(Translated by Kirill Zubarev)
QUESTION: There are so many people now who are engaged in all sorts of practices of self-perfection, they “work on themselves.” Such practices can bring tangible results, and the practices, of course, are able to get a feeling of some kind of spiritual transformation and internal progress. So, can such sense of self-growth correspond to the reality?
ANSWER: It is known that real change in human is a change of his average state of being. Human evolution is a change of his ordinary, everyday state. A human is formed, composed of many sophisticated “parts” and “systems”. The average condition of a human is the result of the combination work of all these “systems”. Every “particle” of a human makes its contribution to the final result. It turns out that a path to harmony means a change of the whole human, not only just a part of him.
An erroneous feeling of “spiritual self growth” appears frequently for obvious and real reasons.
One of the reasons of a false sense of progress are unusual experiences that can occur during meditation or during some kind of psychotechniques. Thus, for example, one is able to see the Divine Light, feels the universal love, feels the cosmic energy flow and experiences different subtle states, etc. Also, the reason for such unreasonable feelings of spiritual progress can be a discovery of unusual abilities such as clairvoyance, etc.
But, all that is no more than a sort of extension of perception. For example, if during your meditation, you manage to see the Divine Light, but at the same time if one of your close relatives plunges you into depression again, it means that you have not changed. It just means that only your own ability to see the Divine Light has changed. In this case, the ability to perceive has changed, but the concrete person the one who sees, the one who acts, has not changed and remains the same.
Achieving higher states of consciousness is like a tour to distant and desirable worlds, but such a tour does not necessarily mean a change of place of residence, it does not necessarily imply the entire change of a human … (It should be noted that there are rare occasions when even such a single experience can completely change the whole human. In this case, that relative of yours, who was constantly annoying you before, has suddenly stopped being “a stumbling block” for you).
The second reason for a false sense of progress is the seeming change of the average state.
All at once, one’s usual state of mood can improve, one’s interests and relationships with other people start to change. In other words, the whole lifestyle changes … However, this may just be the result of the replacement of some habits and stereotypes with other ones. In this case, one’s activities and experiences tend to change. But one who acts, one who experiences all that, the whole human does not change and remains the same.
For example, some time ago you might have cared a lot about “money” and “women” and now you are really interested in “meditation” and “enlightenment”. It means that your interests have changed, but it does not mean that you have changed yourself. It’s as if you were tightened a wooden spoon roughly in your hand, and now, instead of it, you are delicately handling a silver fork. But, eventually, you notice that your hunger has not gone away!
These changes are similar to the process of “plastering” one’s consciousness. Its ideal looking glass is buried under a compressed layer of old rubbish called “personality”. So, human starts to pile another new layer of techniques, methods, philosophy on this old stuff. Gradually the surface becomes perfectly smooth, almost like a mirror. Different techniques work, and the human thinks that he has changed.
This new layer accretes, grows in such a way that it can not be distinguished from the first one, and only in some extreme situations, an old “bottom” can appear, buried under a layer of what we have learned, of what we have already gotten used to. Different people need different blows to make this “plaster” come off them and revealing the reality. For example, it could be a sudden fright. The strongest and always the most guaranteed blow for anyone is one’s own death. But it is not necessary to keep waiting until it happens just to find out what state you are in now…
QUESTION: So, how can one find out what has changed inside of one’s personality or if one has changed entirely? Are these seeming changes real?
ANSWER: It is very easy. The whole Universe is an endless ocean of energy. All that is in the Universe is a manifestation of this energy. Everything is connected to a single whole. A human is also energy. All of his qualities are a manifestation of his energy. Vices represent imperfect flows of energy, a some kind of its turbulences, narrow and dark places, etc.
