I came across a quote that shook me to the core due to the relevance of what and how I would articulate the last 2, maybe 3, years of my life. What I’ve learned through a harsh lesson that I now realize to be the greatest test of my lifetime. If not, the most profound wake up call to and of myself I’ve experienced to date.
The importance of its reminder shall be immortalized here:
The Wisdom of Love
“I am your mirror. That is why I am here. I have been guided by circumstances to be in front of you and give you the opportunity to hear your own knowledge of yourself. To see into the mirror you have to be able to listen intensely. That means being very still, very receptive. The mind does not move, or moves so swiftly that it appears not to be thinking. That is to be very intelligent, very alive. As we are now. Then you can see your reflection in the mirror, as I speak, and you can say: ‘Yes, that is true. Or that is not true.’ We are going to dismiss all thinking, all references to memory. We do not need that. There’s just you and me, wanting the greatest good and communicating in honesty, with integrity and virtue – with love. I am going to talk about love; not loving someone or something, though that comes into it, but about the love that is essential to wisdom.
When we love someone or something, we select them – consciously or subconsciously. We give our attention to them. We meditate on them. We might think about them, but not necessarily. We keep them in front of us and keep their energy in us. This satisfies us. It’s something we look forwards to. In time that energy grows in us as a feeling and love becomes what we call ‘attachment’. We know we are attached to something when we exclude the rest of life because of it.
When we love someone or something we put a copy of it inside us and reach out towards it with ’emotional hands’ to get hold of it; and we get a feeling, an impression of whatever we love. We have an emotional body inside the physical one, and it is wondrous, but like an octopus its tentacles reach out and then come back into us carrying impressions that we carry around with us as vibrations. If we want to experience people who are absent we think of them; we go to our mental image of them and excite the copy we hold of them inside us. We carry everything we love around inside us.
I am your mirror here, tonight. But so is the world your mirror, though you don’t know it. The job of the world is to put our interests, and the things we love, in front of us – put them in the mirror – for us to reach out and select them. And then it takes them away. It’s a game called ‘living’. Everything and everyone you have ever loved is going to be destroyed – die, or leave you. What happens then? You look into the mirror of the world and what you loved is not there. It’s departed; died, or left you for someone else, or betrayed you. But the copy is still inside you as an attachment. When it’s not in the mirror anymore, you are left with something inside you that’s not real. Then you know the dreadful anguish and pain of a broken attachment. And the trouble is that you can’t dig it out of yourself because it goes on vibrating inside you.
All relationships and attachments grow in time. And we let them grow, because they are delightful, aren’t they? Little do we know, while they are growing, that they are tomorrow’s pain. We do not see life as it is. We do not want to know that what we love most will cause us the greatest pain. When attachment is broken we realise something about time. We like to think of time as ‘out there’. That time looks after itself. The time we are trying to avoid is the time of pain, inside us. The pain is composed of what has grown in time, in the past. As it grew in time, it will take time to undo it.
But do not give up loving. To truly love is to realise the truth and the fact of life. Go on loving but do not get into a dreadful attachment, such as when the emotional demands keep coming and you want the person you love to only perform in a certain way. That’s not love.
It is the way of life that we have to become attached as I have described. But that is because we have to be made mature. We have to learn to truly love. The purpose of the evolutionary process is to teach us to love. And the way is to first teach us what love is not.
We learn by negative means in this strenuously difficult and bitter world. It is a negative world, a mirror to our negative selves. The world supplies the negativity. We react to it negatively, and get confusion, which is most people’s lives. But the truth is we are the positivity and if we responded to the negativity of the world positively, we’d have a perfect system.
~ Barry Long
I refuse to forget that love. Yet, it will never happen again. No, not like that…
Perception 