Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

A message I received yesterday.  The author wanted to remain anonymous.

Dear Ed,

It’s been a while since I’ve written and thus a while since we’ve spoken.

How are you?... I trust you’re doing well, as happy as happy can be?

So the subject of this letter is love.  Love, as the binding force, is sticky.  The sense of urgency, and the sense of willingness behind all agency, behind all actions, is but love.  This is said to be the truth and yet we don’t see it. 

My thoughts have been on love, for the endeavor of understanding oneself is, in essence, one of love.  Your message of loving unabashedly, with all one’s being, abandoning concepts surrounding an ‘impersonal love’ – because what I would call ‘impersonal’ is but another shade of my uniquely ‘personal’ experience – is unorthodox and probably earns you a good amount of flak.

However what you say resonates: love, truly loving, through pain, through pleasure, through light and dark, continue loving.  The depth experienced in truly falling in love, totally and completely in love, to that extent will the roots of attention take hold. 

It’s clearing and tilling the soil as you say.  

To truly love, abandoning the concept of ‘personal’ vs. ‘impersonal’, is to become totally exposed to life, and thus to become truly alive.  Is it so?  Only through having known love, forcefully putting aside concepts, even ‘spiritual’ ones, is one really ready to go inside.  Is this right?

This whole conversation is just words.  But in truth this word called ‘love’ points to a force, a reality, something that’s totally my own, but it can’t really be approached or handled casually with concepts.  To be able to love, but to really love, appears to require a maturity and depth of understanding usually brought about by searching, experiencing frustration; the highs and lows and everything in between.

Having not known love but attempting to ‘transcend suffering’ by asking ‘who am I?’, is kind of like a child who declares that he’s going to be an astronaut when he grows up.  It’s like wanting the ocean without first sailing down the river.

It’s like wanting to orgasm without even having gone through the intense yearning of connecting with a first kiss, which then leads to making out, undressing garment-by-garment, imbibing her essence through her kiss and the smell of her soft supple neck; all kinds of for-play, penetration, etc.  And only then, ‘kaboom’.

It’s like practicing self-enquiry to avoid pain.

It’s like praying to God for deliverance without having taken a hard look at yourself, your deepest yearnings and your pain (For that pain needs my love).

Maybe this is why you insist on me being clear when saying the verb “to Awaken”?  Perhaps this is why you criticize teachers’ concepts (or my dependence thereon)?  Such concepts (even the most lofty) stunt my growth because I rely on them instead of relying on me.  Is this right? 

Therefore, to abandon all concepts (including spiritual ones) is tantamount to and synonymous with learning how to really love.  Love can only flow when unobstructed, and holding on to those ideas that protect me most, obstructs love, ironically.  To learn to love is, in itself, turning away from concepts and embracing that ever flowing deluge or current??

I felt it reading your words.  There was a sense of understanding opening up.

So, go deep into love through whatever shape that divine force assumes.  Love.  And then… and then.

So, love is sticky.  I’ve always thought that spirituality was the art of staying “high and dry”; but now I’m seeing that I was mistaken.  It’s really about how drenched in it you can get.

I feel incredibly lucky to have heard of this teaching; incredibly lucky that Maharaj’s words, and more recently your words, fill my heart and make That ‘visible’.

Over the past months sitting has become so easy, so simple, and intensely interesting (although very ordinary at the same time, if that makes sense).

It’s like a mooring has been cast.  The mooring could be quite long but sooner or later the dock will be reached.  I feel this way.