Transcription
Well, then let's sit down and talk about something that appears to cause an awful lot of bother. Something that makes us completely crazy. The inspiration for our most glorious poetry, our stupidest pop songs, and perhaps all of our fears and disappointments. We are, of course, speaking about love.
It is this non-stop itching feeling like it should be foundational to the human experience, itch of a desire to love and like there's a massive shortage of the stuff out there, maybe more pressingly, to be loved. That sounds like the whole point of the exercise, doesn't it? We are searching for connection from the moment we arrive, squalling and disoriented. We want to be touched. We want to be witnessed. We want validation. We wish to become one with the other. And we have been culturally, religiously, ad nauseam told that this is the ultimate goal. Find love and you have found the meaning of life. You will be complete. You will finally arrive.
But isn't it curious? Don't you agree that it's utterly fascinating that the one thing we all want more than anything else in existence, the thing we hold above all as a cure-all for every shake and shimmy of the human experience, is at the same time also our deepest misery. Think about it. The jealousy, the possessiveness, that paralyzing fear of loss, the crushing disappointment when our beloved proves not to be, heaven forbid, perfect, the sheer anxiety of it all. Why does the search for love feel so much like trying to nail jelly to a wall, or maybe like trying to smooth a choppy piece of water with your hand? The harder you try to smooth it, the more agitated it gets.
We have this odd phrase, "falling in love." And it's a very revealing phrase, isn't it? To fall. It suggests an absence of control, a yielding, a pleasing bit of happenstance. But we don't like accidents, do we? We abhor not being master of our own destiny. So naturally, we all want to stand up and lift ourselves out of falling ASAP. We try to secure the love. We want guarantees. We want contracts. We say, "I love you." And our hearts are in the balance as we wait to hear, "I love you, too." As if it were a transaction, a trade agreement. And here is where the whole lovely mess starts. This is the knot we need to untie.
For the problem, I want to argue, isn't love per se. Love, it is the most primary force in the universe. Some combination of these is why any leaf or flake or bone or mechanics wrench behaves as it does. It is the stuff of reality itself. But the problem is not that someone out there who can give you love or make you feel it again. The problem is the "you" who's trying to do loving and the "you" who needs so much to be loved in enter the grand conspiracy of them all, the ultimate hallucination that is the basis of our whole civilization. Never mind the TV commercials. There's a cell job which is going on in respect of that hallucination. And that hallucination is: I am an isolated entity living within a bag of skin. The skin-encapsulated ego. We are programmed from birth to think we are this autonomous "I." You have got a name. You've got a history, an agenda. You are told this is you. There, that is the world. It is separate from you and you have to go and you have to fight this. You have to fight for what you need.
And so we are awfully lonesome. We are strangers in a strange land. We peer out of these two holes in our heads. And what we see is a world that is at its core, other. And this aloneness, the feeling that you are separated from the source of life itself, it leaves an incompleteness, a profound psychological emptiness. It's as if you've woken up to find yourself in a dark room and you think that you are alone. And so you spend your life madly feeling around for furniture, other people, anything to hold, make yourself safe and real.
This separate will, this "I" that is made, is in Buddhism what they call a hungry ghost, a *preta*, a monster with a huge belly and a small cramped throat. It can consume mountains of experience, oceans of affection, but it can never get enough. For the emptiness, just like our hunger, that it feels is not in fact real emptiness. It's the cancer of emptiness that you feel because of a lie: the premise of separation. So when the hungry ghost is out seeking love, what's it really seeking? It's not searching for true connection. It's looking for medicine. It is looking for a cure to the disease of being a separate self. Most of all, it is seeking validation. It is searching for someone else to verify that it exists. "If you love me, I must be real. If you want me, I mean something. If you see me, I'm there."
Do you see the predicament? We're not operating in love based on what we have to give because we are full of the exuberance of being alive. Instead, we are coming at it from a place of starvation and hoping to somehow feed off someone else's vibe. We are employing the attention and regard of others as drugs to hold a state of hallucination. And this is why we are so terrified. For if our own sense of self is measured by another's love and disdain, then we are forever on edge. We're stalking their social media, tracking what they say, how they sound in a text. "Do they still love me? Are they losing interest? Are they watching someone else?" It's exhausting, isn't it?
