The Spectrum of Love

by Alan Watts
transcript from an old radio presentation by Alan Watts
courtesy of Progress. Not Perfection

We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat. These people, usually of enormous creative power, are the envy of us all, and, by and large, man’s religions are attempts to cultivate that same power in ordinary people. Unfortunately, they often go about this task as one would attempt to make the tail wag the dog. I remember that when I was a small boy in school, I was enormously interested in being able to do my schoolwork properly. Everyone told me that I did not work hard enough, that I ought to work harder, but when I asked, “How do you work?” everybody shut up.

I was extremely puzzled. There were teachers who apparently knew how to work and who had attained considerable heights of scholarship. I thought that maybe I could learn “the secret” by copying their mannerisms. I would affect the same speech and gestures and, insofar as I could get around the school uniform, even clothing. (This was a private school in England, not a public school in America.)

None of this revealed the secret. I was, as it were, copying the outward symptoms and knew nothing of the inner fountain of being able to work. Exactly the same thing is true in the case of people who love. When we study the behavior of people who have the power of love within them, we can catalogue how they behave in various situations, and out of this catalogue formulate certain rules.

One of the peculiar things we notice about people who have this astonishing universal love is that they are often apt to play it rather cool on sexual love. The reason is that for them an erotic relationship with the external world operates between that world and every single nerve ending. Their whole organism—physical, psychological, and spiritual—is an erogenous zone. Their flow of love is not channeled as exclusively in the genital system as is most other people’s. This is especially true in a culture such as ours, where for so many centuries that particular expression of love has been so marvelously repressed as to make it seem the most desirable. We have, as a result of two thousand years of repression, “sex on the brain.” It’s not always the right place for it.

People who exude love are in every way like rivers—they stream. And when they collect possessions and things that they like, they are apt to give them to other people. (Did you ever notice that when you give things away, you keep getting more? That, as you create a vacuum, more flows in?)

Having noticed this, the codifiers of loving behavior write that you should give tax deductible institutions and to the poor, and should be nice to people, that you should act towards your relatives and friends and indeed even enemies as if you loved them (even if you don’t). For Christians and Jews and believers in God, there is a peculiarly difficult task enjoined upon us; namely, that “thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” not only going through the motions externally, but with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And that is, of course, very demanding indeed.

It is as if, for example, we admired the music of a certain composer and, having studied his style very thoroughly, we drew up rules of musical composition based upon the behavior of this composer. We then send our children to music school where they learn these rules in the hope that if they apply them, they will turn into first-class musicians, which they usually fail to do. Because what might be called the technique of music—as the technique of morals, as well as the technique of speech, of language—is very valuable because it gives you something to express. If you don’t have anything to say, not even the greatest mastery of English will long stand you in good stead.

So the question and the puzzle remain: You cannot imitate this thing . . . there is no way of “getting” it, and yet it is absolutely essential that we have it. Obviously, the human race is not going to flourish harmoniously unless we are able to love each other. The question becomes: How do you get it? Is it something that you simply have to contract, like measles? Or, as theologians say, is it “a gift of divine grace” which somehow is dished out to some but not to others? And if there is no way of getting divine grace by anything you do, as the Calvinists aver, then hadn’t we better just sit around and wait until something happens?

Surely, we can’t be left in that sort of hopeless situation. There must be some way of getting “grace” or “divine charity” or “divine love”—some sort of way in which we can, as it were, open ourselves so as to become conduit pipes for the flow. And so the more subtle preachers try to see if we can open ourselves and teach methods of meditation and spiritual discipline in hope that we can contact this power. The less subtle preachers say ‘you don’t have enough faith, you don’t have enough guts, you don’t have enough willpower…” If you only put your shoulder to the wheel and shoved you would be of course an exemplar and a saint. Actually, you will only be an extremely clever hypocrite.

The whole history of religion is the history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence. When you deal with the so-called practical world, and people don’t behave the way you wish they would, you get out the army or police force or “the big stick.” And if those strike you as somewhat crude, you resort to giving lectures—“lectures” in the sense of solemn adjuration and exhortation to “behave better next time.”

