OPENNESS CAN KILL AS MUCH AS SECRECY

I posted last Friday that secrets and holding things in can kill you.  I know people—my own students—who held desperate secrets about things they, or others did, that twisted their entire psyches, and the only escape was to go into silence or Robert’s beyondness.

Robert was almost 100% secret. He revealed almost nothing of his past or present.  Many of us, his students, speculated some notorious past, hiding from the authorities for crimes long before (jokingly of course).  Nicole Adams, his wife, refused to let anyone post or publish his photos and threatened to sue anyone who did so.  The editor of Yoga Journal called me one day, frantic that Nicole had threatened to sue the Journal if he published the photo of Robert that I gave him.  The photo was never published.

This secrecy led to one disaster after another in our own Sangha because no one knew where Robert stood on anything, as he would tell one person one thing, and another person something else entirely.

At other times I have been with people who unburdened themselves of long held secrets about themselves or others that was followed by an almost miraculous improvement in health and mood, going from suppressed rage or depression into an exuberance until the next buried secret began to emerge.  However, once they saw the value of complete openness, everything began to emerge in a floodtide.

On the other hand, sometimes secrecy or little lies are better than fully opening to truthfulness, not in an ideal world, but in the world we live in where we fear losing that which we have by being open.

I conclude that sometimes lies and secrecy are more advisable than openness, as many relationships that you are in cannot tolerate openness, and it would be lost, if, for example, you told your significant other you love someone else.  Not that you would leave the relationship or cheat on that other sexually, but only that someone else has taken a large chunk of your heart and made it his or hers.

However, just maybe, in that hidden relationship you can be completely open, loving and committed.  I don’t know.

I think one has to become very mature and learn when to be open and when not to be open.  There are so many stories that can be told here about married people falling in love with someone outside that marriage and what happens as a result.  In some cases the married partner killed themselves after the discovery of the partner’s love.  Sometimes the marriage was destroyed.  Sometimes the love of a lifetime was abandoned for sake of the family.

I do know that love is ruthless.  It wants what it wants when it wants it.  It wants us to shout out our love to all near and far.  It wants us to leap into our cars or planes and fly to the other.  Every moment of the day and much of the night we think about the other to the detriment of our lives here and now with our job, our spouses or children. What to do, what to do?

Yet that same mad, fanatic love changes us.  Our hearts fill with energy, and currents of ecstatic and often sexual energy course through our bodies daily.  Love becomes a visible current of light and energy coursing between genitals and brain.  We become ecstatic and worshipful.  We only want to be with our lover for only here do we finally at home, rested, loved, and whole.

And this state of intense, focused, insane, all-encompassing love, makes us realize we are love itself.  This love itself so intensely felt is a precursor to self-realization with the explosive recognition of our true nature as Christ or Krishna Consciousness, or ecstatic love and an energy beyond measure that fills us with awe and gratitude, and we only want to worship and serve that Other that has arising in us that feels divine because of its immense power and majesty.

And that power surges through us, fills our small self, the sense of presence of being alive as a human, with aliveness and an ability and desire to worship and serve, not only itself, but all other sentient beings which share this Self-nature of consciousness.  But most of all, we want to worship and serve that external lover who ignited our heart’s fire.

Somehow I feel that this love cannot and should not be stifled, for the telling of its story can set others’ hearts on fire, and everyone can feel the love, power, and peace of being both a vulnerable human and the divine itself, complete in itself, yet loving and caring for all as a shepherd for all sentient beings.