Though I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

That was from Corinthians.

And some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire.

That’s Teilhard de Chardin.

Love and death are the great gifts that are passed on to us, that most of us leave unopened.

That is from Rilke. This is a poem of Robert Bly’s.

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long

At this moment to be older, or younger, nor born

In any other nation, or time, or place.

They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.

Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.

The man sees the way his fingers move;

He sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.

They obey a third body that they share in common.

They have made a promise to love that body.

Age may come, parting may come, death will come.

A man and a woman sit near each other;

As they breathe they feed someone we do not know,

Somebody we know of, whom we have never seen.

Just keep letting these run through you, sort of like Chinese food—don’t hold on to them, just let them come and go. They’ll each touch you in the way they need to touch you.

This is from the I Ching.

Life leads the thoughtful person on a path of many windings.

Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again.

Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words,

There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence.

But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts,

They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.

And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts,

Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids.

The path of love. The path of the heart. The path of emotion, relationship, dualism, taking you to the essence of love, taking you from loving to being love. It is the path of the heart. It, like all paths, is fraught with pitfalls and traps, and most of our emotions either are in the service of our minds or are frightening things that overwhelm us and make us afraid. So we protect ourselves from them.

So we come through life a little bit like hungry ghosts. We are beings that have huge needs for love. But seemingly it’s like we have some kind of amoeba that doesn’t allow us to digest our food. So though we get love, it goes through us, and then we need love all over again. And it’s so deep in all of us that we’ve built a whole reality around it, and we think that’s the way it is—that everybody needs love; and that if you don’t get it, you are deprived; and that the more of it the better; and you need it every day from everything. In that sense it’s like an achievement.

You see, people that are achievers—the minute they achieve something, it becomes irrelevant and their awareness turns to the next achievement. Because they are addicted to the practice, not to the goal. The predicament with loving is the power of the addiction of the practice of loving somebody; of getting so caught in the relationship that you can’t ever arrive at the essence of dwelling in love.

If you imagine it in this sequence: that you are cut off in your heart from love, so you feel hungry—what that hunger is is the hunger to come home. It’s the hunger to be at peace, to be feeling at one in the universe where lover and beloved merge. It’s the place to feel fulfilled in the moment, to be fully in the moment. Closed off you are like a bee looking for a flower. You’re flying around, buzzing, looking. And just as with baby ducks, you can create a silhouette of a mother duck and, with a baby duck, if you run that silhouette by, that is the particular key stimulus that will awake the response of following and opening the mouth. And it’s called imprinting. And so you can imprint the duck to a silhouette of a mother duck.

So there are certain very deep patterns—whether they’re psychologically learned, or karmic, or astral in terms of your astrology; whichever level you want—there are a set of factors in you that are like a lock waiting for a key to open it. But the key must fit into that lock. It must be a certain pattern or concatenation of factors. Like, the fact that I could open to my guru I am sure had something to do with my relationship to my father. You think, “Well, a spirit is the spirit, and psychological is psychological.” But all of your psychological conditioning prepares you to be attracted to certain methods or certain paths or to certain people.

For many people, the energies they’re working with at the time they are seeking this love so strongly are second chakra energies: energies of desire, of sexual desire, of desire for union that is relational, and the energy gets into that pattern. And you associate making love as a vehicle to coming into love. So you’re going along as a little lock waiting for a key, and along comes—a “shadow of lover” goes by and, like a little duckling, you turn and you start to walk after it. It just happened to be the particular pattern that turned you on, that opened you up, that did it. And you say, “I think I’m in love”—with him or with her.

See, that’s the key right there. Not “I think I’m in love.” “I think I’m in love with her” or “with him.” And if you’re lucky, your key unlocks her or his lock, and his key unlocks your lock or her key unlocks your lock. So you get into “You love me, I love you. Here we are.” And it’s incredible. Because, through this dynamic, you have opened to the place. It’s like the triangle. It’s like what Bly talks about as the two people together are feeding something that they don’t even know. Because they’re feeding the unit of space behind the dualism. They’re feeding the quality of love. And when they’re together, they touch it. What we’re really saying is, when you say “I am in love with you” (said somewhat blandly): “You are the key stimulus that is opening me to the place in myself where I am love, which I can’t get to except through you.”

