You Are Not Loved, You Are Love
No eres amado, eres amor
A student explores the shift from tasting love in fleeting experiences to recognizing it as ever-present, and the teacher describes how the sense of something missing is bound up with the false sense of self.
You Are Not Loved, You Are Love
A student explores the shift from tasting love in fleeting experiences to recognizing it as ever-present, and the teacher describes how the sense of something missing is bound up with the false sense of self.
We can talk about how you're not actually loved; you are love. And then we can talk about the nature of that, where it's no longer needed or something that needs to be experienced. You don't need to taste it to reconfirm it. It just becomes so natural that it disappears, in a sense.
I think that path of becoming is my line of inquiry, because I've had enough tastes that it's like a jigsaw puzzle whose form I'm starting to see.
The knowing that is already here
That which you're looking for, which you have: I think you have an intuition that's more than an intuition. It's a knowing of it.
Sometimes.
No, even now. I think you know it. You might know it and think it's a memory. You might know it and think it depends on something, a certain condition or a certain type of experience. But just the knowing of that means that right now, even if you say "okay, I remember it," the essence of it is here for you to be able to talk about it.
It may seem like a little thread that connects through a memory to an experience, something that comes and goes, something dependent on conditions. But actually, if you start getting closer and closer and more quiet with it, you'll start to see it's here now. And it's the quieting of the mind as you get close to that which makes it more transparently known.
Love is in the knowing
You start to see just how close it is. It's so intimately close. It could seem like a bird sings and the beauty and the love is in the birdsong, and it came and it went. But was it really? Isn't it in every sound and every sensation? And is it really in the sound or in the sensation, or is it in the knowing of it?
In this way you can start to get more intimately close, to a point where there is no distinction between that and you, or anything that you're knowing. But it gets quieter and softer. It's the love of everything. And it's not something that comes and goes or depends on anything. It's just the choice to see true nature. The alternative choice is to pretend it is lost and entertain yourself figuring out how to find it, like a video game, which includes, "Oh no, suffering!" That is a very valid choice.
I really liked when you said that you can orient toward it as though it were a thread connected to a memory that came from experiences, or you can just be with its being here. And this idea of a choice: I can see now how there's a progression from it not feeling exactly like a choice (spontaneous experiences, or whatever) to more and more of a choice, through that question you highlighted: "What if I am already loved, and all of my efforts are in vain?" I can see how that question, even over the course of this conversation on some level, has turned more into an affirmation. And the more that crystallizes as an affirmation, the more it just is.
Affirmation versus realization
The affirmation is a little tricky, because if it's just a mental mantra, it might be helpful, but be careful with that. "Love, love, love." Then you stop the mantra, you go out, and you're not love. So be careful.
It's not that. It's a realization. And it was really nice to hear you say that it's beyond a momentary realization, that maybe I know more than I think I know. And you said the stillness of the mind is what allows that to deepen.
Yes, at first. Then it doesn't matter how loud the mind gets; it cannot be obscured. When something is so obvious, so known, there's nothing the mind can do to obscure it.
So how do I reliably get to that place of "so obvious"?
Starting with the thread
Let's just start with a thread. Know that what you're looking for is here. And if that's not known to you, start with a "what if." If curiosity is needed, if contemplation is needed, go directly to this current experience and look with your whole being.
You will see: the mind is going to have its habitual mechanism. "What you're looking for is not here, it's there. Not here, there." It's going to create some kind of problem or lack, something that needs to be solved so that in the future, in some other context, you will finally get it.
The "what if" is: what if that's not true? What if it's already here? How is it possible for it to be here when I'm not seeing it?
And the thread you were describing, where you have an experience of this tasting of love: even the imagining of that, even if it's a memory, has at its essence the real thing. Because you can't recognize it in a memory or in the imagination without it being tasted now.
So it turns it around. For me to imagine what I'm looking for, I must have an intuitive, essential knowing of it, which means it's now. There's something that is essentially here now.
The love was never elsewhere
This happened to me when my teacher passed away. I had felt loved in a way that seemed possible only in his presence, through that relationship. After he died, I was dancing in a kind of celebration of his life, and I suddenly felt exactly the same love. Just exactly the same. And I realized: it wasn't in him. It was in me.
But all my life I had projected it, as though it were a love coming from him to me. It was actually my love for him, or the love that we share, the love that simply is. The relationship was a bridge to knowing it in myself; it did not depend on that body-mind who passed away and then took his love with him. That was what the mind believed. And that was the seed that started this shifting, this recognition that love is here.
The false sense of self and the sense of something missing
To the point where the mechanism of believing it's elsewhere started to fail. And it has to do with the essence of the sense of self. That's where it gets really deep.
The false sense of self comes from a belief that something is missing, that something needs to be different. At the core, it's related to love. Lacking love. We all experience it differently, but essentially, something is not okay.
So as you question that, first you need to know the experience: "Yes, I am constantly swimming in a sense of something missing. This is the bane of my waking existence." The more you become aware of that, the more you can get closer to it, to look at the reality and the truth of it. That's the process I was talking about with conscious suffering.
Because the more you get close and aware of it, it becomes in a sense more painful. There's no remedy. Everything you're trying doesn't work, and you start to feel like it's getting worse. But you're actually just getting closer and closer. If you look at the essence of it, the cause of it, it has to do with the sense of self. The sense that something is missing is the sense of self.
We are attached to that sense of self, that separate, independent self. And the closer you get, the more you are pressed with this attachment. You can't have it both ways. You can't get what you want and keep your sense of self.
Is it fair to say that this touching in, this knowing that you're already loved and there's nothing to do, is a method that can release and relax the sense of self?
Staying with what is always here
Yes. Stay with that as much as you want. I mean it. Whenever you want, you stay with it. It's always there. Then it's not something you will need to return to, because you're going to see it's always there. You can't be away from it. You don't have to retaste it, reconfirm it, revalidate it. It's just essential. And in a sense it disappears, because it's not something that can come and go. The things that we can know as things are what come and go.
See, I told you: you knew it.
I'm not a hundred percent convinced that I won't come back to this conversation with less than this.
Come back as much as you want. Knock yourself out.