Call to Love - Meditations by Anthony de Mello SJ
Therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of Man is
coming at an hour you do not expect. (Mt. 24:44)
Sooner or later there arises in every human heart the desire
for holiness, spirituality, God, call it what you will.
One hears mystics speak of a divinity all around them that
is within our grasp, that would make our lives meaningful and beautiful and
rich, if we could only discover it.
People have some sort of a vague idea as to what this thing
is. They read books and consult Gurus, in the attempt to find out what it is
that they must do to gain this elusive thing called Holiness or Spirituality.
People pick up all sorts of methods, techniques, spiritual
exercises, formulas; then after years of fruitless striving, they become
discouraged and confused and wonder what went wrong. Mostly they blame
themselves.
If they had practiced their techniques more regularly, if
they had been more fervent or more generous, they might have made it. But made
what? They have no clear idea as to what exactly this holiness that they seek
is, but they certainly know that their lives are still in a mess, they still
become anxious and insecure and fearful, resentful and unforgiving, grasping
and ambitious and manipulative of people. So once again they throw themselves
with renewed vigor into effort and labor that they think they need to attain
their goal.
They have never stopped to consider this simple fact. Their
efforts are going to get them nowhere.
Their efforts will only make things worse, as things become
worse when you use fire to put out fire.
Efforts does not lead to growth; effort, whatever the form
it may take, whether it be will power or habit or a technique or a spiritual
exercise, does not lead to change.
At best it leads to repression and a covering over of the
root disease.
Effort may change the behavior but it does not change the
person.
Just think what kind of a mentality it betrays when you ask,
"What must I do to get holiness?" Isn't it like asking, "How
much money must I spend to buy something?" What sacrifice must I
make?" What discipline must I undertake? What medication must I practice
in order to get it? Think of a man who wants to win the love of a woman and
attempts to improve his appearance or build his body or change his behavior and
practice techniques to charm her.
You truly win the love of others not by the practice of
techniques but by being a certain kind of person. And that is never achieved
through effort an techniques. And so it is with Spirituality and Holiness. Not
what you do is what brings it to you.
This is not a commodity that one can buy or a prize that one
can win. What matters is what you are, what you become.
B. If you would see yourself reflected in the mirror of
awareness the way you see your face reflected in a looking glass, that is,
accurately, clearly, exactly as it is without the slightest distortion or
addition.
C. If you observed this reflection without any judgement or
condemnation, you would experience all sorts of marvelous changes coming about
in you. Only you will not be in control of those changes or be able to plan
them in advance, or decide how and when they are to take place.
It is this non-judgmental awareness alone that heals and
changes and makes one grow. But in its own way and all its own time.
What specifically are you to be aware of?
1. Your reactions and your relationships. Each time you are
in the presence of a person, any person, or with nature or with any particular
situation, you have all sorts of reactions, positive and negative.
2. Study those reactions, observe what exactly they are and
where they come from, without any sermonizing or guilt or even any desire, much
less effort to change them. That is all that on needs for holiness to arise.
But isn't awareness itself an effort?
Not if you have tasted it even once. For then you will
understand that awareness is a delight, the delight of a little child moving
out in wonder to discover the world. For even when awareness uncovers
unpleasant things in you, it always brings liberation and joy. Then you will
know that the unaware life is not worth living, it is too full of darkness and
pain.
If at first there is a sluggishness in practicing awareness,
don't force yourself. That would be an effort again. Just be aware of your
sluggishness without any judgement or condemnation. You will then understand
that awareness involves as much effort as a lover makes to go to his beloved,
or a hungry man makes to eat his food, or a mountaineer to get to the top of
his beloved mountain; so much energy expended, so much hardship even, but it
isn't effort, it's fun! In other words, awareness is an effortless activity.
Will awareness bring you the holiness you so desire? Yes and
no. The fact is you will never know. For true holiness, the type that is not
achieved through techniques and efforts and repression, true holiness is
completely unself-conscious. You wouldn't have the slightest awareness of
its existence in you. Besides you will not care, for even the ambition to be
holy will have dropped as you live from moment to moment a life made full and
happy and transparent through awareness. It is enough for you to be watchful
and awake. For in this state your eyes will see the Savior. Nothing else, but
absolutely nothing else. Not security, not love, not belonging, not beauty, not
power, not holiness - nothing else will matter any more.
