Welcome to satsang.

Today if you can grasp even a minute portion of what you’re about to hear, you will go away with a new way of thinking.

We have talked many times before about emotional pain, the pain body, and how resistance creates our emotional problems. Today we are going to explore what it is that resists and why we resist. It is so subtle, so insidious, that most people are totally unaware of this. Do you know what it is? It is fear of love.

Today we are going to explore how fear of love brings so much terror that it can drive people insane. Just think of it this way - there are over six billion human beings in the world and there isn’t one that doesn’t want love, attention, affection, to be approved of and to be appreciated.

But look what’s happening now in the world. All you have to do is listen to the news. Even with computers, there are new viruses all the time. Somebody is creating them. Isn’t that a form of hate and vandalism? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of what we are talking about?

So we are going to understand something very precious today. Keep as open as you can, because you are going to see the world in a brand new way that will open your heart as we explore deeper.

The question is, why is it that something so powerful, something that we want more than anything, can fill us with so much fear? We fear the very thing we want most. Let’s explore it.

Let’s talk about love for a moment. There is nothing that is not love. Take creation, for example. Atoms unite, and as they unite they form molecules. Molecular structure creates the living cell, which knows exactly what to do. It has the intelligence to create eyes, ears, a mouth, a heart, a kidney, an animal, a human being. The seed has the intelligence within it to create a flower, a plant, a tree. Everything in life is permeated with this unifying principle called love, and nothing is outside of that love. But because it is so total, we are going to understand why it creates such terror.

There are three levels to love. The first level is familiar no matter what stage of consciousness you are on. It is called sexual love, sexual attraction. In very primitive consciousness it is known as lust. So the first stage is becoming physically attracted towards another human being. That is the first unifying principle of human conduct.

The second level is intimacy, when you have this attraction and you are drawn towards a particular energy. The first level was strictly physical; the second level is physical, emotional, and mental, even somewhat spiritual. It’s called intimacy, which very few people ever enter into. Sometimes after a year or two of relationship, people start becoming honest with themselves and they bare their souls, which is very frightening because there is always a part that wants to hold back. “What if I expose myself totally, I might not be accepted, I might not be loved!” But that’s just the beginning of intimacy.

As intimacy becomes deeper and more profound, we move into the third level, which is very rare, extremely rare. It is a very aware level called true love. True love means the death of the ego. Now are you beginning to see why love can be so frightening? This is why in relationships you hear, “Oh, my goodness, I love him so much I am afraid I am giving myself up, I am losing my identity.” But what if you ask this person, “What is your identity?”

Let me explain what I mean by ego death, because the word death already strikes terror in the heart. There’s no such thing! Ego death simply means this - when you are with your lover, looking into the eyes of this person whom you love so much, for a brief magical moment, you forget yourself. And in that moment of forgetting yourself, there is ego death. Within ego death, the emptiness that you feared is seen to be fullness.

In truth, we fear emptiness. What is loneliness? Loneliness is emptiness, feeling empty, feeling like something is missing. But try to understand one thing. What is loneliness but a total fear of love? The person who is lonely will dream and think of it someone to love them, even have sexual thoughts about it. They dream of being loved and cared for, of somebody being there when they need them. But are they willing to give that love to themselves? Would they say, “I want someone so I can love them?” You see? Fear of love!

So how are we going to understand this discrepancy, and why does it happen that way? First of all, we need to understand the difference between mind and heart. Although mind and heart are opposites and work in opposing ways, they are one. Until they are integrated, we cannot find peace.

What is mind? Mind looks for details; mind sees only the surface. Have you heard the phrase, “You can’t see the forest for the trees”? The mind sees details, fragments. It can’t see the whole picture. The heart, on the other hand, sees the whole picture.

