by Eknath Easwaran
Excerpt from section on Saint Augustine,
pages 250–267
. . . leaving behind all other sights and sounds but this one vision, which ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy . . .
I am now going to take up the most valuable – and probably the most misunderstood – of treasures that we have: desire. Desire is the fuel we have been given for this long, arduous journey into the depths of consciousness. What often makes the journey longer and more arduous than it need be, if I may say so, is our tendency to fritter desire away, in an endless round of pursuits which lead us nowhere.
Spinoza once pointed out succinctly that desires are not decisions. We have very little choice in them. Yet desire is raw power, of a magnitude at least as immense as that of nuclear energy. It is absolutely incumbent upon all of us to work to harness this power within us, so that what we do, we decide in freedom.
Once we see desire for what it really is, interestingly enough, doing something out of purely personal motives will no longer be pleasant. Doing things with the desire to help others, on the other hand, will give us enormous pleasure. With this understanding, the whole alignment of our desires undergoes a transformation.
Do you remember Augustine declaring, “By faithfulness we are collected and bound up into unity within ourself, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity”? It is this basic change of attitude with respect to desire, more than anything else, that opens up the vast treasury within. By a natural process, our capacity to desire actually grows with our capacity to make our actions a gift to others. Sensory desires, for example, are only nickel-and-dime satisfactions. It is only when we don’t have a wider frame of reference than ourselves that we believe they hold out the promise of great pleasure. When we widen our horizons to encompass a greater breadth of life, we can evaluate these pleasures more shrewdly. Some of the greatest of mystics experimented with their senses rather freely in their earlier days. When they reach a state of unlimited compassion and concern for others, they admit, “Those were mere pennies. Now I am in possession of wealth beyond my wildest dreams!”
“What happens to sense pleasures, then?” people naturally want to know. “Should we aim to become bleak ascetics?”
“Why is it that I don’t see you playing in the sandbox any more?” I ask, by way of answer.
“The sandbox?” they wonder, taken aback. “The sandbox is for kids.”
Picture grown-up men and women getting into the sandbox and playing happily for hours together with toy shovels and buckets! That is something like the picture these mystics must get when they see you and me throwing our energy into pursuits as limited as sense pleasures, which run through our fingers like sand. With their vastly wider perspective, they are able to look far down the road and see that the only possible outcome of this kind of play is increasing frustration.
Every human being has been granted a huge reservoir of desire; we all have it in abundance. Measured against this immense reservoir, the senses have a ridiculously limited capacity to satisfy our enormous appetite to know and to love. You remember Augustine’s question: “Why are men not happy? Because they are much more concerned over things which are more powerful to make them unhappy than truth is to make them happy, in that they remember truth so slightly.” It is the existence of this truth that we need to be reminded of as often as possible.
When I hear adults, who should know better, going around complaining, “I want all the pleasures of the senses that I enjoyed in my teens,” I would like to put before them the example of my young friend Jessica. It wasn’t very long ago that I saw her playing with dolls. I understand there are dolls now which, if you press a button, actually get a fever. Perfect for playing hospital! But Jess has graduated from dolls to people. She has worked hard to become an accomplished nurse, and now she is helping and comforting real patients. In the same way, now that we are grown up, our joy should consist in helping others. Once we so much as taste this joy, we will feel no need to play at being children again.
When I use the word love in this connection, l do so advisedly; the popular sense of the word tends to be superficial. I use it in the deeply spiritual sense, where to love is to know; to love is to act. If you really love, from the depths of your consciousness, that love will give you a native wisdom. “When what is known, if even so little, is loved,” Augustine writes beautifully, “this very capacity for love makes it better and more fully known.” With this capacity you perceive the needs of others intuitively and clearly, with detachment from any personal desires; and you know how to act creatively to meet those needs, dexterously surmounting any obstacle that comes in the way. Such is the immense, driving power of love.
Great mystics like Augustine and Teresa take this one relentless step further. If you really love, they ask, how can you act selfishly? They find it impossible to waste a day, even an hour, that could be used for helping others. For spiritual giants like these, in other words, to love is to act.