And this desperation causes us to do something completely useless and sort of pathetic. We make ourselves lovable, or try preserving it when we are. We become performers. We develop a personality, a persona. And you'll recall this word has its roots in the Latin for mask. The mask of the comedian in the ancient theater is where the sound emanates. We wear this mask so we can be accepted by everyone. We present ourselves in the most charming, witty, intelligent, successful way that we are hoping will attract the person who meets our idealization of what they should be. We're having this masquerade ball in a big way. We are all actors on a stage. We become the good husband, the caring wife, the successful professional, the sensitive artist. We launder and filter our personalities. We present our true selves as bits and pieces. Some parts acceptable and others outwardly adorned in order to win approval. We are salesmen who are trying to sell an item, and the product is me.
But here's the tragedy of it. We don this mask. We play this role, and maybe we get someone to respond. They fall for the mask. They fall in love with the show. And then after a bit, the mask starts to come off, for the performance is a strain to keep up. Faking it as someone else is extremely taxing, to always be calculating even in what you say, how you look, so he'll still love you. And we begin to think, "They don't love me as I am." But the "me" you showed was a total fantasy. You never gave them the chance to love who you were because you spent too much time pretending that you weren't. We are afraid for someone to see behind the mask. That some other person is going to look behind the curtain and find our real self. The one we falsely equate with the terrified, insecure, isolated ego that cheated its way out of gym class. We have forgotten that the one behind the mask is us. We have become stage-struck. We believe we are the role. And this confusion between the actor and the role is where all our suffering comes from, because no part is ever big enough. It's the role that is always defined by others. But the actor, the awareness behind the mask, is without limit.
Now let's reverse this and do the other side of the coin. The desire to love. We feel like this is somehow more noble, more selfless. But when the ego loves, what is it actually doing? Almost always, it is a matter of appropriation. It means possession. We want the other person. We speak of "my wife," "my child," "my friend," in the same way we talk about "my car" or "my shoes." We want to add them to our territory. We need them to be there as part of me. As long as the ego loves, it projects its lack of fulfillment onto another person and uses them spiritually to try to fill itself. We perceive someone who represents what we believe we do not possess. They are sure, or calm, or lovely. And we think, "If only I can have that person, then I'll be confident and peaceful and beautiful." That is the great lie of romantic love.
What we perceive the euphoria and completeness of when we fall in love has nothing to do with the other person at all. It's the fleeting obedience of the ego. For just an instant, the walls go down. The constant babble of the separate self ceases. We feel connected, expansive, alive. It's a tremendous relief. But the ego is nothing if not resilient. It won't be able to stand in this borderless condition for very long. It sets about trying to capture the experience immediately, institutionalize it. It says, "This is wonderful. How do I keep it? I like the feeling of you. How do I ensure that this is something someone else continues to provide for me?" And so the contracts begin, the jealousy begins, the control begins. We try to grasp the flow.
And here's the part where our understanding of reality is fundamentally wrong. Life, truth, love, it's like a river. It's always on the go. It never stops. The universe is a very large event that keeps happening. Old Heraclitus said, "You can never step into the same river twice." And by the time you step in it again, it's a different river. And you aren't the same person. Life is like this river. It flows. And the beauty of a river is in its flow, its vitality, its ceaseless transformation. Now, let's say you love a 100-kilometer stretch of that river. You like the light on water, the sound of waves, and you're like, "No, I want to save this. I don't want it to end." So, you get a bucket and you get a scoop of river water and you take it home and you stick it on your mantlepiece and you look at it and say, "I've got the river." But what do you have? You don't have the river. You have a pot of standing water. It has lost all its flow, energy, and life. It begins to smell. It becomes murky.
And this is exactly what we do when it comes to love. We feel this fantastic current of energy, this link, this dissolving of boundaries. And we panic. We say, "Quick, we must secure this. We must formalize it. We make promises. 'I will love you forever.'" And here is a statement that defies one's belief in human sanity. How in the world can you say that you will love someone forever? You don't even know who you are in 5 years. The struggle to keep love, the attempt to secure it, is what kills love itself. Because love is not a noun. It's not something that you own. It is a verb. It is a process. It is a dance. And the dance is the meaning of a dance. The sense of music is the act of playing. You're not dancing to get to a spot on the floor. You can't play a sonata just before the final chord. If that was the point, then the best conductors would be those who played fastest. It was the best dancers who arrived first at the end of the floor.