So you can imagine if you’ve been going around like a hungry ghost starving for love, and you suddenly meet somebody that opens you to this well, this reservoir, this ocean of love, this ocean of feeling at home and it’s all rye bread—you know, you’re just so happy!—that quality that happens when you open to that, and you did it through meditation, or you did it through falling in love, whatever your method was—through acid, whatever you did it through—don’t you get addicted to your method! You know, if acid did it, you want to know who your connection is, don’t you?

So if you met a master, and the master shared with you a method, and the method worked to tune you to the place in yourself of awareness of love, you end up loving that method and you love that master, and the minute you do it, you get really drunk on it and very addicted to it. And fanatics in every religion are really—you call them adepts or addicts. Because all methods are traps. And yet, the bizarre thing about methods is: they don’t work unless you get trapped. So you can only hope that a method ultimately, after it traps you, it self-destructs and you are left free of method. But you’ve got to go through the method. And the method is scary because it does trap you.

And the path of love is where you open to that quality, but the method that opened you when you’re hungry is usually another person, and then you get very attached or addicted to being in the presence of that other person. And then starts the fear: the fear that that person is going to die, or leave you, or won’t be around. And then you get jealous and possessive, and on and on it goes. And you just keep creating a hell realm around the addiction to the vehicle for coming to love.

For even as love crowns you, brings you into that space, so shall it crucify you. Even as love is for your growth, so is love for your pruning.

Even as love ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,

So shall love descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

And this one from Farīd ud-dīn Attār:

To enter the valley of love, one must plunge wholly into fire. Yes, one must become fire itself, for otherwise one cannot live there. One that truly loves must resemble fire, her countenance aflame, burning and impetuous, like fire.

Now let me show you where the problem is. This is from Hazrat Inayat Khan:

The lover that leans upon the beloved’s response, his love is like the flame that needs oil to live. But the lover who stands on her own feet is like the lantern of the sun that burns without oil.

It is because of the way in which one closed down in development that one ends up hungry, because the mind has veiled the heart from its boundless merging with everything in the universe. And we are like in a prison room, and when we fall in love with somebody it takes us out into the sunlight again. We come back into the place of ourselves where we feel at home, safe, and loving. When you hear that statement that “you are my key to the place in myself where I am indeed love,” you see that the spiritual practices of devotion are designed to move you from “I love you” to “we are in love together.”

Now consider love as a huge hot tub. (It’s a very personal image for me.) Let us get into the hot tub together. We are meeting in the space of love. When two people meet in the space of love and break the attachment of mind to seeing the other person as the vehicle to get you there, but realize that it’s in you, and you start through your spiritual practices to rest in it, suddenly the need and desperation start to dissolve. And all of the negative things that go with addiction start to disappear: the possessiveness, the jealousy, the anger, fear that the other person is going to die. Because the quality of love as a state has no time, it has no space, it wasn’t born and it doesn’t die.

In the work I do with people as they are dying, I am often dealing with people who have lost someone who has died and they are grieving. What they are grieving for, put in these terms, is their connection to the place in themselves where they feel safe in the universe, and at home, and at love, and in peace. And they have so identified it with the other person, with an external thing, that they are destitute and feel like they have lost the juice of life. It really is like a meditator who can’t meditate. It’s the same addiction. You get so busy you can’t stop in the morning to sit, and you start to feel like you’ve lost your beloved, you’ve lost the place of your being. And what I encourage people to do is to stay just with what they are feeling, with their grief. And I always tell people, “How long have you grieved?” and they’ll say, “Oh, a year.” I’ll say, “Oh, go grieve some more.”

See, the culture says, “Well, it’s good you’re over it now. Now you can start living life again.” But grieving has to run its course. Those are very, very deep attachments. And you go up, and you go down, and you think, “I’ve broken out,” and then the next moment you crashed into depression. And on it goes—up and down and up and down. And as you and I get older, more and more of our friends and loved ones die, or people die now because of epidemic and so on, and we all have to deal with this loss. And we lose friends, and because of our mobility people are moving away from each other. And we have in some way closed our hearts out of avoiding the pain of losing love, and then we go around armored.

