When you are with your beloved, you really want to be with them. “Am I with you? Are you with me?” It’s better to ask than to wonder. Yet when you think about them, you move away from them. How then can you be with them? Only when you are present and feel their presence are you with them.
When you think of some future happiness together, you are moving away from them. You want to be with them—not in your thinking, but in your feeling. When you are close to your feeling, you are closer to your being. Then you are present with your beloved. In that moment you are not separate from them, and neither are they separate from you. The moment you think about your beloved and your future relationship, you simultaneously distance yourself from the loving being that you are and from the two of you being together. This means when you are separated from yourself, you are separated from your beloved.
You cannot expect anything from them that you cannot do for yourself. Coming back to yourself is the only way to reconnect with your beloved. The true source of the love between you is the source of love within you. There is no way you can be with them through your thinking connection alone.
We are beings of Oneness. In love there is no separation. The mind cannot do anything to replace the beings we are. When you expect the connection to come from your beloved, you disconnect from the source within you yourself. There is no way to come to love. When they are present in your heart in this moment, you are there with them. There is no separation between you. The oneness of being is the source of love within you—just as it is in them.
But when you are seeking love from them, you are moving away from the loving being that you already are.
How strange it is that everyone is looking for love from others without knowing who they themselves are. They can only be the giver, which cannot be demanded from the other. The door to love is open upon your being and giving, rather than demanding. Demanding simply subjects your search for love to the law of reverse effect. When you demand love and fail to get it, you become the victim of reverse effect. Instead, when you give love, you spontaneously receive the love that you give.
How blind human beings are, looking for love everywhere while not knowing that who they are is love.
How hard should you work? How far should you go until you find yourself? That is a mystery. Ignorance is blind; it cannot see. That is why when you ignore what is real, you are ignorant. When you are being ignorant, you are constantly in reaction to who or what is present. You look for to feel fulfilled in the future. For you, love is a goal.
But real love is a self-discovery.
The mysterious presence of love is not a mystery. It is obvious. But one who looks for it in the future cannot see its presence. So, when you arrive in the future, the mysterious presence disappears from your eyes, like a mirage. Such an obvious presence becomes a mystery for those who are looking ‘out there.’ For in reality, it is all in here.
Every time you think about yourself, you move away from the being presence that you are.
What appears to be a mystery to the mind is not so mystical to a mystic. The mystery cannot be unveiled in the future. It can only be unveiled in the present. Presence is so important that you cannot catch it in the future because it includes the past also. Presence is not divided.
How do you know what awaits in the future? The only place in the future where you can go are dreams and projections that come from the mind. You can make up whatever you want, but in doing so, you’ve missed being here at the same time. How do you get there and be there? There isn’t a way. But there is only no way. The way takes you away; no way brings you back. You can give wings to your imagination, but when you come down to the present moment, you need legs in order to walk. If you haven’t learned to walk, the quantum shift that gives you wings is impossible.
Being present does not take hard work. It is not the journey in time; it is not the yogic techniques. It is the knowledge of the truth of who you are that brings you back to here and now. There is nothing you can do to get there.
Yes, doing will get you what you want when you get there—but you won’t be there when you arrive. You can materialize your dreams by going out to get your goal. But the dreamer will be lost in the materialized dream if absent from the present.
Just by being with you, recalling nothing from the past about you, expecting nothing of the future for you, I get to know everything I want to know about you. Simply by being with you. There are no questions about the future for which I need answers.
What comes through the present is the way that it is. There is nothing that can be said about the future that isn’t coming from the mind. It absorbs itself in thoughts about you and about the future.
Love that I seek in the future is a phantom dream.
People are more in love with their dream of love than with love itself. They cannot see, feel, touch, or experience in the future. The love you can feel, touch, and experience lives in the present—which is why it instantly disappears the moment you think about it.
When you are in the present, you are in the presence of love.
Love is not separate from presence. In the present moment the seer and the seeing, observer and observed come into harmonious, co-created loving presence. When you are in love, you are in a co-creative interaction. This co-creating love first happens within before it appears outside. I have no plans. I have no future. I have nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. And yet, I am not lost. If I am here, I am everywhere. When I arrive, if I am not here, no matter where I go, I never arrive.
When you get there you may find what you are looking for—or you may not—but you will find yourself lost anyway. Who you are is present. There’s nowhere to be found, and everywhere you go you find yourself, or you continue to be the one who is looking for you, and are left behind.
To find yourself, go nowhere. You already are everywhere.
The source of love is within; nowhere else can it be found. If you look for it to come from outside or the other, you will be the victim of the law of reverse effect. But you will not know it in the beginning or at the end. Do you know why? Because when you expect it to come from the other, and when it fails to come, you blame the other. That is how you never discover that the source of love is within. Love is no different than the presence—the being that you are.
The love that appears to come from the other or external resources is temporarily experienced but a permanent problem. It is permanent because you will never find lasting love from external resources. The true nature of who you are is loving presence.
Love is the unifying presence just as the presence is. Therefore, Christ said, “God is love.” This is also why the yogis have said that you are Sat Chit Anand. You are the experience of bliss, Oneness, and love that God is.
