It’s not “me” you want
The feeling of love is the most powerful thing in the universe, and perhaps that’s why it’s also sometimes the most painful.
Every so often, someone stirs in us this feeling of love and it is more intense than anything else we go through in this life. We can stay up for hours, we are inspired to poetry and art, even physical pain and illnesses decrease.
When we are in love like this, we have been given a free gift of the ability to meditate like the highest masters. How is this so? Because the highest masters completely forgot themselves. They forgot to keep saying “me, me, me”.
The “me” they go beyond is a fixed sense of who they are. This kind of “me” can always only feel stale, because it is always behind the times. The moment you reify some “self” - in that very moment it has already become out-dated, obsolete. The wisest meditators have seen this happening. Their minds are so sharp, their laboratory equipment so advanced, that they can slow the process down and see it in real time >”I think I am a self”< >zoooom, in comes the too-tight identity-construct to paste itself on my experience< >”OUCH this feels terrible!”<
After witnessing this pattern play out again and again, the wise yogi makes a conscious decision to stop doing it (does it hurt when you do that? STOP doing that!). The person in love gets a freebie. The glamour they see shimmering from the object of their affection has the power to completely obliterate the capacity to think about oneself. Even a moment of stoping thoughts of “me” is powerfully refreshing. It kicks out the stale and outmoded and plunks one straight into the cool depths of Now.
The only distinction between the infatuated and the mystic is that the one who thinks they are “in love” is having an experience that they didn’t choose. They haven’t learned to release the grip of “me”-grasping on purpose, they are practically forced into it instead. That means that the freshness they feel will be only temporary. There’s a type of addiction here. You have to get your fix from out there because you don’t know it’s coming from in here.
Something about the Beloved blasts you out of the realm of the known. That familiarity you’ve worked so hard to build up has completely stifled you, and along comes this amazing, wonderful, super-hot being and BOOM rips the familiarity away. But inevitably, they will leave you. And when they leave you, unless you are very lucky, you will cling even more strongly to the familiar feeling of “me”.
When you are in their presence, something about the magnetic property of the other siphons off the energy you could use to grasp to yourself. But when you are away from them, all you know is that some “you” was able to change that way this “me” felt. You don’t know that it was a release from the stagnation of self-clinging, you think the freshness came from them.
Worst is when the Beloved finally becomes familiar to you. Because once they are familiar, no longer a mystery, they lose all power to transport you outside the realm of the known. When the other no longer consistently gives us a fix, we get angry, sad, deprived. Our addiction is not being served. They were there providing the light of God to us, and now that has somehow stopped. We are tossed straight from heaven to the depths of hell.
How simple things could be if we recognized that it’s not “them” that we want. Wanting “them” is just a sneaky way of wanting “me” - and “me” is something we’ve already got too much of. The beloved looks like the light of God because for some reason we are able to see the Divine in them easily. This divine which is none other than a feeling of Communion. This is the mystic’s secret. Not forgetting the stagnant self in some sense of empty bewilderment or darkness, but a surrender of that self to the divine feeling of love and unity. This feeling is available in a mountain cave, and it is available in our own families. People have had a love affair with God while dying and others have while tending to the sick.
God is better in bed than any human mate you’ll ever find, and you can have her/him 24 hours a day, seven days a week - constant bliss. Because the secret is that we kept waiting for someone to come along and give us that pleasant refreshment we always longed for. But the thing seeking was the thing we sought - the minute we give, and let go of attachment to an outdated “me”, that minute we are free, blissful, and fresh.
Do you want the youthful strength of a teenager - vibrant, alive, inspired? Have a crush on all beings, Fall in love with everything.
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