Open the Gates
Look inside yourself now and see how many people you are carrying around inside of you.
Let me demonstrate this: If nothing is being threatened among your relationships - not your interests, material possessions or the people you’re attached to - then you can say, ‘I am free. I am not carrying anyone around in me.’ That’s fair enough, but tomorrow you will discover that you are, because that’s the way of the world. Tomorrow, or the next day, you’ll suddenly find a pain down there inside you and you’ll discover that you are carrying someone around. It will only be a copy of the person you’re attached to, a mirror-image, but it will be there. And don’t we all know how it hurts? What we have to do is get rid of the copy in us of the thing that creates the pain.
If you had an argument with someone today or yesterday, and you are still vibrating inside with it, you are carrying it in you. The mind keeps going back to it. The mind’s job is to continually re-stimulate that vibration. It will always turn to the thing that either delights you most (which is tomorrow’s pain) or worries you most (which is today’s pain). So, if you allow the mind to work as it wants to, it will double-delude you. It will give you today’s pain and create tomorrow’s.
How are we going to get rid of the pain? Such as the pain of loss? The first stage, if you hear me, is to stop the reference to memory. Stopping thinking won’t stop the pain, but it will stop you sourcing the pain to something in your memory. When you source the pain to something in your memory, you are providing it with a mirror. And you will continue to suffer. So take away the mirror inside yourself, and do not give the pain your thoughts. Then the pain will work its way out of you more quickly.
The second stage is to be able to demonstrate that you love yourself. To love yourself is to love nothing in particular, to hold on to nothing. I am not talking about self-love. I am not talking about Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, with his attachment to himself. I am talking about yourself as the unnameable, which can never be known but only realised as love. To love yourself is to love nothing. When you love in the world, you love something, selfishly, exclusively. When I talk about loving yourself I am talking to the source of love inside you; to the part of you that loves and must love because you are love.
So, let’s say you have an argument with someone you are attached to. This is not like the pain of loss. An argument just disturbs us. It makes the person live inside of us. Everyone is a prison for someone else, locked up inside of them. And we think about what this one said, what that one said. It churns around inside of us. And meanwhile the people in that mirror inside are walking around in the world outside. They’ve gone, but we still have them locked up inside. If you love yourself, you say 'I have the vibration of the argument inside me. And now I am going to open the prison doors … Be gone. I will not hold you anymore. I open the gates. Be gone in love.’
Don’t do it with an attitude, such as, 'Go on, go! I don’t want to have you inside me.’ Love says: 'Be gone in love. What do I care what was said? What you did doesn’t matter now, in this moment. What you said, what you did, what you are doing now only matters if I think.’
If you can say, 'No more thoughts’ and 'Be gone!’ the energy of love is so powerful that if you look inside yourself again there is no more animosity, no prison. Just an emptiness. Nothing inside you: You are nothing. When you are nothing you are loving. Loving what? Loving nothing. You are just open, carrying nothing with you, and therefore not thinking.
One who truly loves does not think. To truly love is to stay in this wonderful moment, to look around at the trees and the flowers and this and that and have not one thought. It is a wonderful but cruel world. It is what it is and when I am not thinking I see it for what it is. When you think you see it for what it is not. To think you have to go into your yesterdays, or the last few minutes, though in those minutes the world has moved on. If you think about your yesterdays, you will start to love what you think about. You will love your yesterdays and not be able to truly love now.
If I can look inside of me and nothing is there, I have the wonderful thing we call 'freedom’ - the freedom of having nothing and no-one inside of me.
Perfection