The Love Trap – Essay No. 11
Audio version coming soon.
What is love, really? And is love truly what we believe it is?
My understanding of love has changed deeply throughout life. As I have changed, gained new insights, and become more conscious, my perception of love has changed with me. What once felt obvious has gradually opened into new layers, and much of what I once believed to be love has revealed itself to be something far more complex.
For a long time, love was mainly a feeling to me. Something you feel for someone. And of course it can be that, but love does not stop there. Love can be a feeling, but it can also be a way of being, a state, a presence. And that is something entirely different from the kind of love most people usually talk about.
Love has many expressions and many faces, and what we perceive as love often depends on what we ourselves have experienced and learned. If you grow up in an environment where love is conditional, where it is given and withdrawn depending on behavior, performance, or adaptation, then that becomes the version of love you learn to recognize and interpret as love.
Many people move through life with fairly closed hearts, not because they want to live that way, but because life has shaped them into it. Experiences of betrayal, rejection, grief, or lack of safety create layers around the heart, and those layers make it harder to feel the deeper form of love. At the same time, a person may feel highly emotional, sensitive, or intense, while still carrying a heart that is, in practice, guarded and partially closed.
What makes it even more complicated is that most people rarely experience truly unconditional love, whether in childhood, in relationships, or in society as a whole. Love is often used as a form of power, consciously or unconsciously. Not necessarily because people want to control one another, but because this is how we ourselves have learned to function. Love becomes something granted under certain conditions. You receive love if you behave correctly, meet expectations, fulfill needs, or become who someone else wants you to be.
And the moment that happens, imbalance enters.
Because love in its purest form has nothing to do with power, control, or exchange. It asks for nothing in return. It places no conditions on anyone and is not dependent on performance. Which means that much of what we call love is, in reality, something else, even if we may not have a better word for it.
We have also merged many different experiences into the same concept. Being in love, feeling infatuated, loving someone, all of these involve emotions, often very strong emotions, but they are not always expressions of love in its purest form. Very often they are colored by longing, projection, attachment, need, or fear of loss. That does not make them wrong. It simply means that love contains more layers than we usually acknowledge.
When love is at its purest, it is uncomplicated. It does not try to change, shape, or control another person. It does not demand anything from the receiver. It simply is. And the more a person opens their own heart, the more accessible that form of love becomes.
And at some point, the direction begins to change.
Instead of love only being directed toward certain people, relationships, or objects, it starts to exist more as an underlying tone within life itself. Not selective, not dependent on closeness or identification, but present regardless.
Most people are highly selective with their love. We love what is ours, what we recognize, what we identify with. A beloved pet can awaken deep love, while another animal evokes nothing at all. We open our hearts toward some and close them toward others. That is human. But that is also where the limitation exists.
The more the heart opens, the less selective love becomes. It no longer depends entirely on who stands in front of you, but begins to arise as a state in itself. Love for people, for nature, for life, for existence itself, without anything first needing to be earned or defined.
And somewhere within that, the way we see the world also begins to change.
We are used to living in polarity, in the idea of opposites. Love and hate. Good and evil. Right and wrong. But perhaps hate is not truly the opposite of love, but rather what emerges when love has been blocked, distorted, or shut down. Beneath all the layers, the same core still remains.
It may sound abstract, but it often becomes more tangible the more deeply one turns inward.
Because perhaps the real work is not about creating love, but uncovering it. The more willing you are to meet yourself honestly, the more love begins to reflect outward as well. And somewhere there, the separation between self and others begins to soften.
The sharp division between “us” and “them” slowly dissolves. The duality that has shaped so much of how we perceive life begins to loosen, and what remains is a sense of connection where love is no longer something exchanged, but something that has always been present underneath everything else.
And perhaps this is where the love trap becomes most visible.
We have been taught to search for love outside ourselves, to obtain it, keep it, secure it. But as long as love is perceived as something external, something to earn or attain, it will always remain conditional.
Every human being carries love within them. I almost see it as a light, or as a sun, always present beneath the surface. But for many people, that light has become hidden. Not because it disappeared, but because it became covered over.
People walk around carrying layers of soot over that inner light, and the more pain, betrayal, heartbreak, or emotional shutdown a person has experienced, the thicker those layers become. Eventually the light can barely shine through anymore, not for others, and not even for oneself.
And when that happens, people begin behaving in ways that do not feel loving. They hurt others. They become cold, hardened, distant, or emotionally closed off. But that does not mean love is absent. It only means it can no longer reach the surface.
It is like the sun behind heavy clouds. The sun remains even when the sky is completely covered.
Every person is born in love. That is our original nature. Then life begins, and life shapes us. Relationships, experiences, environments, disappointments, all of it creates layers over that inner light, and those layers determine how much of love is actually allowed to shine through.
Perhaps that is also why the world looks the way it does.
Many people struggle to understand how love could possibly be the foundation of existence when the world contains so much violence, cruelty, and darkness. But perhaps darkness is not the absence of love, but the result of love being blocked for so long that people lose contact with it entirely.
Which also means that love is not something some people possess while others lack. Everyone carries it within them, but very few fully experience it, and even fewer live from it as a state of being.
Ram Dass described this beautifully when he spoke about moments in which he could feel love toward everything. Not directed toward a particular person or object, but existing as a constant state of being. And that is something very different from what we usually mean when we talk about love.
Because most often, we think love means feeling something for someone. Love for a child, a partner, an animal, nature. And that is also love, but it is the first layer of love. It is directed and selective. The deeper form of love is not dependent on who stands before you. It is something you exist within.
And when you begin approaching that form of love, the way you experience life starts to change.
The need to judge others weakens. Envy, comparison, and resentment begin losing their grip. Not because you are trying to become a better person, but because those states cannot fully coexist with love.
A person who genuinely lives in love has no need to diminish others or constantly assert themselves. There is a natural generosity there, and an almost effortless desire for others to thrive as well.
And that does not mean becoming passive or indifferent. If anything, it means no longer wasting energy on what creates nothing. The endless judging, comparing, and criticizing slowly falls away on its own.
The more judgmental, critical, and selective someone is in their love, the more it often points toward layers still covering the inner core.
And because of that, love becomes an inward journey.
Not primarily toward other people, but inward toward oneself. Because as long as you are harsh, judgmental, or unloving toward yourself, that relationship will inevitably reflect outward. The relationship you have with yourself shapes every other relationship in your life.
That is why people speak about opening the heart. Not merely as an idea, but as an actual experience. For many, the area around the heart feels guarded, tense, and closed. But the more willing you are to remain there, to feel what is present without escaping it, the more the heart slowly begins to open.
And when it opens, not only your emotions change, but your entire way of being in the world.
The deeper form of love is not dramatic. It is not intense in the way we often associate with love. In fact, it is remarkably still.
Warm. Soft. Present.
More like a state of peace and harmony than emotional turbulence.
And perhaps that is why so many people struggle to recognize it, because we have become so conditioned to associate love with intensity, longing, and emotional drama. But this form of love does not come and go in the same way. It remains when resistance falls away.
And from that state, love naturally begins expressing itself.
In actions. In the way we meet people. In how we listen, speak, and see one another. One begins acting from love, not in order to receive something in return, not for validation or approval, but because it becomes the most natural way to exist.
There is no transaction in it. No hidden agenda. Only a movement of love itself.
And perhaps it is only when we begin to understand the difference between trying to receive love and becoming love that the love trap finally begins to loosen.