DECEMBER 19 What I needed most was to love and to be loved. I rushed headlong into love, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers of jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by bursts of anger and quarrels. – SAINT AUGUSTINE Even in the most intimate of personal relationships, most of us still live inside our own private mental worlds. Our attention is often preoccupied – sometimes more in the past and future than in the present – so that we have very little attention to give to those we want to love. Despite our best intentions to draw closer, all kinds of distracting thoughts – likes and dislikes, attachments and aversions, private moods, dreams and desires – come in any time they like, keeping other people at a distance. We yearn for closeness and find, more often, disappointment. Here Augustine echoes the experiences that almost all of us go through, starting often in our adolescence. The journey into deeper consciousness is one we must take up if ever we are to find the love, the closeness, and the fulfillment we all so earnestly desire. easwaran.org
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 06:22:52 +0000