Ask anyone what love is, and they will answer with a someone. I love my wife. I love my son. I love the sea, autumn, my dog. In the everyday dictionary love is a feeling aimed at an object: an arrow that flies out of the chest and has to land in something. No object — no love; sit and wait for one to appear. That is how we were taught. And this is exactly where the mistake is hidden that makes a life «not work out»: the person searches for a target instead of lighting the fire.
Love is not a feeling towards someone. Love is a state you are in. In other words, love has no addressee — it has a carrier. A feeling flares and dies; it depends on whether they called you or forgot, answered or walked past. A state depends on no one: it is either in you or it is not. The difference is like that between a lamp and a spot of reflected sunlight on a wall. The spot trembles, jumps and vanishes the moment someone else’s torch turns away. The lamp simply shines — on everything that happens to be in the room. On the wife, on the son, on the sea and the autumn. They are not the source of your love. They are what fell into its light.
Love is not aimed at someone. Love is what you look at everything from.
Cold is the absence of heat
Physics knows no cold as an independent force. You cannot «add cold» — you can only take heat away. Cold is not a substance but a deficit. Now look with the same eyes at your own states. Hatred, fear, envy, indifference are not separate entities that have to be fought. They are different degrees of love’s absence, just as coolness, frost and absolute zero are different degrees of the absence of heat. Fighting fear is therefore as pointless as sweeping cold out of a room with a broom. The question is always the same: where is the radiator, and why has it gone cold.
Hence a simple working conclusion. When it comes over you — irritation, resentment, anxiety — do not ask «how do I remove this feeling». Ask: where have I shut off the heat. Pain is not a punishment; pain is a marker: the thermometer showing that you have left the state. In that sense it is more honest than any adviser, because it responds instantly and does not flatter.
Why creation happens only from this state
Now the main word — «create». A person is always doing something: working, building, writing, raising children. But doing and creating are not the same thing. Take two cooks and one and the same soup from one and the same recipe. The first has «I need to»: the shift, the quota, the hated stove. The second has «I want to»: he is thinking of the people who will eat it. The ingredients are identical, the grams coincide, and the plates come out different — everyone has felt that difference on the tongue, even if no one can explain it. The mind performed identically in both cases: the recipe was followed. The only difference was the state it was done from. The mind, after all, says «I need to»; the soul says «I want to» — and creation begins exactly where those two words coincide. That is what I mean by the line I keep returning to: love is a state when it’s possible to create your own reality.
The explanation is simple if you remember where things grow from. Fear is always built on the past: it keeps an archive of what has already hurt and demands the repetition of the proven. So everything made out of fear is reproduction: a copy, a defence, a remake. The brain invents nothing from zero — it combines what has already been, and in that it is an honest analyst, like any machine. But the new — that which has not yet been in the world — enters only through a state in which you are not defending yourself. The point of creation is always now, and only love knows how to be in «now»: fear has nothing to feed on there; all its food is in yesterday.
Out of fear a person repeats. Out of love — creates. For the new, we have no third state.
That is why I put it harshly: without love a person exists rather than lives. To exist is to spin yesterday like a worn record: the same reactions, the same scripts, the same circle along the same rut. To live is to add to the world what was not in it: a line, a house, a conversation, a child, a forgiveness. The first mode is switched on in everyone by default. The second opens only from one state — which is why love is neither a luxury nor a piece of lyricism, but the creator’s only working instrument. Not fuel for a mood — the lathe itself.
The mirror does not smile first
«First love yourself» — a saying worn to holes, and it is usually taken as a licence for egoism: pamper yourself, put yourself above others. Turn it over. To love yourself does not mean bargaining for the best piece. It means putting in order the one place from which you see anything at all — your own consciousness. Because the outer world does not stand opposite you like foreign territory behind a fence. It is shown to you — the way a mirror shows a face.
Sit in the chair at the barber’s and try waiting for the reflection to smile first. You can sit there all your life. A mirror is neither rude nor loving — it returns. Exactly as much as you love yourself, the outer world loves you. Not because somewhere a ledger of merits and rewards is being kept, but because the world is your reflection, unfolded into people and circumstances: everything corresponds to everything. To demand warmth from people without switching it on in yourself is to warm your hands on a thermometer.
The world does not answer your requests. The world answers your state.
Which leaves the final question — what for. Why is life built so that only a single door is left open for creation? I think: so that the door cannot be bypassed. Everything that happens to you — meetings, losses, pain, dead ends — is not an exam and not a punishment but navigation: circumstances turning you, again and again, to face that door. Ask not «what did I do to deserve this» but «what has this appeared for» — and you will see that every turn led to one thing: that you should stop searching for the source outside and remember that the lamp is you. Love is not a reward at the end of the road. Love is the state from which the road begins at all.
The work on the cover — “Love” →
— Evgeny Fleysher
Artist and engineer. Author of WHY? and The Spiritual Alphabet, creator of the Art as Healing project. Paints works built on sacred geometry.
About the author and the method →