Eckhart Tolle's take on this:
“In romantic love, you want the other person. In true love, you want the other person’s good’ (you wish the other person well). And so other languages have different words for love to distinguish between the emotional wanting and something deeper: agape, metta, and so on. The Dalai Lama says ‘My religion is kindness.’ So words like agape, metta & kindness point to something, point to something within you – an essence from where you perceive & interact with the outside world in a very different way from the usual mentalized, conceptualized perception of reality around you, including other human beings.
The usual way to relate for people who have not awakened to that deeper level that I often call ‘essence,’ or your ‘essence identity,’ the usual way is to relate to other human beings through mental concepts or judgments. They become the veil that comes in between you and your perception of reality. And awakening is to become free of the compulsion to judge continuously, to interpret continuously, to label and name continuously, what’s around you and whoever you are with.
And when that compulsion to label everything mentally, the conceptualized reality, when that subsides, and that subsides when presence arises, then you sense something in whatever you perceive, that is a kind of recognition, whether it’s a human being, any other being - a tree or an animal, you recognize something in the other that before, when you were naming & labeling you couldn’t.
When we're naming & labeling, the other was always ‘the other,’ and nature was also conceptualized - especially human beings become conceptualized as ‘the other.’ In the egoic state, the ego actually emphasizes the otherness of others, by continuously criticizing, judging, having opinions, and mistaking every viewpoint for the truth. So there can be no love there, although the egoic entity sometimes talks about love.
Jesus said ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’, which means recognize your neighbor – the other, as yourself. And that recognition is sensing, when you look at another human being in the spaciousness of just this, sometimes called the formless dimension. What you’re looking at is form. What you’re looking at is the physical body, and also what you are perceiving is the mental form, the psychological form of that person.
You go beyond form, what you sense in the other, through your own presence, is the presence of the other – that which cannot be seen. It’s the essence of everything.
When your dog dies, all you’re left with is the fur, the bones and internal organs – the essence of that being is no longer there. But when you look at a live dog, you can sense the essence of beingness – the beingness in the other. Sometimes it’s easier with animals than with humans, because with humans you have a lot of mental identifications. So you sense the beingness, because you sense your own beingness. You could call that ‘perceiving from the heart’ – perceiving from beingness. And then you sense the beingness of the other. And that recognition is the recognition of oneness. And that’s love. Love is sensing that you share consciousness. What you love in the other, ultimately, is the consciousness.
It’s nice to touch the fur of a dog, or to touch another human being, but ultimately, what you love in the other is something that you cannot perceive, that is beyond the senses, you cannot mentalize. So to perceive through that space of love, is to be free of the compulsion to mentalize, to conceptualize.
And in practical terms it looks like this. I’m looking at Ram Das, with conceptualization, I have some image – oh, he is the famous guru, he wrote that book, or whatever concepts I have; without any concepts, there’s just suddenly a meeting, in stillness, because that’s really what it is, when you look at something without naming it, you look through the stillness.
And I invite you to look at the totality of your environment, not through any naming, but through the alert space of stillness."
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