Love and Death

They say that death cannot kill love, and that only love and death will change all things. But is there really such a thing as eternal love, and can love really save you from death? What’s the connection between love and death? These are some of the questions I will try to answer in this episode.

When a baby is born, its greatest survival tactic is to become loveable. Without being loved, the baby will die, as its life depends totally on its caregivers. If the parents can’t love the child, it will be left on the street, tossed down from a mountain or given away irresponsibly.

Even if the baby survives in an unloving environment, it will always equate the lack of love with the fear of death. If the child can’t trust even its parents, he won’t trust in anybody else afterwards. He will think – quite rightly – that he can only ever count on himself for staying alive.

He will always try to open up to his parents in the beginning, to establish a warm and loving connection, to achieve some kind of union with them. But when he gets a negative response again and again, this switch will happen in his mind after a while.

Before, he connected love to survival, but now love becomes a threat. Love means opening up, becoming vulnerable, putting trust in the other person. But when this trust is abused, the child learns never to open up again, he retreats behind closed walls both literally and symbolically.

For an unloved child, love becomes risky, and he starts to see love not as a means to survive but as something to avoid. Love is a union that’s normally in the service of life, but for him it’s now a threat to life, and what he seeks instead is separation.

However, those afraid to love are afraid to die also. And those afraid to die are unable to love. But the irony is that those incapable of love are already dead inside. They can’t feel love because they weren’t loved either. And without being loved, nobody wants to die and nobody can feel truly alive.

Without love, the blood freezes in your veins, you become cold-hearted as if already dead. Even in your life, you become the very thing you’re so much afraid of. So if you want to get rid of the fear of death, you have to learn to love again.

But you see, whenever love serves survival, it is false. True love is never a necessity, it is always a gift. You don’t need to take it away, instead you freely give it away. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter how much you are loved but how much you can love.

Feeling love is not a weakness but a strength, because only people afraid to die are afraid to love. Only with a strong heart full of love will you have the courage to face death. Death is total separation, while true love is total union. You can’t survive as a separate entity, but in total union you can become immortal. Fake love is against death. True love is equal to death.

Most people use love only as a shield against mortality. When young people fall in love, they have a feeling that this love will be eternal, they want it to be eternal. They are ready to die together, because they feel shielded even from death. This kind of love is blind, blind to death. Its purpose is exactly this: to make you forget about it.

But when the first wrinkles appear on your partner’s face, you realize that even your beloved won’t provide you eternal salvation. When you recognize that your partner is a mortal being, you are reminded of your own mortality. Suddenly the illusion of eternal love shatters, and you find yourself face to face with death.

This is a good test to decide whether your love is false or true. The proximity of death makes true love stronger and fake love weaker. If the thought of death makes you love your partner less, than it was never true love in the first place. However, if your love becomes stronger in spite of death, then you are on the right track.

Fake love is about attachment, true love is about acceptance. True love accepts the other both in life and death. The feeling of grief comes from the frustration of not being able to let go of the one you got attached to and not being able to truly love him while he was alive. Grief is a regret, while the fear of death is a sign, of unfelt or unexpressed love.

True love transcends death, fake love fades away with time. Fake love always wants to get something from the other, while true love just wants to give. The true color of love is revealed in how you relate to somebody who can do nothing for you. And this is especially true in the case of a dead loved one, because somebody who is dead can do absolutely nothing in your favor.

Fake love and death are exclusive, but true love and death always go hand-in-hand. In fact, true love is equal to death. In both cases, you totally disappear, your borders melt away, you become non-existent. When you are still there, neither love nor death can be total. When you truly love a person, a part of your ego dies. When it dies totally, you start to unconditionally love the totality of existence.

If you want to know more about death from a spiritual but down to earth perspective, you should read my book: The Power of Death. Click on the link below, and get it now! I’m deadly serious.

Memento Mori!