We cease dancing when we attempt to understand love. We become rigid. Now we start to worry about whether we are doing the steps right, if our partner plays by the rules, and if we're going to get there, the destination called "happily ever after." And in that fear, the joy, the spontaneity of it, which is love itself, all goes. We've got this one dynamic where to want to be loved is the ego trying, in effect, to justify its own illusion of existence by putting on a little mask. And wanting to love is the ego's way of covering up its hole with someone else, as if you could take the river home in your pocket. Both are born of the fantasy that time exists. Both are recipes for suffering.
So if this is the situation, then what is the option? Is this our fate to hunt in anguish and desperation? Not at all. But if we want to understand what love really is, we need to begin not with others, but with ourselves. We need to see through the hoax. The fundamental message of every great spiritual tradition is that the "you" that seems to you isn't you. The separate self is a construct, a flimsy fiction that dissolves into air if you try to find it. The ego is not real. It's a useful fiction that is a social construction, like the clock or the inch. They are helpful for measuring things, but they are not fundamental truths.
Who are you really? You are not your mind. My favorite. You are not your thoughts, your feelings, your memories, or your personality. It's all things that go through you. They are clouds passing in the sky. The clouds are not the sky. The climate is not the weather. You are awareness, the empty space in which all of these experiences come and go. But more generally than that, you're not *in* the universe. You are not a stranger who came here from some other place. You are an event the universe is currently producing. Waves are to the ocean kind of like knees are to basketball. The wave but isn't apart from the ocean. It is the motion of the sea. It rises. It takes form and then it falls back into the ocean. But the wave is through thick and thin water. We are like those waves. We have individualized forms. We have names, personalities, histories. We feel as though we are individual waves. And we look around and we see all these other waves. And we feel lonely. We feel threatened. "That big wave over there could hit me. I need to acquire more water. I want other waves to know that I am a wave." But to try to find love from this vantage point is a wave seeking for water. Isn't that ridiculous? The wave is water. It doesn't have to look for water. It is already that. Or the quest for love is just one wave trying to combine with another wave to feel less alone. But this is absurd. The wave is already connected. It is already the entire ocean. It has no need to discover connection. It is connection.
And the moment when the wave really gets that, when it wakes up to the reality that it's not just a wave but the whole ocean, what happens then? Does it stop waving? No. It continues to wave. But it is fundamentally transformed in how it waves. It does not fear falling any longer. This is because, after all, it knows that it is falling back into itself. It cannot be afraid of other waves because it knows that they are also itself. It waves with joy, with laughter, with the whole weight of the ocean behind it. This insight, this awakening, is the dissolving of the dream of separation. And when that illusion cracks, what spills out is love.
You see, love isn't something you do. It's not something you do. You don't generate it. Love is what you are. It's what the world is made of. It is the oneness of all things. When the ego lets go of grasping, owning, validating itself, then love is known as the ground of being. It is already here. It is always present. Think of it this way. The sun is always shining, but other times clouds obscure the sun. It's not up to us to see that the sun shines. We only need to blow away the clouds. The ego, in its ceaseless wanting and grasping, is the cloud cover, a cloud-making machine. The chase for love is in fact the manufacturer of additional clouds. It is the very doing that hides the love that is there already.
When you give up all attempts to get love, all efforts to be lovable, when you have the sense of the futility of the ego project, something very potent happens. You relax. You let go. You stop pretending. You take off the mask. And in that relaxation, that letting go, you find out something else. You are not the scared little creature crouching in the dressing room. After all, you are the great big deep thing that everything in this universe is flowing through. And once you realize this, your relationship with people is different. You don't vibe with them out of poverty consciousness, scarcity mentality, or lack. You are not a hungry ghost. You don't try anymore to bring them in as a way to fill yourself because you are aware that you are already full. You take them from a place of fullness, not scarcity. You view them not as individual objects to be owned, but as extensions of the same universal energy of which you are. You recognize yourself in them and them in you. The Hindus say, "Tat tvam asi," "Thou art that." The one who you are seeing, the one who you are loving, is at the end of the day your own self.
