What are ‘near enemies to the truth’? Borrowing this phrase from Buddhism, I use it to refer to slightly distorted versions of spiritual teachings—statements that are close to a profound and subtle truth, but are distorted just enough to make a big difference over time. When we’re talking about deep and fundamental truths, getting it a little bit wrong doesn’t matter in the short run, but it does in the long run, just like a tiny adjustment to the rudder of your boat makes little difference at first, but after 1000 miles, it lands you on a different continent.
Now, some people object to the use of the word ‘wrong’ in the previous sentence, subscribing as they do to the idea that the only necessary criterion for truth is it feels true to me. This view is as dangerous in spirituality as it is in politics, because it usually means I want it to be true, so I'm going to believe it, regardless of the facts. If you don't see how dangerous this is, or if you doubt whether there really are facts or universal truths, please read the first blog post in this series.
Understanding the Near Enemies to the Truth, and why they are near enemies and not the truth itself, is hugely important for any spiritual seeker who wants to get past the beginner stages and into the deep (and deeply fulfilling) spiritual work. Having said that, it’s important to note that if a Near Enemy is near enough, it can be a Temporary Ally for a beginner. But as the stakes get higher in spiritual practice, there is no such thing as ‘close enough’ anymore, and your comforting affirmations must be sacrificed on the altar of truth, or else your spiritual progress stalls. With that brief orientation, let’s look at this month’s Near Enemy.
Near Enemy #6: love yourself
Surely, one might think, there is no more unproblematic injunction in the self-help industry, and in popular spiritual culture, than ‘love yourself’. Well, think again. When people try to heed this seemingly salutary command, it can lead them into a whole mess of trouble. I’ll first describe some of those issues, then I’ll share the truth to which ‘love yourself’ is a Near Enemy, insofar as I’ve been able to discern and experience it.
First off, what does it actually mean to love yourself? Therein lies the problem. In order to perform (or attempt to perform) this action, one must be internally divided: there must be one part of you doing the loving, and another part of you being loved. There is of course nothing wrong with this per se—for example, it may feel downright wonderful to love your ‘inner child’ after judging or suppressing her for so long.[1] But however good it feels, and however much psychic relief it provides, it’s only a short-term solution. Because what it also does is reinforce internal division; and division inevitably leads to conflict.
Whether one has consciously heard about it or not, the influence of the Western model of the tripartite self is pervasive, and it has set us at war with ourselves: our ‘superego’ or conscience attempts to control other unruly parts of ourselves, like the selfish ego and the impulsive id.[2] Only in the context of this culturally-fabricated inner struggle does the reconciliation offered by the attempt to ‘love oneself’ seem necessary. By contrast, the tradition of nondual Tantra offers a sustainable model of internal harmony: that of the undivided self. According to this view, there are not different parts of ourselves in conflict: we are each a single mass of self-awareness consciousness that includes many activities within itself, just as the ocean contains many currents but is ever undivided. We’ll explore the practical implications of this view towards the end of the chapter.
Let’s recap the issue. The injunction to love yourself requires, and reinforces, a sense of internal division by being irresolubly normative: you should love yourself, so you will have to maintain this internal division to comply with that mandate.You will have to continue to maintain one aspect of your psyche in an infantile state, needy of love, and keep it separate from another aspect that is doing the loving, an aspect implicitly seen as superior or wiser or somehow more ‘you’. But the natural consummation of love, which is melting together or integration, will need to be prevented in order to continue to obey the injunction to love yourself. What a strange paradox! <SNIP>
TO READ THE REST OF THIS BLOG POST, PLEASE BUY THE SOON-TO-BE-RELEASED BOOK Near Enemies of the Truth, in which it appears in a much-improved form.