Your eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is
sound, your whole body is full of light; but when it is not sound, your body is
full of darkness. (Lk. 11:34)
We think the world would be saved if only we could generate
larger quantities of goodwill and tolerance. That's false.
What will save the world is not goodwill and tolerance but
clear thinking. Of what use is it to be tolerant of others if you are convinced
that you are right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong? That isn't
tolerance but condescension. That leads not to union of heats but to division,
because you are one-up and the others one-down. A position that can only lead
to a sense of superiority on your part and resentment on your neighbor's
thereby breeding further intolerance.
True tolerance only arises from a keen awareness of the
abysmal ignorance of everyone as far as truth is concerned. For truth is
essentially mystery.
The mind can sense but cannot grasp it, much less formulate
it. Our beliefs can point to it but cannot put it into words. In spite of this,
people talk glowingly about the value of dialogue, which at worst is a
camouflaged attempt to convince the other person of the rightness of your
position, and at best will prevent you from becoming a frog in the well who
thinks that his well is the only world there is.
What happens when frogs from different wells assemble to
dialogue about their convictions and experiences? Their horizons widen to
include the existence of wells other than their own. But they still have not
suspicion of the existence of the ocean of truth that cannot be confined within
the walls of conceptual wells. And our poor frogs continue to be divided and to
speak in terms of yours and mine, your experience, your convictions, your
ideology and mine. The sharing of formulas does not enrich the sharers, for
formulas like the walls of wells divide; only the unrestricted ocean unites.
But to arrive at this ocean of truth that is unbounded by
formulas, it is essential to have the gift of clear thinking.
What is clear thinking and how does one arrive at it?
I. The first thing you must know is that it does not call
for any great learning. It is so simple as to be within the reach of a
ten-year-old child. What is needed is not learning but unlearning, not talent
but courage.
You will understand this if you think of a little child in
the arms of an old, disfigured housemaid. The child is too young to have picked
up the prejudices of its elders. So when it snuggles in the woman's arms, it is
responding not to labels in its head; labels like white woman, black woman,
ugly, pretty, old, young, mother, servant maid, it is responding not to labels
such as these but to reality. That woman meets the child's need for love and
that is the reality the child responds to, not to the woman's name and figure
and religion and race and sect. Those are totally and absolutely irrelevant.
The child has as yet no beliefs and no prejudices. This is
the environment within which clear thinking can occur. And to achieve it, one
must drop everything one has learned and achieve the mind of the child that is
innocent of past experiences and programming which so cloud our way of looking
at reality.
II. Look into yourself and examine your reactions to persons
and situations, and you will be appalled to discover the prejudiced thinking
behind your reactions. It is almost never the concrete reality of this person
or thing that you are responding to. You are responding to principles,
ideologies, belief-systems, economic, political, religious, psychological
belief-systems; to preconceived ideas and prejudices, whether positive or negative.
III. Take them one at a time, each person and thing and
situation, and search for your bias, separating the reality here before you
from your programmed perceptions and your projections. And this exercise will
afford you a revelation as divine as any that the scriptures could provide you
with.
Prejudices and beliefs are not the only enemies of clear
thinking.
There is another pair of enemies called desire and fear.
Thinking that is uncontaminated by emotion, namely by desire and fear, and
self-interest, calls for an asceticism that is terrifying.
People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by
their head; it is done actually by the heart which first dictates the
conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend
it. So here is another source of divine revelation. Examine some of the
conclusions that you have arrived at and see how they are adulterated by
self-interest. This is true of every conclusion, unless you hold it
provisionally. Think how tightly you hold onto your conclusions regarding
people, for instance. Are those judgements completely free of emotion? If you
think they are, you have probably not looked hard enough.
This is the major cause of disagreements and division
between nations and individuals. Your interests do not coincide with mine, so
your thinking and your conclusions to not agree with mine.
How many people do you know whose thinking is at least
some-times opposed to their self-interest? How many times can you recall having
engaged in that kind of thinking yourself? How often have you succeeded in
placing an impenetrable barrier between the thinking going on in your head and
the fears and desires that agitate your heart? Each time you attempt that task,
you will understand that what clear thinking calls for is not intelligence.
That is easily come by - but the courage that has successfully coped with fear
and desire, for the moment you desire something or fear something, your heart
will consciously or unconsciously get in the way of your thinking.
