The Way to Love: Meditations for Life
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Read between May 24 - October 17, 2020
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There is not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy. Think of that for a minute.
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Right here and now you are happy and you do not know it because your false beliefs and your distorted perceptions have got you caught up in fears, anxieties, attachments, conflicts, guilt and a host of games that you are programmed to play.
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Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is.
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what you give up violently you are forever bound to.
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They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions.
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Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth: The only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming. Observe all of this from the outside so to speak and see the marvelous change that comes about in you.
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It is from the oppression of your programming that you need to be liberated. Only then will you experience that inner freedom from which alone all social revolution must arise for the powerful emotion, the passion that arises in your heart at the sight of social evils and impels you to action, will have its origin in reality, not in your programming or your ego.
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Almost every negative emotion you experience is the direct outcome of an attachment.
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“I am not really attached to you at all. I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy.”
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If you learn to enjoy the scent of a thousand flowers you will not cling to one or suffer when you cannot get it.
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Love can only exist in freedom. The true lover seeks the good of his beloved which requires especially the liberation of the beloved from the lover.
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Therefore, your negative feelings are caused, not by this person, as you mistakenly think, but by your programming.
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This poor person here in front of you is crippled, blind, lame, not stubborn and malicious as you so foolishly thought. Understand this truth; look at it steadfastly and deeply; and you will see your negative emotions turn into gentleness and compassion.
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And another new, unaccustomed feeling: You actually feel a desire to seek out the company of these growth-producing crippled, blind and lame people, the way someone who has learned to swim seeks water,
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Actually nothing on earth is as clear-sighted as love.
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You can hardly be said to love what you do not even notice; and if you notice only a few beings to the exclusion of others, that is not love at all,
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Then you will understand what God is, for you will at last know what love is.
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The first truth: You must choose between your attachment and happiness. You cannot have both.
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The second truth: Where did your attachment come from? You were not born with it.
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As you ponder these truths you may become aware that your heart is resisting them or argues against them and refuses to look at them. That is a sign that you have not yet suffered enough at the hand of your attachments to really want to do something about your spiritual radio.
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Renunciation and avoidance is no help, for to blot out the sound of the drum once again makes you as hard and insensitive as to concentrate solely on the drum. What you need is not renunciation but understanding, awareness.
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You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.
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Second, contemplate the walls, spend hours just observing your ideas, your habits, your attachments and your fears without any judgment
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True happiness is uncaused.
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Think of this: Effort can put food into your mouth, it cannot produce an appetite; it can keep you in bed, it cannot produce sleep;
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Change is only brought about by awareness and understanding. Understand your unhappiness and it will disappear—what results is the state of happiness. Understand your pride and it will drop—what results will be humility.
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There are two sources for change within you. One is the cunningness of your ego that pushes you into making efforts to become something other than you are meant to be so that it can give itself a boost, so that it can glorify itself. The other is the wisdom of Nature.
Brian Hohmeier
"Self," perhaps? (IFS)
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If what you attempt is not to change yourself but to observe yourself, to study every one of your reactions to people and things, without judgment or condemnation or desire to reform yourself, your observation will be nonselective, comprehensive, never fixed on rigid conclusions, always open and fresh from moment to moment. Then you will notice a marvelous thing happening within you: You will be flooded with the light of awareness, you will become transparent and transformed.
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No, the transforming light of awareness brushes aside your scheming, self-seeking ego to give Nature full rein to bring about the kind of change that she produces in the rose:
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Contrary to popular beliefs, the cure for lovelessness and loneliness is not company but contact with Reality. The moment you touch this Reality you will know what freedom and love are. Freedom from people—and so the ability to love them.
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Soon it will join the ranks of the numberless people who say helplessly, “I do not know who I am,” for, having hidden the truth about themselves for so long from others, they end up by hiding it from themselves.
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If you allow yourself to really feel the pains of this hell on earth, the utter emptiness it brings, you might experience within you a revolt, a disgust so powerful that it will shatter the chains of dependence and deceit that have been forged around your soul and you will break loose into the kingdom of innocence where mystics and children dwell.
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If you get caught up in the judgments of people around you, you are eating the fruit of tension and insecurity and anxiety, because when today they call you beautiful and you are elated, tomorrow they will call you ugly and you will be depressed.
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Therefore the first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is.
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It is in that act of seeing that love is born, or rather more accurately, that act of seeing is Love.
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to. If you ever allow yourself to see it will be the death of you. And that is why love is so terrifying, for to love is to see and to see is to die.
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Take some time out to gaze in wonder at Nature, the flight of a bird, a flower in bloom, the dry leaf crumbling to dust, the flow of a river, the rising of the moon, a silhouette of a mountain against the sky. And as you do this the hard, protective shell around your heart will soften and melt and your heart will come alive in sensitivity and responsiveness. The darkness in your eyes will be dispelled and your vision will become clear and penetrating, and you will know at last what love is.
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You cannot love what you cannot see afresh. You cannot love what you are not constantly discovering anew.
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What is love? It is a sensitivity to every portion of reality within you and without, together with a wholehearted response to that reality.
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There is no such thing as defective love, or deficient love, or partial love. Love like sensitivity either is in all its fullness or it simply is not. You either have it whole or you have it not.
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And you must strike not with the sword of renunciation, for that kind of mutilation only hardens, but with the sword of awareness.
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Difficult because if you wish to possess the kingdom you may possess nothing else.
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the divine flame of discontent has arisen within your heart.
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If you haven’t found the treasure as yet, don’t waste your time searching for it. It can be found but it may not be searched for.
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People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is done actually by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.