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Scroll down for a transcript of a lively teaching session on this topic!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] From the point of view of yoga psychology, the term ‘inner child’ can only refer to an interconnected set of samskāras or undigested experiences from childhood. When one or more of these samskāras get activated (or ‘triggered’) by present-day events that exhibit some (even slight) similarity to those past experiences, it can cause a kind of regression where one’s psyche momentarily returns to a childlike state and experiences things as the child did, specifically at the age when the as-yet-undigested experience currently being triggered occurred.
[2] For the sake of simplicity, I am of course over-simplifying the Freudian model here. Also note that the terms ‘id’, ‘ego’, and ‘superego’ derive from Freud's English translator. Freud himself used the terms "the It", "the I", and "the Over-I" (das Über-Ich). His theory of a tripartite psyche was indirectly based on Plato’s theory of the tripartite psyche (a word that primarily meant, in Plato’s time, ‘self’ or ‘soul’), which itself was an influence on Western culture for more than two thousand years.
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TRANSCRIPT of a live teaching session on this topic, with Q&A:
Hareesh: So the issue of this injunction ‘to love yourself” is all too easily misinterpreted by the mind as an attempt to win the game of self-judgment. Those who posit this Near Enemy often cultivate lots of positive self-judgments and minimize the negative self-judgments with the aim of developing something called a healthy ego. They, however, often overlook the fact that everything is profoundly impermanent in the world of experience and is an endless flux. This means there's no permanent thing that you can attain called a ‘healthy ego’. Even if you manage to increase and maximize the number of positive self-judgments, you're still playing the self-judgment game. As soon as circumstances seem to, according to your cultural conditioning, go awry, all the negative judgments are going to be back again. This imagined possibility of a healthy ego is, to some extent, a very unstable entity. It is based on coming up with the right sort of healthy evaluations of an ever-changing reality. No matter how many positive judgments you're able to generate and hang on to, none of the good feelings, the positive effect that comes from believing those positive judgments about yourself, can even begin to come close to actually accessing the experience of centering in abiding in your intrinsic worth as a human being.
There's a beautiful teaching in the Tantric Tradition which is that your very being generates value. In other words, a proposition that can be proven, in your direct experience, should you care to investigate it, is that your very being is of infinite value. The painful irony is that we're constantly overlooking the infinite value that is intrinsic to our being, through an obsessive focus on our actions and whether they are worthy of positive or negative judgment, according to our cultural conditioning. It's this living in a mind world that is my objection to this notion of formulating a “healthy ego”. A mind that is constantly telling positive stories about itself is creating a positive mind world but it's still a mind world that is wholly unsatisfactory compared to the direct experience of being. This is something that's difficult to define in language. Think of a moment in your life where there was nothing that you had to do, nobody you had to be, nobody that is around who expects you to be someone. The circumstances, in that moment, were conducive to simply relaxing into what we might call ‘natural presence’. What we glimpse in these moments is profound peace, the contentment to simply exist, to simply be. What often happens is that we believe that the circumstances have to be just so to achieve this because almost everyone experiences these moments of pure being. You know, of course, it's something deeper than a simple kind of relaxation. Almost everyone has the moments where they know, deep in their bones, that everything's fine and they can truly relax into something deeper. You glimpse, just intuitively, the possibility of sinking deeper into what we might call presence and all of a sudden it's as if the whole world gets quiet and is in harmony. Everything that speaks expresses this harmony, the crickets, the cars going by, everything expresses that harmony and suddenly you are the harmony, even if just for a moment and it's beautiful. Our cultural conditioning doesn't tell a story about these moments being remarkable because there's nothing to write home about, other than to say ‘I had a nice moment!’. You might glimpse a great depth of presence and if you go into it, little by little, every time one of these moments happens, you can actually deepen your sense of it until you sense that it is vast beyond measure. If you have a spiritual practice you might then begin to discover that these moments are not, in fact, dependent on what seems like conducive circumstances. In fact, the barrier to this experience is not your surroundings, not your environment, not your life situation, but your mind. If the mind believes everything's okay then you can relax, and once you've relaxed you might glimpse this greater depth that you can sink into. You can come to experience that everything's okay, even when things are difficult but difficulty is okay, challenge is okay, even suffering is okay. A sense of great harmony is available even in those moments where the circumstances seem to be not conducive. All this is to point to something that ends up being much more meaningful than even the temporarily successful attempt to win the self-judgment game. When you discover more and more of the intrinsic value of being pure presence, the self-judgment game absolutely pales into insignificance.