But what I say to people at a grieving is: after a while, one day, when you lost somebody you really touched in love. So you touch them. The two of you created this third thing you do not know, and you both rested in it. So you both tasted being one in love. But then what you’re missing is the other person. It’s like in a triangle. You’re missing one of the bases, and you can’t get to the center because you only got there through the relationship between the two of you getting to the top.

But one moment after you have grieved and grieved, and gone up and down, and told how you’re done with it, and then crashed—all of that melodrama—there’ll come a moment where you might be watching a sunset, or sitting quietly, and you will suddenly taste the fact that the love that you had with that person is still there. And at that moment you will start to make the break between the vehicle for coming into the love and the essence, or the method and the essence. And then you will realize that what truly connected you to that person at the deepest level was that quality of identity in the quality of love—and where can it go? Ramana Maharshi, when he was dying of cancer and his devotees were crying, they loved him so much and they kept crying, “Don’t leave us! Oh, Bhagawan, don’t leave us!” And he said, “Don’t be silly. Where could I go? Where could I go?”

So seeing those levels of love, and the nature of relationship, we see that relationship goes from a path in which there is incredible need because we are hungry ghosts in need of love. And as the path works and we start to come into love, we start to rest in it, and then relationship becomes a celebration. It no longer is needful, it’s the play of form. Is that coming through? Can you hear that issue?

So in the sense of devotional yoga, the statement “God is love” means that you move through love into love, and that quality of love, which is the quality. The interesting thing about the quality of the heart, as opposed to the quality of the mind—and this is a polarity that is just a metaphor to play with—but the quality of the mind is that it discriminates this from that. It thinks about things. It has object. The quality of the heart is it keeps being boundless, it keeps embracing everything into itself. It doesn’t discriminate even itself from other, it just embraces. That quality of compassion is where you are one with everything. It arises out of that feeling. But our hearts are very frightening to us because we were developed as separate beings, and we got so addicted to our separateness that we get frightened of the way in which the heart keeps giving it away. We feel we need it. We need our separateness, so the heart becomes our enemy.

I want to talk just a little bit about some of the difficulties of the path of relationship, of which poetry books are full. I’m just going slow, because these are things to just sort of reflect about, feel your way into.

As a path, what I experienced was that I loved one being intensely. What opened me to the love of that being was that that being loved me, and loved me so unconditionally that I felt safe to love in return. Now, we talk a lot about unconditional love, but let me tell you, very rarely have you ever experienced it. Because to unconditionally love another person, it means without condition. Most of us say, “Oh, I love you without condition.” “Well then, do you mind if I cut your throat?” “Well, I’d rather you wouldn’t.” “Aha! I knew you’d set up boundaries. I knew you didn’t really love me.” See? And it would have to be a being who was so non-attached to their own life and death that their love wouldn’t flicker, no matter what you did.

That’s a great story about the time when a country was being overrun, a Buddhist country, and the armies of the overcoming country—we had a recent example in China and Tibet, but this was before that; long before—and when they were finding the monks, they were disemboweling them and doing terrible things to the monks, which they just recently did; the Chinese did in Tibet. And in this one village, there was an officer of the army who was very feared because he was particularly cruel. And he had arrived in this village and he asked his adjutant, “How are the people responding?” And the adjutant said, “They are all bowing down to you, and at the monastery all the monks have fled to the mountains except for one monk.” And the officer was infuriated at the existence of this one monk who had not fled to the mountain. And so he went to the monastery and he pushed open the gates. And in the middle of the courtyard stood this one monk. And he walked up to that monk and he put his hand on his sword and he said, “Don’t you know who I am? Without blinking an eye, I could take my sword and run it through your belly.” And he repeated without blinking an eye. “And don’t you know who I am?” said the monk. “I could have your sword run through my belly without blinking an eye.” That’s unconditional love. You ready? The next time you say, “I love you unconditionally,” you just think about it. Just think about it.

And when I met my guru, I really felt loved unconditionally. And what happened was: I opened, and then I became very attached to his form, and to being near him, and to looking at him, and to touching him, and to bringing him gifts, and breakfast in bed—whatever. Just like you do with your beloved. You want them to be happy as long as it includes you. “Well, I’ll be happiest with somebody else.” “Oh, wonderful, because I love you so much.” See about unconditional love? See how quickly it gets you?