When somebody gets mad at you, what is the first thing you see? Someone getting angry at you! You become defensive and hurt, and ask immediately, “What have I done? What’s wrong with me? Did I do something wrong?” We see with the mind. We are seeing somebody who is angry, But if you see with heart, you see that someone is angry because they are hurting. There is anger in them! So why not forget yourself for a moment and look at what is happening? That’s your heart, that’s compassion. Only to the extent that you forget yourself can you see clearly. That’s love, you see? But as long as you are caught in seeing from the way things should be on the surface, you are looking with your mind.

Mind and heart are one. So we can say that if a ruler this long is consciousness, and all is consciousness, the mind is a very small part at the beginning. Even psychologists agree that we only use five to ten percent of our consciousness. The rest is subconscious. What we do here is to bring the subconscious to awareness. That’s called waking up, seeing what we normally don’t see.

One time I took a piece of paper and I drew a circle on it. I asked people what they saw, and most of them said, “A circle.” They missed the paper! They saw with the mind and not with the heart. You have to look at everything. That is what we call heart - the heart sees the whole picture, called love.

To see the whole picture is very simple. It is the simplest thing in the world - just see it as it is. But when you look on the surface you don’t see things as they are, you see with your judgments. You see with your fears and conditioning, with your ego needs. You see things with your conditioning and you can’t see them clearly. But when you look with your heart, you look like a child. A child might go up to a person and say, “You’re funny looking.” Or, “I don’t like you.” Children look with the heart until we tell them, “No, no, no, that’s bad. You should lie, you should not be honest.” [laughs] Then we lose that innocence and beauty because we go into the mind, into how things should be.

A Course in Miracles said something quite beautiful about this and I’d like to quote it. It says, “Your fear of attack is nothing compared to your fear of love. You would be willing to look even upon your savage wish to kill God’s Son if you did not believe that it SAVES you from love. For this wish CAUSED the separation.”

We can say that what causes us to see only the surface is the separation. The other question is, why do we separate so much when any intelligent person knows that everything is consciousness? Nothing is separate from consciousness. But you know what happens? Even though we know that everything is consciousness, we still separate by this little act - thinking that I am inside and you are outside. And because I think there is such a thing as outside and inside, I live in the greatest lie ever given to humanity, the Fall of Man. This is the Fall, that you believe that there is an outside to you.

Right now, as you look, what do you see? Who is seeing? Isn’t it your consciousness? Does consciousness live on the outside or inside? Some people insist that consciousness is inside them. So tell me where! They may say that it’s inside the body. But if consciousness is inside the body, aren’t you experiencing the outside all the time? Who is doing that if not your consciousness?

When you begin to differentiate and create this immense separation, one thing that you miss is that we are searching for ourselves all the time. All you are ever searching for is yourself. Wherever you go, there you are - you have heard this before, right? It’s a good one because it means you take your thoughts, emotions, beliefs and everything with you. But we never realize that what you believe is not important - it’s the power to believe that’s important. This is in everyone - every one of us has the power to believe. But what you believe in is entirely different from everyone else, and what is different in only important to you.

Begin to understand that in the final analysis, you are consciousness like everyone else. Everybody has the power to believe; everybody has the power to experience; everybody is consciousness. What is it that separates me from you? It is my idea of who I think I am, my self image - that’s all! And if I see that, I still have the same self image and the same past - I can’t get rid of that! - but I begin to look with the heart instead of the mind, and that’s how the shift is made.

When we fear emptiness because we think we are small, isolated, limited beings, we create a need for love. When you have a need for love, you are saying, “I am not love.” Therefore, your need for love becomes your fear of love. This is good, sound psychology. If you can understand this, you can understand relationships, because if you understand this, you are not going to say, “I want a relationship so I can be loved.” It’s really, “I want a relationship so I can LOVE, because my goodness, my beauty, my happiness lies in my ability to love, not to be loved.”

Being loved is a bonus, it’s great! But in the final analysis, when your life is over and you’re dying, your greatest test was not how much money you’ve made or how much you’ve been loved by others, but how much you have loved, because love is pure consciousness, love is your totality. Love is that unifying principle, and therefore it is called oneness. So the extent that you begin to feel this love flowering in you is the extent of your growth, your expansion of being.

