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Love and Hate

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

They may seem perfect for a while, such as when you are in love, but invariably that apparent perfection gets disrupted as arguments, conflicts, dissatisfaction, and emotional or even physical violence occur with increasing frequency. It seems that most love relationships become love/hate relationships before long. Love can then turn into savage attack, feeling of hostility, or complete withdrawal of affection at the flick of a switch. And it is easier to recognise the source of negativity in your partner than to see it in yourself. It can manifest in many forms: possessiveness, jealousy, control, withdrawal and unspoken resentment, the need to be right, insensitivity and self absorption, emotional demands and manipulation, the urge to argue, criticise, judge, blame, or attack, anger, unconscious revenge for past pain inflicted by a parent, rage and physical violence.

On the positive side, you are in love with your partner. This is at first a deeply satisfying state. You feel intensely alive. Your existence has suddenly become meaningful because someone needs you, wants you, and makes you feel special, and you do the same for him or her. When you are together, you feel whole. The feeling can become so intense that the rest of the world fades into insignificance. You become addicted to the other person. He or she acts on you like a drug. You are on a high when the drug is available, but even the possibility or the thought that he or she might no longer be there for you can lead to jealousy, possessiveness, attempts at manipulation through emotional blackmail, blaming and accusing   fear of loss. If the other person does leave you, this can give rise to the most intense hostility or the most profound grief and despair. In an instant, loving tenderness can turn into a savage attack or dreadful grief. Where is the love now? Can love change into its opposite in an instant? Was it love in the first place, or just an addictive grasping and clinging?

You can not love your partner on moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your love has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meet. But there comes a point when your partner behaves in ways that fail to meet your needs. The feelings of fear, pain, and lack that are an intrinsic part of ego consciousness but had been covered up by the love relationship now resurface. Just as with every other addiction, you are on a high when the drug is available, but invariably there comes a time when the drug no longer works for you. When those painful feelings reappear, you feel them even more strongly than before, and what is more, you now perceive your partner as the cause of those feelings. This means that you project them outward and attack the other with all the savage violence that is part of your pain. This attack may awaken the partner’s own pain, and he or she may counter your attack. At this point, the ego is still unconsciously hoping that its attack or its attempts at manipulation will be sufficient punishment to induce your partner to change their behaviour, so that it can use them again as a cover up for your pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicts to   alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person   you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.

Life is about relationship   the relationship we have with ourselves, with each other, with the world. When our relationship are good, we feel good; when they are bad, we feel awful. Let’s accept it. We need each other. We need to feel connected; we need to feel each other’s presence and love. We lost sight of where we belong, and instead, we experience intense feelings of loneliness, and confusion. Trying to find the way back to our place in the whole is what the spiritual seeker’s search is all about. It represents a journey home to who we are.

How about you? Do you ever suffer from a sense that you are lost and wandering. The biggest problem facing the world today is not people dying in the street, and not inflation, but spiritual deprivation. This feeling of emptiness associated with feeling separated from the higher forces. And about the pain associated with feeling of isolation and separation. They can overtake any one of us in a heartbeat, even in the every midst of happiness and joy. Loneliness implies a lack of meaningful connection. We can feel separate and apart. Separate from what, we might ask? Separate from others, separate from ourselves, separate from the Divine, separate from meaning, separate from love. Separate from a sense of belonging. Don’t we all need to feel the light and warmth that emanates from others? Don’t we all want true love? Don’t we all hunger for genuine communication. When our relationship are superficial, we feel as though we are leading superficial lives; when our relationship reflect our deeper commitments and aspirations, we feel as though we are walking a more meaningful and satisfying path. Love comes through relating. That’s why we must connect. Greed, jealousy, fear, and the shadows of our personal histories often corrupt our need for romance, passion and love. We want personal connections that bring us the abundance and joy they initially promise. Evil often triumphs but never conquers. If the hand has no wound, one may even carry poison in it. Poison does not affect those free from wounds. Evil does not affect those who carry no evil.

My teacher often say: Sometime we know, sometime we don’t. Sometime we strong, sometime we wrong. Sometime we live, sometime we die. Sometime we give, sometime we wouldn’t. You only get it when you are still halfway. If you find that you have gone all the way, keep going. At the bottom of things, most people want to be understood and appreciated. Lady and gentleman ask yourself. who did you love today.

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Do not suffer from the thinking mind

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

Inflow of new thoughts can remake you The world in which you live is not primarily determined by outward conditions and circumstances, but by thoughts that habitually occupy your mind.

“A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it.”

