So we can have idols in our inner world as well as the external one. In both realms, we create and become attached to forms that then fill the heart. Holding any image, name, or form for the Beloved constrains the movement of the heart. To know the Beloved, however, the heart needs complete freedom—complete liberation from all mind, all memory, all image, all positions and beliefs. It just knows that it loves, and it loves the Beloved without knowing what the Beloved is. All the heart needs is to be near the Beloved, close to the Beloved, in contact with the Beloved, and it is unwilling to believe any ideas about the Beloved. When the heart is free, it has no direction, no image, no idea where to go or what to do. It just melts. When these images and the memories of them have become established, the way to deal with that from the perspective of the heart is not to try and do something to the images, but to simply allow the love itself to deepen and expand. Our passion and ecstatic love for the Beloved isn’t actually diminished by us having images of it; it just gets obscured, covered up, constrained, and somewhat muffled. And our yearning can actually increase when we see how the images are separating us from what we love. If we then allow that yearning love to manifest itself strongly—if we burn with it and feel, “Yes, that’s what I want!”—it will burn away all these images and memories of the Beloved, and the passion of the heart will dissolve the mind. So one of the secrets of the heart is that we don’t need to meddle with these things. The heart divests itself of them through its own passion, through its own love.  

We may have experienced various partial manifestations of the Beloved before, many of its aspects, qualities, and dimensions. We might even have experienced it in its essence as the absolute, in its mystery and vastness, its depth and beauty. But experiencing the absolute as the ultimate nature of everything, the essence of reality, and even realizing it and being it—this is still not the same thing as beholding the Beloved. The Beloved is a very specific way of experiencing the absolute in the heart. You see, the heart isn’t really looking for the nature of reality. It’s not searching for the mystery of being and the essence of things. The heart is simply looking for its own Beloved, the Beloved of the heart. It’s been primed to recognize it, and the heart knows that it’s the only thing that will completely satisfy it. When we experience manifestations of the absolute in its vastness and mystery, the heart may feel it’s getting close to what it’s searching for. But for the heart, close isn’t enough. It wants to experience this mystery directly, within the heart, and that’s why it’s had to be completely emptied and then have its poverty incinerated and annihilated from within. Only then will the absolute appear as the Beloved, as the bedazzling luminous night in the cave of the heart. 

So we finally see the ultimate truth of reality—the Beloved is absolute nothingness, a condition of complete nonbeing, and at the same time, that nonbeing is the nature of everything. It’s like this nonbeingness is stuck inseparably to everything, so it’s literally and absolutely the fundamental nature of everything, no matter how big or small. 

So we’ve reached the point where the Beloved is already touching the innermost depths of the heart and beginning to appear from within it, and that’s when the heart starts to feel this love for annihilation. We want to be absolutely and completely gone so that we don’t feel anything at all. We don’t want to think of ourself any longer, and we don’t want to remember anything or anybody. We don’t just want no more loves; we want no more experience, no more awareness, and no more consciousness—we really do want absolute and complete nothingness. So, it’s not like we just want to leave existence; we don’t even want to know that we ever existed in the first place. There is a wish to be so completely gone that nobody will ever remember us, so it will be as if there was never even anyone who left. 

So we’re beginning to have direct experience of the mysterious nature of the Beloved. We become fully aware that although it appears everywhere and fills all consciousness, it is truly intangible—it’s the essence of intangible. Of course we cannot touch it, because there’s nothing there. It’s obvious to us now why we cannot possess it—it’s so formless, so light, so empty, and so free. That’s why we cannot make it into an object—if we try to, we’re just erecting an idol for it. We’re witnessing the paradoxical heart of the mystery now: the Beloved is an empty nothing, yet at the same time, we experience it as a mysterious night that has a luminous vastness. There is a spaciousness that is vast, empty, and dark, but in its pure, pure darkness, in its silence and utter stillness, it illuminates and scintillates. It has a sense of majesty, a sense of beauty, and a kind of sparkle that appears out of nowhere. And there we have it, the ultimate enigma: it is a nothing that sparkles.