Many a parent says to the child, “Nice children love their mothers. And I’m sure you’re a nice child. You ought to love your mother, not because I, your mother, say so, but because you really want to do so.“ One of the difficulties here is that none of us, in our heart of hearts, respects love which is not freely given. For example, you have an ailing parent, and you are a son or daughter who feels dutifully that he should look after his parents because they’ve done so much for him. But somehow, your living with your father or mother prevents you from having a home and a life of your own, and naturally you resent it. Your parents are well aware that you resent this, even if they pretend to ignore it. They therefore feel guilty that they have imposed upon your loyalty. You in turn can’t really admit the fact that you resent them for getting sick, even though they couldn’t help it. And therefore no one enjoys the relationship. It becomes a painful duty to be carried out.

The same thing would naturally happen if, a number of years after having (at the altar) made a solemn and terrible promise that you would love your wife or husband come what may forever and ever “until death do you part,” suddenly you find that you really haven’t the heart to do it any more. Then you feel guilty, that you ought to love your wife and family.

The difficulty is this: You cannot, by any means, teach a selfish person to be unselfish. Whatever a selfish person does, whether it be giving his body to be burned, or giving all that he possesses to the poor, he will still do it in a selfish way of feeling, and with extreme cunning, marvelous self-deception, and deception of others. But the consequences of fake love are almost invariably destructive, because they build up resentment on the part of the person who does the fake loving, as well as on the part of those who are its recipients. (This may be why our foreign-aid program has been such a dismal failure.)

Now, of course, you may say that I am being impractical and might ask, “Well, do we just have to sit around and wait until we become inwardly converted to learn, through the grace of God or some other magic, how to love? In the meantime, do we do nothing about it, and conduct ourselves as selfishly as we feel?”

The first problem raised here is honesty. The Lord God says, at the beginning of things, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” What appears to be a commandment is actually a challenge, or what in Zen Buddhism is called a koan, a spiritual problem. If you exercise yourself resolutely, and try to love God or your neighbor, you will find that you get more tangled up. You will realize increasingly that the reason you are attempting to obey this as a commandment is that you want to be the right kind of person.

But love is not a sort of rare commodity—everybody has it. Existence is love. Everybody has the force running. Perhaps the way in which you find the force of love operating in you is as a passionate like for booze or ice cream or automobiles or good-looking members of the opposite sex, or even of the same sex. But love is operating there. People, of course, tend to distinguish between various kinds of love. There are “good” kinds, such as divine charity, and there are allegedly “bad” kinds, such as “animal lust.” But they are all forms of the same thing. They relate in much the same way as the colors of the spectrum produced by the passing light through a prism. We might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr. Freud’s libido, and the violet end of the spectrum of love is agape, the divine love or divine charity. In the middle, the various yellows, blues, and greens are as friendship, human endearment, and consideration.

Now it’s said that selfish people “love themselves.” I would say that that belies a misunderstanding of the whole thing: “yourself” is really something that is impossible to love. One obvious reason for this is that one’s self, when you try to focus on it to love it or to know it, it is oddly elusive.

Let me illustrate why. Once there was a fish who lived in the great ocean, and because the water was transparent, and always conveniently got out of the way of his nose when he moved along, he didn’t know he was in the ocean. Well, one day the fish did a very dangerous thing, he began to think: “Surely I am a most remarkable being, since I can move around like this in the middle of empty space.” Then the fish became confused because of thinking about moving and swimming, and he suddenly had an anxiety paroxysm and thought he had forgotten how. At that moment he looked down and saw the yawning chasm of the ocean depths, and he was terrified that he would drop. Then he thought: “If I could catch hold of my tail in my mouth, I could hold myself up.” And so he curled himself up and snapped at his tail. Unfortunately, his spine wasn’t quite supple enough, so he missed. As he went on trying to catch hold of his tail, the yawning black abyss below became ever more terrible, and he was brought to the edge of total nervous breakdown.

The fish was about to give up, when the ocean, who had been watching with mixed feelings of pity and amusement, said, “What are you doing?” “Oh,” said the fish, “I’m terrified of falling into the deep dark abyss, and I’m trying to catch hold of my tail in my mouth to hold myself up.” So the ocean said, “Well, you’ve been trying that for a long time now, and still you haven’t fallen down. How come?” “Oh, of course, I haven’t fallen down yet,” said the fish, “because, because–I’m swimming!” “Well,” came the reply, “I am the Great Ocean, in which you live and move and are able to be a fish, and I have given all of myself to you in which to swim, and I support you all the time you swim. Instead of exploring the length, breadth, depth, and height of my expanse, you are wasting your time pursuing your own end.” From then on, the fish put his own end behind him (where it belonged) and set out to explore the ocean.

