Being in Love ... Part 1

By Ram Dass

The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it’s in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I’m caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.

I’m not interested in being a “lover.” I’m interested in only being love. In our culture we think of love as a relational thing: “I love you” and “you are my lover.” But while the ego is built around relationship, the soul is not. It wants only to be love. 

It’s a true joy, for example, to turn someone whom you didn’t initially like into the Beloved. One way I practice doing so is by placing a photograph of a politician with whom I intensely disagree on my puja table – my altar. Each morning when I wake up, I say good morning to the Buddha, to my guru, and to the other holy beings there. But I find that it’s with a different spirit that I say, “Hello Mr. Politician.” I know it sounds like a funny thing to do, but it reminds me of how far I have to go to see the Beloved in everybody. 

Mother Teresa has described this as “seeing Christ in all his distressing disguises.” When I realized that Mother Teresa was actually involved in an intimate love affair with each and every one of the poor and the lepers she was picking up from the gutters in India, I thought to myself, “ That’s the way to play the game of love.” And that is what I have been training myself for the last past quarter century: to see and be with the Beloved everywhere.

One of the interesting aspects of seeing the Beloved in this way is that it doesn’t require the other person to see him – or herself as the Beloved. All that’s necessary is that I focus on my own consciousness properly. It’s interesting to notice, though, how warmly people respond to being seen as the Beloved, even if they don’t know what’s happening. (Of course, it all assumes that all your feelings are genuine and that you aren’t compelled to act on them or to lay any sort of trip on the other person. The idea is simply to live and breathe among the Beloved.

The way I work at seeing others (like the politician), as the beloved is to remind myself, “This is another soul, just like me, who has taken a complicated incarnation, just as I have. I don’t want to be in this incarnation any more than he wants to be in mine. But since I want to rest in my soul and not in my ego, I would like to give everybody the opportunity to do the same.”

If I can see the soul that happens to have incarnated into a person that I don’t care for, then my consciousness becomes an environment in which he or she is free to come up from air if he or she wants to. That person can do so because I’m not trying to keep him or her locked into being the person that he or she has become. 

It’s liberating to resist another person politically, yet still see him or her as another soul. 

That’s what Krishna meant when he said, “I’m not going to fight, because they are all my cousins on the side.” We may disagree with one another in our current incarnation, but we are all souls. ---  Ram Dass.

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The reason is, the ego always fights or loves another person with our bias and selfish motives, but love from pure Soul (higher or subtle mind) is unconditional, without motive, and just being in love impersonally ... there is no burden of loving.

So, it reflects; the good, the true and the beautiful.

(真, 善, 美) 

Wind