It’s clear now why we had to eliminate everything to finally get to the mystery of complete nonbeing. But there’s still a deeper mystery beyond that, namely that nonbeingness itself is not the absolute, the Beloved—it’s still just a conceptual facet of it. We can’t confine the Beloved solely to the category of nonbeing because its nonbeingness is absolutely inseparable from being. So we could say that it is both being and nonbeing, but the true Beloved is also neither, because it is beyond being and nonbeing. This is a mystery that is way beyond what the mind can cope with, and it can no longer even conceptualize it. It can mouth the words still, and say, “Ah yes, the Beloved is beyond being and nonbeing,” but the mind doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about. Again, it’s the perception of the heart that’s needed, because the heart can feel a direct intimacy and connection with this truth. The truth the heart perceives and recognizes is that the nothingness and nonbeingness of the Beloved is at the same time an immense presence that is the essence and nature of everything. 

Another reason why using the mind doesn’t work is that the Beloved is formless in an absolute way. This makes it impossible to apprehend using reason, because the conceptual categories, ideas, and dichotomies that reason relies on are all forms. Reason uses these forms to delineate and define separate elements of reality, which it can then compare and contrast—because X is such and such, then it must or can’t be Y, which is so and so. When it comes to the Beloved, however, basic categories, concepts, and fundamental dichotomies just don’t hold, and contrasts disappear. So the Beloved is beyond form, beyond image, beyond name, and beyond concept in general. That means it is completely nonconceptual, and not just in the usual sense of that word. What most people understand by nonconceptual is that something exists without it being a creation and content of thought. And it’s true, the Beloved isn’t a content of thought because it’s beyond anything the mind can create and define. But the Beloved is also nonconceptual in the sense that no conceptual category can apply to it. 

The heart knows and recognizes that immediacy and intimacy as the Beloved. And for the mind now, there’s this bedazzlement, a drunkenness of sorts, full of radiance and explosions of brilliance. It’s like intergalactic space, with momentary flashes of lightning that induce a sense of mystery and magic, and delicious, blissful ecstasy. It’s an ecstasy of release for both mind and heart, because whenever we think or feel anything about what’s being experienced, it’s instantly annihilated in a shower of stars. Everything we see is constantly revealing itself to be absolutely nothing—nonbeing—and at the same time, there is brilliance and radiance because that is the appearance of things, the being of things. We can now see that the Beloved is both being and nonbeing, and neither and beyond that. We find being and we find nonbeing, and we can’t separate them from each other. The fundamental conceptual dichotomy between existence and nonexistence, presence and absence, being and nonbeing, is gone. Reason can’t possibly penetrate this, and nobody ever said it should or could—it’s not the job of reason. Here, reason might take you all the way to the edge of knowing, but beyond that point, the intimate knowledge of the Beloved is the heart’s business.

So the understanding that only the inner Beloved can ultimately satisfy the heart is crucial to this process, but there’s something else we also need to understand and accept—that the journey will be a long and challenging one. This is another way the relationship with the inner Beloved is different from our earthly loves. In the early stages of falling in love with someone, or in developing a very deep friendship, there’s usually a phase of intense burning and longing for the relationship to become established. Once it has been, it has a different quality. The burning and longing is over; the person is no longer such a mystery to you, and it’s now a matter of getting to know them better so that the relationship can develop and deepen. With the inner Beloved it’s not like that. The burning and longing goes on for years, decades in fact, and far from getting to know the inner Beloved better, for all this time we still don’t even know what it is. And for years and decades we have to endure the fact that although we come closer to it at times, there are times when it seems to just disappear off the scene—gone, and for who knows how long. It feels to us as if the Beloved just decides that we’re on a break for a while. 

So when the Kaaba, the House of God that represents the heart, is finally emptied of all the idols, it feels uncomfortably empty at first. It’s understandable that we can get scared at this point, and think, “Oh no, I’m losing my heart!” We’re dismayed, too, because this isn’t at all what we expected—spiritual lovers assume that when their love for the Beloved becomes more focused, they’ll experience a more intense kind of love. And yes, we do feel that sometimes, because our love for the inner Beloved is gradually expanding and deepening, but it’s easy to be more preoccupied with how disconcerting this gradual emptying of our heart feels. As we become more and more detached from our habitual everyday loves, their absence in our heart is felt as the absence of love, and of the heart itself. This condition of “no heart” and “no love” is one of the most difficult stations on the path of love—and remember, it’s not just the everyday external beloveds that our heart now feels empty of, but also the various inner beloveds that have sustained us on the spiritual path. It can feel like we don’t love anybody or anything, and we might worry that we’re no longer even capable of giving and receiving love.