If the great energy of the Universe happens to be flowing through a human, one starts to experience what is called love. This great energy entirely permeates the whole Universe, linking everything into one. When this energy flows through a human, one receives communion with the harmony of the whole Universe. For love is an attraction to perfection, to wholeness, to non-duality, to what is beyond harmony. If you begin to love someone, it means that you start to feel separated from someone you love. Love is an attraction to someone you are separated from. If you get fully connected, love disappears. There is only total existence. The flow of this energy is so complete that it can entirely capture the whole human. And if at this moment one manages to look at oneself, it will become clear who one is. It is now obvious where in the depths of one’s being is spaciousness and clarity, and where there are just bottlenecks and darkness.
And above all, such a flow does not always show what you really represent, but it cleanses you and the bottlenecks start to become wider, the curved places start to straighten…
Love is a great “diagnostician” and “cleaner”.
QUESTION: Could you tell more about all that? And what is “ordinary” love?
ANSWER: What is commonly called love, including its strongest manifestation, up to full happiness or unhappiness is a mere shadow of the great mystical power that is behind it. This mystical power itself is Love.
What people usually experience is simply passion caused by addictions, but it is not love. It is a shadow of love, but not love itself. Passion can be so strong that it can lead one to suicide or to a paradise on earth, but all that is just passion.
That’s what can be compared with the following. Imagine an old rare stamp which costs several millions of dollars (such stamps do really exist). This is a stamp, which depicts the “Sistine Madonna” by Raphael. For a collector this stamp can mean more than his life. Finally, he gets it, admires it, looks at the imprint on the corner … At this moment he does not think about any Madonna! What on earth has Madonna to do with anything? The stamp by itself is what is so important to him!
Madonna was the reason Raphael painted that picture. The picture was the cause of printing that stamp. The stamp, rather than the Madonna, causes a storm of feelings in the collector. Due to the stamp and not because of the Madonna, he rejoices or grieves. The farther the Madonna is from the stamp, in the same way love is far from passion that make people fly up to heaven, or to take their own life.
So, what we call love, in other words, are all kinds of experiences. And the cause of these experiences is Love itself.
All “troubles” are due to the fact that an ordinary human is not able to completely experience all existence. First, he singles out and isolates different objects, taking them separately from everything that is around him, from the whole. Second, even when dealing with the object “cut off from the whole”, he does not see the whole object entirely, and he sees again just only one of its properties, only one aspect. Third, he is divided inside into many parts. He is not holistic. Some of these parts, besides, are in conflict with each other. It turns out that a part of the whole deals with a part of another one’s wholeness. How can there be a real, veritable, whole experience? Just shreds…
These “shreds” are called “relations” to something. In particular, relations between people…
QUESTION: Could you explain it again in connection with love?
ANSWER: There are different kinds of relationships between you and the outside world: “men and I”, “women and I”, “my parents and I”, “my children and I”, “my friends and I”, “nature and I”, “music and I” and so on. Refracted in specific ways, the energy of love causes the experiences that correspond to these relationships. People perceive these experiences as love. So, it turns out that for each type of relationship there is its own kind of love.
Therefore, we can say that there are different kinds of love with various aspects. For example, the purest, most sublime, the brightest love between a man and a woman. This is one kind of love.
A mother’s love for her children, it is a completely different kind of love, and it is not like the love between a man and a woman. A mother loves her child in a different way. It is another kind of love.
Love for parents is not like anything else either. It differs from the love between a man and a woman, and from love for children. There can be love for our friends, and it will be different, too. A love of nature is like no other, someone can be crazy about the sea or the mountains … And again, such love is not like other kinds of love. If you pay attention to yourself, you’ll notice that love for arts, for music or painting, for example, is also special.
There is also a religious love…
To understand the anatomy of your soul, just look at how you love. All the narrow and dark places of your soul give a special contribution to your feelings, colouring them with different respective experiences, such as jealousy, for instance.
