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Love… Difficult experiences which distance a human being from others and from the whole of Life, can cause a person much suffering. And if he suffers much, this takes all his attention and all the energy which he could, otherwise, use to see the world which surrounds him clearly and in creating his life in a freer manner. A human being’s contact with love throughout his life is of great importance. This contact makes him feel proud, worthy and self-confident, and gives him a sense of liberty and plenitude. It fills him with happiness and it fulfils the emptiness inside him and the sense of inner void which sometimes gnaws at him. It soothes his pain, it provides a light in the dark and illuminates his way. It makes him feel present to the world and its beauty. Love being that powerful feeling that comes with genuine and beneficent contact with others, with oneself, with the whole of Life… The human being is here to experiment, to experience everything that he feels inclined to try out. From the most limiting experiences to the most exalting, sampling the simplest along the way. He is here to live what he has the task of living, as well as what he wants to live. He is here to learn, to evolve. And, ultimately, he is here to become aware of his freedom and his true nature. When he has had enough of being taken and seized by all the games of human existence, he turns towards change. He realizes that he does not want to be subjected by life’s difficulties any more or to be a mere victim of life. He releases himself from the wounds of the past and from his old beliefs about what life and he himself are. With his new knowledge, he decides to create his life according to his new needs. He no longer lives according to that which limits him, but according to that which brings him closer to his deepest aspirations. The human being comes into the world… he has a body, he feels things, he observes, he learns. He experiences relations with others and with his surroundings. He develops beliefs, he develops his vision of the world, his system of thought. He experiences wounds, he lives pleasure. He develops fears and desires. He makes choices and makes decisions based on his experiences and his own discoveries. He wants to be happy and he is afraid to suffer. He wants to possess and he is afraid to lose, he wants to exist and is afraid of disappearing. He needs to be loved and is afraid of not being loved. He needs wholeness and is afraid of emptiness. Gradually, out of these elements, he creates a person, a character with which he identifies himself entirely and to which he bonds and holds on: the ego. To wholly benefit from the human experience, he seeks pleasure in all its meanings. He often makes this quest his only goal and he seeks the feeling of satisfaction. He needs to be healthy, he needs the basics of food, lodging, clothing… He has the choice not to want these things and he has the choice to want more of these things. He sometimes seeks power and control and this makes up a part of his relationships with himself, with others and with the world. Respect for self and others is one of the great difficulties which he encounters and that makes relationships in the human community often troublesome. Human beings use this planet like a vast terrain for experimentation and they are constantly questioning the choices which they make regarding the proper ways to treat people and the planet itself. They question constantly the ways in which they employ their own freedom to act. This is a part of this need for experimentation and is a component of human development. One of the great fascinations we have is that fascination we
feel before the creations and infinite manifestations of life.
Fascination when confronted by the spectacle of children, when
observing the theatre of men and women… before animals,
before all matter and its colors, in the face of the visible and
invisible universe… faced with the great Game of Life. I believe that, as in life in general, spirituality, philosophy and psychology have often played out such that human beings identify themselves with theories that are too complex, with concepts that are unrealistic or with false images of themselves. In spite of the sense of security that that these could give them, this has often in the end made them more confused and led them to live with restrictive views of themselves. Human beings seeking liberation have often ended up submitting themselves to new-sounding principles invented by their own kind. Rather than submitting to them, spirituality, philosophy and psychology should be tools used to serve the human being in his search for happiness, freedom and truths about who he is, and of a general knowledge of the world. To believe that our personal and limited notion of ourselves and of the world is the single and only reality can cause us to suffer. To identify ourselves as separate from others and from the rest of the world can cause us suffering. Faced with his need for change, the human being is often afraid and does not always know how to leave behind that which he knows, how to leave behind that which limits him and prevents him from changing. Realizing this need for change, a person can find things difficult in the face of his attachments to his old values, his old beliefs and the many ways he has been conditioned. He wants to change, but he is accustomed to seeing himself, to knowing himself and to living according to how his life has been shaped. He has been forming for a long time, from the things he learned from his parents and others, and from experiences and events, a personal way of seeing life. He operates in accordance with these reference points, and often without knowing that there are other ideas and points of view beyond his personal concept of life. In spite of the entrenched habits and attachments that secure him, even through times of pain, he can come to realize that he is more than this identity which he has formed over time. He can realize that he is not simply an accumulation of experiences, events and beliefs. He can realize that he can be free of all this baggage full of memories and that he can become conscious of his true self. Experiences affect us and transform our way of seeing life. They fill up our memory and our thoughts, and they are transformed into personal beliefs and conceptions of the world. Because this is all that we know, we take these beliefs as unique and unarguable truths and we make use of them to decide both how to see life and how we should live our lives. We can realize and become aware of this process and we can turn ourselves towards change, towards a more gratifying and fulfilling life. We have the choice to create out of ourselves something different. It is good to be aware of what we really want. We are creators. We create our lives in relation to the whole
of existence. We carve our own path and we walk this path. We
live the life which we create.
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