Be Not the Moon….

We say the moon is so bright tonight. We should be saying the sun reflects beautifully off the moon tonight. The sun is the source of the moon’s light. Please tell the moon this, because it thinks it shines on its own. We as individuals think we shine on our own. And in our present predicament the individual has shrunk so much that it is just the brain. So if we drug the brain, we change our selves. But the brain is not the source; it is only a vehicle. And the brain cannot love. Through drugs, the brain can produce pleasure; if that is the final goal, we are not looking at the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, we are the shadows.

Last week I wrote about lovers and the righteous. “We are to give up even survival over love. So much of the fight these days is because we believe we will not survive if we do not kill the other. Even this idea of survival has to go so that love of God shines here.” Now we need to ask, “Who wants to survive?” The answer is that the individual wants to survive, at all costs. And survival for the individual means having a certain level of safety. Hence,

But are we safe when we isolate ourselves? Not necessarily. And are we at risk when we engage? Also not necessarily. We are in fact isolated when we operate as if the individual is the sole entity and the soul’s true identity. In order to be an “individual”, we have to isolate ourselves from the sun, the Self, God, which guides us and keeps us truly safe.

The individual believes “kill or be killed”. In the Yoga Sūtras, clinging to life is the last of the five afflictions. From ignorance of who we really are, we fight to keep our small self, our character in our narrative, alive. In spiritual practice this small self, the moon, has to be put in its proper place. We have to cease to identify with it and instead use the small self merely as a foot soldier for the true Self.

To be Lovers, we can no longer identify with our individuality. This is not an easy task; it is not asked lightly. As someone who once loved to fight, I know what I am asking. Hate and fight feel so much more “alive” than love and peace. Are they? For whom are they more alive? The haters? The fighters? They imagine it as vital and a great rush, but even The Art of War by Sun Tzu says differently:

“Therefore those who win every battle are not really skillful—those who render others’ armies helpless without fighting are the best of all”. (trans. Thomas Cleary)

Killing does not help us survive; it is a small self solution designed to keep us in ignorance. Love is the only way to live, but to love we have to acknowledge the Heart to be the sun it is. The Heart informs everything.

This Love is not the opposite of hate. This love informs even hate. Hate is a mere emotion, while Love is the source of all. Hate is just twisted Love. It comes from our wrong understanding of ourselves and of life itself.

These foursquares foster inequality. We must give up our desire to be unequal. In order to be equal, we must give up survival of the small self. We all must own all these qualities to free ourselves from the above foursquares. When we do this, we will Love with all our Heart, mind, soul and strength—and even body and brain.

Even The Art of War says the greatest warrior wins without fighting and definitely without killing. We can discern without hating. We have to give up even hating those who hate. Loving is living.