When we separate and think that there is an outside and an inside, you create four characteristics. These four characteristics, in turn, create all the suffering in the world. When I believe that you’re outside of me, then I am going to argue with you. You see, when you think in terms of outside and inside, you become very much caught in wanting to be right. So love takes on a different form - the need to control situations, the need to have power. This need to control, which can bring a lot of suffering, imprisonment, and so forth, is a substitute for love. Arguments are the same In a very minor way, which happens often in relationships. Sometimes even if you know the other person is right, you still want to be right, you don’t want to give in - it’s the need for power, control.

Believing that there is an outside and an inside creates four things. The first is comparison. You compare yourself with someone who is better than you or worse than you. This creates ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’, rights and wrongs, good and bad. This comparison comes as a natural result of not seeing with your heart but seeing with your head, with your mind. When you do this, you see the outside and begin to compare. Comparison leads automatically to judgment.

Judgment means that you’ve made up your mind that it’s good or bad, right or wrong. Now, remember one thing - if you make someone wrong, you cannot listen to them. They could be perfectly right in what they are saying; they could have wisdom. But in your mind if you have decided that they are wrong, you cannot listen. Your ability to listen is nil, not even one percent. So every time you make something wrong, you have actually made yourself wrong because you have to live with that idea of wrong.

We watch the news and it is always bad. You have cut off every possibility of compassion and understanding. Nobody is entirely wrong, no matter how cruel or “awful” they can be, because in their mind they are doing what they think is right. Begin to understand through oneness how even they, in their limited consciousness, are still wanting love in their own way through power and control.

The moment you begin to understand this, a whole new dynamic comes into being. Blame, conflict, and judgment no longer exist within you. The one thing that happens when you think there is an outside and inside is that every time you judge someone you are judging yourself. It’s inevitable.

Out of judgment comes resistance, because now you’ve made something wrong or right, established a ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’, made rules about how something should be. And because you’ve made rules about how things should be, now you resist anything that you think is wrong. That is how resistance comes into being. The moment this happens, you are already an emotional mess. What we call loneliness, depression, and deep anger is nothing more than resisting a feeling. There is nothing wrong with being angry. There is nothing wrong with being depressed. But when you resist it, it becomes prolonged.

There is nothing wrong in being who you are. All emotions are valid, but the moment you resist them, you suppress them. Suppression leads by imperceptible degrees to unconscious repression. Repression means that you live in your own little prison. People who have gone insane, people in mental homes are repressed. That is just a fact. All mental illness stems from repression. That’s why when people start talking about their feelings, they begin to release themselves. That is the first step.

That brings us to the fourth characteristic, identification. Identification means that you identify with what you have resisted. You think that this is you, and it becomes so solid that it becomes your identity. Now you begin to believe that there is something wrong with you. You think that this is just the way you are. Did you know that you are not this or that? You just ARE!!

When I realized this (because I was pretty goofed up when I was a teenager and young man), I saw that there is nothing to prove, I am OK as I am! Oh, that was such a relief, such freedom. I am not who you think I am. I am free, free from your opinions, even free from my own opinions about myself. Whatever I think and feel is simply what I think and feel and has nothing to do with anything. I just am! [laughs]

So these are the four: the moment you think there is an outside and inside, you have comparison, which leads to judgment, which becomes resistance, and identification then makes up your personality. Your personality is made up of what you’ve compared, judged, and resisted. This is all called ego.

Do you need to overcome them? Not at all. I am going to show you something today that is so beautiful that if you can go through it and really listen, it is all that is necessary.

I would like to read you something that I know most of you are aware of, but it’s so beautiful that it needs to be included. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison and became president of South Africa, he read something from A Course in Miracles. He used this as the basis of his talk and said the following words:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that the people will not feel insecure about you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. [Burt: There is no such thing as an inferior race or a superior race. We are all equal in our spirit.] And, as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

So now we come to the most important part. How do we rise above our fear of love? We are going to explain it, but simply put, it is this - allow yourself to experience your emptiness, because your emptiness is fullness.

