We are unfolding a story. As you fly, the thread of love weaves this story together. We have seen that love is basically the magnetism between the soul and its ultimate Beloved, between you and the mystery. That magnetism, that pull, we call love. And that magnetism is a sweet, pleasurable liking and appreciation. The magnetism is what we experience in our ordinary condition, which is the relative world where duality between the soul and the Beloved still exists. But love, of its own nature, of its very nature, tends to bring you nearer to the Beloved. That means love tends to eliminate the duality. More accurately, love opens us to the other world, the invisible world of spirit. The soul not only loves the ultimate nature—whether we call it God, the absolute, the ultimate self, or something else—but it also loves it to the extent of dissolving into it, uniting with it.
We have been recognizing love in the process of evolution, of unfoldment. The maturation of the soul is a loving process, which also means that the evolution of the whole universe is the action of love. It is the mystery loving to know itself. We have seen that this movement, this progression, has love in it and that love is the motive, the driving force. It is natural that the soul develops as a movement of love toward the mystery and is also driven by that love.
But there is another implication in recognizing that the soul is implicitly and naturally in love with the mystery. We said that this implicit love is not something that you learn—that it is already there. We just don’t see it because of the veils. So there is a natural, appreciative magnetism between the soul and the Beloved. It’s not like we say, “Let me learn to love the Beloved.” We always love the Beloved, but we see the Beloved through one veil or another.
Our love for these forms that veil the Beloved is actually our love for the mystery itself. At some point, we can recognize that directly. But what does that reveal? It reveals that it is in our nature to love the mystery. But the mystery is not only the ultimate mystery of reality; we do not call it “the Beloved” simply to mean that it is beloved by the soul. That mystery, that Beloved, is the ultimate nature of the soul. This has very deep, far-reaching implications. That the mystery, the Beloved, is the ultimate nature of the soul means that it is the ultimate identity of the soul. It is actually the true self, the true essence of the soul.
We just said that the soul is naturally, completely enraptured by the Beloved, and that this is something natural to the soul, not something learned. As we have seen, disturbances in our childhood create barriers to our knowing that, but the heart knows it whether the mind does or not. I’m not saying this is something we should know in our minds…which is why many of these poets tell you to get rid of the head—because the head believes it knows when it doesn’t. The knowledge of the heart is direct; it is not conceptualized knowledge. It is like a magnet that pulls you in a way that other things don’t. It is a very simple phenomenon.
What this means is that the soul naturally loves its own identity. In a very deep, intrinsic, and natural way, the soul loves herself. This means that we all love ourselves. And we love ourselves in such a fundamental and deep way because we ourselves are ultimately the mystery—we are the Beloved.
That brings in a whole new implication: If I recognize that I love the Beloved, at some point I must recognize that I love myself. Since the Beloved is my center, my source, my identity, my nature, my essence…In fact, the soul is nothing but the perfume of the Beloved.
Thus, in some fundamental way, the soul has an intrinsic love for itself. This is an interesting notion, because if we fundamentally love ourselves, what is this push in popular psychology and literature to learn to love ourselves? What does it mean to not like yourself, to not love yourself? The fact is that you love yourself even when you think you hate yourself. Hate is only a derivative of the basic feeling of love. If you did not love yourself, you would not hate yourself. It is as simple as that. If there were no love, there would be no hate. So that becomes an interesting mystery. If at the most fundamental level we love ourselves, why do we have so much trouble recognizing that we love, or even like, ourselves?
We could say that we don’t know what it is that we are loving. Or we could say that the love is already there but is being covered over, veiled from our experience, our feelings, our perceptions—veiled so much that sometimes we feel we really don’t like ourselves, that we hate ourselves and end up believing that we aren’t lovable.
But the fact is that your nature is beauty. You are not only cute; at a very deep level, you are the beauty of existence. The true beauty of existence manifests in the soul; it is the inner nature of the soul. So when you say, “I don’t like myself” it means that there are veils over your eyes and you don’t see your true beauty, your true magnificence, your true majesty, your true significance. You don’t really see who you are.
When the soul finally unifies with its Beloved, we say that the soul is complete, whole, nondual. So we say, “Love eliminates duality.” It brings nonduality between the soul and its own identity. This nonduality is not between the soul and something else we call the Beloved, which is over there somewhere and which you bring back and become unified with. That is merely the language of love. The language of love is a language of duality. There is a lover and there is the Beloved—that’s how we experience the underlying ground of nonduality being felt in the world of duality in which we live.
How do we feel this magnetism that is the ultimate expression of nonduality? We experience it as love itself. The Beloved we are looking for is not only within but also actually ourselves in some fundamental, deep way. And not only that; we recognize that our movement toward the Beloved—our growth, maturation, and development in whatever sphere or phase of life we are in—is really an action of love. The magnetism of nonduality indicates that we are always loving ourselves.