The injunction to ‘love yourself’ can also be co-opted by a need to feel special which is actually antithetical to this beautiful, deep humility that is part of the intrinsic value of being. In this exploration of our integral innate being, humility is natural, not as a kind of self-denigration. This type of humility is simply the freedom from needing to prove yourself, freedom from needing to exalt yourself, freedom from needing others to look at you and say that's an amazing person. But also in this humility, there's no pushing away of compliments when somebody does say you're an amazing person, you know they're really saying that they enjoy your existence, enjoy the fact that you exist, and enjoy connecting with you and then you receive that into your heart. This humility doesn't prevent us from receiving any of those expressions of gratitude even if they're expressed as positive judgments.
Student: So, it's okay to love but we should redirect it from the temporary limited ego-self to the greater wholeness of being?
Hareesh: If you're trying to love some part of yourself you've previously judged, there's still an internal division where you're trying to change the self-judgment but there's the part of you that’s loving, the part of you that's trying to love, and the part of you that you're attempting to love. In the state of awakeness, or realization, there's no internal dividedness at all, so there's no question of loving yourself or hating yourself as both are, in a sense, impossible. When we abide in our essence nature we discover that love is an intrinsic part of it. This love doesn't mean approval, it doesn't mean liking it a lot, rather it means a kind of softness and openness of heart in which there's a natural willingness to be with what is.
Student: loving myself seems to be a natural byproduct of living in alignment with who my being needs to be.
Hareesh: There's a potential danger there which is this can be spiritual language for: “as long as I do the right thing, or the dharmic thing or as long as I perform ‘right action’, then I'm worthy of love”. The ego loves to disguise itself with spiritual language. So there's this phrase here: ‘living in alignment with who my being needs to be”, I hope you examine that language a little bit because there's something hiding out there. At any given moment, you might not yet be on the body-mind level, you might not yet be who you want to be and you might long for the capacity to engage in behaviors that, let's say, benefit others more palpably, more indisputably. If you make this sort of alignment a precondition for regarding yourself then that's a problem because you're putting off, into an indefinite future, the act of regarding the condition of your body-mind with this softness that's natural to essence nature. This desire to change doesn't need to be incompatible with loving yourself in a deeper sense of being accepting of, and open to, the nature of the body mind's manifestation in this moment. There could be a desire to change in a way that allows for greater connection with other human beings, and at the same time, a loving recognition of the fact that being in a process is perfect, and whatever point you're at in the process, is the point you're at in the process, and it doesn't need to be any different from how it is. So, in other words, what we want to avoid is the issue of only regarding the imagined endpoint of a process of growth as fully acceptable, fully worthy of praise, and not all the other points in the process. Don’t defer this kind of loving celebration of the nature of your existence into an indefinite future. You can never love yourself until you love who you are now, rather than the person you could be or strive to be.
