This is a YouTube video titled "Selfless Love & Romantic Transcendence" containing a recorded discussion from February 8, 2020, exploring the nature of romantic and selfless love from a spiritual perspective. The conversation features Eckhart Tolle responding to a question about whether selfless love for a specific person can exist in a surrendered state of consciousness, delving into themes of attachment, the ego, and the transcendent elements necessary for deep relationships.
It's a question about personal and romantic love. If one is in the surrendered state of consciousness. I've heard teachings from my own experience and from just reading. With romantic love, there can be, I need you, behavioral expectations. And then there's like the selfless kind of love where there are no behavioral expectations and you still love the person. My question is, if you're in the surrendered state of consciousness, if you're completely surrendered to what is, do you still have that kind of selfless love for a specific person romantically, or does that kind of dissolve? Or is it just only the universal. Which is wonderful. The universal love. It's amazing. Wow. You know? But can you also have that specific kind of love for someone?
Thank you. So the question you're basically asking, would you then love everybody equally so there would not be one person singled out as special as the course in Miracles calls it, Special relationship, which, of course, in Miracles says, of course, it's of the ego to single one out as special. Now, if you single one out as special, and you. What you see in the other is the form only, and you're attached to the form, which doesn't just mean the physical form, of course. That's an important part of it because it's part of the sexuality and all that which is part of the attraction. But it also includes the psychological form of the other. Who you think that person is, their psychological makeup, how they behave and speak and act. That is also form. That's a psychological form. And there can be strong attachment to those aspects. Both the physical come together with the psychological, which includes also emotions. There's an emotional link also there. And those coming, when they all come together, you fall in love. And aptly, it's called fall because it's a fall in consciousness. But that's okay. If that's what you experience and that life wants you to experience that. It's part of your learning that fall in consciousness. Now, it's not immediately, of course, experienced as a fall. It's experienced as a high. And only afterwards do you realize, oh, that was a fall. And afterwards can be after a year. It can be after three months. It can be after the honeymoon. It can be soon after. You move in together, and then the suffering starts. What before was the love now becomes the suffering. And then for a while, it can happen that you fluctuate for the next year or two or three between still feeling the love and the suffering. And then usually it comes to an end after a while or you compromise and for some other reason stay together. So that's the. Now, if you are able to feel in the other, well, first of all in yourself that which is beyond form, the essence, the stillness, the presence, whatever we want to call it. And by sensing it in yourself and being it, then you recognize it in another. And that recognition that in the space of stillness is true love, which doesn't need the other, because the other only reflects to you who you are. But even there, it can happen that the form of the other, because you are not just the formless temporarily, you are also the form temporarily, you are either a man or woman temporarily, you have this body and, and this form, this man or this woman and this body. And the emotional field may find a certain resonance with on different levels, be it sexual, emotional, psychological levels, a certain resonance with the other form. And that resonance, that is what in the unenlightened romantic love makes up the entire relationship. But now, when you know who you are in your essence, all those factors are still there, but they do not make up the entire relationship. Beyond the resonance between the sexual or emotional or physical resonance, there is a deeper level presentation. So you can go through the motions of romantic love with the transcendent level also present in yourself and recognizing it in the other. So romantic love may, after a while, of course, for the relationship to be truly deep in any relationship, some transcendent element has to be there, because it's not going to last. Otherwise. It doesn't mean necessarily that people need to be totally awake already, totally awake, knowing who they are. But some element of the formless must be there eventually in the relationship for the relationship to survive and be a true relationship. Otherwise, all you have left in the relationship is your judgments about the other and physical attraction and just mind emotional. And that ultimately is not enough. It's not enough. The added element, the transcendent element, needs to be there. And if the transcendent is there, you can be quite content even without the romantic relationship. You no longer say, I need that. When it's there, it's beautiful, but you don't need that. Yeah. Pull. So the mind, it is often in relationships, the mind prevents the deeper level, the transcendent level, from arising in the relationship. So the mind destroys the relationship. Identification with the story in the mind, which is about yourself and the other, obscures love. It might even say love. There is no such thing as love. I read in a novel last year by a British writer, it does, Mac Hewen. He's a well known contemporary writer, Ian McEwen, and he wrote this book about. It's Called On Chassil beach. It's about two young people falling in love in England in the 50s. And these two young people, they feel the pull towards each other and they begin to fall in love. But sexually they are completely repressed and very fearful about. They haven't. It's in the 50s, so the 6 revolution hasn't happened yet about sex. So they're both extremely fearful about sex. And then they get married and their first night they stay in a bed and breakfast near Chesil beach in the south of England. And they're trying to have sex for the first time. And it's a disaster, Dreadful, dreadful disaster. And she is so shocked, she runs out of the room to the beach. Oh, they don't realize. It's actually quite funny. I don't explain what disaster. You can probably imagine it. So she runs out and the next day. So they don't see each other that night. That's their honeymoon, their wedding night. And the next day he tries. He goes to the beach, Jasil Beach. And she sees. She's walking on the beach. They start talking to each other. And both feel still. The pull is still there. But both their minds are bringing up stories. Why it's no longer why it's not possible. It's dreadful. They are projecting things onto the other bot she's. And so the pull is there. But they both create stories in their minds that cuts them off from the other and they separate. And then they spend the rest of their lives doing other things. The rest of their lives in the novel is compressed to five or six pages. And that shows how. How destructive the mind can be of true relationship, how the mind imposes interpretations on the other. Total fictions. But there's so much, as Don Miguel Ruiz would say, there's so much faith in these fictions that it's an impossibility for the human being to see what the mind is creating is a fictitious judgment that creates a barrier between yourself and the other. This writer is not spiritual at all. He just observed human nature and he presented it. And that is the ultimate lesson, is spiritual.
