I’d like to write about love, or being loving today.
In this space I’ll quote Osho, and other people… I am not going to talk about what YOU call love, because what you call love is not love… unless you can call ‘loving ice cream,’ love.
What I would call love is the kind of allowing the kind of surrender, that you probably experience from time to time, like when you lower yourself into the hot tub, or occasionally when you lie down in your bed and all the tiredness and all the tension of the day bubbles out of you: rare, but beautiful.
You give yourself over totally, nothing held back, you are not worrying about what you want, what you get, what is seen, what you “need to” hide… just a total intimacy.
That is what love is, total trust.
Have you EVER experienced it? Probably not.
Instead, you call the play and pleasure love… it isn’t.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that people misunderstand the role of love. “They have made it into play and pleasure because they think that play and pleasure are more blissful than work,” he wrote. “But there is nothing happier than work. And love, precisely because it is the supreme happiness, can be nothing other than work.” I’m sharing this perspective with you for two reasons. First, you’re most likely to thrive on his approach, because everything, every single part of work is in your control… so you don’t desire anything that is a circumstance. By raising your vibration, even if it is temporary, like with an Avatar State Audio, this capacity of yours is at a peak. Here’s how Rilke finished his thought: “Lovers should act as if they had a great work to accomplish.”
Love has become a currency, a tool for blackmail, a tool for bragging rights. When I decided to finally fire my brother, he said: “But I love you…” as if it mattered in the context of employment…
You can only feel your own love, another loving you doesn’t give you any real feeling, any real experience
Some have the practice of love: they heard that being loving is a high vibration thing, so they practice being loving… but it’s a pretense, and it is going to kill them.
Here is an Osho quote:
Enlightenment is bound to take an unimaginable time because you will be fighting with shadows. You cannot conquer them, you cannot destroy them either. In fact, the more you fight with them, the more you believe in their existence. If you fight with your own shadow, do you think there is any possibility of your ever becoming victorious? It’s impossible. And it is not because the shadow is stronger than you that the victory is impossible. Just the contrary: the shadow has NO power, it has NO existence, and you start fighting with something which is non-existential — how can you win? You will be dissipating your energy. You will become tired and the shadow will remain unaffected. It will not get tired. You cannot kill it, you cannot burn it, you cannot even escape from it. The faster you run, the faster it comes behind you.
The only way to get rid of it is to SEE that it is not there at all. Seeing that a shadow is a shadow is liberation. Just seeing, no cultivation! And once the shadows disappear, your life has a luminosity of its own. Certainly there will arise great perfume, but it will not be something cultivated; it will not be something painted from the outside.
That’s the difference between a saint and a sage. A saint follows the path of self-cultivation. He practices non-violence, like Mahatma Gandhi; he practices truth, truthfulness; he practices sincerity, honesty. But these are all practices. And whenever you are practicing non-violence, what are you doing? What is really happening inside you? You must be repressing violence. When you are practicing — when you HAVE to practice — truth, what does it mean? It simply means untruth arises in you and you repress it and you go against it, and you say the truth. But the untruth has not disappeared from your being. You can push it downwards into the very basement of your being; you can throw it into the deep darkness of the unconscious. You can become completely oblivious of it. You can forget that it exists, but it exists and it is bound to function from those deep, dark depths of your being in such a subtle way that you will never be aware that you are still in its grip — in fact, far more so than before because when it was consciously felt you were not so much in its grip. Now the enemy has become hidden.
That’s my observation of Mahatma Gandhi. He observed, cultivated non-violence; but I have looked deeply into his life and he is one of the most violent men this century has known. But his violence is very polished; his violence is so sophisticated that it looks almost like non-violence. And his violence has such subtle ways that you cannot detect it easily. It comes from the back door; it is never at the front door. You will not find it in his drawing-room; it is not there. It has started living somewhere in the servants’ quarters at the back of the house where nobody ever goes, but it goes on pulling his strings from there.
For example, if ordinarily you are angry, you are angry with the person who has provoked it. Mahatma Gandhi would be angry with himself, not with the person. He would turn his anger upon himself; he would make it introverted. Now it is very difficult to detect it. He would go on a fast, he would become suicidal, he would start torturing himself. And in a subtle way he would torture the other by torturing himself.
In his ashram, if somebody was found drinking tea…. Now tea is so innocent, but it was a sin in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram. These ashrams exist by creating guilt in people; they don’t miss any opportunity to create guilt. That is their trade-secret, so no opportunity has to be missed. Even tea is enough; it has to be used. If somebody is found drinking tea, he is a sinner. He is committing a crime — far more than a crime, because a sin is something far deeper than a crime. If somebody was found….
And people used to drink tea. They would drink tea in hiding; they had to hide. Just to drink tea they had to be thieves, deceivers, hypocrites! That’s what your so-called religions have done to millions of people. Rather than making them spiritual they have simply made them, reduced them to hypocrites.
They would pretend that they didn’t drink tea, but once in a while they would be found red-handed. And Gandhi was searching, looking; he had agents planted to find out who was going against the rules. And whenever somebody was found he would be called…and Gandhi would go on a fast to punish himself.
“What kind of logic is this?” you will ask. It is a very simple logic. In India it has been followed for centuries. The trick is that Gandhi used to say, “I must not yet be a perfect Master, that’s why a disciple can deceive me. So I must purify myself. You could deceive me because I am not yet perfect. If I was perfect nobody could deceive me. How can you imagine deceiving a perfect Master? So there is some imperfection in me.”
Look at the humbleness! And he would torture himself; he would go on a fast. Now Gandhi is fasting because you have taken a cup of tea. How will YOU feel? His three days’ fast for you, just for a single cup of tea! It will be too heavy on you. If he had hit you on the head it would not have been so heavy. If he had insulted you, punished you, told you to go on a fast for three days, it would have been far simpler — and far more compassionate. But the old man himself is fasting, torturing himself, and you are condemned by every eye in the ashram. Everybody is looking at you as a great sinner: “It is because of YOU that the Master is suffering. And just for a cup of tea? How low you have fallen!”
And the person would go and touch his feet and cry and weep, but Gandhi wouldn’t listen. He had to purify himself.
This is all violence; I don’t call it non-violence. It is violence with a vengeance, but in such a subtle way that it is very difficult to detect. Even Gandhi may not have been aware at all of what he was doing — because he was not practicing awareness, he was practicing non-violence.
You can go on practicing…then there are a thousand and one things to be practiced. And when will you be able to get out of all that is wrong in your life? It will take an unimaginable time. And then, too, do you think you will be out of it? It is not possible; you will not be out of it.
I have never seen anybody arriving at truth by self-cultivation. In fact, the people who go for self-cultivation are not very intelligent people because they have missed the most fundamental insight: that we are not going anywhere, that God is not something to be achieved; God is already the CASE in you. You are pregnant with God, you are made of the stuff called God. Nothing has to be achieved — only a certain awareness, a SELF-awareness.
Love, self-awareness, being connected to Source
Was this article about love, or was it about self-awareness? Awareness of your shadows. One is useless candy, the other is the best thing that can happen to you.
Yesterday I managed to say something that allowed one of my students to connect to Source for the first time.
That is my job: to say something that jolts you awake, jolts you alert, jolts you aware… and then, Enlightenment is right there.
In the moments you are connected to Source, you are enlightened… then you fall back to “normal” but now you know. And now you can step back there, with much ease.
And Love, REAL love is only possible from there…