If you are deferring love, for example believing that when your actions are fully aligned with your values, you're playing the same game with yourself that parents play with their kids - trying to induce the desired behavior by withholding something and sometimes, unfortunately, withholding love and affection and using it as a bribe to produce the desired behavior. Without even realizing, we end up doing the same with ourselves as adults - trying to bribe ourselves to produce the desired behavior by withholding our unconditional love for the way this body-mind is manifesting. So I invite you to experience this unconditional love for yourself. The seed of this is very simple: every thought, every emotion that arises, if you see a judgment form about that thought or emotion then you just soften around that judgment, make yourself a little bit bigger than the judgment, instead of identifying with it, and question your own judgment. Ask yourself - is that really true? How can I know that it is true? Look at the element of experience that the judgment was judging and opened to the possibility that maybe it's okay that you had that thought, maybe it's okay that you had that feeling. The possibility of okayness is the tiny seed. Maybe it's okay that you are how you are, right now. Little by little, this can blossom into a gentle smile when you catch yourself thinking the thought that you previously judged as horrible and then that can blossom further. It's a natural process. We have to be careful with language as we want to avoid an internal division where one part of you is trying to love and another part of you is trying to be loved. It's actually just a matter of regarding the phenomena arising in your experience in a different way. The real you, the you that you fundamentally are, is not the one judging the judgment, rather the judging is a regurgitation of conditioning. So when you identify with the judgment you are, by that very token, not identifying with your fundamental nature but at any moment you can soften around whatever's happening and you are stepping towards inhabiting your true nature.
Student: I find that first thing in the morning, I can really breathe into my heart space and I can feel that love and that energy flowing and then I can come into this place of really connecting with each part of my body and going, yeah I love this about me and I love this about me, and I love this, and I can do all of those things. I find that even though I do this practice all the time, that later on during the afternoon I'm much more critical and much more judgy.
Hareesh: I would say that the ego aspect of the mind doesn't activate first thing so that can definitely be a golden opportunity. I want to invite you to move past the telling of a positive story to something even deeper. I would invite this possibility, and you can come to it little by little, of encountering the miracle of embodied consciousness anew which can happen every morning. You just look at your hands and you're like ‘wow’. You don't need a thought about it, you can just realize that this is an absolute miracle, embodied consciousness made flesh. It's just an absolute miracle that consciousness has embodied itself in any form whatsoever and when you're in touch with that miracle then there's a sense that any form whatsoever is beautiful - just the fact that consciousness has form is beautiful. You will begin to realize, hopefully, that the universe doesn't actually make mistakes, so you cannot be made wrong! You’re formed by the universe itself and it can't be mistaken. We can take our cue from babies who, at a certain age, are fascinated by the fact they have a body, they don't need to think about it, they're just (and it's not about positive or negative) celebrating and exploring the miracle of embodiment.
So here is an example of exactly what the whole theme of this Near Enemy is about which is game-changing to a deeper level that renders the approval versus disapproval thing irrelevant and meaningless. You were saying that you get judgmental but this is identifying with your thoughts, you're thinking of yourself as the thinker of the thoughts and so there's an opportunity again to realisation. It's not that judgmental thoughts are conditions that are not conducive to realization, there are no conducive or non-conducive conditions. When you see judgmental thoughts happening, you can open up to a perception of - ‘oh, in these certain circumstances, my judgey mind gets activated and I get to hold space for the judgey mind phenomenon, just like I hold space for all the other phenomena’. It's just the stuff of nature, doing its thing and the mind is part of nature and it has its own nature. There's no problem with it but it feels like a problem when you're identified. So, find that place of just being in awe of even the judgment, the fact that consciousness can articulate in this way is part of this vast fabric of existence and it can also be an absurd part! We can laugh at the absurdity of it, in a loving way!
Student: I realized that it's not that I need to make myself love myself because it's probably not going to happen. Rather, that I need to allow for the possibility that I can be loved and then I realize that's actually really damn scary because I realize that I have no guarantee that it won't be withdrawn, so I don't know how to trust that this universal love won't be withdrawn.
