Real love is a spiritual experience that makes me feel part of cosmos

By David McElroy · February 14, 2019

All my life, I’ve heard people react to transcendent beauty in similar ways. Whether it’s a sunset that fills the sky with color and electricity or a dark night sky filled with a million majestic stars, the typical reaction is similar.

“This makes me feel so small and insignificant,” they say in awe.

I understand the feeling of awe, but I don’t understand feeling small. No transcendent experience has ever made me feel insignificant. For me, the feeling is just the opposite. It makes me feel as though I’m a part of something majestic and universal — something which has no beginning or end.

Experiencing something this huge and significant makes me feel that I’m an inseparable part of this Universe — that every part of me is connected to every other part of Creation, that every person and star and blade of grass is one living thing — with power and life force flowing through all of us.

And there’s no time when I feel this intoxicating experience quite like the times when I’m in love with someone who’s also in love with me.

I don’t know how to define love and I don’t know anybody else who does an adequate job of defining it, either. It’s a living force that’s invisible but obvious to everyone who experiences it. It’s the spiritual equivalent of the wind. I can see and feel and hear the effects of the wind, but I can’t quite tell you what the wind is.

Modern culture is badly confused about love. Maybe every culture has always been confused about it. Those who think seriously about romantic love tend to think of it as a fairly modern thing — driven by popular movies and music. I know that cultures have put pragmatic things — such as money and land and family ties — above love in making marriage partners, but love has been around for at least thousands of years.

Those ancient people were more like us in some respects than we might realize.

In the ancient Hebrew book of Genesis, there’s the story of Jacob’s love for Rachel. Parts of the story make no sense to those of our culture, but we still understand his love for her.

When Jacob first met Rachel, he was instantly smitten by her. He encountered her with a flock of sheep and he helped her water her flock. Right after that, we read, “Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud.” Jacob felt something so powerfully emotional that it filled his heart and brought him to tears. I’ve experienced that. You probably have, too.

Rachel’s father was named Laban. He wanted Jacob to work for him, but he was willing to compensate him. The Genesis account says, “Jacob loved Rachel. And he said [to Laban], ‘I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.'”

Jacob must have wanted Rachel pretty badly to agree to wait seven years for her, but this was the deal he and Laban struck. But Laban cheated Jacob. After the seven years had passed, Laban gave him his daughter in marriage — but when morning came, Jacob discovered that Laban had actually given him Rachel’s older sister, Leah, who he didn’t love.

Laban made up a lame excuse for his trick, but Jacob still loved Rachel and wanted her, even though he was stuck with Leah now. He agreed to work an additional seven years for Laban to bless the marriage that he had already agreed to seven years previously. So Jacob worked for Laban for another seven years — and he finally took Rachel as his wife.

Do you love someone enough that you would work seven years to have him or her? And even if you agreed to such a crazy plan, would you work an additional seven years — 14 years in all — to have the person you love?

I’ve asked myself this crazy question and I know the answer, but you might feel entirely different. If I were a young man and if I could be certain of actually getting the object of my love, yes, I would wait seven years. I think I would even wait 14 years. I also realize that makes no sense, but it seems that love rarely makes sense to the rational mind.

Our path to love isn’t as simple as what it was in the cultures of the day. Back then, it was a matter of a father promising his daughter to a man and then keeping his promise. (Obviously, we’re horrified today at the woman having no say in the matter.) Today, it’s more complicated. Two people have to fall in love with each other at the same time and have to overcome all the other objections or complications that can keep two people apart.

But what if the seed of love was laid and circumstances never make things work for two people? What if one of them — or both of them — fall in love with each other along the way? Can love stay alive through years of going separate paths? Can love survive both people making choices along the way that continue to keep them apart?

Does real love survive — even when we make bad choices and end up on very different life paths? Does something conspire to bring such people back together? I honestly don’t know for sure. I think so. I hope so. My gut tells me this is how things work for those who listen to their instincts and obey intuition. But I’m aware that it’s an irrational gamble.

The only thing I can be sure about is that being in love brings me to that same place of transcendental holiness that I experience when I feel connected to all the Universe.

Loving alone — or missing someone — can be a selfish experience. It can be a miserable experience. But when two people love one another and express that love openly to one another, it’s a spiritual experience.

This sort of loving unity makes me feel connected to God and to all of Creation. I think this is the real reason that the book of Genesis tells us that a man and woman can become “one flesh.”

In the deeper sense of oneness, real love can allow two people to unify into something bigger than what the two could ever be working on their own.

I miss this experience of feeling loved by a woman to whom I’ve completely given my heart and soul. There’s no substitute in this world for that.

On this Valentine’s Day, I don’t have that love. A lot of people go out and grab any partner they can find — just so they won’t be alone — but I can’t do that. I have a hunger for real love that’s just as real as the need for food or water. But we can’t always control when — or whether — we can finally have what we so desperately need.

I crave the transcendental experience of oneness born of real love — and I won’t accept the common counterfeits that the world around me is so eager to provide.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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