IT REALLY IS ALL ABOUT LOVE
So many of our Sangha and all Westerners really, suffer from a large split between what their minds say they want, and what their feeling say they want.
The Buddhists’ solution was to learn how to want nothing, and thereby enjoy receiving whatever occurs in equanimity, not necessarily in joy, because joy would beget loss of joy, which is suffering. Their solution was a calm acceptance of whatever life brought.
It took me many years to escape from such a closed system. There was no room for love in Zen as Sasaki Roshi told me back in 1975. Split solved: no room for emotion in emptiness. No room for bliss or ecstasies in emptiness, as both are only to be only watched, or are considered Makyo, or delusions.
But I kept falling in love with women, and when I did my heart opened and I felt incredible love, devotion, and a need to surrender, to be like a puppy near my Beloved. Robert Adams, my teacher, despite being as aloof and cold as one could be, also had an open heart towards women. He loved being with them and loving them.
When total and mutually shared love and surrender came to me in 2010, it cured that split between mind and emotions completely, because love totally blew my mind away and opened me to a deeper layer of bliss and ecstatic energies, which was the message all my previous loves were speaking to me about. I call these energies generically, Shakti. My love for women was a message from Shakti that she was both the instigator of my love and also the object, the life force heartfelt in a woman. Shakti was always driving me towards love while my mind always wanted truth.
The mind may try to explain or find truth, but Shakti actually is truth, not a truth of knowing, but a truth of being. Shakti is the active element of the life force, that aspect of sentience that seeks, that guides and impels actions and which provides life forms for manifest consciousness.
While scientists study matter and energy, and academics study mind, social relations, and power structures trying to eke out some small bits of truth, I just sink inside to that place where love originates, the spiritual heart, and just feel the songs that Shakti is singing. I am aware of the flowing of Shakti in the world and events around me, and it feels like flowing poetry. And I sing to her to ask whether I can help, and sometimes I speak as an intersession for others or even for myself.
The intersession I ask for most is for her to help some of my students heal the split between mind and emotions/energy, by helping them to feel more, to feel more deeply, and to hopefully find the love of their life so that they can be entirely broken open, broken open forever.
In the end, after all is said and done and everything you wanted is accomplished or not, all that is left is love, loving another and being loved. The closest one ever comes to God-realization, are those few moments before making love with your truly Beloved, where your heart, body, and groin totally open up and you feel love, desire, completion, and ecstatic energies that blow away your sense of self, and there are only love and Shakti. If one can stay in this state of pre-orgasmic bliss long enough, you will soon know God.