Hareesh: Well the good news is that it can't be withdrawn because universal love doesn't belong to a person, it doesn't belong to a being with agency. This non-dual tantric view diverges quite strongly from western religious views, such as some aspects of Christianity, which imagines a superhuman person, who's said to love us all. The thing about personhood is that it involves agency and the thing about agency is that that love could theoretically be withdrawn, even if those who assert the personhood of god say this won’t happen. If you say that god can't stop loving you but he might condemn you to hell for all eternity, well I'm not interested in that sort of love! Again that's just some versions of that religion, of course. It’s an academic claim to say that god, or divinity, is unconditional love because you don't actually have any proof of that objectively, it is empirical. All those who discover and abide in their essence nature would say the same, though perhaps in a different language. For example, in the Zen tradition, they don't have a language of love or universal love or anything like that. One of the great Zen masters, I believe it was Dogen, characterized enlightenment, or awakeness, as ‘intimacy with the ten thousand things of everyday life’. That's a phrase taken out of context, but in the context of this discourse, it speaks deeply of this kind of loving presence with all the details of everyday life. It is a loving presence, where you could write a haiku about every little tiny detail of the apparently mundane, everyday life. Even though he never used the word ‘love’, or ‘unconditional love’, or anything like that, you know we can't get thrown off by words. This is a thread that runs through spiritual traditions, that love is a profound, almost tenderhearted willingness, to be with what is, in all its manifestations, whether it's articulated, or not, in whatever language you use. I would suggest to you that you can really let go of any sense of love as that which is between subject and object. To believe that ‘the universe loves me’, or ‘god loves me’, or ‘I am worthy of love’ posits a subject object love. Every subject object relationship is impermanent and inherently unstable. Whether or not you understand the true value of the thought ‘I am worthy of love’ becomes irrelevant when you start to discover that you are, love. Look at someone, or even your cat and just feel this non-performative, quiet, pure love that you could characterize as gratitude that this being exists. You've been conditioned not to feel that exact sentiment when you regard what you call ‘my body’, or ‘my mind’ but that's all just conditioning. See in yourself, already, right now, that you have this natural capacity because it just easily, spontaneously surfaces in relation to some other beings. It's not forced, it's a natural thing and so it's just a matter of discovering, little by little, that you can undo the conditioning that artificially dampens, or inhibits, the flow of that same regard towards all beings and all things. As long as you have an identity with a self, it's a problem but there's a body, and there's a mind, and its love equally flows towards this body-mind that you previously identified as me because when you identify it as ‘me’ the conditioning kicks in. It is a little bit heartbreaking to witness that you don't allow that beautiful capacity of love that's so obviously inherent, right there in your heart, to flow but also, it's not wrong. It's easier than you think, so when you are looking at your cat, or whatever being that you naturally feel easeful love towards then suddenly turn your gaze on your own body. That's one way to start to erase this artificial division that allows love to flow towards some beings and not others. Just when you're experiencing that spontaneous upwelling then maybe look at your own body. Don’t translate it to “I love this too” but maybe translate it to ‘maybe it's okay that this body is just as it is”.
Student: I've never thought that I don't love myself but I’m often afraid of not being good enough.
Hareesh: So this is just another manifestation of the same issue. It’s this fundamental kind of inculcated assumption that ‘I'm not as I should be’ as opposed to another condition, which doesn't have to be described as self-love at all - the ability to celebrate this moment in time as an expression of being itself. It’s stepping outside of that mental conditioning that fixates on the imagined endpoint of a process as the only acceptable point. You can see how insane our minds are where 99% of where we are in the process is not found to be acceptable and only the final moment of the process if there is a final moment of self-improvement, or change, or growth, or whatever is acceptable. Of course, that’s insanity!
Just take how we regard animals, like our pets and just see how the same logic applies. We have some cats here. Sometimes, one of them will pick on one of the others. One cat is bigger and it's attacking the smaller ones and that doesn't seem fair but it wouldn't even occur to us not to love the cat unconditionally because of the unspoken assumption that it can't be different from how it is. Well, every being, in every specific moment, can't be different from how they are and yet you think the cat, or dog, or whatever is worthy of love on that basis but you're not! It's very bizarre!
Student: I wanted to share an experience that happened to me at the Alhambra of Granada in Spain. So when I was in this space, I had the experience that the whole universe was created for me and I was shocked. I became this little thing happening in the middle of this perfection.