“A man is what he thinks about all day long.”

You can actually think yourself into or out of situations.  You can make yourself ill
with your thoughts and by the same token you can make yourself well by the use of
a different and healing type of thought.  Think one way and you attract the conditions which that type of thinking indicates.  Think another way and you can create an entirely different set of conditions.

Conditions are created by thoughts far more powerfully than thoughts create conditions.

Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts.  They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.  It is nature self, we may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness free you and the world from suffering.

The human mind, in its desire to know, understand, and control, mistakes its opinions and viewpoints for the truth.  It says: this is how it is.  However you judge any situation, it is no more than viewpoint, it is no more than a bundle of thoughts.  The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you do not realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are.  And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of “I know”.

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Life is an art

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

Life is an art and you are the artist. You are the master craftsman, shaping your existence from the cradle to the grave. You wield the tools, dream the dreams, see the visions, draw the plans, take the time and do the work in everything you say, and think every moment of the day. When we express our true selves in everything we do, our full human potential is realized and it is uniquely our own.  This potential power of ours includes all human capacities, such as, the power to understand and appreciate things, the power to create and plan, the power to choice and decide, and the power to support and courage, and the power to kindness and affection.

The life will be enriched, your spirit will rejoice and you will open up new frontiers of your life as all your expressions become the true you.  Modern people are inclined to emphasize only the outcome or result of things, to interpret happiness only in terms
of material satisfaction.  “Life is art” and “man’s life is a succession of self expressions” are the most powerful principles of life.

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Co-ordinating Mind Activities

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

The minds that co-ordinate the activities of violence can co-ordinate the activities of co-operation

All of our institutions – social, economic and political reflect our understanding of power as external. Police departments, like the military, are produced by the perception of power as external.  Badge, boots, rank, radio, uniform, weapons, and armour are symbols of fear.  Those who wear them are fearful.  They fear to engage the world without defences.

The perception of power as external has shaped our economics.  The ability to control economies, within communities and within nations, and the ability to control the transnational economy of the world, is concentrated in the hands of a few people.  To protect workers from these people, we have created unions.  To protect consumers, we have created bureaucracies in government.  To protect the poor, we have created welfare systems.  This is a perfect reflection of how we have come to perceive power – as the possession of a few while the majority serve it as victims.

Money is a symbol of external power.  Those who have the most money have the most ability to control their environment and those within it, while those who have the least money have the least ability to control their environment and those within it.  Money is acquired, lost, stolen, inherited and fought for.  Education, social status, fame, and things that we owned, if we derive a sense of increased security from them, are symbols of external power.  Anything we fear to lose – a home, a car, an attractive body, an agile mind, a deep belief – is a symbol of external power.  What we fear is an increase in our vulnerability.  This results from seeing power as external.

What power is seen as external, the hierarchies of our social, economic and political structures, as well as the hierarchies of the Universe, appear as indicators of who has power and who does not.

Competition for external power lies at the heart of all violence.  It reflects the competition for external power that is generated by fear.  Individual to individual and group to group it is now clear that the insecurity which underlies the perception of power as external can not be healed by the accumulation of external power.  It is evident for all to see, not only with each newscast and evening paper, but also through each of our countless sufferings as individuals and as a species, that the perception of power as external brings only pain, violence and destruction.  This is how we have evolved until now, and this is what we are leaving behind.

Our feeling of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, it is possible that anything and everything could cause us frustration.  In our normal way of life, we let ourselves be controlled by powerful thoughts and emotions, which in turn give rise to negative states of mind.  It is by this vicious circle that we perpetuate not only our unhappiness but also that of others.

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Emotional pain

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.

I am talking here primarily of emotional pain, which is resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger, depression, jealousy, and so on.

People also know from their own experience how easily and quickly an intimate relationship can turn from a source of pleasure to a source of pain.

Focus attention on the feeling inside you

Know that it is the emotional pain.  Accept that it is there.  Don’t think about it – don’t let the feeling turn into thinking. Don’t judge or analyze. Don’t make an identity for yourself out of it.
The first thing to remember is this: as long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you can not become free of it.  As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist every attempt that you make to heal that pain.

Why? Quite simply because you want to keep your self intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious.

Every moment, hold the knowing of that moment, if there is anger, know that there is anger.  If there is jealousy, defensiveness, the urge to argue, the need to be right whatever it is, know the reality of that moment and hold the knowing.

Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are.  Giving space to others and to yourself is vital.  Love cannot flourish without it.