But because of the particular game that my guru was playing with me, he kept throwing me out all the time. He’d only let me see him for a couple of minutes and then he’d say, “Jao, go, split, go somewhere else.” And I at first got very offended. I mean, can you imagine if you fall in love with somebody, and then you cross the ocean bringing fruit and whatever you can bring that you could possibly offer to your beloved. And you’ve come this long way and you feel a mixture of righteousness and desire and everything. And he’s all wrapped up with your enlightenment and everything, so you can’t get there fast enough. And you get there, and you kneel down, and he looks at you, and he pulls your beard, hits you on the head, asks you one question and says, “Jao.” You say, “Jao?” You know. He let other people stay around him and not me. So he obviously loved them more than he loved me. Terrible problem. I got to hate the other devotees so intensely.

But then he took me through this trip, which most of you know that have read any of the stuff I’ve written. And I’m just going to take you through because it’s so delicious as a teaching. Even if you’ve heard it, think of how many times I’ve heard it.

This was in the early seventies, when a number of people like Mira and Danny, and we were with Maharaj-ji or Rama Suridas. We were kept in the back of the temple ashram. We were paraded in in the bus in the morning. We got there. He’d be sitting outside. We’d have darshan. We’d hang around him and love him and he’d throw fruit at us. And you just couldn’t get it. You were drunk with love and everything he said to anybody applied to everybody. And then after about, I don’t know, five minutes or a half hour, he’d say, “Jow,” and he’d throw us all in the back where we’d be fed. We were known as only useful for five things: drinking tea, gossiping, sleeping, eating, and moving about. That was our practice. So in the back of the ashram, that’s all we do. And then, late in the afternoon, we’d all be brought back just before the bus was leaving, have another time together, and then be thrown out.

And in the course of the day he’d call people up from the back. There was one woman who sang beautifully, so he’d call her up and say, “Sing,” and she’d sing. It was like little performing animals. You know, you wind up and out come—we were the westerners. You wind up and out you come. So he had Indians coming and they’d be hanging out and he’d say, “You want to see a Westerner?” you know, perform, and he’d be brought forth, And some of us were scholars and we’d be scholarly. And some of us were pundits who could recite Hindu things. And some of us could sing Hindu kirtan. And he’d bring us forth. And I was like a professor from Harvard and there I’d come. In fact, I’d been thrown out. It was irrelevant to Maharaj-ji.

So then, one day he called me up and I come—and each time you’re getting called, you’ve been called out of this mass of, you know, unworthy people. You’ve been chosen to go up and be worthy. And so you rush up because you realize this is going to be your chance to get the juice. This is it, you know? And you run up and you kneel down and you look up. I mean, this is all a game. You understand this is all forms. First, when I went to India, I thought, “I’m not going to touch anybody’s feet.” What a bunch of… you know? Now I couldn’t do it fast enough. I used to try to grab one of his feet, and then it would go under the blanket quick. And I think I’m not pure enough. I mean, it was like a whole routine you play out.

So I’d go up and he’d look and he’d say, “Ram Dass, love everyone.” I’d say, “Yes, Maharaj-ji.” He’d say, “Jao.” See? So you’d go back and that was what you got that day, and you’d sit there and love everyone. “Boy, I don’t love everyone. I should love everyone.” The next day he called me up. I got called in two days running. Came up and he leaned way down. He held my beer and he said, “Ram Dass”—this is in Hindi—Ram Dass. Ram Dass. “Ram Dass, tell the truth.” “Yes, Maharaj-ji.” “Jao.” So I was left that day with what a liar I was. I decided I’d really tell the truth. alternate.