Hareesh: Of course, it's true that the universe was created for you! So, this teaching is best expressed not by words but by the practice of the Blessing Mandala where you envision all beings, in all times and spaces, arrayed in a vast three-dimensional, geometric grid-like Indra's Net. You perceive that all of these beings in existence are connected by lines of force connecting all their hearts and all these lines of force are converging on your heart. Each being in the mandala correctly sees themselves as the center of the entire mandala because each being IS the center as it's an infinite web. Every point is the geometric and spiritual center, every heart point is the centre.
The real meaning of the phrase “the universe loves me” or “God loves me” is just a clumsy way of trying to give language to the fact that this energy flow is bi-directional and it's all converging on you because you are the microcosm of the whole, just like every other being. All beings are within you and all energy converges in you and yet, also, all energy pours forth from you when it's in free flow. That is part of the point of spiritual practice - to facilitate energy entering into free flow instead of stagnancy. Sometimes sacred places, man-made or not man-made, can facilitate this realization of the natural energy flow that you experienced.
Student: There are situations where there's a conditioning of the mind that brings an underlying self-judgment that has been unseen for many years. When I recognize all this programming and this conditioning of the mind, from maybe childhood experiences, then as an adult, I'm at a point where I'm recognizing it and I suffer from judging myself.
Hareesh: Do you mean you're judging yourself for judging? How could it be otherwise? This is how you were conditioned and this is how most people were conditioned. It's really important to look and see that each of these judgments is a variation of the exact same thought: ‘I'm not as I should be’. This is conditioned by society for reasons that go all the way back to our evolutionary biology, where humans put shame pressure on other humans to try to get them to conform to a certain arbitrary behavioral norm and to make them more like themselves. If you notice people in conversation, and the way they judge each other, it's painfully transparent how often people are suggesting you should be more like them. It goes back to the very deep reasons in our evolutionary biology, having to do with tribal identity for the sake of survival and to create a cohesion that was often forced. The things that get selected to help us survive are not necessarily conducive to human happiness and flourishing. One of my teachers said that if you can't have an open heart, at least be open to your closed heart. It is a way of saying that there is always some level of acceptance that's possible. Maybe you're in a paroxysm of judgment but you can at least open towards the possibility of thinking that: “actually my mind is this judging mind, I didn't make this and I didn't choose to have a judging mind. This was created by causes and conditions beyond my control, going back not only to my childhood, but to the childhood of the human species, so it's perfect. How could it be otherwise? My judging mind is there and my job now is to discover more and more my capacity to not believe in thoughts and what the thoughts say”. That's where real freedom lies.
Discover your capacity, which is, at first tiny, to not believe in the thoughts. Practice more and more. Practice in a moment-to-moment way. Try to catch yourself in the act and say “there I go, believing another thought” and then soften and open around it and saying “oh, that's just a thought”. There's a compulsion to believe the thought, especially the thoughts that have been on repeat for decades but that doesn't make them true. Know that you have the power to unbelieve that thought, even just a little bit. Let's say you were believing that thought 100 percent, now you’re unbelieving it ten percent and you can see that's its thought and the fact that you've had it many times doesn't make it true.
The ability to celebrate the existence of any being, or celebrate any moment in time or any experience is synonymous with what we're calling love here. You can have this experience, in any given moment, that I like to characterize as the universe smiling at itself through you. There's no actual duality in it even though it sounds like that when we put it in language.
I want to quote this little bit from Walt Whitman, one of my favorite poets, one of the poets much loved by non-dual teachers today who lived before the English language included the word “non-dual”. Walt Whitman has this wonderful part in his “Song of Myself”:
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning………..
