Unexpected Freedom

When We Fall in Loveexperience. Maybe we won’t spoil it; we will be loving, wewill delight in and be strengthened and even transformed bythe intensity of that experience. The intensity of that beautyand that joy has the power to transform the habit ofselfishness. The momentum of ‘my way’ can be dissolved, bythe radiant warmth of love with all of its intensity and all of itsenthusiasm and all of its beauty, undenied.However, for most of us, most of the time, thisspontaneous capacity for loving is not the reality that we livewith. We find that we are not able to abide as that lovingreality, and so it is that we fall in love. What happens then,when we fall in love? The intensity and enthusiasm of thatmoment when fear falls away and when the natural,undivided state becomes conscious, turns our lives upsidedown. From the point of view of ‘me’, from the unawakenedpersonality’s perspective, that enthusiasm is totallythreatening; it feels like it could shatter me. It becomesintolerable – we can’t sleep, can’t eat and feel we’re beingdriven mad. If we’re not suitably prepared for such intensitythen the very pleasure of loving itself triggers the habit tograsp and contract. The pleasure is so beautiful that I feel Ican’t help but want it to last. The momentum of ‘my way’ isthus expressed as a default mechanism of narrowingattention. Instead of opening in wonder at the beauty of theexperience and simply being it, we default to the momentumof ‘my way’, to the ‘How can I have it?’Pointing this out is not to judge that momentum, but tohelp us consider it and recognise it as a habit. To try andgrasp at pleasure is not an obligation, it’s a habit; it’s a choicethat we make, and therefore we can also choose to exercisethe heart’s ability to inhibit that contraction.When we contract around desire, grasping its object,thinking, ‘I want to make this pleasure last,’ we condition the59