Meditating on Love
Edited extract from the transcript of a meditation at Barry’s home in Highgate, London, 26 August 1981.
All that is most important to us in life is in the meditation I teach. When someone close to us dies, it is better to have been down into the unconscious - where death is - in meditation than to be forced down by the slings and arrows of life. We have to live an integrated way, so that we can participate in all the living that is required of us and at the same time participate in the life within the living, which is love. We are truly meditating on love. We are putting first thing first.
There’s just you and just me. I truly want the greatest good for you. As truly you want it for me. There is nothing else between us; no livingness - only the greatest good. And that is to reach a point of love within me, within you, each to the other. In the absence of anything coming between us is our real interaction, which is not a relationship. If there were relationship between us, you’d have something to think about. There is nothing to think about in relation to me. We are two people in life at this moment, truly vibrating with life and not carrying around the frantic vibration of living that would cause us to think or be disturbed. For this little while, you and I are real - you to me and I to you. To me that is wonderful. I am fulfilled in reaching this point. It is very simple but rarely reached.
We reach this point if we truly love, but in this world there is relationship - physical and emotional attachment. No matter how much we love someone, relationship comes into it and that will cause us pain. But as you and I have no relationship, you and I have no pain. We cannot cause each other pain because we can be honest. When you’ve got a relationship, no matter how loving you are, you cannot be honest. And if you can’t be honest, you’ve got pain.
So we must face this fact of love and relationship. We must endeavour as much as possible to keep the relationship out of our love. It is impossible to get it all out, of course it is, and we don’t aim for the dream of perfection. But we must be able to draw the distinction between love and relationship. So that we can say: ‘Yes, I love you and all my concern is for you. But in my relationship I am concerned for myself, or for how I appear to be, or for how I am hurt’. In love you can never hurt me.
In this meditation we are truly in a state of universal love - not a personal or worldly love, it is very difficult to reach this point of love in the world because most people only understand a possessive love. Universal love cares for the greatest good and speaks straight to that which is immortal in us.
Surrender the World