Well, that shows one of the reasons it’s difficult to love yourself: Your “spine isn’t quite supple enough.”

Another reason is that “oneself,” in the ordinary sense of one’s ego, doesn’t exist. It seems to exist, in a way, in the sense that the equator exists as an abstraction. The ego is not a psychological or physical organ; it’s a social convention, like the equator, like the clock or the calendar, or like the dollar bill. These social conventions are abstractions which we agree to treat as if they did exist. We live in relation to the external world in just exactly the same way that one end of the stick exists in relation to the other end. The ends are indeed different, but they’re of the same stick.

Likewise, there is a polar relationship between what you call your “self” and what you call “other.” You couldn’t experience “other” unless you also had the experience of “self.” We might say that we feel that one’s “self” and the “other” are poles apart. Oddly, we use that phrase, “poles apart,” to express extreme difference. But things that are “poles apart” are poles of something, as of a magnet, or a globe, and so are actually inseparable. What happens if you saw the south pole off a magnet with a hacksaw? The new end, opposite the original north pole, becomes the south pole, and the piece that was chopped off develops its own north pole. The poles are inseparable and generate each other.

So it is in the relationship between the “self” and the “other.” Now if you explore what you mean when you say you “love yourself,” you will make the startling discovery that everything that you love is something that you thought was other than yourself, even if it be very ordinary things such as ice cream or booze. In the conventional sense, booze is not you. Nor is ice cream. It becomes “you,” in a manner of speaking, when you consume it, but then you don’t “have it” anymore, so you look around for more in order to love it once again. But so long as you love it, it’s never you. When you love people, however selfishly you love them (because of the pleasant sensations they give you), still, it is somebody else that you love. And as you inquire into this and follow honestly your own selfishness, many interesting transformations begin to occur in you.

One of the most interesting of these transformations is being directly and honestly “selfish.” You stop deceiving people. A great deal of damage is done in practical human relations by saying that you love people, when what you mean is that you ought to (and don’t). You give the impression, and people begin to expect things of you which you are never going to come though with.

You know of people to whom you say, “I like so-and-so, because with him or her, you always know where you are.” It’s impossible to impose on people like that. On the other hand, if you say, “Can I come and stay over night with you?” and they don’t want you, they’ll reply, “I’m, sorry, but I’m tired this weekend, and I’d rather not have you.” Or “Some other time.” Well, that’s very refreshing. If I feel the person hasn’t been quite honest with me, and I accept their hospitality, I’m always wondering if they would really prefer that I wasn’t there.

But one doesn’t always listen to one’s inner voice: we often pretend that it’s not there. That’s unfortunate, because if you don’t listen to your inner voice, you are not listening to your own wisdom and to your own love. You are becoming insensitive to it just as your hosts are trying to suppress the fact that, for the time being, they don’t want your presence. Likewise, let’s suppose that you are married and have an unwanted baby. It is profoundly disturbing to a child to have false love pretended to it. To begin with, the milk tastes wrong. The smell isn’t’ right. The outward gesture is “Darling, I love you,” but the smell is “You’re a little bastard and a nuisance.”

Very few of us can accept the idea that we don’t love our children, because it seems to be unnatural. We say that mother-love is the most beautiful an natural thing in the world. But it isn’t. It’s relatively rare, and if you don’t love your child, you confuse him or her. The child will respect you much more if you say, “Darling, you’re a perfect nuisance, but I will look after you because I have to.” Well, at least then everything is quite clear!

I found in personal relations of this kind a very wonderful rule: that you never, never show false emotions. You don’t have to tell people exactly what you think “in no uncertain terms,” as they say. But to fake emotions is destructive, especially in family matters and between husbands and wives or between lovers.

It always comes to a bad end. This, on the occasions when, for personal friends, I perform marriage ceremonies, instead of saying, “I require and charge you both that you shall answer in the dreadful Day of Judgment, etc., “I say, “I require and charge you both that you shall never pretend to love one another when you don’t.” This is a gamble. It is likewise a gamble to trust yourself to come though with love.