Well, he kept doing this. Each day he’d alternate. It was either love everyone or tell the truth. And it took me about four or five days because of my density before I realized the peculiar predicament I found myself in: that he was giving me two contradictory instructions. Because the truth was I didn’t love everyone. So I thought about which one shall I do? And I thought, you know, what I always do is I love everyone, even if it’s not the truth. I make believe I love them. “I love you!” “Oh yes, we love each other.” “Oh, it’s okay, I love you.” I thought maybe it’d be good to try telling the truth. That’ll be refreshing. And as I looked at all my gurubai, my guru brothers, and said I realized I hated them all. Because they all took me away from him. And I had spilled the beans about him in the first place with Be Here Now, and now I was set with all these unworthy people who were hanging around, taking his time. I mean, they were nice people. But I had a good reason. I mean, I just didn’t hate them, generally. I’d find reasons for each one. That one was too arrogant, and that one had, you know…. After a week or two, I was really—the truth was: I found I didn’t like anybody. I even had a sign on my door: do not enter.

Now, at the same time I was doing another sadhana, another practice, which was that Maharaj-ji said, “Ram Dass should not touch money.” Now, you can interpret that at many levels. Now I interpret that my mind shouldn’t cling or fixate on money. That allows me to have a credit card. But in those days I took it literally: I shouldn’t touch money. So what I did was: one of my friends, my gurubai, would be a bag person. They’d carry my money. So we get on the bus, they pay my bus fare. See, that worked out fine—until I got to hate them all.

Now I was in a predicament, because I had nobody who I didn’t hate, who I hadn’t alienated, to be my bag person. Now, from the hotel to the temple is eight miles. So what I found was I got to the position where there was a day where everybody got on the bus, and I had no money to get on the bus, so I had to walk. All the way to the temple I walked, knowing what fun they were all having at the temple. Because they got there in about half hour, and it was going to be about three hours for me. It was through the back woods. And so I was getting more and more angry. I was getting furious. And when I came over looking down on the temple, I saw them all laughing, and they were all hanging around Maharaj-ji. And he had obviously spent much more time with them today than any other day. And I was full of loathing and hatred, and hated myself and felt so impure to even walk into the temple. And I walked in and by then they had just, as I came down, they had their lunches—they were sitting on a porch with leaf plates and their food. And I came in, and they might have been talking about me, I don’t know, but one of the people who I especially despised came up with a leaf plate of food and offered it to me. And I took it and I threw it at him. I remember the moment very clearly. I mean, I was the…!

And I heard Maharaj-ji from across the courtyard: “Ram Dass! Ram Dass! Ram Dass!” And I looked over at him and I, at that moment, I hated him too. And I went across the courtyard pissed. I mean, I was really angry, and I sat down in front of him. And I looked up at him and I was like, you know, I was so… my bones were aching. You know how that gets when you’re really constricted. And he looks at me and says, “Something troubling you?” I said, “Yeah.” “Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what is it?” I said, “I hate all of them.” And I said, “And I hate myself.” And he said, “Do you love me?” And I looked at him and it just fell apart. I opened and I started to sob. Absolutely sob. I said, “I love you.” And he—I was sobbing, and he went and he sent for milk, and he was pouring milk down my throat, and he was patting me on the head. And I went through the whole catharsis and all of that. And then he came up to me, kind of nose to nose. He leaned over on his tucket and he said, “I told you to love everyone.” I said, “But you told me to tell the truth. And the truth is I don’t love everyone.” And he leaned forward and he said to me, “Ram Dass, love everyone and tell the truth.”

At that moment, what I experienced were two things. First was: I experienced a coffin in front of me in which who I thought I was was in the coffin. Who I thought I was was somebody whose truth was that they didn’t love everyone. And what he was describing to me was who I would be when I finished being who I thought I was. Can you hear that? Is that…? And the other thing was that at that moment I turned and I looked over at my fellow screw-by sisters and brothers, and I saw that at one level I had all this righteous indignation about them, but one little flip of consciousness and I saw how incredibly beautiful each one of them was. And I loved them so deeply. “Jao.” And that was the teaching.

And I realized that, since that time, for twenty years, I have been learning that teaching. I have been letting—and when I realize is that when I don’t feel that love for another human being, I hear Maharaj-ji saying, “Ram Dass, love everyone and tell the truth.” Then he said to me afterwards, he said, “Ram Dass, give up anger and I’ll help you.” He didn’t say, as I would say as a psychotherapist, “Let’s work through your anger.” He said, “Give up anger.” And I took that as a spiritual charge, as a message. And that when I experienced anger, instead of trying to figure out why I experienced the anger, which kind of investing it, I would just start to do breathing, and Ram, and start to go into devotional practice and just let go, even though the same anger would come back up again.

