Thursday, February 23, 2012

Sadhguru on Why We Fall Out of Love

"Very often, we find that two people who come together out of love grow apart as the years go by. Why does this happen?

Let's say you planted a coconut tree and a mango tree in your garden when they were young saplings, and they were the same height. You thought they would get along pretty well, a great love affair! And if both of them remained stunted and never grew, they would remain compatible. But if both of them grow to their full potential, they will grow to different heights, shapes and possibilities.
If you are looking for sameness between two people, the relationship will always fall apart. After all, a man and a woman come together because they are different. So it is the differences that brought you together, and the differences may become starker and more manifest as one grows. Unless you learn to enjoy the differences as you grow, falling apart or growing apart will naturally happen. If you are expecting both people to grow in the same direction and in the same way, that is unfair to both people. It will curtail and suffocate both of their lives. Whether you fall apart in years, in months or in days simply depends on how fast you are growing.
This whole expectation that the person who partners with you should be just like you is a sure way to destroy a relationship. It is a sure way to destroy the garden. Allow, nurture and enjoy the differences between you and your partner. Otherwise, the situation will be maintained in such a way where one person is compulsively dependent upon the other, or both people are compulsively dependent upon each other.
We need to understand that relationships happen because of certain needs -- physical, emotional and psychological needs. Whatever the nature of the relationship, the fundamental aspect is you have a need to be fulfilled. We may claim many things for why we have formed a relationship, but if those needs and expectations are not fulfilled, relationships will go bad.
And as people grow and mature, these needs change. When these needs change, what looked like everything between two people will not feel the same after some time. But we do not have to base a relationship on these same needs forever and feel that the relationship is over. We can always make the relationship mature into something else.
Whatever the needs that brought people together need not be the fundamentals of a relationship forever. The very fundamentals of a relationship have to change as time passes, and as one ages and matures in many different ways. If that change is not made, growing apart or falling apart is definitely a certainty." -Sadhguru

Sadhguru on Love

"Love is a human emotion. It is one of the most beautiful things a human being is capable of. Many cultures or so-called civilizations have suppressed love. Many people have made an enormous effort to export love to heaven. But love is of the earth, of the heart.
Human beings are capable of immense love. You do not need to go to heaven to know it. It is the tenderness of the heart that you call love. Even your dog is love. By teaching people that love comes from above, we have made them more and more incapable of love. Love comes from within, not from above. If you free your mind of complex prejudices that you have developed, by identifying yourself with one thing or the other, you will see that it is very natural and spontaneous for a human to love.
The moment you divide the world into right and wrong, into what is yours and not yours, into God and devil, your love becomes very conditional. It gets enslaved to the external situations and it will no more be your quality, but something that will only happen because someone else or something else is wonderful.
To put it simply, as a human being experientially, you are just these four things: body, mind, emotion, and energy. Right now, the combination of these four is what you call "myself." The best the body can reach is health and pleasure. The best your mind can achieve is joyfulness and peace. The peak of your emotion is love, devotion and compassion. Your energies can reverberate either with a mundane feebleness or with a great intensity of ecstasy. In your current experience of life, these are the only realms of experience that are available to you.
Generally, people do not know much intensity of body, mind, and energy, but they are capable of intense emotions, whatever those may be -- anger, hatred, jealousy, love or compassion. For most people, emotion is the most intense part of them, and it dominates and decides the general quality of their lives. And love is the sweetest of all emotions.
If you ask someone whether they would like to be healthy or unhealthy in the body, you know what the obvious choice would be. Similarly, on the plane of your emotions, would you want to be loving or hateful? If you are using your sense, you would naturally choose love.
When I use the word "love," you probably think of it in terms of loving somebody, but love is not about someone else; it is your quality. Just as health is of the body and happiness is of the mind, love is your emotion. If the ones whom you love very much are not in your physical presence, you are still capable of loving them, aren't you? If the people you love cease to exist, you can still continue to love them. Many people find the expression of their love only when someone is dead or about to die. We always love the dead, don't we?
Every human being is capable of being absolutely loving, but each one has issues with almost everything and everybody around them. People have gotten into a mental state where no one in the world is okay except himself or herself. The discriminatory dimension of the mind has gone berserk. Sincerely look at yourself and see. Look at the dearest person in your life and see how many layers of resistance you have to them. The moment your mind says that someone or something is not okay, you cannot love.
Love is your quality. You are just using things and people around you as stimuli to find expression for this quality. If you bring sufficient awareness to the discriminatory intellect, loving is the only way you can be. Love is not what you do. Love is what you are."

