Antagonism Can Only Lead to Mutual Destruction

So in this retreat we have to have a very specific focus, which in a certain way, for me, was underlined by the recent video on YouTube, where it was very clear that when we have titles that refer to war and Armageddon, we get massive numbers of viewers and listeners, and when we put the word “love” in the title, almost no one clicks on it. And it’s even worse if we put “God” in the title. God forbid we should put “God” and “love” in the title, we’d be out of business! Not that it’s a business, but our message, since our message is love, this creates a little bit of a technical difficulty for us.

And so therefore, the focus of this retreat is on the relationship between love and war, love and hate. And why that is, is because hate and war are the final form in which love appears in the world. War is love. There wouldn’t be anyone willing to fight except for love, but it’s a partial love that demonizes the other, loves one’s own party or country or religion, and hates the other. But it’s love that is the basis of the action of destruction. But what the ego doesn’t realize is that if you project that the other is subhuman, you have, by that projection, made yourself subhuman, and because the world is a mirror, whatever you project upon the other is a reflection of yourself.

And so the path of yoga, Sat Yoga, is the path of the purification of the heart in which all projections of non-love have been removed, have been eliminated. But our love has to be unconditional and unlimited in scope, because God is everywhere. God is not simply someone who backs one country or one religion, and has nothing to do with people of another—every religion worships in one way or another the same God—and that God is love. Love is the Supreme Reality. So when it is said that God is love, that is accurate. It has become a cliché. And in a world in which love is all but missing in action, it’s cynically rejected as even a possibility for living in love, but this is what has to be overturned.

The very word Sat, which means “the Real”, means the supreme love, infinite love, absolute love, love without any fine print of an exception. And all the ego is, is a set of beliefs that reject love. That’s all. They are defenses against love because one was hurt when one loved in the past and “never again”, and one projects the feelings created by the traumatic wounding of the heart at an earlier time, and also interjects that as a sense of guilt and unworthiness of love. So the ego is that aspect of our consciousness that cannot love itself, and every wound, every form of karmic suffering—whether it’s in the body, or it’s in the mind, or it’s in relationships—every one is simply a symbolic representation of a lack of love within the heart. Whether it’s for oneself or the other or both is irrelevant, because we are all one. But it’s the loss of that recognition of the oneness that has caused all of the suffering, and then all of the karma that manifests that suffering in time and space.

And so Jivan Mukti is liberation from any trace of non-love, and liberation from the pain and the suffering and the karma of separation from the source of love, which is God, but which is the Self. God is the Self, not an other. And so the job, the function, the purpose, the mission, the task, the sadhana of a Sat Yogi is to love oneself. That’s it. It’s that simple. Do you love yourself?

This is the only question that needs to be answered, in accord with the truth that you are love. And if there isn’t love for the Self, then that one that doesn’t feel, that is a false algorithmic internalization of a misunderstanding of reality; a wound that is the karmic consequence of a separation from the Source of our being, that had brought about the need to have a life in which that traumatic wounding would take place, in order to motivate a quest for the return to healing, to wholeness. And wholeness is the union of the lover and the beloved, the soul and God, the conscious mind and the Self.

If you look up the word “adoration” in an English to Sanskrit dictionary, you find a huge, long, long, list of words—and if you go down that list, you notice that a lot of the words are very common terms that we as yogis use, but we don’t tend to identify or define the word as meaning adoration. For example, obviously bhakti is adoration, that’s a definition for it. Puja, it means adoration, kirtan, but sadhana—did you know that sadhana means adoration? That’s your yogic practice. Your practice is to be in a state of adoration of your Self. That’s it. And not part time adoration of yourself, and then the other part disgust, frustration, anger, bitterness, and other kinds of feelings, but full time love of yourself.

How many of you are in full time love of yourself? OK, well, honesty is a great virtue and I appreciate it, but your mission in this retreat for the next two weeks is to be in full time love of yourself.

Now, obviously, you can only love your Real Self; you can’t love a false self. But since your Real Self is love, as soon as you feel love for whatever, you should focus on the love and not the object of the love. Because I know if I asked how many of you loved your cat, everyone with a cat would put their hand up, or a dog, or any non-human mascot. I won’t ask how many love other humans, and there’s probably some who intermittently feel some of that, but it’s impossible for the ego, which is split into seeing the other sometimes as a good object worthy of love, and others as a bad object that shouldn’t be loved. And therefore the oscillation between those two prevents real love, which is without duality, to emerge and manifest.

And so it’s the overcoming of our inability to love. And you have to love yourself, because since yourself is love, without that Self being awakened to shine with love, how are you going to give love to anyone else?

Audio File: Antagonism Can Only Lead to Mutual Destruction.mp3