Apologies, dear friends, for my absence these past weeks. I’ve been beavering away very one-pointedly at another of my online passions – the awakened eye website and blog. The project saw a couple of hundred pages transferred from the original self-hosted website to the WordPress blog associated with it – literally weeks of (joyful) work. The reason? Simplification – downsizing – economics. Please zoom over and have a look at the new site. Feedback appreciated!
I’ve also been putting together a little essay for an online publisher about the “journey home” as it has unfolded for the emelle character – a project that turned up some surprises for her as she joined the dots of the decades. (More about this later.)
One thing I noticed as I examined my own experience over those decades, was a reluctance to use words like “love” when attempting to express the freefall into thusness. Maybe it was my education, which alerted me to recognition of terms that are merely conceptual referents. Maybe it was an awareness of how this word has lost its true meaning as a result of being mouthed ad nauseum by new age adherents and god-botherers in general.
Rupert Spira’s take on love is big enough for me, though. The following is part of a reply he wrote to someone who was courageous enough to ask for clarity about the real implications of this belief-burdened four-letter word.
Whatever is not present right now is not worthy of the name love and is likewise not worthy of our desire. Forget it. Whatever is not present now, even if it is one day found, will by definition one day disappear.
Why go for something temporary? It can never fulfill you. Let go of everything that can be let go of, everything – and anything that appears can be let go of – including all your, my and everyone else’s ideas about love.
In fact, as soon as we look for what is present, it is gone. We cannot focus on or even think about what is truly present. We can only think about an object, about the past, about the future. In other words, we can only think of a thought.
Thought can never know or find the one thing that it almost constantly seeks. It can only dissolve in it.
The mind dies as it turns towards love like a moth in a flame.
Let the mind dissolve in the understanding that it simply cannot go to the place of love and yet, like a fish in the ocean searching for water, it is already swimming in it.
Let everything pass by.
Remember William Blake: “He who binds himself to a joy does the winged life destroy.”
The ‘winged life’ is love itself. It is apparently destroyed by our looking for it as an object, by ‘binding’ our self to an object, which means to the past or the future.
Let go, let go, let go.
Let your tears be the river into which everything you know is offered up, all your longing, everything.
Someone once asked Mother Meera if it was okay to offer everything to God or whether only ‘positive things’ should be offered, and she replied: “A child offers its mother a snail, a stick or a stone; the mother doesn’t care what is offered; she is just happy to have been remembered.”
Offer everything. The love you seek is all that will remain behind.
Yes. Love is all that’s left, but it’s not like any kind of love you imagined. It has no object. It has no opposite. It is a simple, open acceptance without condition, of all that appears. It is no other than your natural self – whatever you are called.
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this unlit light 