When it comes down to it, what most (all?) human beings want is love. Not just to be loved by others, but to love. And not just to love someone else, but to deeply and thoroughly love their own experience. And to deeply and thoroughly love our own experience means to love any sensation, thought, and ourselves and the world as it appears to us.
Many of us are unaware of this. And many of us go about finding this love in haphazard ways. We rely on cultural and other conditioning, and on reactivity and reactions to discomfort. That’s why we often end of not finding the love we seek.
It’s not difficult to find examples of this. Trump is perhaps an especially clear one. I assume he too, deep down, really just wants love. And especially to find genuine love – compassion – for himself and his pain. The way he goes about this, through bluster, bigotry, and scams, doesn’t give him what he really wants, but he doesn’t know any other way, so he continues and doubles his effort. It’s a tragedy in the old Greek sense. It’s a setup and he is unable to escape it, at least for now and probably in this lifetime.
So what do we do? Do we choose the Trump approach of doing more of what doesn’t work? Or do we take the more direct route to find love for our own experience – as it is, and perhaps even find ourselves as love?
We are love. That’s why we seek love. We seek what we already are. We seek home. We seek to allow the uncomfortable separation between what we think we are (which comes from thoughts and identities) and what we really are (oneness, love) to be seen through and fall away.
How do we go about finding what we really are? Heart-centered practices – tonglen, ho’oponopono, tonglen, heart prayer – is a good beginning and is sometimes helpful throughout the process. Inquiry – Big Mind process, Headless experiments – can help us discover what we already are, and can remind us what we are throughout the day. Inquiry – The Work of Byron Katie, Living Inquiries – can help us see through beliefs and identifications that transfix us and distract us from noticing what we are.