This is what unconditional love looks like. It is unconditioned love. Meaning it doesn't depend on the other person's attributes or deeds. It is love that sees and acknowledges the underlying divinity, the essential perfection of the other being, regardless of his or her behavior. From this place, you love when you love aliveness itself. You love without grasping. You love without the fear of loss. Well, how can one lose what one never even had? How do you get removed from that which is a part of you? You stop trying to catch the river in a bucket and jump into the river and swim.
And that brings us to the great cosmic joke, the divine comedy. We are chasing around in the endless pursuit of love, connection, and a lock to take us happiness. We read and we attend workshops and we meditate. We pray. We are searching everywhere except where the answer is. In that way, it's like a man who is searching for his glasses, yet they are on his face. He's searching through the glasses to find his glasses. We are enlisting the ego to defeat the ego. We are using the lie of separation to get to connection. The universe, God, Brahman, or whatever name you want to give the ultimate reality, is playing a game of hide-and-seek with itself. This is the one truth masquerading as many truths. It is the single consciousness playing as if being distinct people. Why? For the sheer joy of it, for the drama, for forgetting who it is and then rediscovering itself. You're the cosmos throwing a game of hide-and-seek. You are God pretending to be John Smith or Mary Jones. And the entire drama of love, the longing, the questing and pining and heartbreak, is part of how it works. It is the chase, after all. It's the tension that needs to be there.
When you wake up to this, when you see the game that is being played and you don't stop playing, but you play differently, you play consciously. You play with laughter. You perform the role, but you're no longer held captive by it. You discover that the entire quest for love has been one big misunderstanding. You were looking for something you already possessed. You were seeking to be what you already are.
Then what? In practical terms, this is not about spinning up some new belief system or practice. It is not about suffering attempts to be more loving or compassionate. The mere fact of the attempt at loving being made signifies that you are not now loving. It shores up the fiction of a little self that has to work on itself. It's about seeing through the deception. It's really just noticing how the ego works. It's about seeing the grasping, the clinging, the defending over that which is not even real. And one day you notice it without judgment, without the impulse to fix it. And then the illusion starts to fade.
And when you stop associating with the ego or dissolve it into yourself, what you find is a tremendous intelligence working through you. You find that you don't need to make an effort to live. Life lives itself through you. You don't have to struggle to love. Love expresses itself through you. You start to believe in the process. You begin to trust the river. It is also that knowing this lifts a great burden, a tremendous unburdening. You are off the hook of constantly having to support the illusion of the "me." Gone are the days of having to work for love or acceptance. You are free. Free to be exactly who you are. Free to feel the full range of human emotion, joy as well as sadness, anger, and fear, too. Because you know they're just weather patterns moving through the enormous sky of your mind. And in this freedom, you taste a love that is so much deeper, so much more fulfilling than anything the ego could ever dream up. A love without anything to be conditional about. A love that does not come with strings. A love that is all there is to being.
So yes, the greatest human longing to give and receive love is in fact a symptom of our basic misunderstanding of who it is we are. It is the call of the self that believes itself to be different from everything else for home, even though it has long lost sight of it. But the funny thing is, it never really did. You are already connected. You are already whole. You are already loved because you are love. Once you do this, you're done looking. The struggle ceases and the dance begins. A dance of celebration, a dance of spontaneity, a joyous expression of the love that you are. And isn't that marvelous? You have to do nothing for it. You don't even really have to look for it. It is there right now, shining in all its glory behind the flimsy facade of the ego. So look closely. Who is the one trying to love? Who is this "I" that feels lonely? Who is the one who fears losing? Peer deeply into that "I" and you will see nothing there. No entity, no separate self. Even as the ground of all being, that vast open loving awareness is the only thing that's really there. And then you will laugh. You will chuckle at how silly it is. You will laugh at the tasty hoax of chasing love when you have been soaked in it the whole while. You were the ocean pretending to be a thirsty wave. And now, now you...