One of the things that has happened to us is that we believe in fullness and emptiness. That is ridiculous. Look at this glass of water. [holds up glass of water] Is it half full, or half empty? It’s your perspective, isn’t it? Actually, it’s both - when you experience one, you experience the other. But you see, all our lives we have run away from emptiness, not realizing that emptiness is love when it is experienced.

I have had so many clients who are on the verge of waking up, and they stop instead of going deeper, saying, “I feel I am drowning.” “When I go into who I am, there is nothing there.” Well, of course there is nothing there! There is just spirit - anything else is just ideas. [Laughs]

There is nothing to cling to, nothing to hold on to, nothing to believe in, and that’s the truth! But the emptiness that is left is fullness. It has no words - you cannot explain it with the mind - but it is a fullness. When you are holding a baby in your arms, when you make love to somebody you truly love, when you walk on the beach and look at those beautiful mountains or sunset, or watch dawn breaking when it’s totally silent and you feel you belong to everything, you are experiencing yourself at that moment. At that moment you are experiencing the emptiness that is fullness.

Why is it emptiness? Because in that moment you disappeared. You are EMPTY!! You are not thinking about tomorrow, you are not thinking about yesterday, you don’t have any beliefs at the moment, you are just there. And in that there-ness, there is fullness. So to the extent that you empty yourself, you fill yourself. In other words, to the extent that you empty your mind, the mind becomes absorbed into the heart. Then, instead of using five percent of your consciousness, you are using 100 percent of your consciousness. That is the secret of true knowledge. But the question comes, knowledge of what? Nothingness is everything.

I am going to ask you a question right now, and answer it as totally as you can. What is the most important thing in your life? Be honest. [Students answer: “Breathing.” “Love.” “Space.” “The space to do what you love.”] OK, you can say ancestry, power, money, family, children, your body; but keep going and totally go into what is most important to you. Are you being honest? Keep going deeper into it.

The most important thing in your life is YOU, your life, your being. So now we go back into you. Let’s find out who you are. Are you your beliefs? Beliefs are something you have. You can have this or that belief, or for a moment have no beliefs at all. You are still you! Are you your name? You can be without a name. Are you your nationality? You can be without a country. So who are you this moment, this very moment as you are sitting there in total silence, now, who are you?

Don’t look at each other or at me just for a moment, feel it. Who are you this moment, right now? [Students answer: “Nobody.” “A feeling.”] That’s right, just a feeling. Exactly. And even when you say, “Nobody,” or “A feeling,” it is still not saying it all because the truth is, you don’t know. I DON’T KNOW! Oh, how glorious that is! You don’t know who you are.

So many people think they are this or that. As long as you think you are something, you are nothing. But when you think you’re nothing, you are everything. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Right now, stick with “I don’t know.”

What happens when you begin to realize that you really don’t know? That’s called emptiness, and it’s frightening. Many people have become desperate and even mentally ill because even with everything they have acquired, they knew they were nothing. When they looked at who they are, they saw it’s all a game, just things they have started or learned or repeated from books and what other people have said.

This moment, I am absolutely nothing and I don’t know who I am. This is something that the mind cannot face - it scares it silly. This is called facing your emptiness. This is very, very scary stuff. This is called the fear of love, because when you are totally one with yourself, you begin to feel your own emptiness. You will do anything to escape it - you will get drunk, take drugs, you will run around, maybe becoming a sexual athlete, because you cannot deal with how nothing you are. Everybody feels it but nobody wants to face it. Everybody wants to be somebody!

What makes a person pretend they’re important? Because they don’t feel important. They want you to believe they are important because they want to be somebody. They don’t want to be nothing.