We’ve seen that as the Beloved draws ever nearer in our experience, we feel an all-consuming love that has an annihilating quality. It annihilates the heart and annihilates the lover into the Beloved. But remember, what’s really happening is that the Beloved is manifesting itself in the heart through this love, consuming the heart and annihilating it from within. So the experience of annihilation and the experience of this intensification of passion and sweetness are also two sides of the same thing. We can now begin to behold the Beloved as it truly is. The Beloved begins to reveal itself not just partially, through its aspects, but in its very essence. This can still happen in many different ways, however. We might find one particular way the Beloved appears to us and settle on that, but the Beloved can appear to us in infinite ways, and each way the Beloved reveals itself shows us something slightly different about it, how we are connected to it, and how the Beloved is related to everything else. 

So the relationship with the inner Beloved is much more mysterious than our human relationships, and the sense of mystery in it continues throughout the relationship. Even when we finally behold the inner Beloved, the mystery doesn’t diminish—in fact it deepens. There’s a sense of going back and forth between closeness and distance, union and separation, and we need to accept that this can go on for years and years. Even though someone like Kabir might have reached a state of union with the Beloved, there was still this going back and forth for many years, and Rumi kept experiencing the yearning and longing almost to the end of his life. You see it in his poems—one day he’s loving, the next day he’s yearning. The Beloved continues to come and go mysteriously, and it takes a great deal of realization before our relationship with the inner Beloved feels more settled. It’s clear then that the level of love required, and the quality of pain to be endured, is of a different order with the Beloved than with a human being. Maybe we can understand better now why the more settled we are in our human relationships, the easier it is for us to sustain our relationship with the inner Beloved. It’s not a necessity, but it makes for less confusion if we aren’t experiencing the anguish of love externally, too. 

When we inquire into, explore, and wonder about this discontent of the heart, this lack of a sense of complete satisfaction and closure regarding the question of love, we recognize that it is a very deep and profound discontent. It’s this discontent that has driven many of us to keep looking for the perfectly satisfying object, and we will do this until we are mature enough to see that the heart’s discontent has nothing to do with any imperfection in our love objects. Their apparent flaws don’t explain the mystery of why, after so long, the heart still hasn’t found what it’s looking for. It can take a long time to recognize that the depth and profundity of our dissatisfaction means it’s not going to be resolved by finding the right person, the right object, or the right situation. The real reason for it is that all these love objects, all these beloveds, are just stand-ins for what the heart is really looking for—its true Beloved. They may come close sometimes, but they will never completely do it for us. So we mature by realizing that there is no new object to be found that will finally prove to be the true Beloved, because the true Beloved is not an object that we can find on Earth. It’s unlike any earthly beloved that we’re familiar with.  

The Kabir poem shows that when we are in love and the Beloved is not there, not with us, the love naturally turns into yearning. The yearning is evidence of both love and separation. If we did not love, we wouldn’t yearn. If there was no separation, we wouldn’t yearn. That's why the journey toward the Beloved involves a great deal of yearning and longing, because we begin from the condition of separation. We begin with the discontent of the heart that loves and wants to be totally intimate with its true Beloved, but is aware of not having this intimacy—it knows that the Beloved is not even near. The yearning can feel like grief, but it’s slightly different. Grief has to do with loss, so that’s more when you’ve had the connection and known intimacy with the Beloved, but now it’s lost. Yearning means you don’t yet know what the intimacy is like, but you’re aware of the separation from it nevertheless. So we feel grief when the intimacy has been disrupted and we can no longer feel it, and then after a while the grief also turns into yearning. 

So, let’s summarize what we’ve learnt so far about this journey of the heart and get a basic outline of the path of love: The heart will not be satisfied and will not settle until it is united with its Beloved, and the inner Beloved is not going to show up unless the heart is completely faithful to it. There is therefore a process of emptying the heart of all its particular objects of love, and divesting our love of all that has form, image, shape, and quality. In that way the love is distilled, unified and focused. This gives it a power that can have a melting quality, a dissolving quality, and also a burning, annihilating quality. The mere intensification and deepening of the love dissolves all barriers and obstacles to its fidelity. As the heart becomes increasingly faithful to the intangible, formless Beloved, it recognizes the transitory and particular for what it is, seeing beyond the forms of things to their essence and meaning. And with this increasing fidelity to the truth beyond forms, the heart ripens and the love deepens even further.   