Q: Tell us more about it…
ANSWER: There are a number of features that can be found in ordinary love…
This is the first sign of human love. All normal and good people are necrophiliacs. They love the dead. Necrophilia is the love of corpses. Almost all normal people are necrophiliacs. When you think that you love a living human, you are deeply mistaken, in fact, you love a dead one. And you create this corpse! A human head is a mausoleum, which houses your lover’s carefully manufactured a mummy.
It does not take much time and effort to make such mummy. All that happens very simply. When you fall in love with someone, suddenly that human becomes quite unique for you and different from all the others. You isolate that human, who becomes really special to you, from the crowd. You start to think about and to dream about that human …
Love makes you think about your lover. And you always remember just what you like in him or her. At this point, love shows itself through flashbacks. When you are separated, you can experience only this kind of love, which are memories. If you cannot touch your lover with your hand or with your look, you touch him or her with your thoughts and dreams.
This entails what is called crystallization. Crystallization is a creation of a sustainable image of someone you love. You crystallize in your mind an image and this image gets fixed inside of you. You constantly refine it, finish and polish it, working at it without any rest … So, you create an image, a pattern, a picture that you love.
But this is not the original! In fact, it is a copy of a living human, but it’s not the living human as he or she is, it’s just a scheme, which has nothing to do with reality in any way. This image can be very, very similar to the original. But it is dead. It is just full of some fixed ideas about that. In fact, it turns out that you love someone else, a person that does not exist, the human that you have created yourself.
And then, the most important thing happens. You start to get more acquainted with your lover, you begin to know your lover better and better until one day you find out that the human you love is different from your ideas about him. He does not correspond to your expectations. In fact, you have already got a projection of what he should be …
In the end, there will be a situation that will let you see that the man or woman you love is a living person and he or she is different from what you would like to have. It seems as if you had drawn a picture, and then you discover that the original is different from the image of your lover you created.
And, what happens next, this is really too much. You begin to correct the original according to the pictures already drawn in your mind ! You start to correct the original so that it can become similar to the image that you carry in your head and correspond to your expectations.
This is the second sign of ordinary people’s love. Ordinary love is rape, a rape of someone you love. The first sign is necrophilia, and the second one is a rape of a living human being in order to bring him into line with the dead scheme in the head. Why does the rape start? If your love is true, then, of course, you want to make your lover be better and you try to help him. But he, dear, is so silly that he cannot understand it… So the rape starts. Moreover, all that is determined by a sincere desire to help, which comes from your true love…
Without any doubt, such behavior – necrophilia and rape – is not the result of any subtle calculation or analysis. By acting so, you are just following your mood, your emotions. You are acting sincerely until you realize one day what you are really doing…
In fact, if you want to change someone, it means you do not like this person. You’re lying to yourself, thinking that you love someone. In this case, your attitude can be expressed by the words “he’s good, but some improvement is needed”. You happened to catch someone who was by your side at that time, someone who was available, and you wanted to make that poor raw material into your dream. Be honest now, you wanted to correct him or her for your own self and to make him or her fit you and your love. All that gives you the possibility to love him without any problems, satisfying yourself and also to be troubled by him as little as possible.
A few decades ago some people started the process of domesticating foxes. They selected only good-natured animals for breeding. Animals with undesirable traits were not allowed for breeding. So, they got domestic foxes. They were all very friendly to people and not aggressive. By their nature and behavior all those animals were no different from dogs. They stopped being foxes. They became dogs. Later it was found that such foxes did not have any distinct individuality and they were less intelligent. They were very convenient for people as animals, but they had lost their wild natural beauty, grace and strength. Having “cleansed” from the fox all the qualities that were not desirable, they lost what made these animals different from others … The same thing happens with your lover when you try to “remodel” him.