But the moment you say, “I don’t know,” and totally accept and allow yourself to be that and rejoice in that, you become innocent, open, and receptive, because there is nothing that is holding you back. You are hooked up to the internet of the universe. At that moment, you have wisdom, you have love, and in fact, you have presence. You realize then that the emptiness that you feared so much has always been your fullness, but you have always run away from it. Now you are no longer loving, you are love itself. Whatever you do is done with love. And you don’t even have to do it, you are automatically loving - it oozes out of you as naturally as clouds ooze raindrops! [laughs] I had to come up with something! [group laughs]

So in your humble acceptance of this great revelation that you don’t know who you are, it makes everything that you thought you knew redundant, immaterial, and unimportant. In that innocence, you feel so free. You feel part of everything. You begin to experience something so unique and beautiful that words cannot explain it. You have allowed yourself to BE!

The Bible says, “I am THAT I am.” I am, I just am. You cannot define it. When masters are asked, “Who are you?” They say, “I am that,” because that has no definition.

The point is how the fear of love is so prevalent. When you walk out of here, don’t look with your mind anymore, look with your heart. What does it mean to look with the heart? Just to look a little longer, that’s all. Don’t make a fast judgment - be still and look longer.

When you look at a tree, don’t just say, “It’s a tree.” No, that’s just a name and label you’ve been given. Just look at it. Take a little time. When you look at a human being, look into their eyes for a few seconds longer than usual, because in that looking, you create a rapport.

Look straight into a person’s eyes, and for those few seconds allow yourself to feel. There is a connection. If you hate someone, the first thing you do is avoid their eyes. So do the opposite - disorient your brain totally! Look into the eyes of the people you dislike. [Student: “What if they don’t look at you?”] It doesn’t matter. [Student: “So what do you do then?”] What they do is not important.

Ignore everything that is happening outside of you. You are allowing yourself to look. What people do or don’t do is immaterial. You just look at them. The moment you allow yourself to look at them, there is something in you that begins to shift. You cannot put it into words, because you haven’t looked with your mind, but with your heart.

That’s all it takes - be still and know! Take a moment to be still, because your mind is constantly making up its mind, jumping to conclusions - it goes back to its conditioning right away. So take time to look.

What if you were to take time to look at your fear, to feel it in your body, experience it totally, to be still and really look at the fear. That’s plunging in to your emptiness. Why do you think you resist it, run away from it? Because fear reminds us of our emptiness. But fear is the need for love! So we escape that fear and we are running away from love!

But if you were to become one with your fear instead of running away, you would find that what you were running away from was nothing but a concoction of everything that your mind created about a particular incident or situation. When you take time to discover this, you begin to shift.

You don’t change. You are always going to be the way you are. Nothing is going to change in you except your viewpoint - instead of seeing with your mind, you see with your heart, but you are still the same. Now even when you are angry, you can be free in your anger. Even when you are upset, you don’t take it to bed with you - you see that it was just a movement of life, and it doesn’t matter. Every moment is new, every moment is precious, every moment is alive. The past is the past. That is the difference.

That shift has renewed you. You have always been new, but you didn’t know it because you were living from a conditioned state. You were living from the old. The old always repeats, just like a broken record. The new never repeats, because the new always renews itself, and because it renews itself, you are alive. That is what aliveness and spontaneity is. That is what joy, bliss, heart is - the newness of every moment.

Nothing is ever the same. You sip from the glass and every sip is new. Every breath is new - nothing is the same. When you begin to glimpse that, you see that the ego, which is the old idea of you, is no longer important. So does the ego go away? No, it doesn’t go away because it never existed - it was just a concoction, an idea. The acquired habits will still be with you, but now you are able to look at them and they don’t master you. The thoughts still keep coming into your head, but they are just thoughts, they don’t matter any more, and gradually you become freer and freer. You haven’t achieved anything - you woke up, just like when you wake up from a dream.

When you wake up, each moment takes care of the next moment by itself, because each moment, being new, contains past, present and future. It is the timeless essence.

Are there any questions?

