Finding Love Within The Depths of The Soul

Finding Love within the Depths of Soul

As I have spoken before of the moral, each of us carries a moral within us. Something particular to the life we live. It moves through lesson, through teaching, through realization, until what was once understood inwardly becomes a physical representation within reality. That what is inawrd comes forward to what is outside of us. The moral becomes visible in how we live.

We live in a reality shaped by fear. We are always asking, What should I do? What is the lesson here? What is the next thing I must learn? But notice that the lesson cannot be for my benefit alone. It must concern your betterment, my betterment, everyone's betterment, even the betterment of all things. Otherwise, what have I learned of love?

Even within the depths of confusion—within psychosis, within what we call madness, within the feeling of being detached from the world—a simple love for yourself and for everyone else can remain a point of return. Compassion may still be present when much else is difficult to understand. There may be something to learn from what you have endured, even before you have an answer for it.

Some go very far into stillness. There they encounter a statement, a conclusion, something the mind has already decided. And here I would make a distinction: the resolution of a conclusion, rather than the resolution to a conclusion. I am speaking of the conclusion itself resolving. The demand it placed upon the mind falls away. You have not found another answer to satisfy it. You have ceased requiring that answer in order to understand.

Then, in the only way I know to describe it, you come back to your senses. Aha. An awakening. What you understood is now present in how you live. You have become an embodiment of the moral itself. To speak of it almost diminishes it, because the words describe something that the life must demonstrate.

Even the moral of light, so often misunderstood and sometimes abused, may still fill a life with light. It is a teaching I hold dear. Is awakening itself a moral? I believe it is. Something comes into the world through a life, and that life begins to teach. For one, the lesson may be selflessness. For another, enlightenment. For me, it has gathered around what I call telepathy.

I have taken this word and begun changing what I mean by it. The usual idea is of a mysterious ability belonging to a few. My interest has turned toward an observation that anyone may examine: the movement of things. I have begun to see lessons in this observation throughout ordinary life. I can even imagine innovations arising from it. But let us begin with something simple.

Telepathy, as I use the word here, is the observation of movement.

Wind is a name. Before you named it, there was movement. Clouds, water, light, birds, cars, aeroplanes—we give each a name, but the name does not explain the movement before us. Even a lawn mower. Look at a lawn mower. Look within it. Each part has its movement, its place among the movements of the other parts, and together we call this a lawn mower. The name is a symbol for something happening.

At first this seems innocent enough. A small observation. Yet when you begin looking this way, the world becomes less settled than its names would suggest. You have named the thing, yes. Have you understood what it is doing?

The student may study every movement and placement of the master. He learns where to stand, when to turn, what to repeat. But what I am trying to describe goes further. He begins to understand the movement from which the master's actions arise. He can repeat what the master did yesterday. Does he understand what is happening before him today? Knowledge may provide the repetition. Understanding must meet the movement itself.

Let us take this to a parable about the sun.

The student looks upon himself and says, “I want to be omniscient. I want to know everything.”

I say to him, “Consider the sun. Within this parable, imagine that its light is its knowing. It touches the world without preference. Wherever its light reaches, there is its offering.”

The student says, “Then I will harness the sun. I will drain it until I become the sun. I will take all that it knows, all of its energy. I will take more from it than it gives.”

The telepath smiles. “This is a fool's errand.”

The sun gives the light it gives. An awakening also gives what it gives. You may spend your life demanding more from it, attempting to possess the source, and never learn how to receive what is already before you. What will you do with the sun once you have taken it? Have you even learned to live within its light?

Wisdom begins in reception. You receive, and through that reception you learn. Your body, your mind, your spirit become capable of making use of what has been given. The telepath turns his eyes away from the sun. “It is bright.” There is a lesson even in this. Stare into it and you may lose the very sight by which its light was useful to you.

Do you see how simple this is? There is already light enough to learn by. The sun does not need to be exhausted for you to receive it. Neither does a teacher. Neither does an awakening.

This has long troubled me in the way people sometimes study Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and other traditions. They gather the words, the rituals, the ceremonies. They collect what another has known and say, “Look. Now I glow with the Buddha's light. Now I possess Christ's wisdom. Now I have inherited enlightenment.” Yet what has awakened within their own conduct? What has changed in the way they receive another person?

The words and ceremonies may teach. But if I am occupied only with possessing them, I may never ask what they are teaching me. I have gathered descriptions of the light. Have I allowed myself to see by it?

Receive what comes through Christ, through the Buddha, through a prophet or a teacher, and ask, What within me can awaken through receiving this? Now the lesson concerns your life. Now the moral has somewhere to become visible.