If we consider that carefully, we will see that the third quality of ordinary love is just business. Why can ordinary love be business? Because you want something from your lover, you expect something from him. For example, you want your lover to be near you so that you can see him or so that he can love you. More and so, that he can love you in a form that is appropriate for you. Or, may be, so that he dresses as you want, or studies in a certain institute, or that he tells you specific words, gives you what you like, perfects himself and that he has other parents … and so on without end…
There can be millions of demands, or only one. It does not matter. It is important that there is something you want; you want it in exchange for your love. So, you give your love in exchange for what you want. As soon as you see that your desire is not fulfilled and than your expectations have not come true and your lover does not correspond to what you want from him, you will get angry.
This is «unfair business». You give him love and he, in return, does not give you what you would like to have. When you see that you have been cheated, i.e. your partner’s «business» is dishonest, you start to rape…
It turns out that ordinary love is conventional, i.e. your love for somebody or feeling of displeasure depends on some conditions. It is necessary that the one you love can fulfill some conditions and can be this or that. If not, and note that your love is sincere, the rape starts as you want to help him with your pure heart. You want to make someone you love perfect. You begin to fight with his defects. You start to “rescue” him. So, you are supposed to privately know better than he himself what he should be; because you are in love with him, you know better.
The fourth quality of ordinary love is loss of freedom. Such loss is caused by a lie. By loving someone you imprison yourself and you want to imprison your lover, too. First, you imprison yourself.
It happens in the following way. If you love someone, you want to please him. You also want to be loved. You think about your behavior. You analyze it. You evaluate it…
You consider each step that your lover takes, thinking: “If I act so, will he like it or not? Maybe, I could do something different? Maybe I shouldn’t do it at all?” You choose, in your opinion, the best alternative for what to wear, for what to say, for how to smile, etc. You remodel and deform yourself, distorting yourself in accordance with what your lover is sure to like. You add something to yourself, and there is also something that you take away … Your behavior becomes artificial. You start to lie in order to please your partner. So you lose your naturalness, imprisoning yourself.
The chosen behavior is insincere and artificial, as it is generated by your mind, your thoughts, and not by your heart. Your heart generates the desire to be liked or loved by someone. But how can you achieve this your mind tells you what to do. Most often you are not even aware of it, all this happens quite unconsciously.
The same thing happens with your lover. If he loves you, he begins, in the same way as you do, to alter himself, to be artificial, to be insincere to make you like him. And he also deprives himself of naturalness and freedom. He puts himself into a prison. And both these prisoners appear to love each other.
But the problem is not that you only start to lose your own freedom, but you deprive your lover of his freedom, too. You only allow him or her to be something or someone in a strictly determined way. In turn, your lover also becomes very unnatural and starts to limit you. You become each other’s jailers.
All that is not bad, it is as it is, in the end, people are made this way. It is necessary to investigate it in order to see clearly and to be aware of what is happening to you and around you. Only then, can something very important, something will change. You will stop lying to you and your partner.
And here’s the fifth sign or quality of ordinary love. Ordinary love deprives you of force. You lose energy. Consider the end of all ordinary love stories when people leave each other, when they part. People break up, losing their force with a gloomy look, without energy, without joy. There is just anger at each other, total dissatisfaction. You can ask a reasonable question: is it love that can do all this to people? When people have just met each other, they feel a burst of energy. They are full of energy. They want to sleep and eat less, their eyes sparkle, they can fly … They cannot pass by unnoticed! When they break up, they are without energy and sad.
Of course, love is not to blame for this. It is not love that causes all of it. It is what people do with love. But they do not do it intentionally. What one gets is the only possible variant. Each one behaves as it is natural for him at a given moment in time. It is not a matter of choice. It can’t be any other way. People suffer from love, not because of love itself, but because of who they are. After all, love is not a punishment!
So what shall we do now? Not love? But the majority of people can’t control love. They can not start or stop loving by their own will.
Through such experiences, people change. As a matter of fact, they begin to do things in a different way, not from their mind but from the heart. Love is the touch of the Divine to human.