Q: I have always wondered about the speech of Nelson Mandela’s, about how we are so afraid of the greatness that we are. I could never understand that, but tonight I heard it in a different way. It’s not that we’re afraid of love, we are more afraid of the rejection. The ego knows how not-good-enough it is, so it can almost foresee the rejection, so why even set yourself up for what you know is going to be a rejection?

A: Yes, fear of rejection is fear of love.

Q: It sees love out there, in separation.

A: That’s right, and it feels unworthy of love, which is, of course, fear of love. And of course, there is no such thing. You are love.

Q: Therefore it attracts it and makes it real, which continually happens.

A: That’s right, thanks a lot. Beautiful.

Q: To build on what you said, because the ego is manufactured, it will always feel like it’s dishonest.

A: It’s a dishonesty, that’s what the ego is.

Q: So when you’re sensitive to things, like I find that at work or around people, I can really pick up their vibes. It drives me nuts because I try to reason with it and I’ve learned to start saying that it’s none of my business. But in the last few years, it’s been happening more and more. Is that about me not releasing myself?

A: Yes, you’re not releasing yourself. You have the advantage of being sensitive.

Q: That’s an advantage? I keep hearing such negative connotations...

A: Yes, it is. A few years ago I started to perceive what people are thinking and feeling and emoting - it is very clear. There was a time in my life when I judged people because of the way they thought and felt. Now it’s the other way around - not at all, not at all. As a matter of fact, sometimes when I see a person who’s being negative, I feel such compassion that I send them love so they can feel good. When I go to a store and I see people not in a good mood, I look into their eyes and smile, and they respond tremendously.

In other words, they do not affect me adversely. There was a time when they did, and I said, “Oh, couldn’t they just be happy? Couldn’t they just snap out of it?” No, all you can do is love them.

Q: But is it that you’re able to sense that or is it that the ego is so self-centered...

A: When you are totally open, that openness becomes pure compassion. Pure compassion is a total clarity of what is going on without the need to change it. You have the sensitivity but you still try to change it.

Q: But in the last few years I feel like I am more open to the sensitivity. I can sense it. I have always been an open person; I am like an open book, like here I am! So it’s like, yeah, here I am - no bullshit. And then you get this resistance from other people, like, “Oh here’s party girl,” or “Here’s this,” or “Here’s that,” and then I started to shut down.

A: That’s called defensiveness.

Q: Yes, I have been defensive for a long time, and now I am wanting to break free again.

A: Break free, then. Break free by forgetting the ‘you’ that you’re protecting, because there’s nothing to protect. Every time you protect yourself, you are taking on the things that you are rejecting from the outside. Every time you reject someone from the outside, you take it on yourself, because we are all one. But if you love them however they are, then you are growing in your love. But we are total reflections, a mirror for everything we feel. So from now on, allow people to be the way they are. Allow them their negativity, allow them their pain. You see very clearly. But if there is the slightest need to change them in your mind, watch it! Because the need to change them is also a fear of yourself changing. It all comes back to you. Always look at how you are looking at the world outside.

Krishnamurti made a wonderful quote one time. Someone asked him about how we learn about relationships. He said, “It’s very simple. Look at how you look at other people, and that’s how your relationships are.”

What you are trying to do to people, how you compare or judge or whatever, is how you are inside. You need to allow them their freedom to be the way they are, because how a person is, is their choice, really. If a person is depressed, it is because they choose to be depressed. Oh, they don’t consciously say, “I think I’ll get depressed,” but they created it with their thinking. “There is something wrong with me. I don’t like myself. I want to be better. I should receive more love. I am lonely,” and so forth.

So a person chooses to be the way they are and you must allow them to be that way. If I am talking to anybody, no matter how I find them, I simply listen to them. If they ask me a question, then I will tell them. But if they don’t, I have no right to want to change them, and this applies to my own thinking. If I try to change them in my mind, I am going to be resentful of them.

Q: I had a girlfriend who was always depressed, and we were friends for a long time, and I would be depressed at times too. But as soon as I started to open up and learn more, I noticed her depression more, and I noticed that I was always being pulled back.