This is a consideration for spiritual giants who have come
to realize that in order to find truth they need, not doctrinal formulations,
but;
A. A heart that divests itself of its programming and
its self-interest each time that thinking is in progress;
B. A heart that has nothing to protect and nothing to
ambition and therefore leaves the mind to roam unfettered, fearless and free,
in search of truth;
C. A heart that is ever ready to accept new evidence and
to change its views.
Such a heart then becomes a lamp that enlightens the
darkness of the whole body of humanity. If all human beings were fitted with
such hearts, people would no longer think of themselves as Communists or
Capitalists, as Christians or Muslims or Buddhists. The very clarity of their
thinking would show them that all thinking, all concepts, all beliefs are
lamps full of darkness, signs of their ignorance. And in that realization
the walls of their separate wells would collapse and they would be invaded by
the ocean that unites all peoples in the truth.
Everyone at some time or the other experiences feelings of
what is know as insecurity.
You feel insecure with the amount of money you have in the
bank, or the amount of love you are getting from your friend or the type of
educational background you have had. Or you have insecurity feelings regarding
your health or your age of your physical appearance.
If you were asked the question, "What is it that makes
you feel insecure?" you would almost certainly give the wrong answer.
You might say, "I don't have enough of the love of a
friend or I don't have the kind of academic training that I need," or some
such thing.
In other words, you would point to some outside condition
not realizing that insecurity feelings are not generated by anything outside of
you, but only by your emotional programming, by something you are telling
yourself in your head. If you change your program, your insecurity feelings
would vanish in a trice, even though everything in the outside world remained exactly
as it was before.
One person feels quite secure with practically no money in
the bank, another feels insecure even though he has millions. It isn't the
amount of money but their programming that makes the difference. One person has
no friends, yet feels perfectly secure in the love of people. Another feels
insecure even in the most possessive and exclusive of relationships. Again the
difference is in programming.
If you wish to deal with your feelings of insecurity these
are four facts that you must study well and understand.
I. First, it is futile to ease your insecurity
feelings by trying to change things outside of you.
Your efforts may be successful, though mostly they are not.
They may bring some relief, but the relief will be short-lived. So it is not
worth the energy and time you spend in improving your physical appearance or
making more money or getting further reassurances of love from your friends.
II. Second, this fact will lead you to tackle the
problem where it really is, inside your head. Think of the people who in
exactly the same condition that you find yourself in now, would not feel the
slightest insecurity. There are such people. Therefore the problem lies not
with reality outside of your but with you, in your programming.
III. Third, you must understand that this programming
of yours was picked up from insecure people who, when you were very young and
impressionable, taught you by their behavior and their panic reactions, that
every time the outside world did not conform to a certain pattern, you must
create an emotional turmoil within yourself called insecurity.
And you had to do everything in your power to rearrange the
outside world: Make more money, seek more reassurances, placate and please the
people you have offended, etc., etc. in order to make the insecurity feelings
go away. The more realization that you don't have to do this, that doing this
really solves nothing, and that the emotional turmoil is caused solely by you
and your culture, this realization alone distances you from the problem and
brings considerable relief.
IV. Fourth, whenever you are insecure about what may
happen in the future, just remember this: In the past six months or one year
you were so insecure about events which when, they finally came you were able
to handle somehow.
Thanks to the energy and the resources that that particular
present moment gave you, and not to all the previous worrying which only made
you suffer needlessly and weakened you emotionally. So, say to yourself: "If
there is anything I can do about the future, right now, I shall do it. Then I'm
going to just leave it alone and settle down to enjoy the present moment,
because all the experience of my life has shown me that I can only cope with
things when they are present, not before they occur. And that the present
always gives me the resources and the energy I need to deal with them.
The final disappearance of insecurity feelings will only
come when you have attained that blessed ability of the birds of he air and the
flowers of the field to live fully in the present, one moment at a time. The
present moment, no matter how painful, is never unbearable.
What is unbearable is what you think is going to happen in
the five hours or in five days: and those words you keep saying in your head,
words like, "This is terrible, this is unbearable, how long is this going
to last, and so on." Birds and flowers are blessed above humans in that
they have no concept of the future, no words in their heads, and no anxiety
about what their fellows think of them. That is why they are such perfect
images of the kingdom.
So do not be anxious about tomorrow, tomorrow will look
after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own. Set your mind on God's
Kingdom before everything else and all the rest will come to you as well.
