Love Makes Us Real

There is a wonderful depiction of realization through Love in Margery William’s beautiful book: THE VELVETEEN RABBIT. Following is the excerpt that moves me deeply. Believe it or not, the first time I ever heard this story was in India when my Master read it to us. And now, I share it with you – may it serve you well.

“What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day. “Does it mean having that buzz inside of you and a stick-out handle?”

“REAL isn’t how you were made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become REAL.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse for he was always truthful. “When you are REAL you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once.” said the Skin Horse. “You become it and it can take a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are REAL, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are REAL, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand…once you are REAL, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

Yes, sad to say that most people “break easily and have very sharp edges and must be carefully kept.” What we are protecting is the painful identity we have as ego. We only “love” people who cater to our painful wounds. In the effort to LOVE, we must become real…which means that we cannot live in our fantasy stuff that has no real substance within it.

In an authentic spiritual practice there are great difficulties we must move through in compassion and forgiveness. These difficulties are about becoming real to Love. When we are in the process of spiritual awakening, we have every chance to be insulted and hurt by whatever the process is leading us through. The ego and pride are always at stake when it comes to meditation and inner transformation. This is just the way it is.

Most people these days are simply uninterested in the journey and adventure to authentic Love. They want everything they have come to believe is “love” to magically occur through entitlement and a disowned system of illogic and self-serving reasoning, which only benefits themselves.

Love is selflessness.
Love is sacrifice of pride and vanity.
Love is the willingness to become unconscionably generous.
Love is the willingness to forgive and allow for people to be just as they are, without the need to judge them or try to change them.
Love is that which occurs when we reduce ourselves down to the place where there is no influence of an “I” or “Me”…or even a “YOU.”
Love is the silence that occurs through emptiness.

So few are interested in this, hence the world we live in. Most are only interested in that which appeals to their pride and vanity, giving them a false sense of self-importance. This is why religion and philosophy works so well for most people. The more filled we become with what we believe is knowledge of the spiritual, the less we believe we need to practice meditation.

I offer to my students the teaching: LET LOVE LIVE YOU. Rather than seek someone to love you, let Love give to you that which means so much to the life you are in. Give up living for the past and what you did or did not get in childhood. Expand yourself beyond the DNA of your body and how it is always seeking emotional gratification and emotional safety. Push beyond fear and hate and find the Way within you through meditation and the practice of compassion.

Nothing can change until we begin to live from a very different place…a space where life and Love meet SILENCE. When the tone of silence enters into your living, Love will be born in you and water will turn to wine. All of this takes devotion to the practice, to root yourself into the practice of meditation and then to never move until you have overcome the fear of Love itself. Yes, we humans are afraid of Love – sad but true. Devotion means that there is a profound sense of willingness to remove the personal from my attentions and concentrate my efforts to come into oneness with you and the world through compassion. Compassion is at the core of Love and its affect upon our lives is deeply beautiful.

Love is what happens when we surrender our fear of not being an individual and having what we want for the sake of the direct experience that is Love. Everything we do is a matter of Love and not some individualized choice that we are making, thinking that we are in control over our lives. Authentic Love is the life that moves us into motion. Love changes everything and everyone…it is the only way to true transformation.