CHAPTER 25 The Wound of Love SRI DA AVABHASA: The ego, “Narcissus”, the self-knot, is
always defending itself, always seeking isolation and
immunity from relations. Love one another and there is nothing cool about it. What
I mean by this love for one another is to become wounded by
love, to submit yourself to love, to live in the world of
love, and to make your relationships about love. Be
vulnerable enough to love and be loved. If you do this, you
will be wounded by this love but you will not be diseased.
The wound of love is the “hole” in the universe, and
ultimately it is Realized as such. In this hole in the universe, this Domain of Feeling
without armoring, without self-contraction, the great
Physics, the great Science, the great Possibility, is
evident. Hardly anyone in human history has known of It.
Human beings in general do not want anything to do with It.
They do not want to come close enough to It to be wounded in
their intimacies with one another. It is the doorway to
Divine Transfiguration, Divine Transformation, and,
ultimately, Divine Translation, or Outshining of phenomenal
existence. It is the way into the Divine Self-Domain. You must be wounded in order to Realize Me. You must be
wounded to hear Me and see Me. Such Realization is felt even
physically as a kind of wound. It is felt as intense,
armorless vulnerability. If you can begin to awaken to this principle, then you
will love others, your sexuality will cease to be
problematic, your friendships and your community life will
become possible. You will make a different kind of
community, a true Spiritual community of My true devotees,
which is a process available to only uniquely free people.
This wound enlivens you. It releases great force, great
energy. It releases all of the armoring of the usual
personality. It enables you to love, to be in love. If you become thus wounded and enter into such intimacy
with one another, then in your emotional-sexual
relationships you will not have any troubles with your
promiscuity and your lack of interest in one another and all
the petty problems you make for one another in your
unconverted emotional state. All of that completely
disappears. Such is the kind of process you must be involved in as a
result of our “consideration” together. Therefore, you must
make a community of love with one another, a truly Spiritual
community. * * * If you enter into this process of self-knowledge and
knowledge of another, it will break your heart. It did Mine!
Yet as dreadful as it is, it is the best thing I ever did.
The best thing that could possibly happen to you is for you
to become a raw nerve-end, a broken heart, unconsolable,
with sorrow on your face and ecstasy as well, no longer a
conventional man or woman, no longer able to put on the
social false face-incapable of it, with no argument, no
anger, no feeling rejected, you responsible and you dying,
and no absolutes coming to you through the bodies of
others. Everything you console yourself with is a lie. When you
get down to the bottom of it, broken-hearted in your
distress, maybe you will discover what “in love” is. It is
not about what you must do. It is about transcending
yourself, about not fulfilling yourself. And it is not
amusing. It is passionate and it is terrible. * * * You must submit to Me emotionally. To submit to Me
emotionally means you cannot let emotion assume a contracted
form, become a reactive state, in relationship to Me. You
must simply feel whatever is the case. You must put yourself
in a position to be wholly vulnerable to whatever is the
case, through feeling. Feeling is a kind of touch. Divine Self-Realization is not the avoidance of the pain
of life but it is to suffer it to the nth degree, to the
point of Awakening, to the point of Freedom, to the point of
being utterly transformed, in effect, by love, to murder the
murderer, to be Free of limitationsbut not by evading
them. Mediocrity is the universal solution of humankind.
Mediocrity, superficiality, convention-this is how people
desensitize themselves to reality, to death, and to the
great requirement that is the Heart Itself, Which is the
Depth of existence. You are always ready to make an
arrangement that is sort of smiling and superficial, that
desensitizes you and makes you get pleasant. You are always
ready to do that, but that is not it. If you were sensitive to the situation you are always in,
you would be serious all the time. You would not settle for
mediocrity or superficiality. Superficiality would not occur
to you. You would never lose the Heart-Wound, ever. You
could be in a circumstance that, to all appearances, is the
most pleasant, amusing, and happy, in the ordinary sense,
and have tears in your eyes because you feel where you are,
you feel your situation, you feel your limitations, and you
will not endure being limited. You press yourself beyond it.