Long ago, people thought that if one falls in love with someone, Cupid’s arrow hits somebody’s heart. Cupid and Amur were portrayed as two winged boys with bows. They shot arrows into people’s hearts with arrows of love that consequent made them fall in love. An arrow is a symbol of an “advance” of energy, which we get from Heaven. This is an opportunity to experience such divine experience, which is love, thanks to another person at the moment when he becomes your lover.
But everyone manages this energy, this “advance” in their own way. If you were given a large sum of money, you would spend it right away on a drink or invest it in some business or you would buy some books or you would travel …
In the same way, this happens with love. You get an opportunity to love someone and some energy is “released” to you. But what will you do with this energy? Where will you direct it? Into yourself? Into your partner? Into feelings? Will you disperse or waste it? All that will happen to you and your lover depends on that.
But all of us sometimes face glimpses of another kind of very special love. This love lies on another level, on another dimension. During one’s lifetime, one has the ability, at least from time to time, to feel such love. Perhaps such an experience lasted for just one second and was aimed at a certain human, but we will never forget it, we will never confuse it with other feelings. That would be impossible.
Such love is different from the one we have just spoken about. First of all, it is different because this time you love a real human. You love a living human. You love him or her for what he or she is. You love all of him or her. At this moment you embrace him fully with your love. You do not cut him like a butcher, choosing edible and inedible parts for your love. No single particle remains in his or her soul that you did not love at that moment.
This kind of love is similar to the behavior of alga in the water. Long green alga are so flexible that it fully merges with the flow of water. It follows the flow completely, it has no desire to “correct” the flow of the water or to change it. Alga fully merges with it and becomes part of it. It can only be seen because it has a different color. It follows every slightest change in the flow…
If you love a person in this way it means you accept all of him at this moment, entirely. Even the gesture symbolizing love, if you love someone, you embrace that person, you give him a hug …
This kind of love is acceptance. Acceptance of what you are. You accept without any desire to change something and without any desire to have something in return. Without any hope of getting something in return, you feel happy because there is someone you can love.
In the East, there is a legend that once, at the beginning of time, God was alone. He was completely alone, but he was filled with love. He did not have anyone to love. Then, he created the Universe in order to have someone to love. And he was grateful to the Universe to be able to shed His love on it.
You can also be grateful to your lover, because he or she really exists, and you have someone to love.
In a monastery, I saw a small epitaph, which was written on a tomb: “Thank you for what you were.” For what he was, not for the fact that he was a loving father or a loving husband, but just for the fact that he was. In fact, that is the reason of love – the existence of someone you love.
How does a mother love her little child? She loves him without any apparent reason. Her child’s existence is the reason she loves him. She does not expect anything from her child. She does not stop loving him when he wets his diapers because she does not put any conditions on him of what he should be. His existence fills her with joy. That’s all. But adult men and women so rarely love each other in this way.
Remember how you love the sea or the mountains. You do not want them be in the only one state. You do not impose any obligation on them. You do not put any conditions on them. On the contrary, you get joy from the variety and variability, from the uniqueness of each new day. The sea is very nice both when it is calm and in a storm, in the afternoon, and at night, when the moonlight plays the with water, and it reflects the stars. And, in the morning, it is sometimes impossible to find the boundary between the sky and the water, it seems that they have merged into each other. You seem to be bathing in the sky. The mountains are also beautiful both in winter and in summer, and when the alpine meadows start to bloom. You do not put any conditions on nature: “Let the sun always be at the zenith, let this tree be only slightly green, let the flower only grow there.” On the contrary, this diversity energizes you.