Mystics resort to the language of love often. They know that the Lord is the true fulfillment of our deepest need to love. This is a certitude stamped with their personal experience, and it sometimes strikes me that they are dying to share with us this crucial secret. Augustine speaks to his Lord with direct passion in the Confessions, calling on him as “God of my heart,” “God, my sweetness,” and “O my late joy!” God has become the focus to which he directs all his love, thus magnifying its intensity immeasurably. “This is happiness,” he tells us: “to be joyful in thee and because of thee: this and no other.”
Then he gives a devastating diagnosis of our failures in love:
. . .Yet the reason may be that what they cannot do they do not want to do with sufficient intensity to make them able to do it.
Each of us wants abiding joy. We want it more than anything. Yet we can find abiding joy, Augustine is telling us, only in loving with all our heart, with all our will. All our time and all our energy must be caught up in this all-consuming effort to love. A person like Augustine ultimately fills himself to bursting with this one uplifting desire, so that he floats free from the need to try constantly to satisfy a hundred and one smaller desires. Every cell of his being fills with this love, “which ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy.”
“Love desires to be aloft,” Thomas a Kempis exclaims exuberantly in his Imitation of Christ, “and will not be kept back by any thing low and mean. . . . He that loveth, flyeth, runneth, and rejoiceth; he is free, and cannot be held in.” Augustine tries to give us some way of grasping this great joy, if only vaguely, by comparing it to more self-centered pleasures:
But what is it that I love when I love You? Not the beauty of any bodily thing, nor the order of seasons, not the brightness of light that rejoices the eye, nor the sweet melodies of all songs, nor the sweet fragrance of flowers and ointments and spices, not manna or honey, not the limbs that carnal love embraces. None of these things do I love in loving my God.
Yet in a sense I do love light and melody and fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God: the light and the voice and the fragrance and the food and embrace in the soul, when that light shines upon my soul which no place can contain, that voice sounds which no time can take from me, I breathe that fragrance which no wind scatters, I eat the food which is not lessened by eating, and I lie in the embrace which satiety never comes to sunder. This it is that I love when I love my God.
It is exercise that helps this great love grow inside us. It is giving in to anger and jealousy and resentment that stunts it and holds us, with their heavy weight of turmoil and conflict, down on the ground. Most of the advice the mystics give us aims to promote one thing: the exercise of our love. If we do not understand this purpose, their advice can sound platitudinous – or worse still, quite mad.
If there ever was a spiritual madcap, it was Jesus the Christ. “Bless them that curse you. Do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you.” People must have rushed back to Jerusalem shouting, “There’s a madman loose on some mountaintop, telling us to love our enemies!” It is in Saint Francis of Assisi that we can see the attitude Jesus wants us to take up: “Lord, keep me floating in the empyrean of love for you, so that I cannot even remember to bump against others with my self-will. When I begin to sink back down under my own weight, have the mercy to give me an enemy or two on whom I can practice my love!” This is the kind of daring on which love thrives.
In this sense, the lovers of God never allow themselves to sober up. With ceaseless practice, they keep themselves drunk with the spirit of love day and night. When we have the privilege of hearing about their exploits or reading their intoxicating words, we say to ourselves: “I want to get into this tavern too! I want to sit on that high stool and say to the Divine Bartender, ‘The usual, please. A double shot of sympathy, on the rocks.’” We look dazedly and see, perched on stools all around, the men and women of God. There is Teresa, holding tight to the bar to keep from floating away. There is Francis, hardly able to utter his favorite prayer, “My God and my all.” There is Augustine, murmuring something about “God, my sweetness.” This mysterious joy that knows no limits is our true heritage, the fulfillment that the travail of human evolution is urging.
When we practice meditation with all the enthusiasm we are capable of, when we repeat the name of the Lord, and most of all when we work harmoniously with difficult people and remain kind and respectful in the midst of provocation, we are drinking deep of the Lord’s healing mercy. I sometimes see stickers on cars, proclaiming, “God loves you.” God is love. He can be nothing else. When we work to live up to this supreme ideal of charity, we become conduits for his love, instruments of his peace. This is what is meant by God’s forgiveness: when we embody his love, we will not be capable of doing anything that causes sorrow to another creature.
