The heart remains soft and sensitive,
But when you're hell-bent on getting this thing or that or the other,
You become ruthless,
You become hard,
You become insensitive.
But all you need is a few minutes' reflection to see this.
How can you love people when you need people?
You can only use them.
When you need them emotionally.
If I need you to make me happy,
I cannot love you.
I got to use you.
I got to manipulate you.
I got to find ways and means of winning you.
I cannot leave you free.
I can only love people when I have emptied my life of people.
When I die to the need for people,
Then I'm right in the desert.
And in the beginning,
It feels awful.
It feels lonely.
But if you can take it for a while,
You will suddenly discover that it isn't lonely at all.
It is solitude.
It is aloneness.
And the desert begins to flower.
And at last,
You know what love is,
What God is,
What reality is.
But giving up the drug in the beginning can be tough unless you have a very keen understanding or and you have suffered enough.
It's a great thing to have suffered.
When you're sick of it,
Make use of suffering to end suffering.
The people suffer and they go on suffering.
And that's why I said to you that the conflict within me sometimes between the role of spiritual director and therapist.
As therapists,
Well,
Let's ease the suffering.
All right.
As the spiritual director in me says,
Let us suffer.
She'll get sick of this way of relating to people.
And she'll finally decide to break out of this prison of emotional dependence on anyone.
Shall I offer a palliative or remove the cancer?
Not easy to decide.
I'll tell you that.
And when the cancer becomes painful enough,
You're ready if you have understanding and you're ready to watch it.
Lots of work to be done in the spiritual life.
So much work.
Spirituality is awareness,
Awareness,
Awareness,
Awareness,
Awareness.
The day you begin to understand how you are really picking up things that have no connection with you at all,
Like in the old days,
And I guess my story is almost everyone's story.
Somebody was angry with me.
Gee,
There's something wrong with me.
Because that's the way we've been drugged.
That's the way we've been programmed by our parents.
When mother got angry with you,
She didn't say there's something wrong with me.
She said there's something wrong with you or I wouldn't be angry until I made the great discovery that if you are angry,
Darling,
There's something wrong with you.
So you'd better cope with your anger.
Stay with it and cope with it.
Not mine.
Now whether there's something wrong with me or not,
I'll examine independently of your anger.
I'm not going to be influenced by your anger.
And the funny thing is when I can do this without feeling any negativity towards you,
I can be quite objective towards myself too.
Because only a very aware person can do this.
Not pick up the guilt,
Not pick up the anger.
After having a tantrum,
Too bad.
I don't feel the slightest desire to rescue you anymore.
And I refuse to feel guilty.
I must talk about guilt.
It's like I'm not going to hate myself for anything I have done because it gets you nowhere.
That's what guilt is.
I'm not going to give myself a bad feeling and whip myself for anything I have done right or wrong.
I'm ready to analyze it,
To watch it and say,
Well,
If I did wrong,
It was an unawareness.
I was hypnotized.
Nobody does wrong in awareness.
That's why theologians tell us that Jesus could do no wrong.
Now that makes very good sense to me because the enlightened person can do no wrong.
Which you can do wrong,
You're not free.