A: That’s also natural.

Q: I finally needed to say good-bye. I feel like a chameleon in a way when I am around people who get a certain way, and I pick it up. It’s really hard for me.

A: You are still trying to be in control. You are seeking love through control. That is also a fear of love. Don’t mind me saying this, OK?

Q: Oh, I don’t.

A: Just being honest. The thing that I repeat all the time, to myself as well, is be honest with how you feel. If you are feeling bad, you are feeling bad. If you are feeling bad about somebody, you are feeling bad about somebody, but YOU are feeling bad. Take responsibility for the way you are, and love yourself for it anyway.

Q: Can I say something? These people, whichever way they act toward you is their stuff. It has nothing to do with you whatsoever. You are not responsible for them getting angry or being depressed. I used to take on a lot of other people’s garbage and I felt responsible, but no, no, no! We are not five year olds. I don’t feel like people shouldn’t be like this - it’s their responsibility and it’s where they are. But it’s not for me to judge it or to fix it, life is going to do it.

A: Is this something that you have realized in the last year or two?

Q: Maybe a year, yes. Because all my life I thought I was not good enough in terms of relationship, kids, money, looks, clothing, anything you could say. And to me it was real, until somebody told me that whatever I had been told I had taken too seriously.

Q: I don’t feel like that’s it for me - I just think I saw a lot of anger in my life and never felt accepted by certain people in my family. I just kept taking all that crap and felt I had to take it because they were my family and I love them. But I don’t feel loved back. Maybe it is that I don’t feel good enough.

A: Could we go back to what we were talking about, fear of love? What you were saying is nothing more than fear of love. And when you get in touch with that, you’ll find that you start loving you. Become aware that everything is triggered by fear of love, and when you start loving yourself totally, it doesn’t matter what other people are saying. What you said indicated a need to control other people. “Why do they have to be like this? Why can’t they be nicer?” This is a need to control. The need to control is a need for power. The need for power is a need for love, a substitute for love. The moment you become aware of all this, you begin to feel that love flowers more and more in you, because now you begin to look with your heart instead of your mind.

So to questions like this that we ask, there are no answers. There are no ‘shoulds’, there is only learning to love who you are in the moment. And when you learn to love who you are by looking with your heart, everything will change.

Q: If you don’t like the way somebody is, you can’t change them just because you’re not comfortable. You know, “Don’t be this way so I’ll feel better.” [Laughs]

A: That’s right.

Q: And another thing you said in your newsletter is that we are usually waiting for somebody to love us before we allow ourselves to love them because it’s scary.

A: Because it’s safe that way - that’s another fear of love. We want to be loved, but we are not willing to love first, and the point is to reverse it. Be willing to love first. When you’re willing to love first, everything starts to flower. And the most beautiful thing, whether it’s a relationship or whatever, although everything is a relationship really, is that you will not be hurt when you are willing to love first, because even if they are not willing to love you, although that’s not as nice as being loved, the hurt doesn’t go deep. When you love and you express that love, you go beyond any form of limitation from the outside.

Q: Instead of going into it with an ego self, you’re going into it unconditionally.

A: Yes, it’s unconditional.

Q: If the most important thing to me is me, like you said before, it’s only natural for me to want you to be the way I want you to be! [laughing]

A: That’s right!

Q: The most beautiful thing you said is, “I don’t know,” because when I say, “I don’t know,” all that garbage is gone. It’s not even relevant.

A: That’s right. It’s not even relevant, and that is why it is so important to empty yourself and say, “I don’t know who I am in this moment.” Then all the ideas you have from your past begin to drop, to die. The moment that begins to die, you flower as love. Then there is no longer you or me, just us. That’s beautiful, thank you.

And that’s true, that’s the way it goes. But as long as you are concerned with you as you think you are, then we have a problem. Then you are stuck with the way you want things to be.

Q: But if you accept yourself the way you are, with your flaws and faults, as we all have, then you have acceptance - I like that word, acceptance - I accept me the way I am.

