Home Back One Page Contact Us Glossary |
  by David Truman |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The other day, I was writing a paper about the psychology of dominance and submission in man-woman relations. I was looking at all the ins and outs, all the problems that were associated with it, in every different way you could imagine, plus some. The subject loomed so large, it began to look like Mount Rushmore. And all over it, the ego's footprints.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Then I saw it totally: This huge Mount Rushmore is dust. It is nothing -- just another in-depth consideration about human psychology. The bottom line is, the ego is always a problem. And I realized, until and unless there is true love, there is no solution for the human condition. Love is the final answer. Love is the only solution. With that, I really released the entire investigation of human psychology that has engaged me for the past thirty years. All this dharma. All this living. I saw it.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| What you really need when you have a problem, is a solution. The solution is love. |
I think I can say I understand the human condition and its problems pretty well, probably as well as anybody. And now I can say conclusively that these problems are not in fact solvable on their own level. If there is a problem, dwelling on it doesn't help particularly. What you really need, if you have a problem, is a solution. No matter what the problem is, the solution is one -- love. You can talk and talk until you're blue about the ins and outs of the ego's garbage. But no matter what you come up with or think about, there is no actual solution other than love. There are a million questions, but there is only one answer. And once you have the answer, then you have no more questions. There's really nothing to talk about, except to mention the solution.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
But what about all the varieties of human experience and human problems? This vast complexity of spiritual teaching that we've been involved in developing for the last twenty or thirty years reflects nothing but the simple fact that people were not willing to love. And that unwillingness generated an infinitude of complexes and problems of many shapes and sizes. Those problems were all the result of people buying time to continue hanging on to their old egoic dreams, their old ways of acting, thinking, and being. And creating and having all manner of difficulties and problems as a result of living as egos. And then waiting for someone or something to come along that could save them from this mess -- some kind of answer, some kind of savior.
|
TOP | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The saving grace of love is HAVING love, BEING love. Tag, you're it!
|
The savior is love, and it will save any person from any trouble. The saving grace of love is HAVING love, BEING love. Tag, you're it! It is definitely not good enough simply to be loved, although that is encouraging, and certainly uplifting. But it is not a solution. You have to BE love.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| If you are willing to throw yourself in and to be love altogether with your heart and soul, then indeed you have nothing to worry about, because you really are saved for all practical purposes. The rest is only the outworking of your salvation. And at that moment, you really have nothing to look forward to but love, which is what you are, having made a decision to be love -- love in a billion different iterations. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
That is easy to say. And it is really not all that hard to do, when compared to any of the alternatives. At the core of it, love is empty. It is unselfed. It is carefree. It is not complicated. It has no hidden agenda. It is not in any kind of conflict. It is not dividing itself, separating itself and creating all kinds of trouble on that account. It is in fact THE solution, and therefore, happy. This is simple stuff for simple people.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Of course, people don't necessarily want to love. And even when people want to love, they aren't necessarily ready or willing to love. But that's their business. To the extent that a person is unready or unwilling to love, it is simply a tragedy -- actually, more tragedies than you can shake a stick at. But I don't want to talk about that infinitude of tragedies by which we imprison ourselves. There is no way out of that whole mess except to love truly, sincerely, unstintingly, courageously, and with profound commitment. Apart from love, there are only pain relievers, consolations, symptomatic remedies of all kinds, but no solution whatsoever.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Until you make that firm decision be love wholeheartedly, you can focus on anything you want, and every topic that you could focus on represents, in itself, a dead end detour. You will go down that road, no doubt, and you will end up having to turn around and retrace your steps. Eventually, no matter how many detours you decide upon, in time you will come back to love's embrace. Ultimately all you can learn from every experience is that there is only one solution, and the solution is love. You will come to that, because it has always been so, and will always be so. There is only that one answer to come to in the end.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
"What's love got to do with what I'm doing right now?"
|
Now, you can apply that one answer to everything there is. And it can be very meaningful, very productive, to do exactly that. "What's love got to do with what I'm doing right now?" you can ask. You can very productively keep asking that question right now and right now and right now, and it will reveal many things. But within all of that, you find that love is a very simple thing. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
"What are the implications to the beloved of what I'm doing now and now and now?"
|
It's like I always said it was. I live unselfishly, I live for the beloved. My thoughts are focused. I consider the benefit of the beloved in all things, all the time. I consider: "What are the implications to the beloved of what I'm doing now and now and now?" Will this help the beloved? Will this be of benefit? I look in great detail at exactly what and how the thing I am doing now and now and now will help the beloved. Or heaven forbid, in what way will what I'm doing now and now injure or otherwise harm the beloved? These are the things that one should look at -- the only things. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
"How, with what spirit, should I present this gift to the beloved?"