You could say that the mystical poverty of the heart is the final stage of cleansing and purifying the love and longing so that it becomes more truly for the inner Beloved—totally free from the reactions and associations of our early history and the situations in which we reenact it. Until this happens, we will continue to project our parents onto the Beloved to some degree, and also bring in all kinds of other projections, pretenses, defenses, and protections—all distractions that just get in the way and make our heart less open to what it truly seeks. So these all need to be seen, worked out, burnt out, and melted away, and that’s a large part of the function of the dark night of the heart, which comes about through our deepening and increasing fidelity to the inner Beloved. The longing we then experience can feel similar to the longing we’ve had before, as it may still be somewhat mixed with the longing we’ve had for our other loves, but because it is now more truly for the inner Beloved, it has more purity, more directedness, and more power. And once we get to a place where all the other objects of love are gone and we’re able to stay with the emptiness and poverty, the heart can now turn and begin to love and yearn purely for the inner Beloved. We still don’t necessarily know what the inner Beloved is in a clear and direct way, but we feel it doesn’t matter. We only know that we just want the Beloved, and nothing else. 

Our yearning for the Beloved has had different qualities throughout our journey, and as we’ve already seen, at this stage it’s felt as a longing to completely disappear into the Beloved. And that’s because, even if the lover hasn’t realized it yet, the Beloved is now manifesting its fundamental characteristic of nonbeingness. As the soul is touched by the Beloved deep within, she experiences this as a nearness that leads to the mystery of nonbeing, which she feels a profound love for. Yearning for union now means longing to disappear, to be gone. So we discover that one of the main ways our yearning for the Beloved can appear is as a yearning for cessation, for complete annihilation. We seek annihilation into the Beloved—we sometimes feel we want the Beloved to overwhelm us, to come and take us and leave nothing behind. We want to be taken in, to be enfolded, and completely absorbed, so that there’s absolutely nothing left but the Beloved. This feels like a return to source—surrendering the soul form to go back to the formless, from being to nonbeing. The yearning for cessation, which can be felt as a gentle, delicate, and vulnerable kind of yearning to melt and disappear, or as a fierce and passionate wish for annihilation, is the desire to be taken in by the Beloved, by the mystery, such that we are gone. It feels like nothing could be sweeter than to simply vanish without a trace. 

The emptiness of the Beloved is radical, because when the heart is emptied of everything, and all the objects, idols, and forms are gone, nothing arises to take their place. No thing. So when we’ve talked about the absolute, or the Beloved, arising and appearing as nothingness, that isn’t actually true. It doesn’t arise and appear, it’s simply what’s there when everything is gone. The nothingness is already there and always has been, but we haven’t seen it because we’ve been looking at all this other stuff. Initially we don’t recognize the truth of this radical emptiness and nothingness. We automatically see it as some kind of deficiency in which something is missing. We view it the same way we view a container that’s had all the contents taken out, so only the empty container remains. We feel we need to remedy the emptiness and put something back in to fill it up—especially the jewels and diamonds of our nature! But the Beloved is not like an empty container. The Beloved is the absence of everything, including the container.

So the intriguing thing we discover is that all we have given up, all that we have sacrificed at the altar of the Beloved, reappears now as an expression of the Beloved, as we now see that the Beloved is the inner secret nature of everything. Ultimately we had to let go of even our concept of God—whatever form or notion of divinity or divine being we had—in order to discover the formless Beloved. And now the Beloved reveals itself to be the inner essence of that and any notion of divine being. That’s why when some traditions talk about God, they describe it as having two aspects—the divine being and the divine essence. The divine essence is the essence of the Beloved. The divine being is the external appearance of the divine essence, just as everything we behold is the external appearance of the Beloved. It’s like the whole universe is the body of the Beloved, and the Beloved is the essence of that body.

