Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Gotta Lotta Love

I know I already wrote about Eckhart Tolle, but the man is like a little German spiritual yoda—and he’s using The Force for good. So I just can’t help but champion his efforts to educate us on "being."

Today a coworker sent me a link to an online interview with Tolle and it completely verified what I’ve always been told about love. You know when you were in college and you’d be complaining about how one of your ears was half an inch higher than the other and your boobs were too small and you couldn’t drive a stick shift and no boy was ever going to love you, and your mom would look up from loading the dishwasher and say, “You can’t be in love with someone else until you learn to love yourself.” And you’d roll your eyes and bury your nose back in your Poli Sci 102 book.

But now, I realize that mom and her dirty Pyrex pan were right!

You do have to truly accept and adore yourself before someone else can (or will). Eckhart talks about how we try to heal our own perceived shortcomings or wounds by covering them with other people. But that will never work. You have to look within for love—not scavenge for it and expect someone else to make YOU feel love for YOURSELF. He says:

“The Spanish language is the most honest in this respect. It uses the same verb, te quiero, for "I love you" and "I want you." To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change. The ego singles someone out and makes them special. It uses that person to cover up the constant underlying feeling of discontent, of "not enough," of anger and hate, which are closely related. These are facets of an underlying deep-seated feeling in human beings that is inseparable from the egoic state.”

“When the ego singles something out and says "I love" this or that, it's an unconscious attempt to cover up or remove the deep-seated feelings that always accompany the ego: the discontent, the unhappiness, the sense of insufficiency that is so familiar. For a little while, the illusion actually works. Then inevitably, at some point, the person you singled out, or made special in your eyes, fails to function as a cover up for your pain, hate, discontent or unhappiness which all have their origin in that sense of insufficiency and incompleteness. Then, out comes the feeling that was covered up, and it gets projected onto the person that had been singled out and made special—who you thought would ultimately "save you." Suddenly love turns to hate. The ego doesn't realize that the hatred is a projection of the universal pain that you feel inside. The ego believes that this person is causing the pain. It doesn't realize that the pain is the universal feeling of not being connected with the deeper level of your being—not being at one with yourself.”

Brilliant, right? You can read the full article at http://eckharttolle.com/interviews_75.

1 comment:

Anita said...

Your post made me think of one of my favorite quotes out there:

"The opposite of love isn't hate. The opposite of love is indifference."

I don't know where this originated from but everytime I hear/see it, I think how true it is. I hope this statement makes sense to others like it does to me...