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love
That contains some obscure language but there's this phrase “a kelson of the creation is love”. A “kelson” is the beam that runs along the bottom of the entire length of an old wooden ship. So, when Whitman says “a kelson of the creation is love”, he is saying that love is a through-line in all of existence. This may sound absolutely absurd, like sheer imagination, to anyone who hasn't experienced it but it's something I feel. I had a moment of seeing, which returns periodically in an experiential sense, but it is always there in a knowing sense. In this moment of seeing, I looked up and saw that the trees were growing out of love, that the wind was blowing out of love, that the clouds were raining out of love, that absolutely everything that was happening only because of love and as an expression of love. It is true in some deep sense that doesn't make sense or needs to make sense, to the mind. The universe is love, it's the reason for existence, and everything is expressing that in every moment. This is something that can be seen, be experienced even though it appears to be non-rational. The motive force of the universe is love. When it comes to humans behaving badly and treating each other badly when we look at that with a superficial eye we say “well, look! That's not love over there!” and I would say to look a little closer because when humans act out and hurt each other, it still boils down to the same thing. In some cases, humans are so frustrated at not experiencing the unconditional love which is their birthright, and the motive force of creation, that they can't do anything else but lash out in pain, the deep existential pain of not experiencing their true nature. Other times, when humans act out, they're trying to impress somebody, or they're trying to prove themselves, or they're trying to win somebody's love in whatever weird way. People running in a gang in an inner-city in America, or the Philippines, can shoot somebody to win the love, approval, and recognition of their gang members. That might seem crazy to you but people will do anything, for any version of love that seems authentic to them. When we say that the motive force of the universe is love, it's not just some pretty speech. You can discover that and directly experience that, in all actions and in all phenomena.
This celebration of existence, which before I was characterizing as love and it is that too but each blade of grass is a celebration only we don't see that. Of course, most of us, most of the time, don't see that when we're carrying our past with us, and imagining who we could, or should be. We are deeply distracted by all of that and overlooking what's happening right now which is that very celebration.
Student: how do we fall in love with another person? How do we choose one person to love as a life partner over another person?
Hareesh: Well, those are two different questions! If we're essentially one love, how do we choose that other half? I think this is a good question because there's a lot of layers to it. Attraction obviously happens for biological and psychological reasons, primarily. These are not under our control and yet we have this bizarre egotistical imagination that if someone's attracted to us that means we're attractive, when in fact they can't help it, it's their biological and psychological imperative. If somebody's not attracted to us, we imagine that we’re not attractive when again, they can't help it! Nobody chooses what to desire! Nobody chooses who to desire! You might even have had the experience that you wish you could be attracted to this person because they're awesome and would probably be great for you. Or you may have experienced the opposite, where you wish you weren’t attracted to a person who obviously isn’t great for you.
When we know that we don't choose from our first-person perspective, we don't choose what to desire, or who to desire, or who to be attracted to, we still tell the story that they were attractive or unattractive. We still take it personally. We take everything personally despite knowing that it's actually not personal as attraction is biological and psychological in origin. It's possible that an energical connection gets formed (of course at the deepest level, we're all already connected all the time) that usually manifests as both affection and attachment. You love this person but you're also attached to them, “oh, I want you around” or “I want you to meet my needs” and this sort of thing. Much more rarely, there can be this opening, where you see god in that person. This can happen sometimes with people's first experience of falling in love where falling in love opens them to this universal love. Usually, they're too young and immature to realize that it has nothing to do with that person but rather, it's actually an incredible opening to the universal love but you think it's because that person loves me. Then it's absolutely disastrous for heartbroken teenagers as they opened to universal love and then because they tied it to one person in particular when that person was no longer available they can't access that love expression. It’s as if the love of the whole universe had suddenly been taken away from them.
As an adult, if you're operating in a non-dual mode, and you're experiencing all beings as exquisitely divine and perfect in their individual expression that doesn't mean you like everyone. Perceiving in this way doesn't really change how much you like or don't like people. The body-mind system just naturally has that attraction or affection for some, and not for others but on a deeper level you can see the exquisite beauty of each and every being. You know that they're an idiosyncratic expression of the One. Whether or not you would want to hang out with them is another question. Within that context, there can be an attraction, and even forming a bond that naturally becomes a kind of allyship. This ‘life partner’ belief in the West, due to poetry, and movies, and stuff creates conditions in which people wrongly imagine that the formation of the life partner situation should be based on romantic love, which is love, plus sexual attraction that have been fused together. The most successful partnerships are based on the sense of deep allyship where you have become allies to each other. Love is there too, of course, but attraction and all these other things, waxes and wanes so easily.