If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a
flower, a bird, a child, they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live
from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future. So they
are spared the guilt and the anxiety that so torment human beings, and they are
full of the sheer joy of living, taking delight not so much in persons or
things as in life itself.
As long as your happiness is caused or sustained by
something or someone outside of you, you are still in the land of the dead.
The day you are happy for no reason whatsoever, the day you
find yourself taking delight in everything and in nothing, you will know that
you have found the land of unending joy called the kingdom.
To find the kingdom is the easiest thing in the world, but
also the most difficult. Easy because it is all around you and within you, and
all you have to do is reach out and take possession of it. Difficult because if
you wish to possess the kingdom you may possess nothing else.
That is, you must drop all inward leaning on any person or
thing, withdrawing from them forever the power to thrill you, or excite you, or
to give you a feeling of security or well being.
For this you first need to see with unflinching clarity this
simple and shattering truth: Contrary to what your culture and religion have
taught you, nothing, but absolutely nothing can make you happy.
The moment you see that, you will stop moving from one job
to another, one friend to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru
to another. None of these things can give you a single minute of happiness. The
can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure that initially grows in
intensity, then turns into pain if you lose them, and into boredom if you keep
them.
Think of the numberless persons and things that so excited
you in the past. What happened? In every single instance they ended up by
causing you suffering, or boredom, did they not? It is absolutely essential
that you see this because till you do, there is no question of your ever
finding the kingdom of joy. Mostly people are not prepared to see till they
have suffered repeated disillusionment and sorrow. And even then only one in a
million has the desire to see.
They just keep going at it, pathetically knocking at the
door of other creatures, begging bowl in hand, craving affection and approval
and guidance and power and honor and success. For they obstinately refuse to
understand that happiness is not in these things.
If you search within your heart you will find something
there that will make it possible for you to understand: a spark of
disenchantment and discontent, which if fanned into flame will become a raging
forest fire that will burn up the whole of the illusory world you are living
in, thereby unveiling to your wondering eyes the kingdom that you have always
lived in unsuspectingly.
Have you ever felt disgusted with life, sick at heart of
constantly running away from fears and anxieties, weary of your begging rounds,
exhausted from being dragged about helplessly by your attachments and
addictions? Have you ever felt the utter meaninglessness of working for a
degree, then finding a job, then settling down to a life of boredom; or, if you
are an achiever settling down to a life of emotional turmoil caused by the
things that you are chasing after? If you have, and is there a single human
being who hasn't the divine flame of discontent has arisen within your heart.
Now is the time to feed it before it gets stamped out by the routine chores of
life.
Now is the Holy Season when you simply must find the time to
get away and look at your life, allowing the flame to grow and grow as you
look, refusing to let anything distract you from this task.
Now is the time to see that absolutely nothing outside of
you can bring you lasting joy. But the moment you do that, you will notice that
a fear arises in your heart. That fear that if you allow the discontent to be,
it will turn into a raging passion that will grip you and cause you to revolt
against everything that your culture and your religion, hold dear; against a
whole way of thinking and feeling and perceiving the world that they have
brainwashed you into accepting.
This devouring flame will cause you not just to rock the
boat, but to burn the boat to ashes. Suddenly you will find yourself living in
an altogether different world, infinitely removed from the world of the people
around you, for everything that others hold dear, everything they are crying
their hearts out for, honor, power, acceptance, approval, security, wealth, is
seen for the stinking garbage that it is. It disgusts and nauseates. And
everything others are forever running away from, holds no terrors for you any
more. You have become serene and fearless and free, for you have stepped out of
your illusory world and into the kingdom.
Do not confound this divine discontent with the hopelessness
and despair that sometimes drive people to madness and to suicide. That is not
the mystical drive to life but the neurotic drive to self-destruction. Do not
confound it withe the whining of people who are forever complaining about
everything. These people are not mystics but bores, merely agitating for
improvement of prison conditions, whereas what they need to do is burst out of
prison into freedom.
Most people, when they feel the stirring of this discontent
within their hearts, either run away from it and drug themselves with the
fevered pursuit of work and social life and friendship; or they channel the
discontent into social work, literature, music, the so-called creative pursuits
that make them settle for reform, when what is needed is revolt.
These people, even though they are full of activity, are not
really alive at all: they are dead, content to live in the land of the dead.
The test that your discontent is divine is the fact that it
has no trace of sadness or bitterness to it at all. On the contrary even though
it often arouses fear within your heart, it is always accompanied by joy, the
joy of the kingdom.