At one point I was studying with a very beautiful man named Anagarika Munindra. He was a Theravadin Buddhist teacher. Lovely, lovely man. And I came to him one time and I said to him, “Munindraji, I am so angry,” because I had so much anger in me for so many years, and keeping grudges, those deep things that always cut you up. Every time that person is conscious, the thought of that person goes through your head, you constrict. And he said, “Ram Dass, don’t hold on to it. It’s just old karma running off. Your anger is just old karma running off.” And one of the traps that I saw that I was caught in was the trap of righteousness that I used to justify my anger. But I saw that love freed me back into the ocean, and that anger didn’t, and that I would rather be free than right. And that’s a scary and big one.

And that if somebody does an abhorrent action, I have to cultivate the capacity to, as Kabir said, and Maharaj-ji used to quote, Kabir said, “Do what you do with another being, but never put them out of your heart.” Do what you do with another being, but never put them out of your heart: that is a total prescription for social activists. Oppose, stand up, defy, confront. Do what you do with another person. You stop their action. You may have to imprison that person so that they don’t hurt other people. You do what you must do, but you do it without closing your heart. And I don’t mean the fraudulent, “Oh, I didn’t close my heart.” I mean really: the quality of do what you do, but do it always in the presence of the beloved.

There is an incredible poem that most of you know by Thích Nhất Hạnh, very beautiful Vietnamese monk:

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow

Because even today I still arrive.

Look at me: I arrive in every second

To be a bud on a spring branch,

To be a tiny bird, whose wings are still fragile,

To be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

To be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

In order to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and

Death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,

I am also the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time

To eat the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond,

I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,

Feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

My legs as thin as bamboo sticks,

I am also the merchant of arms, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl refugee on a small boat,

Who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,

I am also the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,

I am also the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people,

Dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.

My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills up all the four oceans.

Please call me by my correct names,

So I can hear at the same time all my cries and my laughs,

So that I can see that my joy and my pain are but one.

Please call me by my correct names,

So that I could become awake,

So that the door of my heart be left open,

The door of compassion.

Who is it that you don’t love? Who is it that your heart closes to? Yourself? Someone else? The practice is clear. You start a practice.

I’ve kidded a lot about what I’ve done in this beautiful puja that’s developing. That at one point I saw that there was somebody who closed my heart, and his name was Caspar Weinberger, and he was the Secretary of Defense. And I didn’t like what he was doing, and I didn’t like him. I thought he was a righteous jerk. So I thought: “I’ve got work to do with Caspar.” So I took a picture of Caspar and I stuck it on my puja table. And there was Buddha and Christ and the Divine Mother and Mary and Anandamayi Ma and Caspar Weinberger. And in the morning I’d light my candle and my incense and, “Ah, Buddha. Oh, Christ. Maharaj-ji. Anandamayi Ma. Hello Caspar.” I saw how far I had to go. It was just a practice of seeing this poor schlep of a soul who had this really heavy duty incarnation to go through of being a jerk. And I was busy responding to the incarnation rather than to the essence. And it was like the two levels. It’s like having bifocals and you’re looking down when you should be looking up. What you find, though, is that there are people that represent things that are so close to stuff that you are stuck with, attached to, that there’s aversive to you, that you project outward into them and then you hate them. And it’s really partly—it’s all projection, actually.

Rest your weary mind and keep coming back into the quality of awareness which is really the quality of love. It’s the quality of merged love. There’s an incredible poem. It’s called From a Norman Crucifix, 1632 by Charles Causley.

I am the great sun, but you do not see me—

—this poem is God-love talking to you.

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,

I am your husband, but you turn away.

I am the captive, but you do not free me,

I am the captain you will not obey.

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,

I am the city where you will not stay.

I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,

I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,

I am your lover whom you will betray.

