Love is an Equation with Three Unknowns and this is the Best Way to Solve It

We are the light we see in others

Ten years ago, passing through the dark night of my soul, I had reached a point where I thought I would lose the battle with depression. It was Mother Theresa who said:

“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.”

And while now I can say “wow, that was tough, I am glad I made it!” it certainly did not feel like God trusting me. It was an emotional storm. My old world was shattered and I had no idea how to repair it. I remember being so depressed that my survival goal was for one day at a time. “Look”, I was telling me. “You can do it tomorrow. If tomorrow it will be too hard for you, you can leave life through the back door. But wait until tomorrow, OK?”

A big part of the emotional turmoil was created by the ending of my love relationship. I know now that not the love itself was the source of my pain but the attachment. The pain was not coming from love but from addiction, co-dependency.

As always, in moments of crisis, my best friends were my books. I've learned to read since I was three. I remember the first day at school: I was so happy when they gave us the books that I went home, picked up the alphabet textbook, and read it from cover to cover, marveling at the pictures and being so eager to start to learn… Unfortunately, my first-grade teacher was a bully and it took me years to get rid of her toxic legacy, but this is a story for another time.

That hunger for reading never left me. Reading was my coping mechanism, my addiction. Where my parents were fighting? I was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, I was not hearing anything. Was I sad? Then I can ask Jerome K Jerome for help and, with Three Men in a Boat accompanying me, soon I was laughing again.

We had a little library with us and some of OSHO`s books. I never really have been a fan of him — I believe there is a contradiction between what he was preaching and what he was doing, but I might be wrong. Anyway, I was trying to find the right meditation for me so I thought his books would be a good place to start. I did find what works for me, and I love many of his dynamic meditations, but the thing that helped me at that time was not meditation, was a strange thing he said.

“Love”, he said… “we talk so much about love, and yet we are not able when our lover separates from us to be happy for him/her.”

That shocked me: HAPPY? What did he mean by “happy”? That crazy man… of course, he was a man, was easy for him, this is the way they want to live, no obligation, just pleasure, and no responsibilities… Men are evil… and my ex…

Well, I could not rant too much. There was that little voice inside of me, the part that was real love and I heard it saying:

“Ana, someone is not the best, most amazing, the 8th wonder of the world when the things are going as you want and the Father-of-all-monsters, the most disgusting person in the world when the things are not working. It is not about him, it is about you! OSHO is right!”

I didn't like it. But I had to admit that the words rang true for me. If not for other reasons, ranting about how bad my ex-partner was, did not make me feel better. I felt worse.

The next few weeks I did my best to focus on wishing him the best. Easier said than done and I was happy to have books to read and hard physical work to do, it helped with keeping my mind busy.

After a few weeks, my partner went to the city. I was home alone, I had so many things on my to-do list, but I could not find the energy to go out of my bed. I was furious! Why is this happening to me? Why now? And I could not even blame him, we had an agreement, it was all honest and open, no lies, not false promising, what I was expecting? If someone was not kiping his promise, that was me.

Then I remember that it might help to exteriorize the anger. I was alone, I could yell with no fear somebody could hear and judge me. Why not try? I yelled, and in my fury, I took a cup and break it on the wall. Then another one. But they were beautiful cups and I felt sorry for them: it was expensive. And useless.

So, feeling like the worst PPPPT ever — which Marshal Rosenbergclinical says is the terminology for Pretty Pitty Proteine Pourly Put Together — I went back to my bed for another session of pitying myself.

But then, in the middle of all that emotional storm, I remembered something I read the night before. I do not remember who give me that, if it was a book or an article… but I remember what it said: “We people interact with God like this: Oh, God, please give me this. And that. And that. A car, a wife, a hose, a cat, happiness, health, and so on. We treat God as a provider. We never ask Him/Her: “What I can do to help You?”

I remember being furious when reading that. I thought: “This is stupid, what somebody so insignificant as I can do to help something so powerful like that?”

But now I was exhausted. I was so down that I was willing to do anything. So I asked. I sincerely asked it was not a defiant act:

“OK, God, what can I do to help you?”

And then it happened. I heard a voice, my voice, but a totally different tone. Calm, loving, supportive:

“Get out of your bed and stop pitying yourself!” Nothing more. No trumpets, no angel voices, no smell of myrrh. Just my voice, so calm and non-judgmental that I still do not understand where was coming from. So what do I do when God/My Higher Self answered? I fight back. It could not be so simple!

“Who`s speaking? Is this God, or is it me? Or Who?”

“Does this matter?” the voice answered with the same surreal calm. “Can you give yourself another answer, no matter which, better than this?”

I had to admit I could not. So I got out of my bed and started to work.

To this day I`m still thinking I should also ask that voice about the lottery ticket numbers, but I missed the opportunity… And anyway I am pretty sure that those things are not working like that.

That day put a spin on my situation. It was still hard to deal with the depression every day, but now, as God`s helper, I found myself having a better relationship with myself.

The next logical step was to commit me that I would do anything in my power to heal. That brought me another fight. I was trying to grapple with the concept of forgiving. There were so many people I could not forgive… my teacher, the man who abused me when I was a child… how could I forgive them? How can I forgive something like that? This was not possible.

But possible or not, the truth was I was so often thinking about what they did, I was so tormented by my memories that I knew I need to do something. I remembered what one woman said about forgiving her father. “I could not forgive him”, she said “so I forgot his soul. Because I knew that in hurting me, he also hurt his soul.”