And here is a parable of that kingdom: It is like a treasure
lying buried in a field. The man who found it buried it again, and for sheer
joy went and sold everything he had and bought that field. If you haven't found
the treasure as yet, don't waste your time searching for it. It can be found
but it may not be searched for. You don't have to slightest notion what the
treasure is.
All you are familiar with is the drugged happiness of your
present existence. So what would you search for? And where? No, search rather
in your heart for the spark of discontent, and tend the flame till it becomes a
conflagration and your world is burnt down to a heap of rubble.
Young or old, most of us are discontented merely because we
want something - more knowledge, a better job, a finer car, a bigger salary.
Our discontent is based upon our desire of "the more." It is only
because we want something more that most of us are discontented. But I am not
talking about that kind of discontent. It is the desire for "the more"
that prevents clear thinking, whereas if we are discontented, not because we
want something, but without knowing what we want; if we are dissatisfied with
our jobs, with making money, with seeking position and power, with tradition,
with what we have and with what we might have; if we are dissatisfied, not with
anything in particular but with everything, then I think we shall find that our
discontent brings clarity. When we don't accept or follow, but question,
investigate, penetrate, there is an insight out of which comes creativity, joy.
Mostly the discontent that you feel comes from not having
enough of something - you are dissatisfied because you think you do not have
enough money or power or success or fame or virtue or love, or holiness. This
is not the discontent that leads to the joy of the kingdom. Its source is greed
and ambition and its fruit is restlessness and frustration.
The day you are discontented, not because you want more
of something but without knowing what it is you want; when you are sick at
heart of everything that you have been pursuing so far, and you are sick of the
pursuit itself, then your heart will attain a great clarity, an insight that
will cause you mysteriously to delight in everything and in nothing.
Think of some of the painful events in your life. For how
many of them are you grateful today, because thanks to them you changed and
grew.
Here is a simple truth of life that most people never
discover. Happy events make life delightful but they do not lead to self-discovery
and growth and freedom. That privilege is reserved to the things and persons
and situations that cause us pain.
Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and
liberation. In the light of this truth return to your life now and take a look
at one or another of the events that you are not grateful for, and see if you
can discover the potential for growth that they contain which you were unaware
of and therefore failed to benefit from. Now think of some recent event that
caused you pain, that produced negative feelings in you.
Whoever or whatever caused those feelings was your Teacher,
because they revealed so much to you about yourself that you probably did not
know. And they offered you an invitation and a challenge to self-understanding,
self-discovery, and therefore to growth and life and freedom.
I. Try it out now, identify the negative feeling that this
event aroused in you. Was it anxiety or insecurity, jealousy or anger or guilt.
What does that emotion say to you about yourself, your values, your way of
perceiving the world and life and above all your programming and conditioning.
If you succeed in discovering this, you will drop some
illusion you have clung to till now, or you will change a distorted perception
or correct a false belief or learn to distance yourself from your suffering, as
you realize that it was caused by your programming and not by reality; and you
will suddenly find that you are full of gratitude for those negative feelings
and to that person or even that caused them.
II. Now take this one step further. Look at everything that
you think and feel and say and do that you do not like in yourself. Your
negative emotions, your defects, your handicaps, your errors, your attachments
and neuroses and hangups and yes, even your sins. Can you see everyone of them
as a necessary part of your development, holding out a promise of growth and
grace for you and others, that would never have been there except for this
thing that you so disliked.
And if you have caused pain and negative feelings to others,
were you not at that moment a teacher to them, an instrument that offered them
a seed for self-discovery and growth? Can you persist in this observation, in
your observation till you see all of this as a happy fault, a necessary sin
that brings so much good to you and to the world?
If you can, your heart will be flooded with peace and
gratitude and love and acceptance of every single thing. And you will have
discovered what people everywhere are searching for and never find. Namely, the
fountain head of serenity and joy that hides in every human heart.
When you deal with blind people it dawns on you that they
are attuned to realities that you have no idea of. Their sensitivity to the
world of touch and smell and taste and sound is such, as to make the rest of us
seem like dull clods. We pity persons who have lost their sight but rarely take
into account the enrichment that their other sense offer them. It is a pity
that those riches are bought at the heavy price of blindness and it is quite
conceivable that we could be as alive and finely attuned to the world as blind
people are without the loss of our eyes.