I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,

I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,

Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

The process—we grow up, we become separate, we get caught in our separateness, we are hungry for the coming back into love of the merging place, the namaste place; the place where when you are in yours and I am in mine, we are in love together. We are in a place where your heart-mind and my heart-mind remain always inseparable. We get hungry and we finally break out through one technique or another, through loving somebody—perhaps your baby, or your parent, or your cat, or somebody safe, somebody abstract, or a Christ, or a Maharaj-ji, or somebody, and you open. And it feels so good to be in love. And in the path of devotion, you get so addicted to that experience of the intimacy between the lover and the beloved that you keep being drawn into the singing, and the stories, and the images, and the remembrance of, and you are just thinking about it and tuning all the time just to stay in that intimate loving relationship with that which you love.

And then there is this little shift where you start to ask the question, “What isn’t God?” And then you start to look at all the different faces and aspects, and watch your heart close around judgment, and then you practice opening it and looking, and loving this as a manifestation of the beloved, something that is the way the beloved is taking form. And then the love starts to get vast. And then it starts to get more impersonal.

This is a quote from Anandamayi Ma—great, great, great saint; incredible, incredible being. She said:

This body has lived with father, mother, husband, and all. This body has served the husband, so you may call it a wife. It has prepared dishes for all, so you may call it a cook. It has done all sorts of scrubbing and menial work, so you may call it a servant. But if you look at the thing from another standpoint, you’ll realize that this body has served none but God. For when I serve my father, mother, husband, and others, I merely considered them as different manifestations of the Almighty, and served them as such. When I sat down to prepare food, I did so as if it were a ritual, for the food cooked was, after all, meant for God. Whatever I did, I did it in a spirit of divine service. Hence, I was not quite worldly, though always engaged in household affairs. I had but one ideal: to serve all as God, to do everything for the sake of God.

But listen to this one of hers also:

You all love this body so much that you often come to see me, unmindful of the long distance that many of you have to travel. Yet it is true that this body has no relationship with any of you, except the kinship of the atma—

—meaning the source, the truth, the love—

—which this body enjoys equally, not only with each of you, but even with all trees, creepers and foliage around, as well as with rocks, mountains, and everything else.

I really want you to hear that one, because that’s the one that changes romantic love into that expanding conscious love. And what I have experienced over these years is that transformation, and there have been very frightening aspects, because the cultural models of romantic love have to do with specialness: I love you specially. And what I experience is that I don’t love people specially. I have special work to do with one person or another, but I love beings, and I’m getting to love universe, and I’m getting to love the manifestation.

And it’s interesting, because people keep wanting you to love them specially, and I don’t feel it anymore. I don’t feel it anymore. And it’s a strange experience. It’s strange from a cultural point of view. Is that too weird, or can you hear the issue? It’s a transformation that goes on. That, because you have initially identified that feeling of love to somebody else with a quality of possessiveness, or collecting them, or wanting them around.

I’ll tell you what happened to me. I started to guide people through acid trips back in the sixties, and I’d take the acid with them, and we’d both go into the place of merging, of just beyond separate; we were in love. And then the session would be over, Saturday night would be over, and then it would be Sunday. And then we’d be parting in the beautiful morning mist, listening to the Messiah. And they had never had a thing like this before. And they would say, “When can I see you again?” Can you imagine? I mean, you’ve just been with somebody in total love, and then you’re about to part, and you say—see, this is where the fear comes in, and the lack of faith, and the doubt. “When will I see you again?” Like a little bit of, just a little bit of, UGH. And I’d say, “Well, why don’t we have dinner Wednesday night?” And then it became like every Wednesday night we’d have dinner, because that’s what you do with a beloved, you know? Like, let’s hang out. So then I ran a second session, and the next day the person said, “When will I see you again?” I said, “Well, how about Thursday night?” And after I had run six sessions, I went to my teacher, Tim Leary, and I said, “Tim, I don’t think I can guide any more sessions. I don’t have any more evenings free.”

And at that point I realized I was going to have to up-level the thing. I was going to have to take it up to another level of loving people, where if we have a moment of truth of love, this is what we’ve got. And the clinging of the mind comes out of the fear that says, “I want to possess it because I may run out of love later.” And when you leap out of that and go into the next space, realizing that every time you turn around there is another form of the beloved.