But there is really no alternative.

Now to trust oneself to be capable of love or to bring up love—in other words, to function in a sociable way and in a creative way—is to take a risk, a gamble. You may not come though with it. In the same way, when you fall in love with somebody else, or form an association with someone else, and you trust them, they may as a matter of fact not fulfill your expectations. But that risk has to be taken. The alternative to taking that risk is much worse than trusting and being deceived.

When you say, “I will not trust other people, and I will not trust myself,” what course remains? You have to resort to force. You have to employ stacks of policemen to protect you, and have to hold a club over yourself all the time, and say, “No, no. My nature is wayward, animal, perverse, fallen, grounded in sin.” What then happens? When you refuse to take the gamble of trusting yourself to be capable of love, you become, if you will excuse this extremely graphic but nevertheless relevant simile, like a person who cannot trust himself to have bowel movements. Many children learn this from parents who do not trust them, and think they ought to have these movements in rhythm with the clock, which is a different kind of rhythm from that of the organism. People who cannot trust themselves to do even this take laxatives endlessly, as a result of which their whole system gets fouled up.

Exactly the same thing happens with people who can’t trust themselves to go to sleep. They have to take all kinds of pills. And so also with people who can’t trust themselves to love, and have to take all sorts of artificial and surgical measures to produce the effect of love for saving face. They become progressively more incapable of loving at all, and they create turmoil and misunderstanding and chaos in themselves and others and society.

In other words, to live, and to love, you have to take risks. There will be disappointments and failures and disasters as a result of taking these risks. But in the long run it will work out.

My point is that if you don’t take these risks the results will be much worse than any imaginable kind of anarchy.

In tying up love in knots or in becoming incapable of it, you can’t destroy this energy. When you won’t love, or won’t let it out, it emerges anyway in the form of self-destruction. The alternative to self-love, in other words, is self-destruction. Because you won’t take the risk of loving yourself properly, you will be compelled instead to destroy yourself.

So, which would you rather have? Would you rather have a human race which isn’t always very well controlled, and sometimes runs amok a little bit, but on the whole continues to exist, with a good deal of honesty and delight, when delight is available? Or would you rather have the whole human race blown to pieces and cleaned off the planet, reducing the whole thing to a nice, sterile rock with no dirty disease on it called life?

The essential point is to consider love as a spectrum. There is not, as it were just nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on the one hand and infatuation on the other. These are all forms of the same energy. And you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. When you find only one of these forms existing, if at least you will water it, the rest will blossom as well. But the effectual prerequisite from the beginning is to let it have its own way.

Connect with Progress. Not Perfection

Alan Watts: The Real You

An inspirational and profound speech from the late philosopher Alan Watts.

Original Audio sourced from: “Alan Watts – ‘Nature of Consciousness’ from Human Consciousness”

Produced and Edited by T&H Inspiration

Speech courtesy of alanwatts.org

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It Felt Love

by Hafiz, Persian lyric poet & mystic (1320 to 1389)

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give to this world

All its

Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being,

Otherwise,

We all remain

Too

Frightened

from The Gift
translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Spiritual Bypassing: Avoidance in Holy Drag

by Robert Augustus Masters, PhD
originally published April 29, 2013

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Cover image credit: CDD20

Source: Kent Nerburn

by Kent Nerburn
November 30, 2006

Giving is a miracle that can transform the heaviest of hearts. Two people, who moments before lived in separate worlds of private concerns, suddenly meet each other over a simple act of sharing. The world expands, a moment of goodness is created, and something new comes into being where before there was nothing.

Too often we are blind to this everyday miracle. We build our lives around accumulation- of money, of possessions, of status- as a way of protecting ourselves and our families from the vagaries of the world. Without thinking, we begin to see giving as an economic exchange- a subtracting of something from who and what we are- and we weigh it on the scales of self-interest.

But true giving is not an economic exchange; it is a generative act. It does not subtract from what we have; it multiplies the effect we can have in the world.

Many people tend to think of giving only in terms of grand gestures. They miss the simple openings of the heart that can be practiced anywhere, with almost anyone.

We can say hello to someone everybody ignores. We can offer to help a neighbor. We can buy a bouquet of flowers and take it to a nursing home, or spend an extra minute talking to someone who needs our time.

