Unexpected Freedom

When We Fall in Loveefforts is that, as we follow the impulse to gratify desire, themomentum of ‘my way’ increases. ‘I’ feel more and morethat ‘I’ must have that which ‘I’ long for. With this comes acorresponding intensification of the fear of not getting theobject of my desire. The increase in force of the compulsionof ‘my way’ gives rise to an absolutely equal increase in thefear of not getting my way. With the increase in the force ofthe fear of not getting ‘my way’ there is the painfullydiminished capacity for simply being loving.Tragically, we don’t notice this happening. All we knowis that the passionate longing is increasing and that we feeltrapped. It is rare that we receive the kind companionship ofothers who would guide us through our adolescent strugglesto wisdom. Hope for true love and lasting meaning increasesyet the clouds of loneliness roll in and our hearts grow cold.Our life continues to unfold in myriad ways. But nowwe’ve got this divided consciousness – we believe strongly inright and wrong and good and bad. We have the ability tomake judgments about how things should and shouldn’t be,and about how I should and shouldn’t be. And it doesn’tstop. Years go by; the momentum of it all seems to increase,and yet there is still this inkling that somehow this businessof love is terribly important. We write poetry about it, singsongs about it and from time to time we experiencesomething that we call ‘falling in love’. Yet we are not freedfrom our increasingly chaotic dividedness.In fact everything about us becomes divided, even ourprofessional lives. We talk about ‘being at work’; there’s whowe are at home and there’s who we are at work. Even ifyou’re a professional meditator, a monk or a nun, there canbe dividedness. I hear people talk about ‘the real practice’,which means there must be the unreal practice. The realpractice, they say, is when we’re meditating. They say that57