Do you remember that moment when you we’re “in love”; when you looked into your beloved’s eyes and the rest of the world melted away? You looked so deep that even the image of your beloved blurred until all that was in front of you was bliss. You were so content that there was no longer any past, no future, only that singular, precious moment. You, for that moment, ceased to wish for anything else. There was nothing else you could wish for. For a moment you ceased to want to become anything else. The physical/emotional/intellectual sense of your own being melted into the state of nothingness and oneness. You were nothing but love, and were one with the entire cosmos which too is nothing but love.
That state of peace, love and joy is our natural state. It is the state of union, of yoga…but.
I know a lovely Hungarian woman who cannot take the emotional trauma of watching sci-fi movies – they can be that effectual.
When you are at the movies you become absorbed. You become identified with the calamitous characters, with their precarious past and their fearsome future. Some times the movie is like the Blue Lagoon sometimes it’s more like Harry Potter. It doesn’t matter. You twitch in your plush velvet seat in anticipation, you grab at the armrest when you are scared. You are effected by everything that happens on the screen. You laugh, you cry, you worry about what may happen next. You watch so long and contentedly that you forget you have any other life beyond the screen. It’s a long walk from the state of timeless ‘in love’ state.
Maybe you have become so engrossed in the gross matter of maya, the star of the movie, that you no longer see anything else. You believe that everything that happens in front of you, on the screen of life, will make you either happy or sad, or gives you a heart attack.
I might come along and tell you. “yo’ man, this isn’t real life, come outside the theater and enjoy the sunshine.” You will of course think I’m smoking crack. How can there be anything else besides what is in front of your eyes; only what you have known in the past is real, only what lies ahead is relevent to you then.
Or maybe you know there is more because you have had moments of the being ‘in love’ which was of course incomparably more vivid, more effecting, and these real moments make the rest of your ‘movie life’ placid and pale in comparison.
I know it sucks because there is more to life than this pale black and white, movie I’m living. Yet I choose not to live ‘in love’ and am sated by the other state. I don’t know how to get back to being ‘in love’. I might try getting high, try finding ecstasy through sex, or just numbing myself from the pain of that separation with equal parts tequilla and tamales.
I give up hope and become completely identified with the movie, until there is seemingly nothing left of me without it. Like that woman down the block in an abusive marraige, It is beyond scary to think of leaving something I know so well. Even if it sucks.
If I stopped the movie – If I forgot my past like a amnesiac, if I had no inclination, hopes or fears of tomorrow, if I forgot my known habits, idiosyncracies and idiocies. If I left the theater, I would no longer be the star, who would I be?
That is a scary proposition. I would be nothing; have nothing. I wouldn’t know what to feel or think because I would no longer hold the years of preconceptions and learned responses. I would be in a no-state state.
I would be completely open to whatever is there in the present moment, just me in my sandals, drinking latte’s at Starbucks with a dumbstruck look on my face. I would be in the state I described and you remembered before – When all else is removed. When we remove ourselves from the maya movie we return to that state of peace, love and joy which is our natural state. It is the state of union, of yoga, we open up to by being ‘in love’.
Buddha is ‘in love’. Buddha is not getting all emotional about last night’s dream. He is not worrying his mind about eventually going bald. He lives in the present moment, suspended in the breath of love, where all the stuff happening in the maya movie around him cannot effect him. He eats when he is hungry, sleeps when his eyes grow heavy and buys a yak-wool sweater when it gets cold in his retirement home in Boca Raton. But he remains present to the present.
Being present to the present is being ‘in love’. Being in the past and future is being in the imaginary movie.
We can be Buddha too. When we open to the ‘in love’ state of ‘no mind’, out of the imagination of past and future, we find contentment in all that is. In that moment we know that all that is, is love; and we are in it.
I’ve been asked what love is between two people. I have started replying that love is both complete, and I mean complete, acceptance and the urge to nourish. That is also universal love, of the higher, the absolute, god, Bob, whatever you want to call it. Consciousness-energy is what I call it. Consciousness-energy envelopes and accepts all there is, everything we do and will ever be. Consciousness-energy nourishes all, everything, feeds all that has life, and everything has life. Consciousness-energy is organic and is also mechanical. It does not differentiate between philosophical ideas of good or bad, it has one direction and it pulls everything along with it. We can fight it or we can live in harmony, ‘in love’.
What is this Consciousness-energy? It is all and one. Everything that has ever been is made of energy, which is scientifically proven. It is also proven in quantum physics that all energy has consciousness. Every atom that is, is Consciousness-energy. You are completely composes of Consciousness-energy and all that dark, dusty, nothingness between us is also Consciousness-energy. There is nothing separating us. All is one and that one is Consciousness-energy. Got it?
All our lives we search for one to call our other half, we long for our beloved, it consumes us, till our beloved is with us, then we fall ‘in love’; high as the kite on the end of a string held by the Nepali yak header’s son on Mount Everest. Ok, there are no yak on Everest, but…
It’s the same with that ‘in love’ state of Consciousness-energy. We feel seperated from something even when we know not what. We long for a sense of belonging of being ‘in love’. It consumes us. Till we find it and we are with it, then we are ‘in love’; high as … oh never mind.
But, how? Where do I start? Continuity of conscious effort. You start now, in the present moment and then make the next one the only present moment as well, then the next too. When we do twisty yoga asanas, when we meditate, in between the breath in pranayama practice, we bring our focus to the pin prick of “now”.
Now I feel my physical presence.
Now I am witness to the mechanical working of my tick-tock mind.
Now I see the pendulum of my emotions pulling me this way and that.
Now I feel the essence of life, of love, of the “I am.”
This is a start.
You can look at everything ‘in love’ and the rest of the world melts away. You go so deep that everything else is blurred and all that is in front of you is bliss. You can become so content that there is no longer any past, no future, only this singular, precious moment. You ceased to wish for anything else. There is nothing else you could wish for. For a moment you ceased to want to become anything else. The physical/emotional/intellectual sense of your own being melts into the state of nothingness and oneness.
You are nothing but love, and are one with the entire cosmos which too is nothing but love.
elet elan 