We can take ten dollars out of our pocket and give it to someone on the street. No praise, no hushed tones of holy generosity. Just give, smile and walk away.

If you perform these simple acts, little by little you will start to understand the miracle of giving. You will begin to see the unprotected human heart and the honest smiles of human happiness. You will start to feel what is common among us, not what separates and differentiates us.

Before long you will discover that you have the power to create joy and happiness by your simplest gestures of caring and compassion. You will see that you have the power to unlock the goodness in other people’s hearts by sharing the goodness in yours.

And, most of all, you will find the other givers. No matter where you live or where you travel, whether you speak their language or know their names, you will know them by their small acts, and they will recognize you by yours. You will become part of the community of humanity that trusts and shares and dares to reveal the softness of its heart.

Once you become a giver, you will never be alone.

When Things Fall Apart

Tibetan Buddhist Nun and Teacher Pema Chödrön on Transformation Through Difficult Times

by Maria Popova, the marginalian
July 17, 2017

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control — lacerations of the heart that feel barely bearable, that leave us bereft of solid ground. What then?

“In art,” Kafka assured his teenage walking companion, “one must throw one’s life away in order to gain it.” As in art, so in life — so suggests the American Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön.

In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library), she draws on her own confrontation with personal crisis and on the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to offer gentle and incisive guidance to the enormity we stand to gain during those times when all seems to be lost.

Half a century after Albert Camus asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Chödrön reframes those moments of acute despair as opportunities for befriending life by befriending ourselves in the deepest sense.

Writing in that Buddhist way of wrapping in simple language the difficult and beautiful truths of existence, Chödrön examines the most elemental human response to the uncharted territory that comes with loss or any other species of unforeseen change:

Fear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.

If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.

This clarity, Chödrön argues, is a matter of becoming intimate with fear and rather than treating it as a problem to be solved, using it as a tool with which to dismantle all of our familiar structures of being, “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.” Noting that bravery is not the absence of fear but the intimacy with fear, she writes:

When we really begin to do this, we’re going to be continually humbled. There’s not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.

In essence, this is the hard work of befriending ourselves, which is our only mechanism for befriending life in its completeness. Out of that, Chödrön argues, arises our deepest strength:

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

[…]

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Decades after Rollo May made his case for the constructiveness of despair, Chödrön considers the fundamental choice we have in facing our unsettlement — whether with aggressive aversion or with generative openness to possibility:

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.

To stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge — that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic — this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation — harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.

Half a century after Alan Watts began introducing Eastern teachings into the West with his clarion call for presence as the antidote to anxiety, Chödrön points to the present moment — however uncertain, however difficult — as the sole seedbed of wakefulness to all of life:

This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us.

[…]

We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

Remaining present and intimate with the moment, she argues, requires mastering maitri — the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness toward oneself, that most difficult art of self-compassion. She contrasts maitri with the typical Western therapy and self-help method of handling crises:

What makes maitri such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that’s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.

[…]

In the midst of all the heavy dialogue with ourselves, open space is always there.

Another Buddhist concept at odds with our Western coping mechanisms is the Tibetan expression ye tang che. Chödrön explains its connotations, evocative of Camus’s insistence on the vitalizing power of despair:

The ye part means “totally, completely,” and the rest of it means “exhausted.” Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say “totally fed up.” It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope — that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be — we will never relax with where we are or who we are.

[…]

Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.

Decades after Simone de Beauvoir’s proclamation about atheism and the ultimate frontier of hope, Chödrön points out that at the heart of Buddhism’s approach is not the escapism of religion but the realism of secular philosophy. And yet these crude demarcations fail to capture the subtlety of these teachings. She clarifies:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.

[…]

Hopelessness is the basic ground. Otherwise, we’re going to make the journey with the hope of getting security… Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.

[…]

When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself… In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things.

Only through such active self-compassion to our own darkness, Chödrön suggests, can we begin to offer authentic light to anybody else, to become a force of radiance in the world. She writes:

We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.

Complement the immensely grounding and elevating When Things Fall Apart with Camus on strength of character in times of trouble, Erich Fromm on what self-love really means, and Nietzsche on why a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty, then revisit Chödrön on the art of letting go.

