Unexpected Freedom

Unexpected Freedomarising of the exactly equal and opposite experience of ‘I’mafraid it won’t last.’ These two experiences, of wanting thepleasure to last, and fearing that it won’t, go together, like thefront and back of the hand. We can’t have one without theother. The sadness of this situation is that by grasping thedesire to make it last we lose the loving. We lose the loving inits pure, natural form; the contracted heart no longer has thecapacity to contain our enthusiasm and so it leaps out andlands on the other person.This is the subjective experience as the open-heartedbeautiful state is lost. Because of the habit of desire and theconsequent fear, the heart-energy leaps out and lands on theobject – whether it’s a thing in a shop that we feel we musthave, or another person, or an ideal, or a state of mind.Assuming that it’s another person, the consequence of thisleaping-out is the thought, ‘I can’t live without you.’ Andthat’s true; ‘I’ can’t live without ‘you’, because I don’t have myheart anymore; you’ve got half of it at least, so I’ll doanything to keep you – that’s what the heart feels and whatthe mind tends to believe.The unawakened personality cannot live without theother, for it feels like death, though from the perspective ofthe awakened personality all this would be seen as a state ofdiminished responsibility. Now, to say this is not to diminishthe experience; we all have the experience and we all have tolearn from it. But we should also recognise that in thisexperience we betray ourselves and project our hearts’passion and enthusiasm onto another object or anotherperson. Subsequently we have to suffer the consequences ofhaving betrayed ourselves. Believing that, ‘I cannot simplytrust my own heart’s capacity for loving, so I will project itonto you and expect you to carry it for me,’ we fall in love.This is losing ourselves, and there’s an intoxication in this60