The Divine Magic of True Love: Moving Beyond the Skin to the Soul

Why does the world suffer from so many heartaches today? We see relationships crumbling and marriages ending in separation every day. We celebrate breakups with parties, yet deep down, we remain empty and miserable. Why? Because we have misunderstood the essence of Love. We have confused the divine emotion of Love with lust, and the eternal longing of the Soul with the transient attraction of the skin. If we want to experience Everlasting Bliss and Eternal Happpiness, we must activate the Divine Magic of True Love within us.This transformation begins when we understand the four pillars of Love, learn how to make our relationships work, and move from ordinary love to True Love.The Four Pillars of LoveHave you ever stopped to contemplate what makes a relationship strong? Just as a table needs four legs to stand upright without wobbling, a lasting relationship stands on the four essential pillars of bonding.The four pillars that hold up a relationship are emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual. Love must flow not only from the body and the heart, but from the head and the Soul too. The body expresses physical Love, the heart expresses emotional Love, the head allows intellectual Love to blossom, but it is the Soul that creates Eternal Love between two people.Most relationships rest on only the emotional and physical pillars, and couples wonder why, in time, they grow bored of each other. Without an intellectual bond, a stimulating conversation, there is nothing to sustain the connection once the initial spark settles. And even a relationship strong in all three of body, heart and head is still incomplete without the fourth and most important pillar: the Spiritual. It is only when Love flows through all four levels — body, heart, head and Soul — that a relationship becomes truly unbreakable.Many couples mistake this physical pillar for the whole of Love. But physical Love without the Love of head and heart behind it is closer to lust than Love. True Love that flows from the head and heart naturally expresses itself through the body, making that bond beautiful rather than empty. If we want our Love to be True Love, we must let it flow through all four: Body, Head, Heart and Soul.How to Make a Relationship WorkWhy are so many relationships breaking apart today? It is because Love has become transactional, full of conditions and expectations. To experience True Love, we must learn to give more than we take. Love is not a well from which we keep drawing water — pull from it endlessly, and it runs dry. Love is a fountain. The more it flows outward, the more it circulates and returns. If we try only to extract Love from a relationship instead of pouring it in, it will inevitably wither.Just as in our garden, we never forget to water our plants, yet we routinely forget to shower Love to the ones we love, taking relationships for granted until the Love has withered past return. Often, when we finally try to make up for that neglect, the effort only ends in a breakup, because True Love, when genuinely present, never reaches a point where two people consider leaving each other at all.Many couples also make the mistake of assuming that Love, once felt, does not need to be spoken. But a simple, sincerely meant expression of Love makes a tremendous difference. Partners who take the trouble to surprise each other with small, unexpected acts of Love keep that Love standing strong, rather than letting it be eroded quietly by silence.The other great destroyer of relationships is possessiveness for possessiveness is insecurity wearing the mask of Love, and it suffocates the bond it claims to protect. True Love and trust go together — where there is genuine Love, there is no room for suspicion, and where trust is missing, no relationship survives for long. If we want relationships to truly work, we must turn our Love into True Love which is transcendental and unconditional. Such a Love can never break.Moving From Love to True LoveHow do we transition from ordinary worldly love to the sublime state of True Love? We must move from the "Love of the Skin" to the "Love of the Soul." Worldly love is skin-deep, based on physical beauty, wealth, or status. Because the skin must eventually age and wither, skin-deep love is destined to fade, leaving us in agony.True Love, on the other hand, is a longing of the Soul, that Spark Of Unique Life (SOUL) within us, for the Soul in the beloved. It is the realization that the same Divine Life Energy that throbs in my heart gives life to yours. It is seeing the Divine in the beloved and in one and all.This is also the distinction older spiritual traditions have pointed toward. The Sufis called this Divine Love Ishq-e-Haqiqi, distinct from the worldly Ishq-e-Majazi, and the Greeks separated Agape from Eros similarly. Love flows from SIP, the Supreme Immortal Power, that we call, God, to our individual Spark Of Unique Life. True Love is this Divine current flowing between two Souls, asking for nothing in return.In True Love, we do not fall — we rise. The world's ordinary language treats Love as something we stumble into and eventually fall out of, but True Love lifts us, because it flows from the Divine within one Soul to the Divine within another, not merely from skin to skin. When we see God in the one we love, and love God in all, there is no longer an "I" and a "you" — there is only Oneness. This is the ultimate secret: build your Love on all four pillars and let it rise until it becomes True Love — Divine, unconditional and eternal.Authored by AiR - Atman in Ravi