LOVE
You can only love another, whether it’s your child, friend or lover, if ultimately you need nothing from them. Otherwise, your love is needy. If you don’t get what you need, the love dries up. You’ve probably already noticed this with people, both the ‘nice’ ones who need to be everybody’s friend, and the dried up ‘honest’ ones who seem to want to make everyone hate them.
Love is not discovered in company, not even in what is called love, but only ever in absolute solitude. Those who cannot be alone, who must spill themselves into the minds of others, who cannot look within and must let everything out, these people waste away in spiritless hope for an intimacy that never reaches them.
Then there are the cold and lonely ones, whose solitude is one of resentment and suffering and crushed dreams. They keep everything bottled up inside, waiting for someone to come along who they can take all their hatred of life out on. They would be quite happy with a prostitute, but a needy doormat will do just as well.
Only the perfectly alone can love, because love is heightened consciousness and consciousness can only be discovered in solitude.
Because they are conscious, the perfectly alone are happy, and so they don’t need someone else to bring them happiness, and so there is no fear in their love, the fear that cleaves the lonely together and makes their lives a torture to each other.
And because they are conscious, the perfectly alone can experience the other from within, just as others can discover them from within. Their selves don’t get in the way, you see, which is why they are never lonely, even when they are alone, because there is always some wonderful other to experience from within, even if it’s just a passing cloud.
DEATH
Just as only the perfectly alone can love, so only the perfectly alone can die, and the two, love and death, end up being one, which is why those who can love do not fear death, and vice versa.
You find death by dying. Not by killing your body—that would be literal suicide—but by letting your false self die. Conscience is continually recommending that you destroy your false self, bit by bit, so that a new, more conscious self can grow. Conscience is constantly prompting you to give up your beliefs, give away your possessions, question your assumptions, laugh at your pride, change your routines and surrender your power.
The more you intelligently die in this way, the more you let go of who you think and feel you are, the more you glimpse a deeper truth than what your false self can give you.
What is it that is deeper than the self? Whatever it is, it’s not in your mind—that just gives you facts—and it’s not in your emotions—that just tells you what you want or don’t want, like or don’t like—and it’s not even in your senses—they just show you colours and sounds and smells. You can’t look in your self for something that is deeper than self. That’s obvious.
So where can you look? Where can you look to find who you are? Where can you look to discover who or what anything or anyone else is?
The only place is space. In the space between your thoughts, in the space underneath your emotions, in the space between things, there is no self, and if there is no self, there is no separation. The literal, scientific mind objects, and the literal, religious mind tries to turn it into a sentimental or religious idea, but in the absence of self you and the other are one.
Very often it takes death for you to realise this. After someone you have loved dies you get an unshakable, extraordinary, sense that they are in you, or you are in them, that they are here. Sometimes. Or you might feel, in the quiet feeling of love you have for them, in your belly, that the unbearable sadness has cracked you open somehow, and in this now bearable sorrow, you have become more loving, that death has brought out the best in you.
The reality is that this is a world of death. You are all hiding from this. You are all running from death. Nobody really looks at it, or not for long. Look how amazed people are when someone dies. Amazing! He died! Look how you all hide your dead bodies. Look at the indirect and awkward way you talk about and deal with death.
Face death my monkey friends! Face the death of your loved ones. Talk about death with them. Face your own death. Live as if you are going to die, because you are. Face the death of everything—because everything you are attached to will be taken from you. Better to release your grip now, while it isn’t so painful, than to have what you are attached to ripped from your grasp.
Are you holding on to anything? Some horrible pain that you are nursing? A grudge? A mad ambition? Are you addicted? Are you attached to anything? Are you holding on to your sad story or your nice, plausible excuse? What about all the likes and dislikes of your personality—firm grip you’ve got on those no doubt? Or you might even be holding on to your body, trying to live?
How about letting go? How about giving it all away? How about dying? How about reaching beyond yourself into the quality of this moment? How about sacrificing your self for the love of it?
Or perhaps you think there’s not much to love in this moment?
That’s because you’re not loving. Just as you can only feel alive by living, so you can only love, by loving.