All that so rarely happens to people. Imagine that you were expecting him or her to come at seven. He did not come at seven. He came at eight but not in the evening, but in the morning, and, by the way, not to your place, but you start to rejoice with the variety and spontaneity of his behavior! It is unlikely…
Normal love is like a huge gun, which you aim at your lover. You catch him in the cross of the target and you start to love him like- bang, bang, and bang! But a living human being does not stand still. He moves. He changes his location. He goes in every direction. And he himself is changing. But your weapon weighs tons (maybe it is the Tsar-Cannon). It is so inert, that it cannot be moved even to be able to keep up with a moving target that is your lover. It is much easier to get your lover back in the cross of the target and to chain him to the place at which the gunpoint of your “gentle” love is aimed. And, then you start to love him until death do you part…
But if your love is like algae, not like a cannon, everything is different. You do not rape anyone. You only have something to offer. Yes, you can offer someone your love. You can offer something.
After all, love means giving. The process of love is a process of giving. You experience the pleasure of giving the energy of Love. Energy comes from your heart, bringing you to bliss. The surprising fact is that the more you give, the more full you are. The more you radiate, the stronger the source of love inside of you becomes…
Loving so, you can offer something to your lover. You will never rape him with your offer. It is up to your lover to decide to accept it or not.
From such love, you will not lose your freedom. You will not appear to be artificial. You will be not correcting your behavior “by him.”
And such love will not weaken you. On the contrary, it will fill you with power and energy. It will give you more joy and more freedom. It will free you. The more you are immersed in love, the more you feel freer and more sublime.
This kind of love, in the East, was compared with the scent of a flower, with the fragrance of a rose. When you walk past a rose and smell it, you experience something pleasant, some kind of bliss. You smell its scent and enjoy it. And even though you go away and stop smelling it, the rose remains the same. It continues to be fragrant. The smell has ended for you, you have moved apart and now you do not smell it anymore, but it still persists in the rose.
The rose still smells, but not for you. It just simply smells. This is one of its attributes, just as are as the number of petals, their shape and color. We experience this part of its existence as something very pleasant.
Love is the same. It can be a part of your existence, your quality, and your state. Thus love is not simply a relationship between two people: I’m doing different things for you: giving you flowers, writing poetry, and carrying you in my arms…. I am ready to die for you…
This is an attitude. It is very good, but it is an attitude. But love is a state. It is a special state of consciousness, a state of your soul. When you are in this state, and someone is close to you, he is immersed in the field of your love that you are radiating at that moment. You feel love for this person, and he feels it…
All that is weak needs a lot, and all that is strong needs a little. If your love is strong, you will not demand much from your lover. You will not put any conditions on him. You do not need your lover to be this or the other person. But if you are not able to immerse yourself deeply in love, if your consciousness has not grown enough for such ecstasy, so you will only be able to experience “weak” love, love with special conditions depending on external circumstances.
Here’s one more thing that is important.
It is necessary to distinguish between two fundamentally different things: connection and affection. Affection means that you have firmly caught hold of someone and you do not allow this person to turn around, nor to move away from you or to come closer. You do not allow your partner to move, to whirl, to dance around you. You cannot see your lover in all of his or her beauty, feel him in his entirety. You tied him and you also tied yourself. You are an anchor for him and he is an anchor for you. In this case, there is no possibility for growth, for changes. There is no freedom, no real life.
Connection is another thing. It is similar to a mobile phone, which both of you have. Wherever you are – near or far from each other – in fact, you are always present. You just need to dial a number, and you can hear your lover’s voice, and he will hear yours. It is similar to telepathy. You are together now. When you feel a connection, indeed, you are always together. The stronger your connection is, the freer you are. It sounds strange, but, it is really so.
Love is always a force of attraction. It is something that connects. It connects the one who is in love with someone else or with something that one loves. Love is a connective force connecting two lovers. It is a great Universal pimp. The connection can be mental, emotional, and physical…
Connection is a channel between you and your partner, in which love is moving. It is your openness towards your partner. This is something that enriches your partner and you.
The two types of love are completely different. In the first case, your love lives in your head, and in the second one it lives in your heart.
Why in the head? Because you always remember, compare and plan.