|
You really want to know what exactly would make the beloved happy. And not just WHAT -- you are much more astute than that if you think with your Buddha mind -- but HOW should you do it? You want to know, "How, in what tone, should I present this flower? With what spirit should I present it?" With your Buddha mind you certainly know this is going to make a difference to the beloved. You want to know what, you want to know why, you want to know HOW to do the presentation of this gift to make the beloved most happy. This is all you care about. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| You put your Buddha mind on this. You think deeply about what are the things that would be helpful to the beloved, why those things work, and how they work best. And you come to the conclusion, in your own heart and in your own sincere inquiry, that they work best when they are done wholeheartedly and with all the corners back on. You begin to understand what it means to be wholehearted in your loving. It means to be complete. It means to cut no corner. Then you are given in your entirety, and therefore you are loving. This is what love is: that you give yourself entirely. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| "Is the service I am doing FOR the beloved?" | Regarding acts of service, acts of self-sacrifice, ask yourself, "Is what I'm doing a valid service?" If it is for the beloved, it certainly is. If not, then it certainly is not. And furthermore, if you look at your track record of service, you may see there are many corners that could be cut in service. Up to this point, you have cut many of those corners. And however many corners one can manage to cut, you see that the gift is proportionally degraded. Therefore there are many, many corners to put back on to make what you're doing whole, complete. However many corners can be put back, on the more the gift takes shape as a true love expression in its wholeness, in its completeness, in its sincerity. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
"Have I cut any corners? If so, what corners can I put back, to make my service whole and complete?"
|
So, when you look at your acts of service, contemplate, "Have I cut any corners? If so, what corners have I got to put back, to make my service whole and complete?" Consider all the factors in great detail, and perfect them. Ask, "What would make this gift perfect?," which is precisely the opposite question from asking, "How can I do this minimally? How can I get by?" | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This is what it means to be a loving person: to entertain these thoughts with all due care and consideration, with heartfelt simplicity and sincerity. This is love. This is the activity of love, and it has no other activity. It has no other goal, purpose, enterprise, activity, method. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| People who have a very strong motivation toward excellence end up considering many, many factors that one might not otherwise think of. You see a reasonable model or facsimile of this idea in an Olympic hopeful. They find themselves involved in sports psychology, deep studies of kinetics, considerations of nutrition. No stone is left unturned by a person who strives for absolute excellence. In that same spirit, how much more would a person who strives to be a true lover consider all the factors that go into love, which could make love the perfection that it wants to be? Certainly if an Olympic candidate would do such a thing, why would we not? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sincere love is entire, uncontradicted and unconflicted, whole.
|
Sincerity is all that is really at issue here, because sincerity is that one factor that would cause a person to be whole. When we say sincere, we mean entire, uncontradicted and unconflicted, whole. And it could only be insincerity -- some form of withholding, some form of doubt, some form of reservation -- that could cause anything less than that to happen. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In this you find your creativity. When the whole of what you are is consecrated to love, then you are always casting about for love's solutions creatively. You are not just trying to be safe by repeating the same old shoulder rub, or whatever else is safe. You are always contemplating the needs of the beloved, and this causes you to be infinitely creative in your responses. "What's going to work NOW for the beloved?" This is what you would be wondering, now and now and now. The more you wonder it, the more things you would think of, and the more things that you would think of, the more things that you would do. And you would find your wholeness and all of your total creative possibilities in the process of answering that one question in each moment. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Use your Buddha mind and your Quan Yin heart to find the right nuance.
|
There are very few things within the entirety of your potentiality that would not be embraced and implicated in the consideration of HOW. Maybe there's a million or a billion possibilities for ways to present this flower with love. But you can find the one in a billion, you can find the nuances that apply to the moment very subtly, with your Buddha mind and your Quan Yin heart. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In this one thing you can follow my example with great confidence. I have certainly left very few stones unturned in my efforts to help you. It is you for whom I write, sing. It is because of your requirements, what you need, that I dig into every possible resource that I personally can think of and express through these various means, depending on what I feel would be most beneficial for you at that moment, and on what I am capable of doing. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This is because I stand for you. I do not stand for myself. I stand for you. You too must have something to stand for in your time. And when you in fact stand for the beloved, when that is your answer, then you will be standing for something worthwhile. The beloved is worth everything that you can be or give. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Love is the highest priority for a lover. That's all this means. It's all loving truly means. There is nothing complicated about that. When love is in the first place, love wins. When it is in any other place, it cannot win; whatever is in the first place, will topple it. Therefore love, to be true, must in fact be in the first place, and everything else must be subordinated to love. If that is so, then everything other than love is all disposable. You stand for love. And love itself stands for you. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Nothing can stand in the way of a person who loves. Everything that you hold has to be flexible. A lover would not cling onto some pattern or behavior that appreciably damages love's interests or the interests of the beloved. If your long hair became a problem, it would be cut. And so would your wrong thinking. And so would your problematic attitudes, and so would your toxic beliefs. There is nothing in you that love itself cannot and will not perfect. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Take it all off for love's sake, and then give it all.
|
So I say, "Take it all off for love's sake, and then give it all." Take off whatever is an impediment, and then give yourself freely without it. Love would have you do that exactly. And love would certainly recognize an impediment for what it is. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
"Do I have an issue, concern, or attachment that is superior to love in its value to me? If so, what is it?"
|
Ask yourself, "Do I have an issue, concern, or attachment that is superior to love in its value to me? If so, what is it? Or what are those things?" If love is not on top, I do not have a problem. I have an infinitude of problems. If love is on top, I have nothing to worry about. I have a solution. I have a solution to an infinitude of problems. I have a scissors capable of cutting every hair that gets in the way. And I have a star that certainly outshines everything that can happen either within me or without me in the entire world, or any world. Having a solution, I have nothing to worry about. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| There is nothing like love. No facsimile of love is like love. No gesture, no sacrifice, no experience, nothing is like love. Popularity, manipulation, getting are nothing like love. Things, processes, energies, even those are nothing like love. Love stands beyond all of that. It stands on its own right. Love does not stand for itself. It stands for you. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Love rules. Let it rule. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
by David Truman Please feel free to share copies of this article. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|