In the depths of our heart the Lord is pleading: “Come close and look at me, come deeper and deeper and become one with me, and you will be blessed wherever you go.” We may think our heart is hungry for success, hungry for pleasure, but the mystics assure us, “Oh, no! What your heart is hungering for, what everyone’s heart is hungering for, is the revelation that our real personality is divine.”
*
The great doubt that comes to everybody is: “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t really think I can love that way.” Here the miracle of love comes in.
If you look at popular novels, at gossip magazines, at syrupy soap operas and movies, you come away with the impression that falling in love is something that just happens. Here you are, sauntering down Fourth Street minding your own business, when suddenly you spy a certain someone coming out of a shop and you fall in love as if into a manhole. True love is much harder to come by than that.
The mystics are the world’s authorities on love. When Saint Teresa says “Amor saca amor,” she is giving us the basic principle: “Love begets love.” One of the most beautiful things about love is that even today it cannot be purchased. It cannot be stolen, it cannot be ransomed, it cannot be cajoled, it cannot be seduced. Amor saca amor: only genuine love begets love.
All of us have been conditioned, even though we may not put it in such crass terms, to believe that if you love me six units, I should love you at most six units in return. I can feel secure in loving you six units because you have already committed yourself that far. But if you get annoyed with me and stomp out, slamming the door, I should get annoyed in return – and pull back, at least temporarily, my six units of love. This is the type of bargain that more and more so-called lovers strike today. Saint Teresa would say uncompromisingly, “Don’t pretend that this is love. It falls more accurately under the heading of commerce.” Shakespeare put the matter in perfect perspective: “Call it not love that changeth.”
The whole thrust of what Teresa is confiding to us is simple: With practice, everyone can learn to love like this; everyone can live in endless love. After all, even if you don’t learn Esperanto, your life is not necessarily going to be dull and drab. Even if you are not intimately acquainted with ancient Sumerian sculpture, you can make it through life without suffering serious depression. But – and this has to be drilled into the ears of the modern world – if you do not learn how to love, everywhere you go you are going to suffer.
Even in the wealthiest home, discord can leave the members bankrupt. Ask people who “have it all”: several luxury cars in the circular drive, large-screen satellite TV setups in every bedroom and den, heated pools and saunas and exercise machines, priceless originals scattered casually throughout the house. If they live in disharmony, they will be the first to admit, “Life is miserable. I wake up in the morning dreading to go to the breakfast table. I come back in the evening with a sinking feeling in my heart.” These are the simple facts of life.
One trend I see which only focuses domestic disharmony is competition. “How much money does he bring in? How much does she bring in?” We should divide up our chattels and responsibilities fair and square, legal-minded advisors warn us, even to the “ownership” of our children. Millions of people have absorbed this criterion. The real question to keep asking ourselves is, “How much am I making my life worthy of being a gift?” Saint Francis says perfectly, “It is in giving that we receive.” Right on, as my young friends would say. What matters is not who brings in more or invests more or inveigles more; it is who gives more. That person is the real provider, the true light of the home.
Children, likewise, can exercise their love. When they find their parents slowly moving apart, they can help bring them together with their love. Where grandparents are squabbling, parents can work to reestablish peace. Everybody can learn to play this great mediating role. I know of no greater gift.
*
Still, practicing this kind of love is not easy. After I give a talk people sometimes come up to me distraught and tell me: “But you don’t know the atmosphere in my home! You haven’t met my office mates!”
I hasten to assure them, “You don’t have to give me the details. I wasn’t raised in a cave.” I grew up in a large joint family, where we couldn’t escape rubbing shoulders with one another at every turn. Later I worked on campuses with thousands of students, and must have attended hundreds of meetings where faculty members from all departments often differed with each other with passionate conviction. I am perfectly well aware that in every context there can be people who are difficult – every bit as difficult as we ourselves can be at times. Wherever we turn in life, we are liable to run into challenging predicaments.