It is not possible, not even conceivable, that you would
ever awaken to the world of love unless you pluck out, chop off, those parts of
your psychological being that are called Attachments.
If you refuse to do this, you will miss the experience of
Love, you miss the only thing that gives meaning to human existence. For
love is the passport to abiding joy and peace and freedom. There is only one
thing that blocks out entry into that world and the name of that thing is
Attachment.
It is produced by the lusting eye that excites craving
within the heart and by the grasping hand that reaches out to hold, possess and
make one's own, and refuses to let go. It is this eye that must be gouged out,
this hand that must be cut off if Love is to be born. With those mutilated
stumps for hands you can grasp nothing any more. With those empty sockets for
eyes you suddenly become sensitive to realities whose existence you have never
suspected.
Now at last you can love. Till now all you had was certain
good heartedness and benevolence, a sympathy and concern for others, which you
mistakenly took for Love but has as little in common with Love, as a flickering
candle flame has with the light of the sun.
What is Love? It is a sensitivity to every portion of
reality within you and without, together with a whole-hearted response to that
reality.
Sometimes you will embrace that reality, sometimes you will
attack it, sometimes you will ignore it, and at others you will give it your fullest
attention, but always you will respond not from need but from sensitivity.
And what is an attachment? A need, a clinging that blunts
your sensitivity, a drug that clouds your perception. That is why as long
as you have the slightest attachment for anything or any person Love cannot be
born.
For Love is sensitivity, and sensitivity that is impaired
even in the slightest degree is sensitivity destroyed.
Just as the malfunctioning of one essential piece of a radar
set distorts reception, an attachment distorts your response to what you
perceive.
There is no such thing as defective love, or deficient love,
or partial love. Love like sensitivity either is in all its fullness or it
simply is not. You either have it whole, or you have it not.
So it is only when attachments disappear that one enters the
boundless realm of spiritual freedom called Love. One is now released to see
and to respond. But you must not confound this freedom with the indifference of
those who have never passed through the stage of attachment.
How could you pluck out an eye or amputate a hand that you
do not have? This indifference that so many people mistake for love (because
they are attached to no one, they think that they love everyone) is not
sensitivity, but a hardening of the heart that has come about from rejection or
disillusionment or the practice of renunciation.
No, one must brave the stormy seas of attachments if one has
to arrive at the land of love.
Some people, never having set sail have convinced themselves
that they have arrived. One must be able-bodied and clear-sighted before the
sword can do its work and the world of love can arise in one's awareness; and
make no mistake, this is only achieved through violence. It is only the violent
who carry off the kingdom.
Why the violence? Because left to its own devices life would
never produce love, it would only lead you to attraction, from attraction to
pleasure, then to attachment, to satisfaction, which finally leads to
wearisomeness and boredom. Then comes a plateau. Then once again the weary
cycle: attraction, pleasure, attachment, fulfillment, satisfaction, boredom.
All of this mixed with the sorrow, the pain, that makes the cycle a roller
coaster.
When you have gone repeatedly round and round the cycle, a
time finally comes when you have had enough and want to call a halt to the
whole process. And if you are lucky enough not to run into something or someone
else that catches your eye, you will have at least attained a fragile peace.
That is the most that life can give you; and you can mistakenly equate this
state with freedom and you die without ever having known what it means to be
really free and to love.
No, if you wish to break out of the cycle and into the world
of love, you must strike while the attachment is alive and raw, not when you
have outgrown it. And you must strike not with the sword of renunciation, for
that kind of mutilation only harden, but with the sword of awareness.
What must you be aware of? Three things;
I. First you must see the suffering that this drug is
causing you, the ups and downs, the thrills, the anxieties and disappointments,
the boredom to which it must inevitably lead.
II. Second, you must realize what this drug is cheating you
out of, namely, the freedom to love and to enjoy every minute and every thing
in life.
III. Third, you must understand how, because of your
addiction and your programming, you have invested the object of your attachment
with a beauty and a value it simply does not have; what you are so enamored of
is in your head, not in your beloved person or thing. See this and the sword of
awareness breaks the spell.
It is commonly held that it is only when you feel deeply
loved yourself, that you are able to go out in love to others. This is not
true. A man in love, does indeed go out into the world not in love but in
euphoria. For him the world takes on an unreal, rose hue, which it loses the
moment the euphoria dies. His so called love is generated not by his clear
perception of reality but by the conviction, true or false, that he is loved by
someone - a conviction that is dangerously fragile, because it is founded on
the unreliable, changeable people, who he believes love him. And who can at any
moment pull the switch and turn off his euphoria. No wonder those who walk this
path never really lose their insecurity.