Even though you can see the beauty in all beings, you're attracted to a fairly small subset. If you're involved in a monogamous life partnership (and there's no reason you should be) it's because you see a value to the benefit in sacrificing acting on every whim of attraction for the sake of deepening the container of trust in that one relationship. If you don't feel called to do that, then fine, there's no right and wrong about it. It's certainly not true, as some people imagine, that non-duality translates to promiscuousness. There's no direct relationship at all.
Student: my heart is habitually contracted though so I'm not really conscious.
Hareesh: Well, you're conscious of a contracted heart. Don’t worry about whether you're conscious, and don’t worry about what the conditions are, or the situation is but rather bring awareness to awareness and realize that's where your freedom lies. You can't dictate the heart-mind conditions, you can't dictate terms to what you're hearing but you can always take a breath and come back to consciousness itself. That's the spirit that we're talking about that pervades all your experiences and it has an endless depth, unguessed at, unimagined by those who conditioned you, to believe that a well-functioning mind is the apex of human existence. You know that's just nonsense as it's just the mind extolling itself.
Trying to love yourself more is about seeing that there's no valid reason to not relax into your natural state which deepens into love if you let it. You can't push it, you can't force it. We come up with every pretext for resisting reality, for believing the thought “I'm not as I should be” which is completely artificial. It's just a thought that we've internalized from somewhere. So then, you just sort of fall out of playing that game. Do you see the subtle ways in which you're still trying to establish that you're worthy, or that you're good enough, or that you're spiritual, or whatever? The main point is that, if you're still engaged in something that you think you can succeed in, or fail at, then you're just distracting yourself from actual spirituality every time. It really starts with acceptance but not superficial acceptance but the acceptance that opens your heart. The acceptance that is born of the realization that not accepting is completely absurd, then you can open to this more profound acceptance which in there's laughter, and there's release.
My root guru said once that we are tortured and killed by what is not happening and what is not happening has no solution. What is happening always has its own solution, right there, within it. Part of the implication of that is any beneficial change that's actually called for naturally grows out of accepting what is now. Yet we tell this bizarre story that non-acceptance is needed to have motivation for change despite no good evidence for it.
We'll finish with this poem, attributed to Bhatta Nārāyanakantha. It's actually an amalgamation of a couple of different sources including Utpaladeva but it's beautiful as stated we don't need to worry about the historical syncretism behind this particular articulation.
"With my eyes closed, secretly enjoying the wonder of inner love
Saying unto You: Homage to You, o Siva!
I would like to worship everything,
I would like to worship everything till the last blade of grass!
Give me Your grace, o Beloved!
Then, my soul remaining forever at Your feet, will be filled with ecstasy,
and will dissolve in an ever renewed and eternal enchantment
Crazy and overfilled with love, overwhelmed by happiness till ecstasy,
Your worshippers spin, vibrating with their entire being because of the
ineffable touch of Your Grace
Blinded by tears of joy, with their face blossomed, uttering incoherent
words in the cosmic dance of love
The love in the Supreme divine,
The love in You, O Shambhu!
The love in Siva, O God!
The overflow of love, I cry with all my soul!
May my love, burning and deep be only in You!
I would like to cry: Siva! To cry once more, to always cry: Siva!
I would like to laugh and cry of joy in the drunkenness of love.
In my ardent search, I went out of my soul, in full moonshine
In my ardent search, I came to realise that the same God unites with the
same God. . .
This whole world is You, O Siva!
What are all these things and beings? They are Your eyes."
Next up: You create your own reality
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