The movement of the soul to mature, to be itself, to rend the veils, is a movement of love. A movement of love toward what? Toward the Beloved, which is you. You are always loving yourself, and because you are loving yourself, you are moving toward yourself. If you didn’t love yourself, why move toward your nature? You would move toward something else.
Perhaps it is obvious now that we do love our nature in some way, in some very deep way. And if we don’t love it, there must be some barrier, some veils for us to rend, veils to see and penetrate and dissolve. Here is another poem from Kabir:
Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine
mountains, and the maker of canyons and
pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.
And the music from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water.
If you want truth, I will tell you the truth:
Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.10
So, the Beloved is not only inside, it is also the fabric of who we are. Not only is it inside, but we always love it. We never stop loving it. We can’t help it. We cannot not love the Beloved, because the very process of maturation is nothing but the movement according to that love. It is a love that we don’t need to create; it is the love already there behind the veils. We are made in such a way that our very maturation is based on our love for ourselves. So I don’t believe, as many psychologists do, that you learn to internalize taking care of yourself and loving yourself because your parents loved you. That’s not the case. We already loved ourselves. Our life itself is a process of loving.
The deeper we go into ourselves, the more veils we go through, which means the more accurately we see and know the Beloved. Recognizing the sources of our veils is one of the ways of rending them. We need to recognize our love for the Beloved by recognizing our love for ourselves—but we have to start by seeing that we really believe that we are unlovable. We learn in some way at some point that we are unlovable. But that is ridiculous! How can a human being be unlovable? Still, we end up believing that we are unlovable, and that is why we don’t love ourselves—and we believe that this is why other people don’t love us. That’s not it. Can’t be. That is not part of the laws of nature. So, we will do two exercises about this, one after the other, because this is very important.
PRACTICE SESSION 1
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You will do a monologue in groups of two or three for ten minutes each, or, if you are on your own, do the exercise in writing. Explore what makes you believe that you are unlovable.
What has led you to believe that there is something unlovable about you or that you are unlovable? Where did you get that notion? What do you base it on?
Since it can’t be true, you must have some idea, some belief, some misconception about who you are and about reality that makes you believe you are unlovable.
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Questions and Comments
S: The thing that was not acceptable in my childhood was the truth. What I have come to understand is that in putting out an image that wasn’t truthful, I couldn’t love myself. So I was in a double bind: I didn’t feel I could be loved if I was truthful, and I couldn’t love myself if I wasn’t.
AH: So you feel you weren’t being loved for just being yourself. You have to put on some image to get some love—but then you can’t love yourself, because maybe that’s not really you. Makes sense. You could also think of it in terms of why you wanted to be loved.
S: I think that when I was little, it wasn’t so much about love as it was about fear of abandonment. I got rejected when I acted in ways that weren’t acceptable to my parents.
AH: You said that you didn’t want to be abandoned. You didn’t really want love?
S: I chose not loving myself over abandonment.
AH: That’s what many of us do, because at that time we are dependent.
S: What happens when you think you don’t need love from anyone? I feel lovable in a sense, but I still feel rejected by my parents. But when I separated, I said, “I don’t need your love anyway.”
AH: You might say “I don’t need your love anyway” as a defense, in order to separate. If you acknowledged your need for love, you wouldn’t be able to separate. Many people deny their need for love in order to separate. That doesn’t mean you don’t need love. It is a complex situation because your need to separate is based on love for yourself. Otherwise why would you want to separate? Why wouldn’t you want to be abandoned? Why do you not want to die? You must love yourself someplace.
S: For me, it was a sense of physical ugliness. I can look in the mirror and see the lie, but—
AH: Yes. Many people relate their unlovableness to some kind of ugliness or deformity. You feel you aren’t loved and that there must be a reason. Usually we love what is beautiful; love and beauty are pretty connected. So if we feel unlovable, we conclude that we must be ugly someplace. However, I can’t see why you say you’re ugly. You don’t look ugly to me.
S: I can say that too, but it doesn’t change the feeling.
AH: So, some kind of belief about that has developed. You need to find out where it came from. Feeling ugly and feeling unlovable are somewhat interchangeable. You feel that there is something about you that is unlovable; but when we see who we really are, we can’t help but love ourselves. And when we really see ourselves and love ourselves, we will see our beingness. To love ourselves means to let ourselves settle, to relax and be, to leave ourselves alone, and to appreciate ourselves.
If we really leave ourselves alone and relax and be, what is there is beingness itself. We recognize “That is what I love.” When you see that, you are getting very near to the truth, because the absolute mystery is nothing but the nature of that presence. When we love ourselves, we can love our beingness, the fact of our isness, the fact of our existence, the facticity of our being—that we exist, that we be. That is basic. This amounts to loving our essence, since when we are being, we are being our essence. When we come to love our beingness—and we love it because we already love it anyway—at some point we also recognize that we love it. When we recognize that we love it, we recognize it for what it is. When we recognize its beauty and exquisiteness, that’s beingness—which is the perfume of the Beloved.
