The Real

First I want to mention that I did not come up with the real or not real explanation I mentioned in my post yesterday. It is something that I read in the book “I am that”. It is a collection of conversations people had with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and enlightened man in India. His answer to the question what is real was, “Everything that has a beginning and has an end is not real.”

Yesterday I talked about things that cannot bring us lasting happiness. I am not saying that it is not great to have any of the things I mentioned but we all had experiences to have some of them and we realized that they bring us happiness only for a short period of time. After that we move on to something else we desire only to come to the same conclusion.

There is something stale and empty about getting and achieving things in the world. Why is that? Because like I said something that is not real cannot bring us lasting happiness. We pretend that the world is real but subconsciously we know it is an illusion. This is why money and success will never bring us happiness. All we can buy is not real.

It will actually make us more miserable. As long as we believe that when we have a lot of money we will have the life we always dreamed about we have something to look forward to. But what happens when we get what we want and we are still not happy? What then?

The big question now is of course what brings us lasting happiness, what has no beginning and no end? What is real?

To find that out we have to ask a simple question. Why? Why do people want to earn lots of money? Why do they want a physically beautiful partner? Why do they own the latest gadgets? Why do they need powerful friends? Why traveling the world? Why being in great shape? Why the beautiful car? Why being successful? Why is it important to be handsome or beautiful? Why do we want to be looked up to? Why do we want to be rich? Why do we want the attention? Why date all those people? Why do we want to be intelligent? Why being powerful? What has no beginning and no end?

Love.

Everything we do we do to be loved. Every big business deal that was ever made, every skyscraper that was ever built, every gym membership that was ever issued and every beautiful car that was ever sold is connected to love. We do anything to be loved. It was never about the fame, the money, the power or the knowledge. All we do we do to find love.

Love also is “it”, the source of all things. Love is what we really are when we take the illusions away. Love is the energy behind the whole universe.

I am not talking about romantic love. Romantic love is not unconditional. It is a special love because it is directed to one person. But when we fall in love we can feel the power of “it”. We feel the strength and we completely lose ourselves in it.

The ego hates to fall in love. Love destroys all the ego stands for. Fear, control and separation do not exist when there is love.

The love I am talking about is our true nature. It is an unconditional love to all things. Anybody who ever had deeper insights radiated this love.

Creating an illusionary self that limits who we are and is not aware of our true nature destroys the true self. It limits us to flesh and bones. The ego stands for the opposite love stands for. Ego and love cannot coexist. We loose love and suffer greatly because we need love. Since we do not know that we are love we try to find it on the outside.

But how can we find it, how can we keep it as long as the ego is in place? Like I said love is the ego’s worst enemy. The ego pretends that it is looking for love but it doesn’t because the moment we find it will do all that is in its might to destroy what we have found and keep its control and power.

The problem with trying to find love on the outside is that we think we have to work for it and that we depend on somebody else to get it. We will try hard to make the money to impress people or any of the other things on the list to find somebody to love us. When we are with somebody we are afraid to lose that person because we need him or her to have love in our lives. This is the opposite of freedom it is codependence.

We are love; we have no beginning and no end. The more we let go of our egos the more we will realize that and the less we will have to drive ourselves crazy and wear ourselves out. We will be love; will love all things and ourselves. The world will still be there. Then we can have fun and we can play. We can be successful, date lots of people and make all the money in the world. But we are free. We do not have to find love and there is no fear to lose it. We have all we need.

"The Real" Williamsburg/Brooklyn 02-20-08 at 07:56PM.

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