Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

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fear, in hope and desire, in education and environment. This identification
with those thoughts and memories has been so thorough,
that ‘I’ have become ‘that’. ‘I’ am the past with its clinging to what
is dead. And thereby there can be no living in experiencing the
present moment. We do not live in the present and can therefore
not be sensitive to the present, we cannot by sympathetic to the
needs of others, and we cannot understand the nature of the fetters
which bind us to the past in fear and craving for security.
But in seeing and understanding, there is freedom from fear,
from conditioning, from striving to become; and in that atmosphere
of calm and unselfishness there is love, now.
Love is not acquisitive. Rather it is destructive, because it does
not build up, does not maintain and preserve, because it has no
thought of the future. It cannot maintain past, because it has no
memory to feed on. That which lives in memory is not love; it
is possessiveness, acquisitiveness, selfishness. That which lives in
ideals is not love; it is hope, it is fear, it is escape, it is ‘self’.
Love destroys all things made by the mind, by its thoughts of
clinging to past memories; for, love is loving, and cannot think of
‘self’ while loving; it cannot strive to become, to retain, to possess,
when there is fulfilment in loving. Love cannot build, cannot protect,
cannot make secure; love is blind to the future as well as to
the past, because in love there is no concept of time, of duration,
of continuing. And so, love has no problem, no conflict, no knowledge
of attachment or opposition, no worry, no agitation, because
in loving there is no desire, no gratification, no thought of ‘self’ or
others.
Love is destructive, because it destroys all thought of self, of
security, of permanence. It is destructive, because it destroys all
that has been built up so carefully so as to endure throughout the
ages, faith and hope, religion and tradition, emotion and devotion.
In love there is nothing so gain and nothing to lose, for there is no
thought of anything, past or future. It is only now, at the moment of