"Love" as a Product of Deprivation

When you chose to love another, it was because you believed love was lacking and it was from this absence that you decided another must be found to achieve fulfillment. You were taught that egocentric "happiness" was the result of joining with another in "love."

In this world, lack and subsequent need, brings people together. We decide to love in order to fill an absence and it is the belief in an absence of love that motivates a desire to locate the “lover.”

Filling this lack would not be so bad if it had the potential to remain fulfilled, but the fact that we often move from relationship to relationship demonstrates how this lack is never truly fulfilled.

Even when “love” is found, the experience of lack, and the corresponding need for fulfillment eventually returns. It’s as if this experience of lack can never be fulfilled and the need to fill the emptiness continues on indefinitely.

Seek to fulfill a lack and the lack is reinforced. Seek an fulfillment from increase and lack disappears and is no longer the reason for your search. Seek love from fulfillment and love must be found because it's already there.

The love you find from lack and deprivation is nothing more than a relative rendition of "love," identifiable to no one else but you and you will expect the chosen 'lover' conform to your personal criteria of “love.”

Many will claim that, until you can effectively love yourself, you can never love another. But how can you love a ‘self’ (“you”) that is judged as lacking (love)? Isn’t it the feeling of lack that drives you to seek to join with another in order to fill the void? Would you seek love if it was not lacking 'within' you?

The ego-self will never allow you to love yourself until the lack is filled and to fill the lack you must seek out another. Yet, seeking to love another from a deprived 'self' only increases deprivation. 

Once you find the one to fill your lack, you soon realize that they cannot fulfill your lack unless the love that is given specifically meets your relative, egocentric criteria of love. Although many may come close to your relative criteria of love, they MUST always fall short, only to leave you once again lacking and seeking to have that void filled.

To seek love from lack, only defines more lack. You are never lacking love, however, you are always lacking love based on your conditions and as long as those conditions are the motivation for seeking love, lack will eventually return, because lack is the criteria that drove your search in the first place.

In realizing that you do not lack love, no void need be filled. This removes a heavy burden from the one you have chosen and they, in turn, place no ‘burden of love’ upon you. Love does not have reason to sacrifice unless it is a love born of lack.

A love born of lack demonstrates that you have no idea how to love yourself or another and, therefore, you must become open to the possibility of learning with and through another. Fully engage with another to learn what love is and not to fulfill some predetermined conditions relative to your egocentric past conditioning.

Loving one ‘self’ is in direct proportion to the love you give another and the love you give another can never be from lack. Deeply engaging the world by joining with another in that engagement enriches your experience of a world.

A Deep Spirit engagement with the world does not evolve from lack, but from an increase that has NO limits.

So how do you know if your love comes from lack or from increase?

If the lover leaves you and you feel lack then, make no mistake, lack defined your love and, therefore, was NOT love at all. If the loved ones passing leaves you feeling empty, then your love was based on what you lacked.

This is a fiction in which love becomes more a burden than an increase. I have met grieving spouses who, after years of domestic hell, felt deeply grieved over the lovers passing, even though in life they engaged in chronic, never-ending conflict. This grief is nothing more than an acute re-identification with the lack that was never fulfilled, even after years of “love.” The grieving partner tends to glorify the deceased “loved one,” as if they actually had fulfilled the emptiness all those years.

This is called “anesthetic love,” in which we pretend that the relationship form (marriage) was enriched by the content (love) when, in fact, only the form held it together. Form without content is a lifeless shell of lack and deprivation.

This is difficult for an ego-self to comprehend, primarily because an ego-self is constructed entirely from lack and deprivation, causing an endless seeking for fulfillment through what the world offers. Many use lack as a tool, believing that if they withhold love from another, the other will experience lack and seek to reform in order to fulfill their lack and alleviate the deprivation. Yet, what is withheld was never there in the first place and lovers play out the fiction of love by using lack against one another.

Deep Spirit correspondence experiences NO lack or deprivation and only enriches those who join from that depth. To come to another from Deep Spirit means to come from an experience of increase, as opposed to lack. From depth, individuals seek unity through love and even the ego cannot interfere on what it cannot interpret due to its depth, because the ego is a surface creature.

Artwork by Katherine Blackwell - "Surrendering to the Inevitable and Inescapable"