It's in the language of love then that the lover’s desire for the Beloved expresses itself as a very deep and genuine yearning to just not be. So, you know the famous question: “To be or not to be?” Well, for the lover the answer is simple! Because for the lover, not to be is for the Beloved to appear. It’s not that the one is the cause of the other—it’s not like the disappearance of the lover is necessary for the Beloved to appear. No, the disappearance of the lover and the appearance of the Beloved are one and the same thing, because the Beloved is the liberation of nonbeing and the majesty of absolute nonexistence. This love for annihilation can therefore be seen as the heart’s way of expressing the desire for enlightenment. It’s what Buddhism calls Bodhichitta, which means the idea, the thought of enlightenment, and also the desire for it. In the beginning there is a desire for enlightenment, but when that deepens and matures, it becomes the desire for cessation, usually called the desire for Nirvana. So what is Nirvana? Well, it’s often understood to mean perfect bliss, but the literal translation of Nirvana is “extinguished,” or “blown out,” like a candle. So it actually refers to the self and suffering being completely extinguished. It’s the end of all that, and this cessation of the self and suffering is the appearance of Nirvana. 

We can see therefore that the desire for cessation is expressing a desire for the Beloved. Cessation and the Beloved are intimately connected, for the Beloved is the mystery that precedes all being, all existence—it is the nonbeing from which all being comes. So we long to disappear, and as we love the prospect of cessation and annihilation, we are actually loving the Beloved. It may feel different from the way we loved the Beloved before, but the Beloved has not changed—it’s just that we now know more of its fundamental nature. I say we “know” more, but we’ve recognized that our mind can’t really grasp all this yet. It’s the heart that is perceiving the mysterious truth of Beloved, and it’s the heart that knows what it really loves. It loves the prospect of simply disappearing, melting away, and there being nothing there. The heart feels that would be just wonderful. The mind says, “What an odd thing to want!” It's in the language of love then that the lover’s desire for the Beloved expresses itself as a very deep and genuine yearning to just not be. So, you know the famous question: “To be or not to be?” Well, for the lover the answer is simple! Because for the lover, not to be is for the Beloved to appear. It’s not that the one is the cause of the other—it’s not like the disappearance of the lover is necessary for the Beloved to appear. No, the disappearance of the lover and the appearance of the Beloved are one and the same thing, because the Beloved is the liberation of nonbeing and the majesty of absolute nonexistence.  

So this path of love is a passionate, intense, and often painful affair, but it’s a necessary one for the heart. And that’s because the inner Beloved can manifest its fullness, luminosity, and mystery in many different ways while still not appearing in the heart, which means the heart will not be satisfied. You see, the heart doesn’t just want the inner Beloved to appear—the heart wants the inner Beloved to appear in the heart, and it’s only natural that it won’t fully recognize it as the true Beloved of the heart until it appears there. We know that this can’t happen if the heart is filled with a multiplicity of beloveds, because there isn’t enough space for the inner Beloved to appear there. And we’ve seen that through shedding our attachments to all these other objects of love, we arrive at the mystical poverty of the heart. We feel that the heart is completely empty at that point, and that we don’t even have a heart, or any love—there’s just nothing. As I said, the inner Beloved is actually very close at this point, but we’re not seeing it because the veil of self is still there, even if its many beloveds are gone. And we’ve recognized how challenging it is to just be with this emptiness of the heart—to stay in the empty valley of love without trying to fill it with new loves or return to our old ones. 

The true longing and love for the Beloved is when the wish is for only the Beloved to be, and nothing else. It’s not really “I want to have the Beloved,” it’s more, “I love the Beloved so much I want it to be there in a way that makes me irrelevant.” That’s not how you feel in a human love relationship. There can be moments of complete surrender when two people want to disappear into each other, and they may do this for a while. But when it comes to the inner Beloved, the feeling is: “No, I don’t want the inner Beloved to disappear. I want to disappear.” And that’s not the same as with a human beloved. Perhaps at times there is a fantasy of you disappearing and the other person remaining there, but of course that doesn’t work in reality. So we can see now how this very deep yearning and total love for the Beloved is part of the reason why there have been so many fears and terrors along the way. Because it’s not just a matter of losing the other beloveds, it’s actually a matter of losing oneself, losing one’s separateness.