Instead of mirroring to each other your pain and your unconciousness, instead of satisfying your mutual addictive ego needs. Remember that the ego needs problems, conflict, and enemies to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends.  The emotional pain is demanding feedback and not getting it.  The need for argument, drama, and conflict is not being met.  And that they may collapse altogether, resulting in loss of self.

How much more time do you think you will need before you are able to say,” I will create no more pain, no more suffering?”  How much more pain do you need before you can make that choice?  If you think that you need more time, you will get more time – and more pain.

Remember the deep wisdom underlying the practice of Eastern martial arts: don’t resist the opponent’s force.  Yield to overcome.  The real doing nothing implies inner non resistance and intense alertness.

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Knowing yourself is freedom of voice

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind.  It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being.  To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

Complaining and reactivity are favourite mind patterns through which the ego strengthens itself.  For many people, a large part of their mental-emotional activity consists of complaining and reacting against this or that.  By doing this, you make others or a situation “wrong” and yourself “right” Through being “right” you feel superior, and through feeling superior, you strengthen your sense of self.  In reality, of course, you are only strengthening the illusion of ego.

Envy is a by-product of the ego, which feels diminished if something good happens to some one else, or someone had more, knows more, or can do more than you.  The ego’s identity depends on comparison and feeds on more.

The ego needs to be in conflict with something or someone.  That explains why you are looking for peace and joy and love but cannot tolerate them for very long.  You say you want happiness but are addicted to your unhappiness.  Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.

When you think or speak about yourself, when you say “I”, what you usually refer to is me and my story.”  This is the “I” of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the “I” that is never satisfied for long.  It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to find its fulfilment in the future.

When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head.  Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self.  This is the ego, a mind-made “me.” That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious.  That’s why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking.  When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice – the thinker – but the one who is aware of it.

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A Heart Practice

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

So whenever you are desperate, anguished, or depressed, whenever you feel you cannot go on, or you feel your heart is breaking,  the only conditions to the effectiveness of  this practice are that you need to do it with all you might, and that you need to ask, really, ask, for help.

Even if you practice meditation you will have emotional pain and suffering, and a lot of things from your past lives or this one may emerge that will be difficult to face.  You may find you do not have wisdom or the stability in your meditation to deal with them, and

that your meditation on its own is not enough.  What you need then is what I call “a heart practice.”  I always feel sad that people don’t have a practice like this to help them in times of desperation, because if you do, you will find you have something immeasurably precious, which also become a source of transformation and continuing strength.

  1. Invocation
    Invocation in the sky in front of you the presence of whichever enlightened being inspires you the most, and consider that this being is the embodiment of all the buddhas, and masters.  If you cannot imagine in your mind’s eye any one form, just feel the presence strongly and invoke his or her infinite power, compassion, and blessing.
  2. Calling out
    Open your heart and invoke him or her with all the pain and suffering you feel.  If you feel like crying, don’t hold back: let your tears flow, and really ask for help.  Know that there is someone who is absolutely there for you , someone who listens to you, who understands you with love and compassion, without ever judging you : an ultimate friend.  Call him or her from the depths of your pain.
  3. Filling the heart with bliss
    Imagine and know now that the buddha you are crying out to responds, with all his or her love, compassion, wisdom, and power.  Tremendous rays of light stream out toward you from him or her.  Imagine that light as nectar, filling your heart up completely, and transforming all your suffering into bliss.  Think of him as infinitely warm and loving, a sun of bliss, comfort, peace, and healing.  Open your heart, let out all your suffering; cry out for help.  Imagine now thousands of rays of light streaming out of his body or from his heart: Imagine that the nectar of Great Bliss in the skull cup in his hands overflows with joy and pours down over you in a continuous stream of soothing, golden liquid light.  It flows into your heart, filling it and transforming your suffering into bliss.  As you do this practice again, and again, you will realize, with joy and delight, that the buddhas are not outside of you but always with you, inseparable from the nature of your mind.
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Ending Grief

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

When you are overwhelmed by your suffering, try to inspire yourself in one of those many ways I mentioned. “Bringing the Mind Home”.  One of the most powerful methods  have found to soothe and dissolve sorrow is to go into nature, and especially to stand and contemplate by  waterfall, and let your tears and grief pour out of you and purify you, like the water flowing down.  Let its wisdom bring you solace.

