Is your love special?
To love is to see beyond the self..
Pablo Neruda wrote:
"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
It is beautiful. But I wonder whether even this love still rests on the distinction of you.
Love can be deeply personal, but that kind of love does not necessarily elevate us.
To love a particular person, belief, or possession as mine is often an exercise of the ego. When what we love is threatened, we may justify anger, possessiveness, even cruelty in its defense. How much of that is still love? Perhaps this is why love and hate are said to be separated by such a fine line. They are often born from the same attachment.
True love asks for something different.
It allows us to see beyond ourselves. It lets us loosen our grasp because another's well-being matters more than our need to possess. It understands instead of judges. It sees that every person is the consequence of countless causes and conditions. It remains beautiful even if they never stay with us.
A single shared moment is enough.
Such love does not depend on reciprocity, ownership, or permanence. It survives absence because it is no longer feeding the self. There is no personality to defend, no specialness to cling to, no motive to satisfy.
It simply exists..
Love, when true, lets us see past our self. When we could let our hold go, because we genuinely want their well-being. When we don't judge them, truly understand how they came to be, and it would be beautiful just the same even when they are not with us. Even a mere moment is enough to sustain that love, because it is independent of any selfishness.
There is no personality left in that love.
No specialness of that individual. It just exists, without any bias or motive.
That primordial feeling of being in the same soup.
In the same moment.
The same time.
The same life.
The Neruda distinction you're drawing matches something Mahayana Buddhism spent centuries mapping.
Possessive love, the "mine" version, runs on tanha, which translates roughly as craving-that-clings. It's not love; it's the self trying to extend itself outward. It looks like love because it feels warm. But when the object of that warmth threatens to leave, the warmth flips.
What you're describing in the second half, love that "sees every person as a consequence of countless causes and conditions," is closer to what the Mahayana tradition calls bodhicitta, awakening heart, the mind that holds all beings without needing to possess any of them. Not romantic love, not attachment. Something that can absorb the full condition of another without needing to possess it.
The phrase that stuck with me: "primordial feeling of being in the same soup."
That "same soup" language is almost precisely dependent origination (pratityasamutpada, the web of mutual causation) stated without the Sanskrit. Not everything isolated, but everything mutually arising.
Does that shift in love feel more like an insight that hit you once, or something that has to be practiced back into view each time?