learning to love.....

a recent post on www.intentblog.com threw open a q by Mallika Chopra on whether it is really possible to love a person with whom we differ on very fundamental perspectives of life and living....

i will share something which i observe to be very common place occurance...initially i used to think i was unique in feeling this way....

this concerns our relationships with our parents.....

i do not share many of life's perspectives with my mom....i lost my dad earlier and we are the two of us who share our lives....geographically and otherwise...

in my earlier years, i was constantly judgemental....saw her as a weak person , a loser in many of life's endeavours....our conversations were invariably of an argumentative nature.

i tried loving her from my mindspace...pathetic....i was expected to be nice to her..be a source of support.....which i did...but where was all the spontaineity and feeling.....there was a certain dryness, a dead habit to our interface....

an event i distinctly remember was the death of my dad when i was 14. I have found the mind to be a weird entity, capable of randomly generating thoughts...on the day of father's death, Prince Charles was getting married to Lady Diana and the event was being televised...my mind was actually flitting across the two events...making me feel very guilty...

later , when i read The Story of My experiments with Truth , I could easily relate to Mahatma Gandhi's integral expresses....of how he was overcome by lust when a parent was dying....and lust seemed to control him....lust is a pattern in the mind....

i could not deny my realities....i could not wish them away....i wished to be something which was very far from what i actually was...the way i saw myself or wished to see myself was a "projected ideal" inculcated in me by various aspects of conditioning and i was trying to live upto it....i was trying to love when i intrinsically lacked a capacity....

acceptance was the key to transformative processes within.....

i realized i was "incapable" of love and joy.....from domains from which i was operating....love and joy are not about directed and manipulated thoughts.....thoughts can hardly be controlled; most of the time they control us....as i was to learn subsequently....i cannot plan to love, sometimes thoughts force me into situations where i go after an innate need...like thoughts can create a habitual need for food out of force of sheer habit..contrast this psychological need with real hunger....

a lot of my spiritual explores and seekings addressed this innate dryness...the desert within...until the oasis within manifested in a gentle spring....just a "happening", not a matter of effort....i discovered a fountainhead within which was just there for the asking.....beyond logic, beyond concepts, beyond planning.....non-judgemental, unconditional.....just a part of my intrinsic being.....not person or activity specific.....like a river in flow....flooding all in its' wake....

the mind is not the faculty which is capable of love and joy.....it is a beautiful faculty to design a chair or a software programme.....but one has to explore beyond for accessing domains of consciousness which are intrinsically trusting, intrinsically loving and intrinsically joyous and blissful.....totally accepting and non-transactional.....

a state of being......domains in existential consciouness...

i am still exploring and discovering the potential of these realms....where one just melts away...there is no holding back....as natural as a flower in bloom or a bird in flight....

and yes..i share much better spaces with my mom.....in acceptance, not in perennial judgement....

in deep gratitude to my masters who have facilitated and enabled this evolution.....when i say thank you today, i feel i mean it much more...there is a certain depth to the words as different from the lip-service i was accustomed to in the past....