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| ~ Ram Dass ~ |
Imagine feeling more love
from someone than you have ever known. You’re being loved even more
than your mother loved you when you were an infant, more than you
were ever loved by your father, your child, or your most intimate
lover—anyone. This lover doesn’t need anything from you, isn’t
looking for personal gratification, and only wants your complete
fulfillment.
You are loved just for
being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything
to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical
perfection, or social and economic success— none of that matters.
No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.
Imagine that being in this
love is like relaxing endlessly into a warm bath that surrounds and
supports your every movement, so that every thought and feeling is
permeated by it. You feel as though you are dissolving into love.
This love is actually part
of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic
texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything.
When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not
your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual
heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.”
This is your deeper heart,
your intuitive heart. It is the place where the higher mind, pure
awareness, the subtler emotions, and your soul identity all come
together and you connect to the universe, where presence and love
are.
Unconditional love really
exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not
so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not “I love
you” for this or that reason, not “I love you if you love me.”
It’s love for no reason, love without an object. It’s just
sitting in love, a love that incorporates the chair and the room and
permeates everything around. The thinking mind is extinguished in
love.
If I go into the place in
myself that is love and you go into the place in yourself that is
love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the
state of being love. That’s the entrance to Oneness. That’s the
space I entered when I met my guru.
Years ago in India I was
sitting in the courtyard of the little temple in the Himalayan
foothills. Thirty or forty of us were there around my guru,
Maharaj-ji. This old man wrapped in a plaid blanket was sitting on a
plank bed, and for a brief uncommon interval everyone had fallen
silent. It was a meditative quiet, like an open field on a windless
day or a deep clear lake without a ripple. I felt waves of love
radiating toward me, washing over me like a gentle surf on a tropical
shore, immersing me, rocking me, caressing my soul, infinitely
accepting and open.
I was nearly overcome, on
the verge of tears, so grateful and so full of joy it was hard to
believe it was happening. I opened my eyes and looked around, and I
could feel that everyone else around me was experiencing the
same thing. I looked over at my guru. He was just sitting there,
looking around, not doing anything. It was just his being, shining
like the sun equally on everyone. It wasn’t directed at anyone in
particular. For him it was nothing special, just his own nature.
This love is like
sunshine, a natural force, a completion of what is, a bliss that
permeates every particle of existence. In Sanskrit it’s called
sat-cit-ananda, “truth-consciousness-bliss,” the bliss of
consciousness of existence. That vibrational field of ananda love
permeates everything; everything in that vibration is in love. It’s
a different state of being beyond the mind. We were transported by
Maharaj-ji’s love from one vibrational level to another, from the
ego to the soul level. When Maharaj-ji brought me to my soul through
that love, my mind just stopped working. Perhaps that’s why
unconditional love is so hard to describe, and why the best
descriptions come from mystic poets. Most of our descriptions are
from the point of view of conditional love, from an interpersonal
standpoint that just dissolves in that unconditioned place.
When Maharaj-ji was near
me, I was bathed in that love.
Excerpted from BE LOVE NOW by Ram Dass