When I was teaching on university campuses, however, I was also practicing meditation and trying to translate the teachings of the mystics into my daily life. Gradually I learned to cease looking upon challenges as difficulties, and began to see tense situations as opportunities to put my growing love to use. We can do this everywhere; the family context is perfect.
In every family, for example, there is likely to be somebody with a bit of Jonathan Swift. Swift, you know, had a sardonic tongue and a rather black sense of humor; he is said to have worn mourning on his birthday. This sort of thing has an inhibiting effect on everyone, and naturally enough, when the Jonathan of our own family enters the room, others may try to make themselves scarce. Not the person who is trying to take love seriously. She learns to come up with a genuine smile and says, “Come in, Jonathan! I’ve been looking forward to seeing you.” To herself she can add in a whisper, “I need the opportunity to deepen my patience.”
As we become more aware that the same spark of divinity is in all of us, we will find opportunities everywhere to make that divinity more evident. We won’t see anybody as an enemy; we will see everybody as a friend. Every event, however difficult or potentially threatening, can be used to help carry out what the mystics call “the will of the Lord”: to love, to forgive, to be kind.
In other words, these are daily exercises, very much like aerobics. You don’t stop when your heart rate gets up to 85. You say, “My target rate is 120,” and you keep at it until you get there. When your heart is accustomed to 120, you can start aiming for 130, then for 140. Where physical conditioning is concerned, everybody accepts this process.
It is exactly the same process for increasing pa-tience. The resting rate for patience is zero: you say, “I don’t have any patience at all. I blow my stack at the slightest provocation!” I commiserate with such people by patting them on the back and reminding them, “That is where everybody starts.” But as you learn to meditate, you get more and more capacity to draw on. After a while, when Jonathan goes out of his way to provoke you, you find you can bear it cheerfully for half an hour. With continuing practice, you reach the point where you can get through an entire Saturday morning without losing control. From seven-thirty until noon, you are so patient that you begin to relish your show of self-mastery. After lunch – wisely, I would say – you make yourself scarce again, because your patience has run dry. But if you keep at it with the same diligence in every arena of personal affairs, the great day arrives when you can be patient around poor Jonathan throughout the weekend. He does his level best to provoke you, but you say to yourself, “Oh, no, you don’t! Those days are over. Nowadays I can be patience itself.”
There is a remarkable statement in mysticism which I am now going to translate into the language of learning to love. Through sheer exercise, over a long, long period, we do not just love Jonathan or Josephine; we become love itself. Our love radiates to anyone who comes within our orbit; we simply lose the knack of doing otherwise. It does not matter whether the person seated beside us has been unpleasant to us for years, perhaps has even opposed us; that is immaterial. What matters is that our very nature now is love. At all times, in every situation, we are at our best with everybody. This is the answer to our most profound prayers.
We need to stretch the frontiers of this miracle as far as we can. To me, any person who even thinks about waging war – economics and politics completely aside – needs desperately to learn how to love. Saint Teresa’s principle “Love begets love” does not apply only to personal relationships; it works on the level of nations just as well. Here again, Saint Francis is a marvelous teacher. How do we make ourselves into instruments of world peace? How can we forge our nation into an instrument of world peace? Francis replies, “Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon.” He does not mean it as an incantation for special state occasions; it is given to us as a dynamic exercise.
I have enjoyed the opportunity of wandering through a good number of countries. Everywhere I made the same discovery: what divides one people from another is just one percent of superficial differences; in the other ninety-nine percent, we are all the same.
On my way to this country from India, I spent a week in Paris with other Fulbright scholars. My friends were intent on catching glimpses of the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Left Bank, and (I suspect, though they spared me the details) the Folies-Bergère. I spent my days in the lovely city parks, watching French children happily at play. “Just exactly like Indian children,” I used to say to myself. “Where is the difference?” On my return to India I was invited to speak before many groups, and always I was asked searching questions about the United States. I could see that they looked on this continent as another world, and Americans as a different kind of people. Imagine their surprise when I responded, “They’re the same as you and me. People there like to be treated kindly, just like people here.”