It’s interesting because I’m a wanderer. Maharaj-ji said, “Ram Dass should not stay in one place. He should keep moving around, because yogis, like water, tend to go bad if they stay in one place too long.” And not bad in the evil sense, but bad in the clinging, habitual way of having a building around you, a kind of a cocoon of safe emotional space. And it’s much different when you’re on the road all the time and you’re meeting motel keepers, and they’re your host for that moment. And on and on and on and on, and airport people, and all that. Is that the beloved? Are you traveling with the beloved? Or are you waiting to get home to the beloved?

And there was a moment where I was sitting in a motel in middle America, and it was one of those really plasticky Holiday Inn-type places. And I had arrived, and I went into my room, and I sat down, and I was starting to set up my little puja table on the plastic thing and all that stuff, moving the menu and stuff, and sitting there. And it was kind of depressing, and I thought, “Well, a few more weeks and I’ll be done with this tour and I can go home.” And then I saw the pain that that thought was creating for me. And I got up and I walked out of the room, closed the door, walked down the hall, turned around, came back, unlocked the door and yelled, “I’m home!” Okay? And I came in, and I sat down, and I looked, and—you know, I wouldn’t have decorated particularly this way, but, you know, what the hell! You know? I thought: if I’m not at home in the universe, boy, I got a problem. I got a problem. If I say I can only be home here, not there. What is home? Home is where the heart is. Home is the quality of presence. It’s the quality of being wherever you are.

But when you’ve gone from the hunger, the hungry sponge, looking for somebody to love and finding somebody, and then wanting to hold them and have them around because you’re afraid you might run out later—and you know how horrible that is. And then you start to cultivate these inner qualities of spaciousness and awareness, and you begin to feel this love not in a possessive way, but in a, like, light pouring out of you. And you just love people just because they are. You love things because they are. You see the manifestation, the awe, the mystery of the divine in form. When that starts to happen, you still have your old models of possession going. They haven’t been burned out yet. So when you love the second person, you want to collect them, too. And then the third person, you want to collect them, too.

I usually kid about my story is that you fall in love with somebody, and you nest, and you collect feathers and build a nest and straw and drapes and stuff. And then you need to go to the supermarket, and you get—what’s my thing? Yogurt and beer. And you’re at the checkout counter, and you look into the eyes of the person at the checkout counter, and the thing happens again. Because the eyes are the windows to the soul. And you’re in love. Because now you’re starting to function from this place. When you’re in this place, everybody you look at is your lover. When you are in love, you see love where you look. So you look, and—but your old model is: “I’ve got to collect this. My God, this is great. We are in love and it’s the checkout person!” See? So the question is: have you considered a ménage à trois? Are you opposed to open marriages? You know? But then what’s going to happen? You walk down the street, and you look, and there’s another one. Pretty soon you’re the atomite community or one of those kind of things. And the politics gets so complicated. Plus the emotions of everybody that thinks they’re the first of this, the first one.

And you realize you’ve got to graduate from a deprivation model to an abundance model. And I don’t mean that in the kind of cheesy way it’s often used; “it’s abundant so I can have it.” It’s abundant because you are it. That, as you become love, you get to the point where you walk down the street, and somebody comes, and it is the most beautiful thing again that you have ever seen again. And you look, and you look, and you appreciate, and you love, and your eyes may meet, and you both recognize the love, and you don’t have to do anything about it. So you go through from “come live with me” to “let’s have coffee together” to “would you give me your number?” to “how about a calling card?” to a wink to “are you experiencing what I’m experiencing? Wasn’t this great? Fantastic!” Or: “God is love.” Or “Ahh.” Or—and then you’re just looking at your beloved. And it’s nothing special to be in love. It’s nothing special. It’s very ordinary. How alien that is in this culture; to think that being in love with the universe is ordinary. It is ordinary. Aaaah.

Just take all these words back into the silence behind the words. Kabir said:

Since the day I met with my Lord, there has been no end to the sport of our love.

I see with eyes open and smile, and behold the beauty everywhere.

I utter the Lord’s name, and whatever I see it reminds me: whatever I do, it becomes worship.

The goddess is everywhere. Anybody you have ever touched in true love, that love still is present. Where can it go? Anyone who you’ve closed your heart to with your mind, rest your weary mind. Praise God for the light within us. Praise God, let love abide. Praise God for the light within us. Praise God, let love abide. Praise God for the light within us. Praise God, let love abide. Praise God for the light within us.