(When you go out to the world because of the love that
someone else has for you, you are all aglow not with your perception of reality
but with the love that you have received from someone else, someone else controls
the switch and when it is switched off the glow fades away.)
As you use the sword of awareness to move from attachment
into love, there is one thing you must keep in mind; Don't be harsh or
impatient, or hating of yourself. How can love grow out of such attitudes? But
rather hold on to the compassion and the matter-of-factness with which the
surgeon plies his knife. Then you may find yourself in the marvelous condition
of loving the object of your attachment and enjoying it even more than before,
but simultaneously enjoying every other thing, and every other person just as
much.
That is the litmus test for finding out if what you have is
love. Far from becoming indifferent, you now enjoy everything, and everyone
just as much as you did the object of your attachment. Only now there are no
more thrills and therefore no more suffering and suspense. In fact you could be
said to be enjoying everything and enjoying nothing. Because you have made the
great discovery that what you are enjoying on the occasion of each thing and
person is something within yourself.
The orchestra is within you and you carry it with you
wherever you go. The things and people outside you merely determine what
particular melody the orchestra will play. And when there is no one or noting
that has your attention, the orchestra will play a music of its own; it needs
no outside stimulation. You now carry in your heart a happiness that
nothing outside of you can put there, and nothing can take away.
Here then is the other test of love.
You are happy for no reason that you know.
Does this love last? There is no guarantee that it does. For
while love cannot be partial it can be of temporary duration. It comes and goes
in the measure that your mind is awake and aware or has gone off to sleep again.
But this much is certain, once you have had even a fleeting taste of this thing
called Love, you will know that no price is too high, no sacrifice too great,
not even the loss of one's eyes, nor the amputations of one's hand, if you can
have in exchange the only thing in the world that makes your life worthwhile.
It is a sobering thought that the finest act of love you
can perform is not an act of service but an act of contemplation, of seeing.
When you serve people, you help, support, comfort,
alleviate pain. When you see them in their inner beauty and goodness, you
transform and create.
I. Think of some of the people you like and are drawn to
you.
Now attempt to look at each of them as if you were seeing
them for the first time, not allowing yourself to be influenced by your past
knowledge or experience of them, whether good or bad.
Look for things in them that you may have missed because of
familiarity, for familiarity breeds staleness, blindness and boredom. You
cannot love what you cannot see afresh. You cannot love what you are not
constantly discovering anew.
II. Having done this move on now to people you dislike.
First, observe what is it in them that you dislike, study
their defects impartially and with detachment.
That means you cannot use labels like proud, lazy, selfish,
arrogant. The label is an act of mental laziness, for it is easy to stick a
label onto someone. It is difficult and challenging to see this person in
his/her uniqueness.
You must study those defects clinically, that means, you
must first make sure of your objectivity.
A. Consider the possibility that what you see as a defect in
them, may not be a defect at all, but really something that your upbringing and
conditioning have led you to dislike.
B. If after this you still see a defect there, understand
that the origin of the defect lies in childhood experiences, past
conditionings, faulty thinking and perception; and above all in unawareness,
not in malice.
As you do this, your attitude will change into love and
forgiveness, for to study, to observe, to understand is to forgive.
C. Having made this study of defects, now search for the
treasures buried in this person that your dislike prevented you from seeing
before.
D. And as you do this, observe any change of attitude or
feeling that comes over you, for your dislike had clouded the vision and
prevented you from seeing.
You can now move on to each of the persons you live and work
with, observing how each of them becomes transformed in your eyes when you look
at them in this way.
In seeing them thus it is an infinitely more loving gift
that you offer them that any act of service. For in doing this, you have
transformed them, you have created them in your heart and, given a certain amount
of contact between you and them they will be transformed in reality too.
III. Now make this same gift to yourself. If you have
been able to do it for others that should be fairly easy. Follow the same
procedure: no defect, not neuroses is judged or condemned. You have not judged
others, you will be amazed now that you yourself are not being judged.
Those defects are probed, studied, analysed, for a better
understanding that leads to love and forgiveness, and you will discover to your
joy that you are being transformed by this strangely loving attitude that
arises within you towards this thing you call yourself. An attitude that arises
within you and moves out through you to every living creature.
