From the Universal wisdom, we can deduce that our souls choose incarnation (crave it even) for the richness of experience that only physicality can bring. Part of this, in our current incarnations, is human love of all types, which explains why we suffer so when we feel that love is being withheld from us.

As children, we desperately need that love to lay the groundwork of waking to our true selves. While incarnate, we cannot realize our true nature without being introduced to it. Plenty of souls have all but wasted entire lives on this planet asleep, because human love was withheld from them when they were children, and without the proper introduction, their poor souls could never remember or conceive of the love from whence they came, until they return to it.

Human love is largely the reason we’re here, and once we wake to our true nature, providing that love to our fellow souls becomes a primary calling. On the other hand, once we become connected with our souls’ source, we should quickly learn the difference between love and attachment.

Of course a child is necessarily attached to the parent or parents they love. A child needs those specific loving figures in their lives, and it will always be emotionally damaging to a child to remove that parent from their lives. Like all emotional damage, it can be healed over time, especially once the soul establishes connection with the source, but the important take-away is that, for a child, love and attachment are much the same.

Once we reach maturity, however, showing discernment between love and attachment can be a strong indicator of where we are in our walk. While being able to receive human love remains important, when we are committed to our meditation and our walk toward enlightenment, we should find ourselves moving in the direction of an emotional stability devoid of attachment. We should, more and more, receive the love we need from humanity as a whole and spend time within our meditation sending it out to every fellow soul whether currently incarnate or part of the collective. We can feel this intensely while inside the meditative state, and we can experience it wholly in our everyday lives, even in the presence of strangers. Speaking very plainly, as enlightened souls, we should not need the love of any specific person.

This does not mean that institutions like marriage have no place. Souls must find their own authentic way through their lives, and for plenty, marriage and family are important parts of the experience. That said, enlightened people don’t count receiving love from any specific person component to their inner peace. That comes, as the words suggest, from within, and more specifically from connection with the pure creative love that is divinity.

Feeling a need to receive love or even approval from any specific person whether that be a spouse or significant other, another family member, a grown child or a spiritual teacher is an indication of a need to deepen our commitment to our spiritual walk. It’s something to meditate on and admit as an area requiring more self-study and growth, because feeling that need always indicates attachment which is not love and is actually an aggressive act.

When we’re faithfully journeying toward enlightenment, practicing our meditation and honoring the connection with our source, an indicator of our spiritual growth is a burgeoning inner peace, more and more unshakable by external stimuli, sustained by the inexhaustible loving divinity that animates us. Conversely, a lack of that inner peace will lead to our souls’ attempts to substitute something external for what’s lacking within, and that substitution often takes the form of human attachment. A soul in this state feels the need to receive love and approval from one or more people to fill the void inside where their authentic inner peace has yet to develop.

This need is attachment and it can manifest in a number of ways. The plainest, as we’ve discussed, is feeling a need to receive love or approval from a specific person. Some other subtler ways attachment reveals itself include having a need for another person to feel or act a certain way, for example finding ourselves wanting our friends to agree with our opinions about controversial topics or wanting, say, a sibling or an adult child to take a specific path in life. It’s easy to hide behind Earthly “reasons” for these desires. “I want my friend to stand with me in the fight against sexism!” Or, “I just want my son to be successful, and so of course I think he should take the job offer in front of him. It’s because I care about him and his well-being.” These statements sound plausible, even “reasonable,” but no enlightened soul would make these statements, because they are very clearly statements of attachment, and while we may well love the person we’re speaking about, statements like these reveal something additional to that love… our flawed attachment to that person.

Once we’ve begun to build our inner peace from connection with the source, any desire we might have for others to agree with us falls effortlessly away, because we know that who we are is already divine, already perfect, and there’s no need for support for our inclinations from others. And once we’ve begun to successfully meditate, we quickly see that any desire we might have experienced in the past for a specific person to live their life a specific way disappears, because we come to understand that the only reason we would ever want someone to change the way they live is because we are unfairly and falsely casting some portion of our self-worth onto that person and measuring our value by a perceived quality of their life. That’s not love, and it’s not kind. That’s manipulation for our own selfish benefit. It becomes a thing of the past once we achieve ultimate connection.

So, we must ask ourselves, honestly, are we attached to anyone in particular? Beyond the bountiful love that pours endlessly forth from the infinite creative love from which we spring, do we believe we need the love, approval or obedience of anything or anyone else? If our answer is yes, we should already know what we need to do to change it.