We're delighted to present an extract from The Truth About Love, the new book by Conor Creighton.
We are trained from the youngest of ages to imagine that love is a force outside of ourselves. That if you keep swiping one day your prince will come. That love is something you have to look for, you have to work for, you have to diet for. The truth is that love is an inside job. We are creators of love, not discoverers of love, and until we realise that love comes out of us, rather than to us, we'll never really get it or feel it.
In this modern manifesto and spiritual guide to relationships, Conor Creighton makes a daring call to action and explains how to change yourself and the world around you through the courageous act of opening your heart.
AN AWKWARD FIRST DATE
Neem Karoli Baba was an Indian guru. He died in 1973. Like many holy folk, he announced he was going to die and then popped off a day or two later. Throughout his life, he performed miracle after miracle. He appeared in different locations at once. He manifested objects out of thin air. One time he pulled crisp, new money out of a burning fire. He knew things he shouldn't, what people were thinking, what they’d dreamed the night before, what was really in their heart. He was magical, truly magical. When newcomers met Neem Karoli Baba for the first time, they’d often break down and cry. Their reaction to seeing him, this simple, bald, chubby Indian guy who wore nothing more than an oversized nappy, and spoke in a kind of nasal sneer, was one of profound emotion, awe and bliss. If you go on YouTube, you’ll find lots of interviews with North American boomers and Indian devotees describing their first encounter with him and, well, if they’d given birth to unicorns in a butterfly meadow beneath a double rainbow, you can’t imagine their words would be as emotional. Baba didn’t teach very much. His teaching was more of a sense thing. You saw him and you got it. One glimpse and things fell into place. There are lots of people like this on the planet. They have something to them. Something more than words. When Neem Karoli Baba did use words, however, they were very simple: Love everyone. Your friends, your family, your neighbours, your work mates, the people you went to school with, your new flame, your old flame, loud people, obnoxious people, boring people, landlords, clampers, spammers: love everyone. Neem Karoli Baba was an enlightened being who lived not so long ago. By enlightened we mean that he had completed all levels of the game called 'being a human’. And his advice, after winning the game most of us struggle with every day, wasn’t to buy cryptocurrency or work hard, or avoid carbs and dairy, it was simply to love everyone.
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Listen: The Truth About Love - Conor Creighton talks to The Ray D'Arcy Show
I used to believe that love was something soft. A weak thing. You might believe that too. As a boy growing up in the Irish countryside, I didn’t use the word ‘love’ that often, not with my family, not with my friends, not even with my first girlfriends. ‘You’re great, you’re cool, I like you, you know?’ But ‘I love you’, the actual ‘L bomb’? No, you must be mad. To be honest, I think I was afraid of love. I was afraid to let it out. How about you? Have you let your love out this lifetime? I’ve dated enough through my twenties and thirties to believe that maybe we’re all a little bit afraid of love. But listen to this: you are made of love. You are made of love Right now, wherever you are, if you get quiet and pay close attention, you can feel it rippling inside your body. Now you might call it molecules, or wavelets, or vibrations, or the pulsing creaks and groans of your old bone machine, but you could also call it love. The energy inside you is love. It’s the effort to stick a pizza in the oven when you’re depressed as hell, the strength to floss your teeth when you’re lonely and thinking Who’s going to kiss this mouth? It’s the power to pick up your phone and text the word SRY. It’s your heart still dutifully pumping blood to your feet and hands, while you torture yourself over your lack of productivity. This is love and it’s not weak, it’s an enormous force. We are trained from the youngest of ages to imagine that this force is something outside ourselves. One day your prince will come. Keep swiping. Put yourself in the window. Do all your homework and you’ll get a treat. We are conditioned to believe that love is something you have to look for, you have to work for, you have to diet for. Of all the cruel messages our deeply unwell society teaches us, this is the cruellest. But love is an inside job. We are creators of love, not discoverers of love, and until we realise that love is something that comes out of us, rather than something that comes to us, we’ll never really get it, or feel it, and we’ll never be able to do as Neem Karoli Baba instructed and love everyone. We’re living in very strange times. There is an anti-love agenda sweeping its way across our planet. You can see it in the way we’re destroying nature. You can see it in the systems that govern us and the people we somehow elect into office. You can see it in our families, our marriages, how we date, how we ghost, how we tend to consume rather than celebrate each other. Thank you – next! You can see it in how we spend our time zoning out, how we are so often disempowered and small, and how we push and torture ourselves towards some twisted, unfair vision of perfection.
Perfectionism is not love. Perfectionism is self-hate in sheep’s clothing. Love everyone, said an old Indian guru, starting with you. Love is radical I’m a teacher. I work one on one with people who have fallen out of love with themselves. I explain to them that it’s not their fault. That we all do it. That there are forces all around us on our social media, in our advertising, our governments and institutions that would deliberately keep us from loving ourselves. They do this because if we were to love ourselves, and if we were to love everyone, then all these loveless structures would collapse. Do you think there could still be billionaires and starving people on this planet at the same time if this was a planet ruled by love? It’s in the interest of the most powerful, and coincidentally most traumatised, on this planet to keep us disconnected from love. As people, we are at our most powerful when we are generating love, and at our most disempowered when we’re not. In an often-cruel society that would have you turn against yourself and everybody around you, the most radical thing you can do is love.
Our society is becoming more compassionate. More and more people are waking up to the powerful force that is love. You might say, Hold up, I don’t see that, but I do. When you learn to switch on your love, you not only feel more love, but you also see more love. See love in everyone Neem Karoli Baba said something else. He said ‘See god in everyone.’ I don’t believe in god. My experience of god was through a Catholic upbringing that infected me with so much shame that I used to bite my nails after masturbating. I turned against myself. Love brought me back. So if you want, you can say see god in everyone, but I prefer to say see love in everyone. It’s the force, the goo, the thin, wobbly membrane that binds us all together, and truly understanding and then embracing it is the most radical thing you can do. We’re building a new society based on kinder, more heart-centred values. If you’ve bought this book, it means you get that too. A new society requires a direction, so: Love everyone. Starting with you.
The Truth About Love is published by Gill
