It seems there are many ways that love can be expressed: there is relational love, where love is focused on the other – a lover, friend, child, guru, parent. This love can be primarily selfish and possessive: love me and only me! Or primarily unselfish like a mother's love can be for her child. All these loves are narrowed down however to the object of the love, and are most often contaminated with personal, subjective wants and needs. The arena of love is usually a maelstrom of conflicting and sometimes brutal forces.
There is another kind of love however that rarely emerges but which is always present, latent, waiting to be revealed. It lays buried deep within the Being, the true nature of the individual: a subtle but powerful fragrance that will only be discovered when Being itself is discovered and surrendered to. This love is different from relational, transactional love. It is an aspect or quality of one's own Self, a refined milieu or climate in which one lives and breathes. There is no calculation in this love nor any effort to control or manipulate. This love is an emanation, a natural flowering of Being, that makes no distinctions and asks for nothing in return. It is not that it is given freely, it simply IS, present and available, a mysterious outpouring from an unknowable Source.
Comments below:
Anne - what is the relationship between your experience of love "that makes no distinctions and asks for nothing in return" and your experience of "relational love"? Are the related at all or completely distinct and unrelated in your experience? And the big one: Do you think / know / believe that it is possible to experience, cultivate and express love "that makes no distinctions and asks for nothing in return" in relationship with others?