-Sadhguru

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Like the Ocean

It's evening. Someone is playing the piano, someone is talking, someone is browsing the internet, someone is doing the dishes. Life is moving. Life keeps moving, like the ocean. The urge to write is there. The topic unclear but words keep flowing, like the ocean. I had to connect to the internet to access this blog. I had to connect. I had to connect to an external source to get access to this page. This page is not available without the external connection. Am I available without the external connection? Where is that connection? The ocean and the trees? Another human? Another human activity? Even if that is established, what is the password to that connection? AUM? Thinking "Yes, I can and I will?"

If the teacher has no students, is he still a teacher?
And is his pride hurt when the students disappear? Is his identity lost? Is HE lost? Does his bubble of self-definition burst and the solid ground melt?

Everyone here, there, and everywhere is talking about self-love. Love yourself. I keep going back to this statement over and over. I have lots of friction with such a term. I keep searching for clarity. Here, there, and everywhere, it is defined as wrapping one's own arms around one's body, thinking of how great one is, how kind and generous, how awesome and whatever other adjective can be thought up. Really? Really?? That's the whole point? And then what? I can tell myself how I love myself all I want and even cultivate a loving feeling for some time, and then what? How is my life experience different with such thought process?

So I keep searching and I keep running into this: dissolution. Dissolution of oneself, a complete offering of oneself to life processes. This is love, this is devotion, this is surrender, this is trust, this is transparency, and this is living. And how scary that is! Riding the wave of life with ease and grace, without resistance or fight. How beautiful and utterly terrifying.

The piano man is gone. The dishes are done. The temperature dropped down. Life is still moving and flowing, just like the ocean at night. Ten minutes ago are different than the now and a few seconds from the now. I am in the writing mood, in the contemplative mood, and... intermittently connected.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

The Game

It may not seem so, but everything is a choice. Everything, all our experiences and perceptions are, ultimately, a choice. It may not seem so most of the time, simply because we are too close to a thing, an event, an experience. We are too entangled in it. We are deep in mud unable to pull out and get a bird's eye view. And yet that is also a choice. Choice.

I can stand on top of a chair, looking over a crowd of happy, cheering people, celebrating an event of some kind. I can remain on top of that chair as an observer, feeling disconnected from what's slightly below and in front of me, feeling angry and superior, or I can remain on top of that chair as a participant, making a silly statement to the girl next to me, smiling with my whole body, celebrating the event with full force, and seeing nothing else, or I can remain on top of that same chair, and choose to become involved in this show and this celebration, feeling fully connected and happy to enjoy the festivities with an understanding that this is just a play. I can feel connected without entanglement. I can enjoy whatever is presented to me. I can be happy, or sad, or anything else based on the choice I make, because I am aware of the game that is being played.

And herein lies freedom. Freedom to feel, behave, and experience as I choose. Excuses vanish, struggles dissipate. Freedom to flow with the current arises. How would such a life experience be? Wouldn't it be a great item on the menu? I would certainly like to have a dose of it. Daily, please.

Friday, February 10, 2012

More on Love

I want to start by first stating a very clear thought: I do not know the answers! Ok.. Having made the disclaimer, I would like to pose this question: what is love? More specifically, what is loving another? I am doing dishes while wearing purple rubber gloves to protect my hands from chlorine-polluted water and the thought just keeps nagging me. What does it mean to love someone? Please follow me here: we are all guilty of saying that we miss person X, Y, or Z. We miss the person. Is that really what we miss? The person with his moods and principles, his physical and emotional needs, his frustrations, his baggage carried since birth? I am not that certain. What that one thought was nagging me about was that we miss a feeling, a certain emotion, that was invoked by the presence of another. We might be missing that, not the actual human. If that is so, then what is loving another? Can we love another simply for what he/she is regardless of how we may feel around him? Regardless of what the other provides us with, be it money, intellectual stimulation, comfort, butterflies in the stomach and shaky knees. Can we see the person? I mean, really see. And if we can see one, can we see many? And if we see many, can we love many? And if we love many, in what way does it show? What type of love is it? And what does ultimate love look like? And another great question for me is how can we see when we're so caught up in our minds, our own agendas, our own need to be seen and loved and validated and comforted... You get the point. And if these aren't enough of a brain-teaser, I am adding one more amorphous piece to the growing puzzle, which is this: how does romantic love fit into all of this?