Today doubts about the future of mankind are part of the emotional atmosphere. I feel dispirited when I hear that young people, confronted with hard choices in their lives, are saying more and more often: “What does it matter? By the time I’m grown up, they’ll probably have blown the earth sky-high!” Too often these doubts are justified by the actions they see so-called responsible leaders taking. Worldwide, the governments of nations are spending six hundred billion dollars every year on developing and manufacturing weapons of destruction; half a million educated, intelligent scientists are working hard at this task. What is desperately needed are personal examples of another attitude, another way of living.
If we could only remember the simple truth that people everywhere are ninety-nine percent the same and only one percent different, we would be saved a lot of headaches, and we would still have that intriguing one percent to make living a delight. Sometimes I wish a few politicians would take to meditation; then they would find it difficult to overlook the fact that all of us have the same basic needs. We all cherish health, happiness, and love; and we all desire, most important, to live in peace and harmony.
In today’s shaky world, believe me, everybody takes hope from you when you have some awareness of the unity of life. Remember Francis’s line: “Where there is despair, let me sow hope.” Even those who sometimes belittle your efforts cannot help thinking after a while, “This just might show us the way out of our troubles.” None of us can afford any longer to think in terms of living just for ourselves, or even of living just for our own family. When you can return good will for ill will, love for hatred, you are restoring the faith of everyone around you in these timeless values. As you begin to take this responsibility seriously, your life slowly takes on the greater meaning that all of us dearly desire.
Giving people grounds for hope is exactly what we are doing when we strive every day to make love the basis of our lives. I read a deeply moving article about a group of peasants in Central America who managed to flee the terror rampant in their homeland by swimming a river into the neighboring country. Sympathetic people from this country are going down to live with them in shifts in an effort to discourage military units from harassing them. The one thing these peasants talk about most is their former archbishop, who, in the face of a brutal civil war, spent his time pleading with his people to lay down their weapons. Though he was assassinated for these efforts, his people will never forget his example. As they say over and over again, in the simplest words imaginable: “He who falls for the people will live in the people.”
*
In this we have an enormous responsibility: to keep in good health, not so much for our own sake but so that we can go on giving this gift as long as possible. Doctors, nurses, and medical technicians can be valuable allies in this sacred task, but the primary responsibility is ours alone. Health is something we have to educate ourselves to maintain, beginning with a nutritious diet, appropriate exercise, work which benefits others, loving relationships, and the enthusiastic observance of spiritual disciplines.
Here I continue a step beyond conventional medicine. In order even to contract illness, I would say, bacteria and viruses and environmental stress are not enough; we must have a certain susceptibility to illness. The immune system is not simply a physiological network, and it is clear that there are wide diVerences in how different individuals resist disease. Some people exposed to a particular virus get sick; others, though exposed to the same conditions, do not. Similarly, we know that spontaneous remissions – often termed “miraculous” – do occur. All this is because there are many, many factors involved in resistance, and number one, in my opinion, is the mind. The highest, most effctive kind of resistance – to illness of any kind whatsoever, even to the ravages of time – is a deep, deep desire to live for others. This is a tremendous force, which I can testify to from my own life.
I am talking now about the deepest roots of the human being. Psychologists know the vital necessity of the will to live; yet when you live only for yourself, how deep can the will go? My will to live springs from the love that floods my heart when I realize that the Lord himself Wnds it possible to inhabit your heart and mine; and this love expresses itself in the myriad choices I make in my daily life. Most of us have experienced firsthand the benefits we reap from loving two or three people. Imagine what love for five or six billion people can do!
All of us can be much healthier than we are, much more secure. Most of us can live much longer than we expect to, and work more actively right into the evening of our life. Even in our nineties we can be productive, creative, cherished, and respected, because our life has become a shining gift. The time to cultivate the habits of living that make all this possible is now.
