If you took the branches off of a tree, would the tree have the same meaning as it does with the branches? No, the tree would not have the same meaning because it would be missing half of what it is. The tree would no longer be whole.
Love is when the reflection and the reflected are the same thing. The meaning of something cannot be found apart from the whole of it. Our present mind does not search for the whole of meaning, it gives meaning to things so that it can feel whole. And it should go without saying that there is a vast difference between actual, living wholeness, and the temporary feeling of a self-supplied sense of wholeness.
The real moments of wholeness, sweetness, and love in a person's life are always due to the disappearance of the gulf between that person and reality. The separation that exists between us and the real world is the making of a mind that creates a "world" in its own image, and then suffers over that world being so incomplete.
Wholeness never ceases to be, but our conscious relationship with wholeness is only possible when we end the separation between the seer and the seen. Pain in life is present for the sole purpose of helping us to gradually realize that the reason we feel so apart from life, apart from wholeness, is that we keep ourselves that way.
