Understanding Love

Nat Dukan
7 min readDec 2, 2020

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Understanding Love with insight from Kabbalah.

Love is one of the most used words in the world. No matter the language or culture we all have a word to qualify that powerful, indescribable feeling named love. How many books, songs, movies, or paintings about love? How many industries are fueled by the desire we have for it? How many of us dream about it? How much pain and suffering come from the lack of it? No doubts Love is omnipresent in our world. Yet it is still very mysterious.

I hope the beautiful understanding about Love shared by this story will help reveal some of Love’s greatest secrets. If it resonates with you as strongly as it did with me, it’s a game-changer!

Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash

When I talk about Love, I talk about the phenomenon of Love itself. By Love, I mean, for a lack of a better word, the “energy” that binds everything together while at the same time pushes everything to grow. By Love, I mean the source within us that holds our cells together at a microscopic level. I do not talk about what we commonly call love. Everything we commonly qualify as love is a manifestation of the experience of Love. In the story below when I talk about the source itself, I will use a capital L for Love when I talk about manifestations of it I will use a lower l for love.

Let me illustrate that in a more tangible way. When you hold a newborn baby from your family, for example, you may feel at that moment lots of emotions flowing through you. All of a sudden all the worries disappear, all the questions, all the doubts, you are fully immersed in experiencing a deep feeling of love. Time may even feel distorted as you hold the baby. This experience is an experience of Love. It is not Love per se, it’s just us experiencing Love.

What seems to happen in this example is that the beingness of the newborn allows all our blocks and resistances to be removed letting us connect to the inner source of “energy” called Love. As a result, many manifestations of Love are appearing and we say that we love the baby. The connection to the source is facilitated and triggered by the other person, but we are the ones letting it happen. You may hold the same baby, on a day in which you are very frustrated or worried and you won’t feel the Love. You know you love the baby but you don’t feel it. This is because others can help us unlock the barriers within but they can’t remove them for us. When we fall in love, these barriers are falling, hence the expression, however, to remain in love after the fall we need to learn how to access the source of Love.

The manifestations of Love or our experiences of Love are not Love. Love is just Love. Connecting to Love is an art that requires skills that very few are teaching us. No wonder we confuse Love with the experience of it. We have lost access to the source and are left to believe that love is only an outside force that comes from others. With such a false conclusion we passively wait to meet the people that will make us feel love. It’s true that people can help us access Love, but ultimately we are the only ones who can remove the fear and blocks within us to find our way to Love within. Truth is, for thousands of years, around the world, spiritual practices are teaching how to awaken our hearts and experience Love. Many spiritual masters are able to Love everyone, they mastered the way to the heart so well that they can connect to the source at will.

Awakening the heart. Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash

During a Kabbalah circle(*)for which I prepared an introduction, a teaching about Love revealed itself! I first thought to introduce Kabbalah showing one of its ways to reveal wisdom, it’s called gematria. This is the association of numerical value to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This interesting approach creates dual reality letters and numbers. It opens many doors for meaning and interpretation. Such as:

The word for Love: Ahava written אהבה has a numerical value of 13.

The word “One”: Ehad אחד has also a numerical value of 13.

From the numerical equality of these two words, we conclude that there is a deep meaningful link between Love and One. We can say Love is One. Or that to love is to make one. And the other way around to make one is to love. We also notice that the movement of making one implies separation first.

To love someone, we need to see past what separates us and connect what unifies us, what makes us one.

It also means that if I’m making one with something or someone there is a bond of love between me and the object, I’m making one with. This is useful to choose where to put our love into. When we merge with our devices, for example, we may keep in mind that part of us is creating a loving bond with the device (chose the devices carefully :😊)

We can use this teaching also for our own selves. We often are fragmented. Working on unifying our fragmented parts is self-love. When we hear that we need to love ourselves first, we can interpret that as aligning ourselves and connecting the different parts of our being. These are great tools to help us grow.

Beyond the nice personal-growth advice, another way to make one is Understanding.

Understanding an idea is to merge with it. At first, the idea and I are separated. Then I start to think about it, meditate on it, and after some effort and time somehow, I understand the idea that is now part of me. You may reject part of it, but the part that you accepted is part of you. The process of understanding is a process of making one with an idea.

As we just saw making one is to love, so understanding is loving. Understanding an idea is to love an idea. This is probably why the Latin word for understanding is “comprendo” which means “to take with”. When I understand I take with me, I merge with the object of understanding. Understanding isn’t only a mental affair. I’m talking about a full-body, mind, spirit, and soul understanding.

(If you’d like to make this concept more tangible, try to think about an idea that is already part of your set of ideas. Can you make a difference between the idea and the part of you that contains that idea? What’s the difference between an idea you accept as yours and an idea you qualify as not yours?)

From that, we can say that when we Understand Love, we are making One with Love. Or in other words, we are loving Love. We’ve all heard the advice that we need to be Love. Well here’s a way to become Love, by Understanding.

When you think about it, it makes total sense. Love can only be Love. Love is just Love. Love isn’t an external force that can make you Love from the outside. It is an internal force that invites you to be Love only by being Love. So, for us to become Love we need to Love. One way to do that is to Understand Love. The very process of understanding which is internal is Love.

It may sound confusing, but if you take some time to integrate it, it will make sense. (It is a nice meditation exercise.)

When we get that, we understand that the only way Love can spread to the world is through Love. For us humans to spread Love we can only become Love ourselves. Any other way wouldn’t be Love.

To say it slightly differently, we all have within us this “energy” that bounds everything together and gives everything the power to grow. This “energy” can’t do anything else but being itself, an “energy”. We have the power to remove the fear and the blocks within us by understanding, to connect to that “energy”. This movement of understanding and connection is Love connecting to itself. This is the way humans become Love.

By now you may realize that you have been presented with a tool to become Love. You can join this cycle of Love by starting to work on understanding Love. You might even take it as an invitation from Love itself. Be Love, spread Love. The more of us become Love the more Love will spread to the world.

This is not easy. Learning how to understand Love and how to connect to it within us is a process. It’s a journey, a beautiful Love journey!

During the discussion about Kabbalah, I realized that this movement of being Love through Love is an infinite virtuous circle of Love that feeds itself and everyone who becomes it. The Love of Love has a numerical value of 26 which is the value of the highest possible divine manifestation and source of Love on earth according to Kabbalah: YHVH. Therefore the Tetragrammaton may be interpreted as this virtuous cycle of Love feeding itself with Love. For it to feed the whole world, it needs us to take part in it and become Love ourselves. There is no other way since at our level of reality, it can’t do anything else but being Love.

When I reached that understanding an interesting idea crossed my mind. What if this all discussion had for only goal to have us hear and understand that we needed to be Love. What if Love needed to spread through each one of us reading these very lines? I take it as a message. Therefore I wanted to share it because we need more Love! I hope many of us hear the call! If you do… welcome aboard the Love vessel my love! Let’s spread 😉

(*) Here’s the link to the video of the introduction to Kabbalah.

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Nat Dukan
Nat Dukan

Written by Nat Dukan

Sharing pieces of my journey!

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