That sounded true. And doable. I could do that. So I decided to forgive their souls.

Again, no instant miracle. No big satori, no oneness, just a little bit more peace. Some joy from time to time. Some rays of the sun. And more hope. I knew I am on the right path, I could feel it.

If I would tell you that everything went up from that day on, I would lie. There are stories of spontaneous awakenings and I remember how Eckart Tolle describes what happened about he had his:

“I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like.”

There is this Buddhist practice of meditating on a koan. However, my Western mind does not like this type of charade. Even if I found it intriguing, the sound of clapping with one hand does not look like a question worth answering. So I meditate instead on how a diamond sings. I know how silence sings. I can hear it with ease when I stay still, maybe I can hear the diamonds too in the future. But I am nowhere close to that yet and I might never be.

My progress is like my Medium stats. 🙃 It has highs and lows and I've learned to appreciate the lows too. In one of those low moments, I had another “aha moment” that helped me to solve the love equation.

I had no idea what was the trigger, I just remember being in one of my self-deprecating moments. My mind was running like a broken record, telling me all the meanest things I ever heard or, worst told to me.

Then one thought hit me:

“If I had been as smart as I thought I was, I wouldn’t have let that happen to me!” I frozen. By “that” I was meaning the sexual abuse from my childhood. I was 8 or 9yo at that time.

Who knows how many times I tortured myself with that thought… but that time I heard it. I truly heard it.

“Wait a minute! If there was an 8–9-year-old child in front of you now, it doesn’t matter how “stupid”, annoying, “bad”, ANY child you would see him suffering would you say to him something like that? NO!!! Then why are doing this to YOU?

I still shake my head in disbelief at that realization. That singular moment made me see my shadow with such clarity that I never forgot about it. No more automatic thinking! Any time I found myself being judgmental I questioned my thoughts! That shadow part was torturing an innocent child for years! That guy, the abuser took advantage of me just once. He was long gone, he was old then, I am pretty sure he's not alive anymore. Me…who knows, without that moment of clarity I might abuse myself even now!

From that moment on, I watched my internal dialogue as a hawk. I worked relentlessly to change it. Affirmations, meditation, holotropic breathwork, anything I could do, I took my chance. And, of course, Tantra.

Tantra brought me the philosophy I needed to reframe my practice. One of unconditional love and compassion.

That was when I pieced everything together.

What does “unconditional love” mean? I broke this into three parts:

• self-love,
• love for the others
• and love for Creation itself

Because love sounds so daring, and I know I am nowhere close to unconditional love, I aimed to smaller steps — compassion, kindness, and gratitude.

We hear a lot “is it easier to love others than yourself”. Just look at the search results below:

But here is the trick: love is not static. Love is a verb. And an equation. Love is not something to find out, it is something to do. Something to solve.

“I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbor as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that?” ― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

In any equation, we need to know the steps. There is a proper order for the mathematical operation if we want to be able to find the right answer.

As I said, there are three unknowns in this equation: us, the others, and God/Divinity/Creation.

Which of these can I truly know? Can I truly know what happens in the inner world of others? Can I truly know what God is? I barely can be sure about myself. Today I might believe I want this, and tomorrow something happens, and want something entirely different.

How can I truly love someone/something I do not know? At most, I love my idea about him/her/it.

And then… love your neighbor as you love yourself. If this “as” means “equal”, then love is working as a communicating vessel: the level in any one of them cannot be higher than in the others.

But if we ever had someone telling us “I love you” and thought… oh, if you would truly know who/how I am, you will not love me at all” then… this line means just one thing: we cannot love what we do not know and we are aware of this, even we do not usually articulate it.

And if when we love and admire someone and they are praising us with wonderful words and we find ourselves thinking “That’s not me, who are they talking about?” … this is the pain of not being seen. The pain of not being loved for who we are. Is there even any chance for someone else to see us? To truly know us, when we carefully craft our persona, hiding what we do not like about ourselves? And if they do not see us, who do they love?

So we have to start with Self-Love. It cannot be the other way around.

Me — the first of the 3 unknowns.

There was a reason for which “know thyself” was the first maxim carved into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and many cautionary tales are speaking about great heroes who met their demise as a result of being too confident or too full of themselves.

The others — the second of the 3 unknowns

“I am the light I see in others.” This line from a Liquid bloom song is my favorite mantra.

We use our friends, our family, and our “enemies” to construct our sense of self. If we are lucky, we surround ourselves with friends so truthful that their light helps us to see our own.

If not… “Tell me who your company is and I will tell you who you are”

This is a Romanian proverb and while might look like a judgmental one, there is a lot of truth there. Our friends tell us a lot about who we are. We learn from them and grow (or not) with them.

It took me another low to decide I wanted to take what seemed the hardest path and tackle Self-Love first.

“From now on, I`d pledged, no more harsh judgments! No more beating myself, bullying myself, putting myself down!

God/Goddess/Divinity/Creation — the last of the 3 unknowns

We need an eye trained in seeing beauty to be able, even for short moments “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower” to worshipping love the Creation in the way William Blake speaks in his poem Auguries of Innocence.

And when I see and love myself as a part of Creation, my love for Cration itself increases.

I am happy to report that my discovery worked for me. I keep my pledge and stay away from any self-deprecating habits.

Will I ever be able to live a life of unconditional love? To “solve” the equation of love? I don't know, but I'm glad I'm able to be more compassionate and joyful.

This is a path worth walking.

I let you the song from my favorite mantra is coming from. I hope you will enjoy it.

Thank you for reading until the end.

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