What you do as a human being that has a heart, intellect and some senses, is that you use what you’ve got.
You use what you’ve got to get beyond that which you use. Method’s work when the method itself and the means of using that method disintegrates.
Awakening Through Relationships
One of the methods that is available and is perhaps the method that is most easy to work with and recognize and that is prescribed for the Kali Yuga, which we may or may not be in now, is the method of Bhakti yoga, or the method of the heart.
It’s saying, “Look, you’ve got a heart.” You have feelings and love, you’ve probably loved somebody in your family, or your cat, or somebody else, you know what it feels like. It is a tremendously powerful, mobilizing and directing force. If you would direct that force toward your own freedom, towards that which represents everything, you would go from lover and the Beloved to a point where lover and the Beloved become one. And at that point you are no longer using a method.
In most relationships, when people come together and fall in love, they go towards each other until they come to a certain point where they see the writing on the wall and are not willing to go any further. Because if you surrender any farther into that love, then who you thought you were, the person making that surrender, has to be surrendered as well. And there is the thought, “Do I really want to die into this one so fast?” And it’s usually very subliminal.
For a person with a low tolerance for change, at this point they pull back and turn to go the other way. This liberates the other person to start and go forward again. It goes on like this and they both keep the same distance. Again, they come together and again they get to the point where one says, “Screw this,” and turns away, which liberates the other. They keep coming back together because they love each other and want to be together but they just can’t seem to do it because they can’t figure out what would happen when they surrender.
This all has to do with power, third chakra power. And love, as a vehicle, has to do with the fourth chakra. There are relationships that exist at every chakra. Relationships that exist at the first chakra are like if you and I meet in the jungle and there’s a piece of meat and we compete for who’s going to get it. It’s survival, it’s who’s going to eat who at the Donner party, it’s the bottom line.
Relationships at the second chakra are very subtle and have to do with maximizing hedonistic arousal, it’s sensory overload, it’s a form of ecstasy. The problem with second chakra relationships is that every time the method brings them together in union, the union is very short-lived. This is because the whole system of the relationship is rooted in separateness.
-Ram Dass
Read Part 2 of this article here.
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