To accept and end grief is possible, no matter how long ago your loved one died, you will find this most effective.
Visualize that all buddhas and enlightened beings are in the sky above and around you, shining down their rays of compassionate light and giving you their support and blessing.  In their presence grieve and say what you have to say, what is really in your heart and mind, to your loved one who has died.
Visualze that the person who is dead is looking at you with a greater love and understanding than he or she ever had while alive. Know that the dead person wants you to understand that he or she loves you and forgives you for whatever you may have done, and wants to ask for and receive your forgiveness.
Allow your heart to open and put into words any anger, any feelings of hurt, you may have been harbouring, and let go of them completely.  With your whole heart and mind, let your forgiveness go out toward the dead person.  Tell him or her of your forgiveness ;tell him or her of the regrets you feel for all the pain you may have caused.

Now feel with your whole being his or her forgiveness and love streaming toward you.  Know in the depths of yourself that you are loveable and deserve to be forgiven, and feel your grief dissolve.

At the end of the practice, ask yourself if you can now truly say farewell and really let go of the person.  Imagine the person turning and leaving, and then conclude by doing the phowa, or another practice for helping the dead.
This practice will give you the chance of showing your love once more, doing something to help the person who has died, and completing and healing the relationship in your heart.

You can learn so much, if you let yourself, from the grief and loss of bereavement.  Bereavement can force you to look at your life directly, compelling you to find a purpose in it where there may not have been one before.  When suddenly you find yourself alone after the death of someone you love, it can feel as if you are being given a new life and are being asked “What will you do with this life? And why do you wish to continue living?”

Loss and bereavement can also remind you sharply what can happen when in life you do not show your love and appreciation, or ask for forgiveness.  Be vulnerable and receptive, be courageous, and be patient.  Above all , look into your life to find ways of sharing your love more deeply with others now.

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Helping After Death – 1

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

So often in the modern world when someone dies, one of the deepest sources of anguish for those left behind to mourn is their conviction that there is nothing they can now do to help their loved one who has gone, a conviction that only aggravates and darkens the loneliness of their grief.  But this is not true.  There are many, many ways we can help the dead, and so help ourselves to survive their absence.

There are ways of helping people in every conceivable situation, since there are no barriers whatever between what we can “life” and what we called “death”.  The radiant power and warmth of the compassionate heart can reach out to help in all states and all realms.

It is never too late to help love one has died, no matter how long ago it was.  Don’t for one moment imagine that it would be less effective for you to invoke the truth to help your dead relative than if a “holy man” prays for him/her. Because you are close to your love one who has died, the intensity of your love and the depth of your connection will give your invocation and added power.  The masters have assured us: Call out to them, and the Jesus and buddhas will answer you.

Often spiritual people says that if you really have a good heart, and really mean well, and then pray for someone, that prayer will be very effective.  So be confident that if your love one you love very much has died, and you pray for him/her with true love and sincerity, your prayer will be exceptionally powerful.  The consciousness of your love one, when it is invoked by the

power of prayer, is able to read your minds and can feel exactly whatever you may be thinking or meditating on….

Remember too when despair menaces you that giving in to it will only disturb your love one who has died.  your sorrow may even drag him/her back from the path he/her may be taking toward a good rebirth.  And if you are consumed by grief, you will cripple yourself from being able to help him/her.  The steadier you are, the more positive your state of mind, the more comfort you will give him/her, and the more you will enable him/her to free himself/herself.

When you are sad, have the courage to say to yourself: “Whatever feelings I am experiencing, they will all pass: even if they return, they cannot last.” Just as long as you do not try to prolong them, all your feelings of loss and grief will naturally begin to dissolve and fall away.

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Helping after Death – 2

Posted on July 27, 2010 by lau

You may come to feel mysteriously grateful toward your suffering, because it gives you such an opportunity of working through and transforming it.  Without it you would never have been able to discover that hidden in the nature and depths of suffering is a treasure of bliss.  The times when you are suffering can be those when you are most open, and where you are extremely vulnerable can be where your greatest strength really lies.  Suffering, after all, can teach us about compassion.  If you suffer you will know how it is when others suffer.  And if you are in a position to help others, it is through your suffering that you will find the understanding and compassion to do so.

So whatever you do, don’t shut off your pain, accept your pain and remain vulnerable.  However desperate you become, accept your pain as it is, because it is in fact trying to hand you a priceless gift: the chance of discovering, through spiritual practice, what lies behind sorrow.  “Grief”  Rumi wrote “can be the garden of compassion.”  If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.

And don’t we know, only too well, that protection from pain doesn’t work, and that when we try to defend ourselves from suffering, we only suffer more and don’t learn what we can from the experience?  As Rilke wrote, the protected heart that is “never exposed to loss, innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness; only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied.

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