People who are near death sometimes begin to see how much they love life, how much they love the world, how much they love very simple things. To be able to get up and take a shower is wonderful. You don’t want to lose that . . . just feeling the water running over your body. Normally, you don’t tend to notice that; you just take a shower every morning and put on your clothes and run. But when you are about to die, you think, “Oh, am I never going to have a shower again?” and you recognize how much you like it, how much you love it. If we explore our relationship to the world, we recognize that we have a tremendous love for it. We have a deep love for the world even though many of us have difficulty with it. We have fears and conflicts about the world, and there is much suffering, pain, aggression, and disappointment. Some of us sometimes hate the world. But when we explore very deeply, we usually recognize that we feel love for it as well. At the same time, we have another love. Many people in the world are not aware of this other love. They are only living out their love, their attraction to, and their need for the world. But when somebody becomes more mature or sensitive, the conventional world is no longer enough. The life of the world, regardless of how much we love it, feels incomplete at some point. Every aspect of it, regardless of how beautiful, how wonderful, it is, has something about it that is not completely satisfying. Even with people we love, in our intimate love relationships, and in our connection with nature, we hunger for something else, something more invisible. We can’t even define at first what that is. We become aware of this love in different ways. Some of us feel discontented, incomplete, or we become aware of a sense of meaninglessness. Some of us have a lot of pain and suffering and want to end that; so we seek happiness or freedom. That is why many spiritual teachings see as the motivation for enlightenment and spirituality the need to develop compassion, or to free people from suffering, or to have love for God or for truth. But if we explore all of these, we begin to recognize this other love, the love for what is beyond this world. Anyone who becomes interested in inner work, spiritual work, starts to be aware of this love. ahalmaas/books/divine-eros
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:48:14 +0000
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