Connect with the marginalian

Larken Rose introduces conversation points designed to teach voluntaryists/anarchists how to be far more effective in talking to their statist friends, co-workers, family members, etc., using techniques that, by taking into account the quirks and complexities of human psychology, give a far better chance of getting others to understand and accept the concepts of self-ownership, non-aggression, and a stateless society.

About this Author:

Larken Rose

Larken Rose is an outspoken, nationally known proponent of individual liberty, self-ownership and a voluntary society. He lives with his wife and daughter in eastern Pennsylvania and is the author of several books, include The Iron Web and How to be a Successful Tyrant, (The Megalomaniac Manifesto). He just completed another book, The Most Dangerous Superstition. Visit his website for more info (Larkenrose.com).

PDF of The Most Dangerous Superstition

Compassionate Water (The Great Bell Chant)

The Great Bell Chant
by Thich Nhat Hanh

May the sound of this bell penetrate deep into the cosmos

Even in the darkest spots living beings are able to hear it clearly
So that all suffering in them ceases
Understanding comes to their heart
And they transcend the path of sorrow and death.
..
The universal dharma door is already open
The sound of the rising tide is heard clearly
The miracle happens: a beautiful child appears in the heart of a lotus flower
One single drop of this compassionate water is enough
To bring back the refreshing spring to our mountains and rivers.
..
Listening to the bell I feel the afflictions in me begin to dissolve
My mind calm, my body relaxed
A smile is born on my lips
Following the sound of the bell
My breath brings me back to the safe island of mindfulness
In the garden of my heart, the flowers of peace bloom beautifully.

One hour version for meditation:

A Place Called Gratitude

video & voice by Patrick Willis
poetry by Les Visible
originally published December 11, 2005

Malachi 3:10

“Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse,
that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith,
saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven,
and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.”

Possibly the emotion I experience most often is gratitude. Sometimes it goes on for a length of time and I discover many other things in the process. It is as if Gratitude is a room, dimly lit. As you stand there your presence begins to emit more and more light and to reveal more and more of the contents of the room. Gratitude has attendants and handmaidens; joy, serenity, a feeling of awesome protection. I don’t notice these things initially. If my gratitude goes away too soon I do not see to the further reaches of the room. It takes a while for the dynamo to wind up and bring on the full orchestra of sights and sounds.

I’ve been in the presence of realized masters and it is evident to me, as it is to most people in the room, that there is something different about them. Probably one of the finest talents a person can acquire is to become a ‘trained observer’. In order to be a trained observer one needs to relinquish pre-conceived assumptions and natural prejudice because they taint the quality of your research. It could be said that when the gravity of our assumptions begins to outweigh our capacity to learn, then we no longer grow. Since growth is an imperative, pain enters the picture to offset that gravity. It’s apparent to me that many people have a higher pain threshold than I do. I can’t take it. Why should I? Why should I, when there are so many more refined stations of being than that of being whipped along the way?

So in watching masters and in reflecting afterwards; where real learning takes place …because you can’t always remain objective in overwhelming presence. I have come to a conclusion about the way they breathe. The state of our minds and our emotions affect the regularity and depth of our breath. Alternatively, the way we breathe affects the quality of our mind and emotions. So I think about gratitude when I am breathing in and out. I am grateful when I eat and I imagine the food as being divine substance. I have to do this. It is a matter of self defense. If I am not eating and breathing consciously then some other agency may be doing it for me. Thoughts like this appear delusional to some and the example of new age mandarins also work against credibility on the part of those who have seen the naked emperor.

These masters didn’t get where they are in an afternoon or at a weekend seminar. Of course these things are advertised; like the Thighmaster and those round cages that do your sit-ups for you. My favorites are the patches with the electrodes that stimulate the muscles and turn you into Adonis while you are watching TV. The slenderizer creams are pretty neat and so are the space suits that eventually return you to needing only one airline seat. I haven’t seen Shamoo’s magic crystal and wealth amulets but I know they are around even if Shamoo is going by another name now.

It comes down to work and there is where problem #1 gives birth to a lot of other problems and the discouraging catcalls from the peanut gallery of entropic recidivism. There must be an easier way. And this is where gratitude comes in. Gratitude takes the inertia and resistance out of the ride. Gratitude promotes an eager willingness. Gratitude makes it feel good. We’ve no problem engaging in the things we love to do. If we don’t love it then it becomes work. I work all day long every day, a lot more than eight hours. I don’t get paid for my work in the way most people do but I do get paid. I get paid in gratitude; in the increased capacity to feel gratitude.