The first impulse of each love is always born in the heart. But when you start to think about love, the energy leaves your heart and starts to fill your head. That is why the head has grown enormous, and the heart small. Suddenly the head cannot stand all that and finally it “explodes” and you cease to be satisfied with you lover. And, then, you leave him. Your love is over. That kind of love always comes to an end. If there are not any new arrivals of impressions from outside that love gets dried up.
Of course, at the beginning of relationships you can eat your heart’s energy of love feeling the emotions. In this case, the energy is spent on emotions. But when this energy comes to an end when your heart does not radiate your love anymore, you begin to “eat” your lover. Ordinary love feeds on who you love. You devour your lover.
You will say: «It is nonsense.»
However, that is so.
There are different kinds of food. One food is the food that we eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some people can even include here a five o’clock tea. Another kind of food is a more delicate one. It includes the energy, which we get from the environment, for example, when we breathe.
Also, there is another kind of food. It is the finest food we eat. It is our impressions or, in other words, the information that is the food on which our consciousness and our soul feeds. The soul needs such food for life and growth, because one’s soul grows throughout all one’s life. And if this food, if the impressions, are rough, both our consciousness and our growing soul become the same.
By the way, you get only one part of all your impressions from outside. The other part, the biggest part, you make it yourself. You take any reason from outside and, then, add to it something that you generate inside of you. That’s the way in which bad impressions are created. You always create them. Very often you do not even realize that it is happening precisely in this way…
Harmony is proportionality, the balance between what you give and what you get. But if you really want something from someone and you always think about this man or woman, you start to remember him or her. So, there is no balance. In this case, you get much more than you give.
Even plants feel when you think about them. The experiments done by Baxter, way back in the 60s, showed that the body of plants reacts violently to any mental desire, for example, to break a branch.
The same thing happens to the human body.
That’s why attention is a channel that connects you to what whatever you focus on. But people are able to feel just a very small part of themselves, just the superficial one. They are not able to feel such influences, but they do exist! All that has been said above is not intended to cause a neurosis like “I am being thought about, I am in danger!», or a prohibition to think about others. It happens to everyone, but almost no one realizes it.
If you love with your heart, on the contrary, you fill your lover and the space around you with the energy of love, not with your own ego, but with what is going through you but does not belong to you.
All the great saints left this world much more beautiful than they had found it after they had come to this world. Living here, they filled the world with love, made it more beautiful. Such people are links between the ordinary world and subtle harmony. They are windows from which the light of other realities pour through. Such people shed the fragrance of love all the time…
Kahlil Gibran wrote in “The Prophet”:
“…Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
Such love does not have two sides. It is holistic. Ordinary love always has two sides: joy and suffering, bliss and pain, happiness and unhappiness. Strange but true that the one who gives you happiness becomes the cause of your unhappiness.
For example, you love someone and you’re happy thanks to this man or woman. But, suddenly, he has to leave, for example, to go on business, and you start to suffer. He has not taken away your happiness, because, after leaving you, has lost it too. You both get lonely and, as a consequence, you both start to suffer.
Loneliness makes you unhappy. Before that, you were not alone. You were with your lover. But, then, he goes on a business trip, and your happiness comes to an end. Is it true happiness, if it depends on the location of your lover? May be, it is just an illusion of happiness, isn’t it?
You can merge completely into each other just by remaining alone. If you remain alone, you can be infinitely close to each other. There is no contradiction. You can continuously move towards each other, without getting stuck at any single distance. As you remain alone, there is nothing that can stop you from moving.
So, all that seems to you, as ultimate closeness today, will become a huge distance tomorrow. It seems to you that it is impossible to be closer, but suddenly a new horizon has been discovered. All the time you seem to have recently met your lover, you are just starting to know him or her. You are approaching him closer and closer. While approaching him so, and all the time, you will start to feel that there is always something new that earlier never existed for you. Whenever you are alone, your lover remains new for you all the time. You contact him, his state in which he is in that moment. Each time you experience a new love.
