Unloving environments have conditioned us to lose our innocence and our openness. Some learned to attack, some deadened their hearts so as not to feel the attacks of others, some chose to seem not worth attacking, others chose to flee, to hide, or to camouflage themselves.
Those who are beautiful must know how to fly.
We adopt the same defensive approaches we see in Nature:
in human society, we can see wolves and deer, skunks and porcupines. We can see sharks, electric eels, and puffer fish. We recognize that the realm of animals reflects back to us our own images. Thus, we tend to adore those creatures that have retained their beauty, playfulness, friendship, loyalty, communication skills and social mutuality, while coping courageously with a difficult world. We valorize dolphins and whales, elephants, giraffes, many birds, ants and bees, and of course, those animals we have special relationships with, through domestication, such as horses, dogs, and cats. We experience a purity of love that is often lacking in human beings.
The human ego has become defensive because it has not received enough pure love.In compensation, the ego often becomes arrogant, aggressive, and narcissistic: the egocentric person may be beautiful to look at, very talented, very intelligent, but is usually very difficult to get along with - unwilling to listen and adapt, unable to reciprocate, or to be truly caring. This produces suffering, which is then passed on and increased from generation to generation, and has now reached a climax throughout the world.
This suffering can only be healed through the offer of mercy.
Mercy is a rare and highly revered quality, famously sung among poets, and often found in sacred texts of every religion.
The mercy of God is celebrated. There are times in the life of everyone in which we need mercy and forgiveness from another. And we are always in need of mercy and forgiveness from God. We must seek that divine mercy by being merciful. We must offer forgiveness in order to receive it.
Whether or not we believe in God in any personal sense, we all recognize the interventions of fate in our lives, of synchronicity, of miracles large and small. These are not random occurrences - with hindsight we can recognized hidden blessings. We are here in life to grow, not merely to enjoy pleasure. Painful experiences tend to produce the most growth - it need not be so, but
we must be open to perceiving our failings and quick to rectify them.We must grow from our experiences: not just our waking experiences but our dream experiences too - we can learn a great deal from our nightmares if we study them, and from this learning we can change ourselves and avoid the need for the nightmare scenarios to appear in our waking lives.
We generally live long enough to conquer our own ego, and that is the only true freedom.
Realization of the real, eternal Self is the only authentic fulfillment of existence. Paradoxically, this brings the understanding that we do not exist at all. The Self is not the body, nor the mind and its jungle of thoughts. The Self is found within, in silence, in emptiness, in the solitude of inner aloneness. The Self has no form nor name nor any objective existence. The Self is unborn. In everyone, this Self lies asleep within the ego. It must awaken. This is the point of existence. It is by the awakened unborn Self that God, the Supreme Real, our encompassing and inmost divine nature, is realized. Once realized, this most priceless gift will naturally be offered to others.
The recognition of the true Self is the beginning of real life. It can take great losses and unbearable pain before one is willing to remove the ego, with all its defensive habits and compensations, and return to the Self. But we can also choose to transcend the ego voluntarily, and gain the joys of Divine Presence without spending all our life in the hell realms.
And we discover that the greatest joy is giving.It is a wonderful healing balm to be free of the ego and its incessant demands.
To live in peace, in love, in oneness with each other, with the universe and its Creator, makes all the suffering and spiritual effort worthwhile. To foster the growth and fulfillment of others is the greatest achievement.We can then find
ecstatic liberation from both fear and desire, and complete our
journey to love.
Great stuff, Shunyamurti, thank you.