A: And what happens when you accept yourself the way you are?

Q: I accept everything around me.

A: That’s right. And your ‘faults,’ whatever they are, do not matter any more.

Q: Yes, I have faults but they don’t matter.

A: But if they don’t matter, then you don’t really have faults. They are just your personality. You see, we all want to change to be better. It’s impossible to change until first you accept that which you don’t like about yourself. But the moment you accept it, you don’t even need to change it because that very acceptance will bring the change itself.

Q: When you say that, to accept things you don’t like about yourself, there is some real deep self honesty that you have to go through first.

A: And what does it mean to be honest?

Q: To listen to what’s really going on.

A: That’s right. And when you listen to what’s really going on, what happens?

Q: It becomes obvious that it’s really all about your need for love.

A: Exactly. And when you find that it’s all really about your need for love, what happens?

Q: That’s opening up to the love that you are right then and there.

A: Right, so it’s no big deal then. So the acceptance goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, and to the extent that it goes deep, you are flowering into that love. You don’t need to say, “Oh, I shouldn’t be like this. What’s wrong with me? I should change.” None of that! You just need to look and be aware. And as you go deeper and deeper and deeper, that very looking becomes an acceptance, and the acceptance brings the change itself. You don’t change yourself - change happens automatically through that very awareness.

I saw the change in Sivia tremendously. It’s a change that is so beautiful - you have to live with her to know this. And it came simply through awareness. In the beginning, she tried hard to live up to certain ideals of what she thought a spiritual person should be like, but all those models were crushed.

Get rid of all models, all ideas of how you should be. Let it all go. Just learn to be empty in the moment. She has been learning that beautifully. You see the flowering that happens. You don’t bring any change, it just comes.

Q: So the things we don’t like about ourselves is the conditioned self, right?

A: Right. And the things you don’t like about yourself will continue and get worse, because as you don’t like the stuff in you, the stuff in you that you don’t like doesn’t like you back. Remember one thing about darkness. What does darkness do? It tries its darnedness to get rid of darkness! You’ll find that no matter how horrendous a murderer or serial killer or rapist, they always have a reason for what they do. And if you go back in their thinking, you will find that they are doing it for a good purpose. “I am getting rid of all prostitutes, so I kill them.” Everybody is doing what they do because there is this darkness inside them and the darkness tries to get rid of darkness. So therefore, when you feel dark, you see darkness all around you. And then you try to get rid of that darkness that you see outside.

Q: About what you said before that you have things you don’t like about yourself, isn’t it true that when you have relationships, you subconsciously seek ones that will trigger the stuff you don’t like? And doesn’t this kick your butt to look at it and resolve it?

A: Yes, and that is the point where you decide you want the truth more than anything, when a lot of unresolved stuff starts to reach the surface. That’s why we need that courage. But once you are totally resolved to look at it and not blame yourself no matter what is surfacing, that becomes the cleansing, the purifying. This will not happen overnight, but healing does not happen overnight. It has to be integrated into everyday life.

Q: Can we talk about differentiation within relationships, how you can be together and feel like one, but you are also your own person? I guess that comes from loving yourself.

A: That’s right. By accepting yourself totally, just the way you are, you accept the other person just as they are. The allowing of this differentiation becomes your oneness.

Q: Codependency is when you don’t love yourself enough.

A: So you become needy.

Q: And you look for love on the outside.

A: Yes. When you look for love on the outside, it means that you are not totally loving you. But when you totally love yourself, and you begin to love the other person as yourself, then the other person might not be on your level, but they will start to love you because they can feel your beauty. A couple can teach each other so much. It is rare when a couple is on the same consciousness level. We must admit that. But the one who is higher is the more loving, and by being in proximity to that, the other learns to do that too. That’s why commitment is important in a relationship. If there’s no commitment in a relationship, the moment something happens, you quit and run away. But if you quit and run away, you cannot grow.

Q: And you have to do it again.

A: And you have to do it again.