You do not submit to superficiality or casualness. That is
what it takes. * * * The Reactive Rituals Of egoity Must Be Released By The
selfTranscending (and Then Spiritual) Practice Of Love. This
Requires Each and Every Practitioner Of The Way Of The Heart
To Observe, Understand, and Relinquish The Emotionally
Reactive Cycle Of Rejection and Punishment. And the
Necessary Prerequisites For Such Relinquishment Are
Vulnerability (or The Ability To Feel The Wounds Of Love
Without Retaliation), Sensitivity To the other In Love (or
The Ability To Sympathetically Observe, Understand, Forgive,
Love, and Not Punish or Dissociate From the other In Love),
and Love Itself (or the Ability To Love, To Know You Are
Loved, To Receive Love, and To Know That Both You and the
other, Regardless Of Any Appearance To The Contrary, Are
Vulnerable To Love and Heart-Requiring Of Love). * * * To be in love is embarrassing and awkward. Your face
changes, and you become foolish, not so ready-made,
buttoned-down, cool, and strategic. You consent to be in
love only on very rare occasions, usually when you have
realized some romantic sexual association. Yet to be in
love, to be submitted into the Divine SelfRadiance, is the
native state of human beings. God is love. That is true
enough. * * * The great fear, and what no one wants to do, is to live
the life of love. Nobody wants to do that. It is
embarrassing. It is not consoling. It involves a profound
responsibility. You cannot be a child and do it. Therefore, you prefer the magic acts of self-destruction,
the magic acts of dissolution, whereby you are not liberated
from anything but, perhaps, relieved. You prefer orgasm to
God-Realization and to love. All of that is a reflection of your childishness, your
recoil, your inability to go to school, to submit and be
changed, to be responsible. You are self-destructive.
Instead of celebrating, you poison yourself because you are
refusing the moral obligation inherent in your True
Condition, which is to love, to penetrate the whole force of
your self-contraction, to be morally heroic. * * * The. endless cycle of your own moods is not the Condition
of Satsang. Satsang with Me is a “radical” Condition, and It
requires everything of you. It requires you to absolutely
lose face. You must lose face in relation to the Truth. It
is quite a different thing from being caught nude in the
subway. You lose face by exposing yourself absolutely to Me,
the Divine Adept Who is your Real and Inherently Perfect
Self, by becoming known. * * * Why be reluctant to love? It is your obligation to do so.
Be aware of your reluctance, but surrender, forget yourself,
animate yourself, be expressive, override your reluctance,
do the counteregoic act. If at first you are embarrassed
about loving, love and be embarrassed. Then do it some more.
Animate the throat, the voice of praise, the expression of
love. Say love. Do love. Live love. * * * Oblige yourself. Do not just sit around meditating on
your reluctance to do so. “Consider” the matter and do it.
And then do it some more. And do it more and more. Make agreements with others about how you will magnify
your expression of love, and then oblige yourself to do so.
It does not make any difference how reluctant you are. Love
is a matter of your practice of the Way of the Heart, that
is all. Confess all the reluctance, all the embarrassment,
if it is there-fine. But this is the practice: Do it.
Override your reluctance. The more you override it, the more
you are purified of it. You are purified of your reluctance
not by analyzing it and dwelling on it and meditating on it
forever but by accepting the discipline and engaging
yourself in this counter egoic effort, this responsible
practice, whereby you override the very thing you know is
your impediment. If to do so embarrasses you, so what? After a while you
will notice that it is not embarrassing you anymore, because
you are doing something else. Doing something else is what
the religious life is about. Doing the other thing, the
“else”, the very thing you are reluctant to do-that is the
cure. Instead of living like an addict, the ego, do the
cure, do the other thing, do the discipline. It is difficult. It requires a confrontation with your
limitations. It requires you to go beyond them. But that is
how it is. That is it.
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