Gratitude changes you. It changes the cells in your body and makes you flexible and young. It neutralizes anger. Most people aren’t aware that depression is the result of turning your anger inward; turning it upon yourself. Most people also don’t realize that much of their anger comes from their sense of being denied something they insist upon having; whether that is an object, a world view, someone’s attention or their right of way on the way to whatever it is that they want or wherever it is they wish to be. Gratitude makes all of that unnecessary. The more grateful you are the more reasons you are going to have to feel that way. This follows observable laws of physics. As above, so below; what you observe taking place here takes place everywhere, whether you can see it or not. This is one of the scientific truths about faith. We take things that are only mathematical theory as everyday fact. We are probably unaware of this but we do. Many people would be quite surprised to find that they regularly practice things that they firmly attest they do not believe in.

If you would simply practice feeling gratitude, breathing it in and out, you would rather quickly become enlightened; or, if you prefer, more enlightened. As good as it feels, why would you want it all at once? Shouldn’t the increase in the increments of bliss take forever? Gratitude is a pair of rose colored glasses and a certain biblical coat. That’s what I call haute couture. Why wear sunglasses in a dark room? Because when you are cool the sun is always shining.

I don’t know it beyond a ‘shadow’ of a doubt but I strongly suspect that this is what masters do when they breathe in and out. Of course it may be Love and it may be Peace or Compassion but the origin of every virtue is in the ineffable, just as the colors, pre-prism, are in the white light. There isn’t any spiritual thing that can’t be understood in a practical, scientific way …if you are so inclined.

Gratitude greases the wheels of movement into a better state of being. It is a sort of cosmic three-in-one oil. In this time of spiritual crisis you need all the help you can get. I do anyway. But none of this is relevant to my feelings of gratitude; merely attendant to them. I feel grateful because I am grateful. Of all the things that I could be engaged in, of all the people I could have been; see, even now parts of me are departing and I speak of myself as if I were in the past. Of all the things I could have, to have gratitude, well… that makes me a hundred times more grateful just thinking about it.

I feel held. I feel something inexpressible and the very best part is that I know I am not nearly grateful enough. No, I’m just playing at the margins of gratitude. Further on, the room changes into a world of music; the sounds of planets rubbing together, the liquid radiance of stars pouring into an empty cup and over-spilling beyond boundaries and limits. And this is only what I can imagine from the margins. This is only what I can see in the lens of imagination. Once again, science tells me that it moves beyond that. We know a great many things about the universe that we cannot see. How did we come to know these things? Scientific inquiry and tools adapted to the pursuit made it possible.

Thinking about this has had the result of making me even more grateful than I was and so the room has gotten larger. That’s good, because my gratitude makes me want to dance and sing and I need the extra room for that. Every breath of gratitude alters my cells some infinitesimal amount so that critical mass gets closer. This seems to tell me that, “It’s getting better all the time.” Will shadows fall? Sure… just as darkness will turn into light when darkness falls. Be grateful.

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Cover image credit: jobertjamis23

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

~ Hafiz, Persian poet & mystic

From: ‘The Subject Tonight is Love’
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Tonight I am pondering some things I ponder quite often.

Things such as seeing all relationships as mirrors of oneself…

gratefulness for all of life — everything, without exception…

forgiveness of myself as a participant in all the pain that has ever existed in this realm…

returning to love again and again — and the way we get when we are disconnected from that love…

the great need we have for one another, and so on.

As I pondered, I stumbled into reading some Hafiz poetry which lifted my heart and called me to see from heaven’s viewpoint.  Here are a few that I found myself reading again and again.

~ Kathleen

 

Forgiveness

 

Forgiveness is the cash you need.
All the other kinds of silver really buy just strange things.
Everything has its music.
Everything has genes of God inside.
But learn from those courageous addicted lovers
of glands and opium and gold —
Look, they cannot jump high or laugh long
when they are whirling.
And the moon and the stars become sad
when their tender light is used for night wars.
Forgiveness is part of the treasure you need
to craft your falcon wings
And return to your true realm
of Divine freedom.

