Separated From The One You Love - The Greatest Hell One Can Know

[Vladimir]

During a 3 hour contemplation and meditation session yesterday evening, I started understanding that illusion goes far deeper than I expected and it made me question just how distorted my idea of reality really is. The insight that our whole understanding of reality, who we are and everything we know is all in our heads made me question what other beliefs I'm clinging on to. We build our self image based on the past experiences, memories and knowledge which have been embedded into our long term memory with enough rehearsal. But what if we started practicing and thinking new thoughts and broadening our understanding of reality, learning new theories, trying out things that we haven't before, learning and experimenting. If we constantly remind ourselves about who we are and what reality is like on a sub-conscious level, wouldn't it be useful to become aware of those programs running in the background so that we can start changing them? 

One very powerful example is how our culture and most people today believe that true love can be found "out there", this idea is something people are reminded of constantly - in the movies, pop culture, songs ("baby I love you....I can't live without you..") dating scene, people get married -- all of this is a constant stream of programming information which embeds itself into people long term memory and becomes a deeply held belief -- "true love exists in the external world, I only need to get lucky enough to meet her." I'm starting to realize, I'm still holding this belief on some level, despite meditating for 2 hours everyday for the past 3 months and doing full time consciousness work of contemplating, self-reflecting, watching Leo's videos, unplugging myself from toxic information sources, reading books etc. How can you not hold this belief so strongly, if the most powerful source of information, especially innocent love songs and movies like "The Notebook" constantly program this into our sub-conscious for many years. I think this love message is actually creating a lot of suffering because people start pursuing love by seeking it in the outside world, while neglecting cultivating true love within themselves, which is where it's really found. 

Of course you can't market true, internal love for ourselves, it's intangible, you can't show it off to people, you can't post it on Facebook for everyone to be jealous of, like, comment and admire. So people, spend money, time, effort on trying to make themselves "fit" into the dating scene which promises increasing your chances of finding that true love some day. Many people have lowered their standards of love so much, out of desperation, that they're willing to accept much less than true love these days, which could fall as far as "like" or even "likes about him/her" outweighing "dislikes" about him/her - "We get the kind of love that we think we deserve" ~From the Perks of Being a Wall Flower, based not on the true feelings of love, but rather certain personality traits and positive feedback which would fall under our accepted "like" criteria, eg: makes me laugh, makes me comfortable, confident, intellectual conversations, understanding each other etc. 

With that said, I understand this is not as black and white as described here, no doubt people do fall truly in love, though it still falls far from the fairy tale story portrayed by the Hollywood. This can happen to people who already love themselves, though I'm not sure that even these people that find true love in a traditional sense of falling in love with each other, have cultivated true love for themselves, otherwise Romeo and Juliet wouldn't kill each other for losing one another. Then again, what would I know about love? I have never fallen in love in my life and I'm 34, I'm only starting to cultivate love for myself and beginning to feel what I've been missing out on my entire life. Joseph Campbell says: "the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love." Though is he referring to the one you love as yourself or another person?