Remember what Rumi said: “I will cherish the soul, because it has a perfume of thee.” The perfume is our essential nature, our beingness. And when we love our beingness, we can also love the development, the unfoldment, of that beingness, that presence. That is what we call the soul, because the soul is the dynamic quality of our being, our presence. Of course, with the unfoldment come all the qualities of the soul—our reactions, our dynamism, our capacities, our gifts. We love them, but remember that these are expressions of our being. Our being itself is central. It is the center of what we are and what we love.
Sometimes we don’t love ourselves because what was loved in us were only expressions, external manifestations—some of our capacities, our qualities, our actions—but not the fact of what we are. Our core being was not loved, not recognized. To love ourselves we need to start at our core. We have to recognize the presence, the beingness, the essential nature of who we are. Then appreciating and loving the manifestations makes sense because they are the manifestations of that core. Otherwise, we are loving empty, disembodied manifestations. It is like loving an empty shell.
When the presence is there, and you are aware that this core of beingness is the beauty, the value, of who you are, then all the capacities, all the external manifestations, will be included in what you love. I’m not saying it isn’t okay to love your external manifestations, but to love them at the expense of the core, the depth, will make you into a shell. And you will end up not recognizing that you love yourself. It is that core, that inner beingness, that inner nature, that is our direct connection with the source, with the Beloved. That is how the Beloved appears when we start looking. And it appears as one form and then another until it reveals its most absolute nature, its mystery. It is a matter of penetrating the veils. And that happens as a process of inquiry and exploration of ourselves propelled by the dynamism of love.
We know the kinds of things that we love about ourselves—and there are many of those. But most of the time we don’t see them, we don’t want to know what they are because of our other voices that tell us all sorts of other stories—lies.
PRACTICE SESSION 2
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We worked on some of the veils that stopped you from recognizing that you are lovable. Now we want to see how you are lovable. We’ll do another exercise, a repeating question in dyads, with ten minutes for each person. The question: Tell me something you love about yourself. You really need to be honest. You want to see what is there in you that is lovable. You want to see how much you can see your beauty.
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Questions and Comments
AH: What do you think? Are you cute? [There are smiles on the faces of many students.] Seems you found out you are more than cute. That’s what I thought. Everyone is more than wonderful. You just need to know it.
S: I just want to stretch out and kiss me on the cheek!
AH: Kissable, huh?
S: It’s dangerous!
AH: Oh yes. Love is one of the most dangerous things in this world.
S: For me, it was quite difficult because every time I would say something, I would get a jab, or there were qualifications.
AH: The darkness would start closing in? Sometimes looking opens up the darkness instead of closing it. It’s just more veils to be rent.
S: I’d find something I thought was lovable and I’d feel I was either lying or bragging. It was a real mixed feeling for me.
AH: This exercise could be quite difficult. It could also be an exercise where we could tell ourselves something we already know, something that’s not a secret. We know the kinds of things that we love about ourselves; there are a lot of things that we love about ourselves. Most of the time we don’t see them, we don’t want to know, because our other voices tell us all sorts of other stories, lies.
S: So, if it was hard to come up with things I loved about myself, was it because the lies were too loud?
AH: Yes, what else could it be? What other explanation could there be?
S: A lot of the things I love about myself are things that my parents didn’t think that I had. The little voices kept saying, “But you don’t have those.” I’ve learned to see those qualities, to love those qualities, but the little voices still come in.
AH: That’s where the doubt comes from. Not being seen and loved for what you are is one of the main reasons we tend to not see those qualities in ourselves. It’s possible to learn, though. You can start finding out for yourself.
S: In both this exercise and the earlier one, loving myself was one step too early. In my childhood, I first had to deal with survival, staying physically alive. Being unlovable was such a given that hoping for love was…If I got through the day without being physically abused, hit, put down, criticized, it was a wonderful day. So, I have had to work through that stuff first to even begin to see that there was something lovable in me.
AH: Usually, that’s the case. Survival comes first, especially with children. But you could ask yourself first, “Why did I want to survive?” You want to feel good, right? You want to feel happy. Why would you want anybody to feel happy? Love was there even though your primary goal was to survive. True, it wasn’t in the foreground; you just wanted to get away from the pain, the hurt, and all that. But love was there in an implicit way.
S: It felt clear that love was the force that kept me going. It was like fighting tooth and nail, but that came out of love.
AH: You could even ask of survival, “Why do you want to survive?” If we don’t like ourselves, why would we want to survive? Everyone wants to survive and be happy. Do you want someone you hate to survive and be happy? Even there, love is implicit—but we have all these other voices, so we don’t see it.