~Hafiz, in The Subject Tonight is Love, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

 

---

 

I Know The Way You Can Get

 

I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.
Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one’s self.

O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
Looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.

I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love’s
Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering God,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love!

~Hafiz, in I Heard God Laughing – Renderings of Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

 

A Great Need

 

Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.

Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.

~Hafiz, in The Subject Tonight is Love, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Start a Huge, Foolish Project

by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, 13th century Sufi mystic &  poet

These spiritual window-shoppers,

who idly ask, ‘How much is that?’ Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? “Nowhere.”
What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”

Even if you don’t know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

Don’t Sell Out to Fit In

A Parable

by Alan Cohen

A fellow once went to Zumbach the tailor to be fitted for a new suit of clothes. After Zumbach altered the suit, the man stood in front of the mirror to check the fit. At first glance he noticed that the suit jacket’s right arm sleeve was rather short, and too much of his wrist was showing. “Say, Zumbach,” the fellow noted, “This sleeve looks a little short. Would you please lengthen it?”

“The sleeve is not too short,” replied the tailor. “Your arm is too long…Just pull your arm back a few inches and you will see that the sleeve fits perfectly.”

The man withdrew his arm a bit, and the sleeve was matched with his wrist. But this movement rumpled the upper portion of the jacket. “Now the nape of the collar is several inches above my neck,” he protested.

“There’s nothing wrong with the collar,” Zumbach insisted. “Your neck is too low. Lift the back of your neck and the jacket will fit well.”

The customer raised his neck a few inches, and sure enough the collar rounded it where it was supposed to. But now there was another problem: the bottom of the jacket rested high above his seat. “Now my whole rear end is sticking out!” the man complained.

“No problem,” Zumbach returned. “Just lift up your rear end so that it fits under the jacket.”
Again the customer complied, which left his body in a very contorted posture. But Zumbach had convinced him that the problem was not with the suit, but him. So he paid the tailor for the suit and walked out of the shop in a most awkward position, struggling to keep all parts of the suit in their right places.

On the street he encountered two women who were walking in the opposite direction. After they had passed, one woman turned to the other and commented, “That poor man is really crippled!”

“He sure is,” the other replied. “But that suit looks fabulous on him.”

Our families, friends, schools, religions, and society prescribe many suits for us to wear. Some of them fit and many don’t. If a job, relationship, living situation, or spiritual path does not match you, others may try to convince you that you have a problem. A good, strong, wise, devoted, or mature person, they tell you, should be able to stay in this position and even enjoy it. Yet if such an arrangement does not bring you happiness, you only cripple yourself by trying to stuff yourself into it. Your problem is not that you cannot live up to the standard you have chosen; your problem is that you cannot live up to a standard others have chosen for you. You will never walk comfortably in an ill-fitting suit prescribed by a shortsighted tailor. Your inability to adapt is not a sign of your weakness, but the strength of your inner guidance to remind you where your passion lives. So what you thought was wrong with you may be what’s actually right with you.

When Dave Barry was in junior high school, he was the class clown and often got into trouble for cracking jokes during lessons. Dave’s teacher scolded him, “You’d better get to work, Dave Barry — you can’t joke your way through life, you know.”

Now, forty years later, Dave Barry is the most successful humor writer in America. With many popular books to his credit, he writes the most widely syndicated humor column in American newspapers. Oh, yes — along the way he won the Pulitzer Prize.

The junior high school teacher was way off the mark. Dave Barry is joking his way through life, and doing quite well at it. He is bringing laughter to millions of people, helping them lighten up about their difficulties, and earning a hefty income. What he was told was very wrong with him was very right indeed.

No one knows your passion and purpose better than you do, and no one has to live with the results of your choices more than you do. That is why you must be very honest about what fits you and what doesn’t. Seminar participants often ask me, “How can I find out what is my life purpose or passion?” I tell them, “Begin to tell the impeccable truth about how everything you do feels. Is it a fit or is it not? Be true to your inclinations on the little decisions, such as where you go to dinner and with whom. When your daily decisions reflect your intentions, you will discover the big picture for your life.”

Robert Louis Stevenson noted, “To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying, ‘Amen’ to what the world tells that you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.” Keep your soul alive, and you will be amazed at how easily and naturally your body, relationships, prosperity, career, and entire life follow.