illusions about ones state of knowing and realization, and relationships that develop because of drugs but are not truly right for the person.

For these reasons I do not advocate drugs to find love. There are better ways to find love that are safer, gentler and more lasting. Everything worth having has got to be found through walking the path and having the experiences that lead to love. Love is the greatest experience we can have. Love is our inner reality.

Love lives within us and this is where we must look. The question is: how do we find this love and where can it lead us? Personally, I have seen love lead people to healing, connectedness, peace, beauty, relationship, and for some who are deeply committed, to the Realization and Truth of God. For some it has led to the answer we all have wondered about: Who are we?

As long as we seek to have our needs for love fulfilled by an outside source of love that is unable to truly give love, we will always feel separation, disappointment, and the hunger of the heart for the real food.

I have found that when I seek love from my wife, friends, or even children, I am never completely fulfilled. This led me on a different journey. I realized that to have love was to feel full, complete and happy. I found that I was peaceful inside and not striving for anything. The love itself was enough for me. Over and over again, I had been let down by seeking love from others. Over and over I had attended courses on loving myself. Each time, I could not sustain the love or fell down searching for it. One day I realized that I must find a source for the love that would not fail. That was always there.

I spoke to some who said that through meditation I would find the peace and love I was seeking. So I began to meditate. I meditated for 15 years where I reached states of emptiness that were heralded as the no-mindedness of meditation. Here one is empty of mind and there is a certain peace that comes, but for me it did not fill my heart. I still felt somewhere deep down that I had missed something. I began to travel the world asking the question: how do we find love? How can we reach the knowledge of love so that we can feel full and happy most of the time? One day I began reading some of the ancient Sufi texts. They heralded themselves as the path of love. Through this ancient path one could reach to know the real love. They said that love in its deepest state was communion with The Divine One. With God, if you will. They spoke about the poetry of Rumi as an expression of this great love.

It was difficult for me to understand this love because I did not have a good feeling of what God was. How could one be in love with the divine? What was this divine melody that they spoke of? I had often been hurt by the teachings about God and the Divine that I had received in my religious training. Yet, after feeling the quality of the love that the Sufis spoke about, I felt that it was important for me to at least taste the path of love.

As I began my studies, I found that there were different kinds of love. There was the sexual love that we learned in school; this was considered the most distant type of love and in the end the least meaningful. There was the deeper love that we find when we meet someone who stirs our hearts in a deep and meaningful way.

There was the love of the soul; the transcendent experience that people speak about as soul mates. Their other half. A love so strong that often people could not be without each other. Finally, there was the deepest love of all. The love of the Beloved for the Divine. Where the lover becomes passionately inflamed by the love of the One and begins to merge and disappear into this union of love. This is the completion of love and the return to the source of all love that is the hidden treasure that lives within our hearts.

I learned that through this love one would be given the experience of all the other types of love. I learned that the Divine Love was the source of all love and the origin of all experiences of love. That through learning to receive and give the Divine Love, we could experience all the love that was possible for us. This was exciting to me.

Here was the secret I was seeking. Through remembering and experiencing the love of the Most High, I could find and know all the love I was missing. By learning to surrender to the love of the Divine One, I would be given the other types of love that I sought.

I liked this idea and began walking the path. The path that would lead me to the heart of God. Not the concept of God, nor an idea or illusion about God but the transcendent experience of the Deeper Heart of God, which was love.

I was taught that the time to reach God was in the night. It was said that during the last third of the night, when it is most quiet, was the time that God came to his lovers. That if we asked, God would open our hearts to know, taste and experience the Deep love that is God. Before I knew it, I was flying along. Each day my love became stronger. Each day more opened for me, and finally I began to know the real love and unending beauty of the Divine.

Interestingly, the more I traveled in this deeper love, the more it was reflected to me in my life. My wife loved me more, my children honored me in a way that I had only hoped they might. Many people came to me for guidance on love and began to seek to understand how the love of the Most High could change their lives from one of pain and dissatisfaction to one of peace, beauty and yes, love. Abundance, health and well-being can come through this love. Perhaps most importantly, I found the beauty of my own heart and the divine treasure that lived within it waiting to be discovered.

Today, I want to share these teachings with you. To teach you how to reach the Divine One that is waiting to give you all the love in the world. The love that is waiting to make your relationships work. Waiting to help your hearts be happy. Waiting to teach you how to fly in your soul so that you can know the truth. Through this love, we can become healthy and radiant and live a life that is filled with all the goodness and love that we can carry.

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Join Richard (Ibrahim) Jaffe in a free evening, "A Taste of the Love," Thursday, May 16, 7:30-9:30 pm, at the Renaissance Chicago Northshore Hotel. To register, call (800) 238-3060 or visit www.jaffeinstitute.org to register.

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