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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3072, Sunday, February 10, 2007, Editor: Mark
You have considered yourself to be a separate "self"
only because of having regarded a solid object with a name that
is the body, as yourself. But in fact the body itself is nothing
but an insignificant, vastly intricate complex of electrical
wave-patterns, a series of rhythmic functions, a throbbing field
of energy and emptiness. What you actually are, then, is what
everybody else is: sentience itself. Therefore, instead of being
a puny self by way of an object, you are indeed everything.
- Ramesh Balsekar, posted to ANetofJewels
The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make
straight your hooks and nothing can hold you. Give up your
addictions. There is nothing else to give up. Stop your routine
of acquisitiveness, your habit of looking for results and the
freedom of the universe is yours. Be effortless.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
For the average person, love is a manifestation of the violent,
possessive doership of the ego. Whereas for the spiritual person,
it is not a sentiment at all, but a state of mind in which love
exists to the degree in which the selfish element is transcended.
According to the average person, the desire for possession is the
criterion, the touchstone of sincerity or reality by which love
is to be judged. Even the mother is accused of not loving her
child if she is not particularly possessive towards her baby.
Love - the sentiment, and love - the non-affective state of mind,
where a subject-object relationship does not exist, are infused
by the same force. Though basically not different, one is steeped
in egoistic involvement, the other unaffected and pure. The
former is exemplified by the love of a man for a woman, the
latter, sometimes called divine love or caritas, is a luminous
pool of light and not a beam focused on one object at a time.
- Ramesh Balsekar
It is possible through love for man to become God. And when God
becomes man, it is due to His love for His beings.
Meyer Baba, from The Path Of Love
And yet, love is what we crave. There is often a love/hate
relationship with the idea of love, most likely stemming from our
experiences as children where we loved helplessly. We projected
love out onto our loved ones - our mothers, fathers, brothers, or
sisters - and at some point found our loved ones to be
unreliable. We confused their actions with love and concluded
that love was not trustworthy.
People are definitely not trustworthy, because in general, they
are very busy protecting their story of who they think they are.
Since they are mostly involved in their story, they can only give
a certain amount of love before they start wondering, 'Well, when
do I get mine?' And since love has been identified as being
connected with another person, this sets up a whole continuation
of distrust around love. But love is not a person. Love is the
individual, collective, and universal soul. Love is God. Love is
truth. Love is beauty. Love is peace. Love is self. To know
yourself, to surrender to the truth of yourself, is to surrender
to love.
Many people are aware of their resistance, and they want to
surrender, but they don't know how. The only actual barrier to
surrender is in not seeing the underlying story you are telling
yourself about the danger of surrendering everything to love. And
the degree to which you hold back surrendering everything to love
is the degree to which you suffer. The degree to which you try to
maintain the story about who you think you are is the degree to
which you feel isolated from love. Until you realize, 'I want
truth, which is love, more than anything,' you will experience
yourself as separate from love. Love is the constant. Love is not
an aspect of truth. Truth, God, and self are aspects of love.
What is the worst that could happen if you surrender to love?
What we seem to fear the most is the broken heart. Yet the very
unwillingness for the heart to be broken is the broken heart. The
tragedy and the irony is that in order to avoid a broken heart,
people live in a state of broken-heartedness. In the willingness
to have the heart be broken a million, trillion, zillion times,
true love is revealed.
Let the whole world break your heart every instant of the
remainder of your life. Then this life can be lived in service to
love. It does not mean you stay in abusive relationships. It
means only to stay true to that which is always true to you, and
that is love. Anything else is a story. If the story is never
investigated, your whole life is lived on the assumption that the
story is real, and that your heart, your soul, and your love need
to be protected. But that assumption is actually a denial of your
heart, your soul, your love. It is the denial of self-love.
The great good news is that love is free and it has not gone
anywhere. In all of these aeons that you have been hiding from
love, love is still here, it is still open, it is still waiting
for your commitment, still waiting for you to say, 'Yes, I give
my life to the truth of love. I vow to let love live this life as
it will, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.'
Through honest self-investigation, it is possible to see why you
may not be surrendering to love, and to see that you actually
have the choice to surrender. It is a way to let the unconscious
storylines become conscious, the unknown become known. Ask
yourself this question: Why is it dangerous to surrender to love?
Not why is it right to surrender to love, or why is it good to
surrender to love, but why is it dangerous to surrender to love?
Let your individual consciousness drop down into the source of
consciousness, into the space where all of the reasons and
justifications for resisting surrender are seen simply as
stories, as something made up that you can very easily let go of.
Allow all of the stories, all of the defences, be seen for what
they are. Are any of these stories worth keeping? What is the
cost to your life?
The love that you search for everywhere is already present within
you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events. A
mountain can evoke this love. A sunset can evoke this love. But
finally, you must realize that you are this love. The source of
all love is within you.
From The Diamond In Your Pocket, by Gangaji
When you are willing to speak what's there, to show what's there,
you bless it, and you allow us to bless it. And blessing what is
allows what wants to come through us to come through. Because
what we've been taught through conditioning is to put a lid on
everything, to curse things, to keep them under wraps. What if we
let what is knocking come in?
- Jeannie Zandi