Some time ago I blogged that Selfless Love Is Self-Love. Yesterday I tweeted that "You cannot love yourself unless you realize that there is no self." Both postings attempt to describe the same truths, but the tweet seems to call for some more explanation.
On the level of human relationships, it is a truism that you cannot fully love another if you are unable to love yourself. People who have not come to terms with their demons and accepted themselves as perfect children of God will prefer to crtiticize and stand off from others, rather than embracing their humanity along with their innate divinity. In the realm of spirituality you must identify and worship the God within yourself in order to be able to see and revere the same animating spirit in other beings. In both realms, as long as you hold back from loving yourself you may experience a sensation that you think is love for others, but is really simply attachment born of insecurity, a felt need to supply from external sources something that is seen to be lacking in yourself. Spiritual love, on the other hand, grows out of the mutual awareness of our essential perfection. The Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying: "The best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other."
At this point yesterday's tweet intersects the other tweet I posted yesterday: "The purpose of yoga is awareness; the purpose of awareness is compassion; and the purpose of compassion is Oneness." Yoga - a term which refers to all forms of spiritual practice - is directed at achieving the recognition of the divine Spirit within yourself. Because it is intensely introspective it may lead the practitioner to isolate himself, sometimes physically (the hermit) and sometimes emotionally, from others. Great teachers caution the student, however, not to allow this self-absorption to be taken over by the ego (when it expresses as narcissism), nor to allow it to become an end in itself. If those things happen, then awareness will not come. Recognition of the God in ourselves is the first step in spiritual rebirth, not the last. The glowing lotus which blossoms at the center of your being at the moment awareness is achieved is not the sole point of light in the Universe. To the contrary, its illumination is cast in all directions and soon unites with the light of infinitely many other souls.
Introspection thus leads to awareness, not just of your own divinity, but also of the divinity of all other beings. Hence awareness leads to compassionate connection, in which the Spirit in you reaches out in yearning to touch and be absorbed in the universal Spirit which is no more nor less than the vibrational energy of the entire Universe, that of which individual souls are manifest. It reaches out, not only to others who have attained the same awareness, but even more so to those who have not. It seeks to cast its cleansing light into the dark places within you and within others where Love has not yet penetrated; to release the phantom demons chained there, and to free every individual manifestation of Spirit from the illusion of separation.Humility is another outgrowth of complete awareness, because the individual recognizes himself as no different from any other.
Inevitably, the continued practice of awareness and compassion lead to the internalized realization that all beings are one; that the entire Universe is a single vibrational energy in which our individual existence is simply a localized illusion. As long as we persist in human form this realization requires constant reinforcement, because our experience seems to deny it and our egos resist it. Reinforcement takes place as we return to the practice of yoga, the source of awareness, and to compassion, the awareness of our coexistence in the Universal Mind of God. Thus, the loss of self is part and parcel of the experience of pure universal Love.
