Addicted to love

fear is the cause, getting stuck in a pattern is the effect. All patterns arise from our fear of rejection, and the result is always more self-rejection.

These negative feelings are not really true, they don’t relate to what we are in reality, but only to what we’ve learned to think about ourselves.

Other people’s love and approval are the drugs that we can’t live without, and will do anything to get.

wing, embracing, integrating.

here are people who share their emotions with others, and bond with them in this way. And there are people who keep their emotions to themselves, and gain approval through a cool demeanour of steady reliability.

The idea that our thoughts relate to how reality truly is, is itself nothing more than a thought, a projection of the thinking mind! And that this projection is really true, is in turn just another thought. The whole experience of an ‘I’ that is hurt and a ‘reality’ that does the hurting takes place solely within the experiencing mind.

When you learn to look at reality and see that mind and experience are a perfect unity, then you’ll increasingly recognise the perfection in every apparent imperfection; for instance, in those two major obstacles on the spiritual path: merging with safe patterns of thinking and dissociation from unsafe patterns. In these, you can now recognise the two most important qualities of the mind’s perfect nature: the ability to embrace reality with loving awareness and to transcend it with clear awareness. Without awareness, loving embracing is mutilated into merging, and clear transcendence into dissociation. But when these qualities function within the clarity of the perfect self-knowing awareness, they form the dyad of all spiritual growth: transcending and embracing, wisdom and love.

can examine in yourself how subtly this mechanism works. It can sometimes be seen when you’re alone and have been watching television or reading for a while. You’ve been distracted from the here and now for quite a long period of time, and have been merged with the events in the movie or book. Then at a certain point the movie ends or you finish the book. The temporary state of merging stops abruptly, and you briefly become conscious of yourself in the here and now. Observe carefully: you might now experience an uncomfortable feeling. This is the most subtle self-rejection, inherent to being distracted from your aware state. And it’s accompanied by the urge to immediately start doing something else. If you have little or no meditation experience, you won’t recognise this urge and will therefore give in to it immediately: you’ll start zapping channels or reading something else, or immediately go to bed or whatever. You dissociate from the uncomfortable feeling. But if you’ve been meditating for a while, and you recognise the subtle self-rejection and can stay present with it for a few moments, embracing it with non-judgemental awareness, then dissociation changes into transcendence to a clearer and more spacious self-knowing awareness. When self-rejection is lovingly embraced, it is transcended in clear, non-judgemental awareness. Each time awareness finds itself again in this way, it becomes a little clearer and more stable, and thus more able to embrace the next manifestation of self-rejection or despair with even more loving awareness.

It’s only when we see that we ourselves are responsible for our own suffering that we start to train our mind in looking at itself, searching for our own nature. And it’s only then that the miracle is revealed! Only then that the discomfort and self-rejection turn out in reality to be the gateway to our perfect nature. Then our suffering turns out to be the unrequited love of our perfect nature for our straying mind.

perfect nature – the Buddha in each of us – is distracted and swept along by its own projections, and thus becomes alienated from itself. Each time we’re confronted with this, we feel uncomfortable and out-of-place in that alienated state of being. And then we quickly run away from that feeling into a new distraction. This is the vicious circle of samsara, the self-sustaining mental suffering. Each time we’re trapped in self-rejection, it’s the inner Buddha who wants to be freed, and is hammering painfully hard on our door. And time after time we keep the door closed, and run away from ourselves into a new distraction; completely understandable, but not at all practical.