The more you love, the happier you are. That sounds obvious, but what isn’t obvious is how much there is to love, how much to be grateful for, how much to softly attend to. The more you look and listen and feel for love, the more of it appears. But you have to die to yourself first. Die to your likes and dislikes. Die to the past. Die to the future. Die to your emotions.
Got a problem? What’s the worst that could happen? Death. Death is the worst that could happen, and it’s going to happen. Don’t turn away from that, face it, and you’ll find that death is not an enemy, but a friend, who brings peace, freedom and a loving intensity that makes everything okay.
THE MYSTERY
People love the idea of mystery, they love the idea of all-powerful, all-knowing supernatural forces. They love, in a word, the idea of a mysterious, all-powerful, all-knowing ‘God’, which is why the idea of ‘God’ was invented in the first place. Over time though the idea of ‘God’, written down in God’s Big Books, became ridiculous, so new ideas were needed.
One idea was called ‘life’, a thing that nobody understood but which they all had to protect at all costs, even if it meant killing everyone. Another idea was money, an equally mysterious all-powerful force that had the power to control everything on earth, and yet nobody ever had enough of it. A third God-like idea was the internet, an all-knowing force which promised freedom but which enslaved everyone on earth.
Strange, isn’t it? You’ve spent ten millennia killing each other, hoarding money and destroying the natural earth in order to do what? To build yourself a prison! Not just that, but a perfect prison. It is so perfect, in fact, that you are fused to it and no more able to escape than you can your own skin, your own mind.
This has driven you all completely la-la, and now, as the prison falls, you’re all going to die.
This is good news. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but it’s the faker that is worried, not you. Only the faker despairs. Only the mask cannot hear. Only the living dead fear death. And only those who are addicted to the world fear its passing. So give up the faker, put the mask down. Live.
Between left and right, between science and religion, between self and world, there runs a tiny little crack, invisible to all the heavy arguments of either side, but into which the small quiet spirit slips and finds itself in a world—no, a universe—of strange mad wonder, in which all great philosophies are reconciled and from which all great ideas and feelings and acts and creations spring like mushrooms from a spore, like palm trees from an oasis, like gods from the head of Zeus. Here, in this slender eternity, there is truth as hard and useful as brass, and yet, when you reach out for it, it flashes into a smoky spirit and flies away, not to be possessed.
And where can it be found, this fracture in the dismal business, this secret garden unknown to caricatures and ciphers, this counterclock mystery behind the dead mask of the world?
It is in mere existence, in the strange, mad union of my consciousness here, and the situation I am in, there. It is in the quality of the moment, the atmosphere of the day, the sensation of the body and the passionate spirit of my will, as it does what it does, what it does, what it does.
Become a connoisseur of qualities. There is poetry in today’s grey sky that seems to stretch as far back as pagan battlefields and men ready to give their lives for what they love. There is solemn meaning in the surface of a lake at sunrise, and its promise of bare arms and heavenly gifts. There is the eternity of childhood in the fat and clatter of a beach-side cafe in the salty sun. There is a cold planetary heart in the clump of damp moss crumbling from the side of a forgotten hillside monument. There is terrifying otherness is the suffocating chipboard and nylon-carpet hush of the office at midday. There is a great and mad mystery in the silence of mere things.
And all these mysteries are one! They are all utterly unique and themselves, and yet, all one!
Great is the man or woman who can let go of his self and sink into the river of the moment, however filthy, and find its quality, however bleak, or painful, or grotesque, or borrrrring; for the quality of the river is eternal, and flows outside the mere thing your little monkey mind makes of it.
In such moments thou art alone, utterly alone, with the universe, and in that aloneness, thou art that. The problem of leaving or entering the room is over, for you are the room. Then there is no death, or rather, life and death are not different things to you, or if they are different they are one with the mystery of the moment, like clarifying light and concealing shade are one with the mystery of the sun, and the stars and the vast space between them.
Then you are no longer just a little monkey. The monkey is here, but you are a man, you are a woman. And that’s all you ever need to be.
YOU HAVE BEEN READING AN EXTRACT FROM
My friendly little guide to reality…