Only a lonely man can experience true happiness. “Alone” means separate from what makes him unhappy. “Alone” means to be separated from what causes unhappiness and the fact that you are alone with your happiness face-to-face.
The reasons for your unhappiness are always inside of you. It’s as if there was an “organ” in your mind that could produce that feeling of your unhappiness. This “organ” produces unhappiness from any incoming material. That’s why any impression may be the cause of your disorder: your lover, the dollar’s exchange rate, the state of the environment – anything. That “organ” functions continuously and very regularly.
But if that “organ” is not given any food, it will atrophy. Nature is thrifty. The body is not so wasteful to expend its energy for the maintenance of non-functioning parts. It just gets rid of them. If you stop eating in the usual way, your intestine will get atrophied, and it will already be completely impossible to restore it. The same thing happens to your consciousness.
It is clear that it is very difficult to make that organ of “disaster” starve. If it were easy, everyone would be continuously happy for a long, long time. So, any efforts in this direction will be rewarded generously. You will have to “try” much more than you ever tried before to feel unhappy…
To achieve something significant it is only possible when you are completely immersed in the present action. A human can sometimes experience such moments, while he notices that even a second ago he was absolutely inseparable, indivisible, with what he had been doing. It can even be just simple dish washing or watching a movie.
At that moment, you are what you are doing: dish washing or watching a movie, you do not feel apart from this activity. You do not have any ideas, you have no past, and you feel like what you are doing. In fact, “you” do not exist, there is only dishwashing, only this thing is what really exists …
So an everyday action can turn into a meditation.
In all other cases, people are more or less dualized. This is what happens when you, for example, are doing something, and at the same time you are in the process of thinking about something, and a large part of you is just “sleeping.”
It is called doing something automatically.
For example, you are driving a car and, at the same time, you are communing with your thoughts.
But the duality is much stronger when you disagree inside of you with what you are doing right now. In this case, you are lying. You make yourself do what you are expected to do. You are doing what you cannot agree with. But you have to do it. And it happens very often.
It is a simple duality: outside you are one person, and inside of you is completely the other one. You are torn by the internal contradiction. Your inner behavior is different from the external one. So, you become insincere.
In this state, it is impossible to do something fully, holistically, truly. When you are dualized, you’re weak. It occurs because only one part of your force goes towards the definite “purpose”, only one part of your attention, and the other part is spent on protest or on internal resistance. If you are not real at this moment, how will you be able to create something real? And your actions at this time are false, too. You do not agree with what you are doing.
What you are doing always bears the imprint of your state at the present moment.
What you do is similar to you.
If you are insincere, so your creation will be insincere, even if apparently everything is done well and good. Thus such creation can just only be a smile or an act, or it can be even the whole life…
In fact, a vast majority of people always act like that. They are being a little disingenuous, somewhat not agreeing with what they have to do. They continuously slightly rape themselves. It becomes so usual for them (as everyone has already been trained since childhood, hearing constant “you must not” and “you must”).
Even if you want to notice something like that inside of you, it will be almost impossible. It is already a part of you. It has merged with you. It has become normal.
If there is something that is continuously present in you, even in small concentrations, it gets accumulated and forms into a very substantial quantity.
Look, people, who were completely immersed in what they were doing, have created all of the most outstanding things. They had devoted themselves completely to that. They werat the extreme level of their sincerity and integrity.
If you are dualized, you have two options either to act according to your inner feeling or to act as you are expected to.
“Dual” means “di”, “opportunities” – “able”, ” two opportunities” sounds like “di able”. “Di able” is “diable”, devil. It is not a creature with two horns. It is a state of conflicting duality, of unnaturalness, of fears and of doubts in your actions. Two horns is a symbol of duality.
Note that the horns come out of the head. The head with its thoughts is a source of a dualizing force. When there is no sincerity, you condemn yourself to hell inside of you. It can be hidden very deep, but it is always the same…