Your thoughts?

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

The Second in F-series

She is everything. She embodies all. She emcompasses the gross and the subtle. She first enters as innocence. She exudes kindness and mildness, drawing out affection from her surroundings. When head is in her lap, she is the well of love. She hugs life in its entirety. Her visit lingers in the world caught up in the mundane. Her frail frame is pushed aside into a loud, cold corner. She shudders and lets out a long-lasting tear. The chemistry of purity is re-arranged into a different configuration. A configuration of resolve. She will not be brushed off so easily. The streets are bustling, busily occupied with bodies upon bodies. Bodies of perfection, of imperfection, of confusion, of anxiety, of fear, and of mad rush. She is in stride with the world now. Her shell is thickened. The eyebrows are drawn in. Her body assumes the shape of determination. She is innocence turned anger. She's flying through the vast space, wreaking havoc to that which encounters her. Madness and fire ensue. Out of control. Wild like an animal on a chain. She screams, she thrashes, hair floating in thick, steamy air. She is innocence turned untamed. But, frankly, she just wants to be seen.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Unstable

So many of them talk about non-attachment. Philosophies and religions, that is. Then, of course, since most of us have very limited understanding of what that means, we come up with our own descirption about it. This description becomes a cool and hip idea, and we strut around impressing ourselves and our friends with it. When we go to bed, the experience of our days hasn't been affected much at all, but we did have an interesting conversation with the guy to our right.

Then there is the Buddhist tale vaguely recalled at this moment about a man falling off a horse, which could be interpreted as bad just to learn that, as a result, he was not asked to fight in a war, and then something else happens to demonstrate that a situation can be both good and bad and neither good or bad. It simply is.

Now back to what this piece is about. Still having no operational definition for non-attachment, there is an experience that could demonstrate the meaning of the term. In a course of less than eight hours, the possibilities for the near future have changed not once, not twice, but three times. Each time an opportunity was presented, research and planning and energy to run the two were employed just to switch gears a few hours later, repeating the cycle. Feels like being caught up in a cyclone, dropped to the ground, and picked up once again. A bumpy and exhausting ride ensues. This, appears to be attachment. Grabbing on to one thing as the last and keeping it near and dear as the final page, the final answer, the only way. These experiencial few hours in a day allow for an in-depth glimpse of what non-attachment is not, and that already is progress toward clarity.

Being Steady

I don't have a logical explanation (which works well for me, for I very rarely make any logical sense), I just know what I experience and that is whenever I focus on something intensely and purposefully, life opens up her arms wide, as wide as the ocean, hugs me, lifts me up to the cloudless blue sky, and bids me smooth sailing toward my destination. The questions and doubts, the unknowns and the fears become vapor-like, and I become aware they never existed anywhere but in my own imagination, leaving me to do nothing but enjoy the effortless ride. It's like beginner's luck. The initial attempt, the first leg in a four-person race is supported strongly, breaking static friction, creating momentum to move forward, gaining speed and confidence toward the next stage, which may be its own branding with its own mystery and its own rules. The cycle may continue, it may break, it may contort, it may be many other things. What remains is the knowing that a steady focus on any one desire moves the molecules around and re-arranges them in such a way as to benefit the desirer. And that is simply amazing. It is a miracle that is to be expected. Thus, as of now, I expect miracles and miraculous happenings, happening in a miraculous way with miraculous outcomes of miraculous proportions, as I am overtly reminded that life is a miraculous miracle.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Sadhguru on Energies

"One half of every human being is feminine, another half is masculine. It is just that in a human being, one half is overshadowed because of certain hormonal secretions. If testosterone is predominant in you, it sort of overshadows the feminine in you. If estrogen is predominant in you, it overshadows the masculine in you. But there is nobody here who does not have both, the masculine and the feminine, in equal quantity. The question is just to what extent you have subdued one of these aspects, either due to hormonal secretions, or just due to social conditioning – it could happen both ways."