In the understanding I have called telepathy, reception comes before possession. As I cease trying to claim the lesson, I begin to notice what the lesson asks of me. A moral begins to kindle. It belongs to the life I must live, to the responsibility I cannot hand back to the teacher. Through discipline, openness, and practice, it becomes more than something I can repeat.

And perhaps one day you discover that you have become radiant yourself. The sun is still there. You have taken nothing from it. Yet it may seem, for a moment, as though you have exchanged places. You have learned to shine.

But how am I supposed to learn?

Listening. I make a distinction here between listening and what I am calling hearing. Much as I might distinguish seeing from merely looking. You may hear every word a person says and still give that person no opportunity to teach you anything.

The next time you are listening, notice the moment you decide you already know where the speaker is going. The intellect is quick. Before the person has finished, it says, Aha. I have arrived at the conclusion. And now it waits. It listens only for the words that will confirm what it has decided. Almost like a predator, it waits for the speaker to come close enough to the answer it already holds.

What am I learning at this point? I am waiting to say, You see? I arrived there as well. Perhaps even before you. I am sharp. The speaker continues, but I have placed my own conclusion between us. Everything that follows must now pass through it.

You could say this sharpens the intellect. Perhaps it does. But notice something else. A space has appeared within the mind where an answer was placed before I was aware of placing it. Now that answer is directing my attention. I hear what agrees with it. I prepare to argue with what does not. The person before me has become an occasion to confirm something already within me.

This is what I mean by hearing. Recognition takes hold and says, We have arrived. We may move forward. Listening remains with the speaker. It allows that something has yet to be understood. It has not decided in advance what that understanding must be.

Perhaps this also reveals an illusion within the intellect: its ability to make a conclusion feel like understanding. The conclusion may be correct. Still, did I understand the person, or did I recognize an answer? These are different things. An answer may be repeated in many situations. Understanding must remain attentive to this one.

When I speak of listening in relation to telepathy, I begin here, with that quiet interval before my answer takes over. Can I remain receptive to another person without filling that interval with what I presume to know? Can I allow the person before me to be more than my conclusion about them?

The intellect places its conclusions within the recesses of the mind, and later those conclusions are heard. We begin seeking an answer to them, seeking to settle what they have declared unresolved. Yet the experience before us may ask something else entirely. Yesterday's answer has stepped forward before today has been allowed to speak.

What do I mean by a recess of the mind? I mean that place into which attention withdraws, where an old conclusion can begin speaking as though it belongs to the present. We may scarcely notice the withdrawal. We believe we are still attending to what is happening, yet we are occupied with something already decided.

The living mind need not remain there. It can listen. It can accept that the experience before it has arrived, even when the experience is unwelcome. Acceptance, in this sense, allows us to examine what is here. We do not have to approve of everything in order to understand it.

There is a fearlessness in allowing understanding to arise before demanding a conclusion. The mind can respond to what it understands without pretending to possess certainty about everything. It remains capable of learning even while it acts.

Fear finds this difficult. Fear says, You do not know what to do. Where is your answer? Where is the conclusion that will keep you safe? And the intellect may hurry forward with something familiar. Something decided long ago. Its certainty can be comforting even when the present situation has hardly been examined.

Understanding belongs to the present. A conclusion records where thought has already arrived. The trouble begins when I require the present to agree with that record. I may possess a thousand answers and still fail to understand the person standing before me.

Consider the difference between saying, I know what to do, and saying, I understand what to do. As I use these words here, the first may be spoken from a stored answer. The second requires attention to what is happening. Its clarity depends upon remaining present, upon being willing to notice what the answer might have missed.

Then even when conflict arrives, with its anxiety, its confusion, its insecurity, the mind may return to something simple: I am here. I am aware. I am still learning. There is no need to pretend that the conflict has disappeared. One listens within it. One allows what is happening to be understood.

But attention may wander away, much like a child leaving what is before him to go and play. Into that recess it goes, and there it finds all the conclusions already made. It returns carrying them. Now I confront this experience with what I decided once before, perhaps with what I have repeated to myself a thousand times since.

The old conclusion is heard first. The present moment scarcely gets to speak.

And here I return to love. If I love you only within the boundaries of what I have concluded about you, how will I recognize what I have yet to understand? How will I receive you when you no longer resemble the answer I have kept?

The same question concerns the love I hold for myself. Even within confusion, even when I have not resolved what has happened, compassion need not wait for the final explanation. I can remain willing to learn. I can return to what is before me. The moral may begin to live there, in the way I receive you, in the way I receive myself.

Listen. There is still someone before you. There is still a life to be understood.