Who doesn’t want love? I ask that question a lot. Can someone answer that question for me? When people say yes, they want love, I then tell them how to get it: be with your experience, let whatever comes up from your experience come up, and function appropriately on the physical plane. That is where everything breaks down. No one wants to do it.
Everyone says they want love, but they don’t want to accept that real Love comes from stillness. If we want real Love, we have to do the rigorous work of knowing our vibrations and stilling all of them; then Love, which is underneath it all, can emerge undistorted. This Love is not at the mercy of anything outside of us. “Outside of us” includes our bodies, senses, minds, emotions, intellects, narratives, habit energies—any vehicles or vibrations. This Love arises out of the Heart.
The practice is nothing new. The Yoga Sutras say that Yoga is the stilling of all vibrations. In the Bible, Psalm 46 says, “Be still, and know that I am God”. The Desert Fathers say for us to guard the Heart and all will be quiet—their word hesychia is Greek for “rest.” Kashmir Shaivism instructs us to rest in the Heart by a mere orientation of the will. A great Sufi Sheikh once wrote, “When your heart is emptied of beings it becomes filled with Being and from that moment love is born between you and other beings”.
We have the free will to choose Love or not. We recognize Love when we experience it because it is our nature; we have just covered it up and then forgotten it. But once it arises there is immediate knowledge. We have to have at least a trickle of Love within us to feel love from others. Therefore, I have to love myself in order to feel someone else loving me.
This is so seldom the case. Everyone has their moments when they’re likable, because at those moments they tend to have stilled even a little, so Love is flowing less obstructed within them. We have to be practicing to have those moments all the time. Strangely, we usually don’t like those moments in ourselves; we don’t feel we’re being ourselves. When you come into the meditation room and sit, you might not like you. And that’s a big problem. Who is it that doesn’t like you? The one that doesn’t like the moment is not you. The meditation room is the laboratory where, hopefully, we continually choose Love.
To get to the place where we continually choose Love, we must have a guide, and that guide must encourage real rigor in our practice. People love the concept of a tough, no-nonsense teacher. They just don’t want to sit in the same in the room with a tough teacher. They only want the concept, which allows for the idea without the rigor. You don’t have to do the work; you do the concept of the work.
But if you are doing the concept of the work, you are doing the concept of Love. If you want Love you have to go to the stillness that is beyond all conception.
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