“Use the light of awareness to access your spirit path.”
My Divine Loves, I suspend my activities for a while, leaving you with a wonderful yin practice, just as valuable for men as for women, which is about what I myself need to work on more absorbedly now. Balancing fire and water. Smoothly working through layers that seemingly hinder the sacred union.
Even just watching this, without being a yoga or qigong practitioner, helps one dissolve in joy. Thank you Marisa for such peaceful generosity.
💜
What in your life is calling you, when all the noise is silenced, the meetings adjourned, the lists laid aside, and the wild iris blooms by itself in the dark forest, what still pulls on your soul?
Thank you “Sparky”, Julie, Katy,
and Αυρούλα, one of our stray cats who
taught us a similar valuable lesson here yesterday. Love and Gratitude to All, Leon
It’s a question about… personal, romantic love… [low laughter in audience, young man glowing with wisdom]
If one is in the surrendered state of Consciousness, can they st…
I’ve heard teachings from… –my own experience in the form of just reading…–
With romantic love, there can be “I need you…”
Behavioral expectations.
Then there’s like the selfless kind of love
where there are no behavioral expectations
and you still love the person.
My question is,
If you’re in the surrendered state of Consciousness,
if you’re completely surrendered to what Is,
do you still have that kind of selfless thought for a specific person, romantically?
Or does that kind of dissolve, or is it just only the universal…
– which is wonderful, [audience laugh] the universal love, it’s amazing, it’s… fff… Wow! You know?
But can you also have that specific kind of love for someone?
OK… Thank you.
So, the question you’re basically asking, “Would you then love everybody equally, so there would not be one person singled out as special?”, as the Course in Miracles calls it special relationship, which the Course says of course it’s of the ego, to single out one as special.
Now, if you single one out as special, and you… what you see in the other is the form only and you attach to the form, which doesn’t just mean the physical form –of course that’s an important part of it because it is part of the sexuality and all that, which is part of the attraction– but it also includes the psychological form of the other –who you think that person is, a psychological make-up, how they behave and speak and act; that is also form, that psychological form– and there can be strong attachment to those aspects, both the physical coming together with the psychological, which includes also emotions, there’s an emotional link also there, and when those all come together, you “fall in love” [laughter] And aptly, it’s called fall, because it’s a fall in Consciousness [louder laughter], but that’s OK if that’s what you experience, and if life wants you to experience that, it’s part of your learning, that fall in Consciousness. Now it’s not immediately of course experienced as a fall, it’s experienced as a high! [laughter]And only afterwards do you realize, Oh, that was a fall! [laughter] And “afterwards” can be after a year, it can be after three months, it can be after the honeymoon, it can be soon after you move in together…
So… And then the suffering starts; what before was the love, now becomes the suffering. And then for a while it can happen that you fluctuate, for the next year or two or three, between still feeling the love, and the suffering, and then it usually comes to an end after a while. Or you compromise and for some other reason stay together.
Now if you are able to feel in the other… or, first of all, in yourself, that which is beyond form, the Essence –the stillness, the Presence, whatever you want to call it– and by sensing it in yourself, and being it, then you recognize it in another, and that recognition in the space of stillness is true love, which doesn’t need the other, because the other only reflects to you who you are.
But even there it can happen, that the form of the other –because you are not just the formless; temporarily, you are also the formed; temporarily, you are either man or woman; temporarily, you have this body– and this form, this man or this woman and this body, and the emotional field, may find a certain resonance with –on different levels, be it sexual, emotional, psychological levels– a certain resonance with the other form.
And that resonance, that is what in the unenlightened, romantic love, makes up the entire relationship.
But now, when you know who you are in your Essence, all those factors are still there, but they do not make up the entire relationship. Beyond the sexual or emotional or physical resonance, there is a deeper level present. So you can go through the motions of romantic love, with the transcendent level also present in yourself, and recognizing it in the other.
So, romantic love may… after a while of course, for the relationship to be truly deep, in any relationship, some transcendent level has to be there. Because it’s not going to last otherwise. It doesn’t mean necessarily that people need to be totally awake already, totally awake knowing who they are, but some element of the formless must be there eventually in the relationship for the relationship to survive and be a true relationship. Otherwise, all you have left in the relationship is your judgments about the other, and physical attraction, and just mind, emotional… And that’s…
Ultimately it’s not enough!
It’s not enough.
The added element, the transcendent element,
needs to be there, and if the transcendent is there,
you can be quite content even without the romantic relationship.
You no longer say, I neeeed that! It’s When it’s there, it’s beautiful. But you don’t neeeeeed that; that pull.
So the mind…
It is often in relationships,
the mind prevents the deeper level,
the transcendent level from arising in the relationship.
So the mind destroys the relationship.
Identification with the story in the mind,
which is about yourself and the other,
obscures love.
It might even say, Love? There’s no such thing as love!
I read a lovely novel last year, by a British writer, Ian McEwan, a well-known contemporary writer, and he wrote this book about… It’s called On Chesil Beach. It’s about two young people, falling in love, in England in the fifties, and these two young people, they feel this pull towards each other and they begin to fall in love, and… But sexually they are completely repressed and very fearful about that –it’s in the fifties, so the sixties’ revolution hasn’t happened yet about sex– so they are both extremely fearful about sex, and then they get married, and their first night, they stay in a bed-and-breakfast near Chesil Beach in the South of England, and they’re trying to have sex for the first time, and it’s a disaster! Dreadful disaster… [laughter] And she… she is so shocked, she runs out of the room to the beach, Ohhh! [holding his head] They don’t realize it’s actually quite funny; [laughter] I don’t explain what disaster, you can probably imagine it. So she runs out, they don’t see each other that night, it’s their wedding night, and the next day he goes to the beach, and she’s walking on the beach, they start talking to each other, and both feel, the pull is still there! But both their minds are bringing up stories why it’s no longer… why it’s not possible; it’s dreadful, they are projecting things into the other… And so the pull is there, but they both create stories in their minds that cuts them off from the other. And they separate. And then they spend the rest of their lives doing other things. The rest of their lives in the novel is compressed to five or six pages.
And that shows how destructive the mind can be to relationship. How the mind imposes interpretations on the other that are total fictions! But they are so much –as Don Miguel Ruiz would say– there’s so much faith in these fictions, that it’s an impossibility for the human being to see what the mind is creating; it’s a fictitious judgment on that… creates a barrier between yourself and the other. This writer is not spiritual at all, he just observed human nature and he presented it, and then the ultimate lesson isspiritual.
