Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition (5 page)

33. Clean, neat, and smells good naturally

34. Inspires evermore love

35. Cooperative

36. Financially savvy

37. Under-spender — lives below her means

38. Has created some of her own means

39. Knows herself

40. Flexible

41. Social graces and practices

42. Wants us to entertain and be entertaining

43. Playful and adventurous

44. Loves to dance

45. Thinks abundance

46. Wants to create superior memories

47. We can talk forever through the decades

48. Lives in ideas

49. Wants to make the world work

50. Is passionately on purpose

51. Sophisticated

52. We have a profound and growing soulular connection

53. We are soul mates

54. Loves to exercises, stretch and work on her strength, health, flexibility, aerobics and balance daily

55. Wants to see the world

56. Nurturing spirit

57. Has deep spiritual practices

58. Meditates

59. Creative

60. Non-smoker

61. Non-alcoholic

62. Non-drug user

63. Charitable

64. Has great etiquette

65. Is pro-organic foods and healthy eating

66. My friends love and enjoy her personality and are thrilled to be with her

67. Loves my family, kids and grandkids and our kids get along — if hers exist

68. Culturally, politically, financially, socially, emotionally, and spiritually aware

69. I can fully feel her love for me

70. Has her own businesses, products, and services to create

71. My staff loves, enjoys, respects, admires, and appreciates her

72. My career is second to her

73. She helps me know and expand my love

74. We share similar tastes in almost everything

75. Energetic and enthusiastic

76. Wholesome

77. Fresh, Spring-like

78. Young-minded and thinks forever young

79. Neat, Clean

80. Original rich mindset

81. Loves me in all my dimensions

82. Disciplines

83. Not jealous

84. Monogamous

85. Enchanting

86. Seeks out the good

87. Compellingly joyful

88. Sacred experiences

89. Bright-eyed

90. Eager to learn forever

91. Wants to serve

92. Positive mental attitude

93. Socially adept

94. Extraordinary

95. Proud to be with me and vice versa

96. Great design sense personally, professionally, for the home’s interior, et al

97. Great dresser

98. Beautiful to behold

99. Lives with ease, grace, and spiritual dignity

100. Adoring

101. We give ourselves totally and completely to each other

102. Works on her own wellbeingness

103. Has mutually agreed upon boundaries

104. Truly becomes my best and closest friend

105. Loyalty

106. Trust

107. Faithfulness

108. Integrity

109. Honesty

110. Compassion

111. Passion

112. Integrated

*Bold indicates my absolute must haves

Now you’ve seen the clear intention I wrote about before I met Crystal. In the secret place within my mind, I knew she had to exist and be alive somewhere or I couldn’t have had such a clear, purposeful vision of her. I knew she had to be alive and that with every breath I took, I was getting closer and closer.

~Mark Victor Hansen

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.

~Rumi

I
n the West what we generally call love is mostly a feeling, not a power. This feeling can be delicious, even ecstatic, but there are many things love is meant to do that feelings cannot.

When love and spirit are brought together, their power can accomplish anything. Then love, power, and spirit are one.

There has never been a spiritual master — not Buddha, Krishna, Christ, or Mohammed — who wasn’t a messenger of love, and the power of the message has always been awesome: it has changed the world. Perhaps the very immensity of such teachers has made the rest of us reticent. We do not accept the power love can create inside us, and therefore we turn our backs on our divine status.

Love is spirit. Spirit is the Self.

Self and spirit are the same. Asking “What is spirit?” is just a way of asking “Who am I?” There isn’t spirit outside you; you are It. Why aren’t you aware of it? You are, but only in a limited way, like someone who has seen a glass of water but not the ocean. Your eyes see because in spirit you are the witness to everything. You have thoughts because in spirit you know all. You feel love toward another person because in spirit you are infinite love.

Restoring the spiritual dimension to love means abandoning the notion of a limited self with its limited ability to love and regaining the Self with its unbounded ability to love. The “I” that is truly you is made of pure awareness, pure creativity, pure spirit. Its version of love is free from all memories or images from the past. Beyond all illusion is the source of love, a field of pure potential.

That potential is you.

What is the Path?

The most valuable thing you can bring into any relationship is your spiritual potential. This is what you have to offer when you begin to live your love story at the deepest level. Like the seed needed to start the life of a tree, your spiritual potential is the seed for your growth in love. Nothing is more precious. Seeing yourself with the eyes of love makes it natural to see others that way too. You will be able to say of your beloved, as the poet Rumi does:

You are the secret of God’s secret.

You are the mirror of divine beauty.

The path to love is something you consciously choose to follow, and everyone who has ever fallen in love is shown the first step on that path. The unfolding of spiritual potential has been the chief concern of all the great seers, saints, prophets, masters, and sages in human history. Theirs was a carefully charted quest for the Self, a far cry from our notion of love as a messy, emotional affair.

In India, the spiritual path is called Sadhana, and although a tiny minority of people give up normal life to wander the world as seekers of enlightenment (these are monks, or sadhus), everyone, from those in the most ancient civilization of Vedic India until today, considers their life to be Sadhana, a path to the Self. Although the Self seems separated from us, it is actually intertwined in everything a person thinks, feels, or does. The fact that you do not intimately know your

Self is amazing, if you come to think about it. Looking for your Self, the Vedic sages declared, is like a thirsty fish looking for water. But as long as the Self has yet to be found, sadhana exists.

The goal of the path is to transform your awareness from separation to unity. In unity we perceive only love, express only love, are only love.

While the inner transformation is taking place, every path must have some outer form to sustain it. In India a person’s nature leads him to the style of path appropriate to reaching fulfillment. Some people are naturally intellectual and are therefore suited to the path of knowledge, or Gyana. Some are more devotional and are suited to the path of worship, or Bhakti. Some are more outwardly motivated and are suited to the path of action, or Karma.

The three are not mutually exclusive; ideally, one would include in one’s lifestyle daily periods of study, worship, and service. All three approaches would then be integrated into a single path. It is, however, entirely possible to be so taken with a single approach that your whole existence may be centered on reading the scriptures, contemplation, and scholarly debate — the life of Gyana. Or you may spend your time meditating, chanting, and participating in temple rituals — the life of bhakti. Or you could do social work, apply yourself to mental and physical purification, and do God’s bidding in daily activity — the life of karma. Even in the most traditional sectors of India today, these paths have broken down, giving way to modern lifestyles in which study and work have little or nothing to do with spiritual aspirations.

What does this mean for a Westerner who has never been exposed to sadhana? I propose that being on the spiritual path is such a natural and powerful urge that everyone’s life, regardless of culture, obeys it. A path is just a way to open yourself to spirit, to God, to love. These are aims we all may cherish, but our culture has given us no established, organized way to reach them. Indeed, never in history has a seeker been confronted with such a disorganized and chaotic spiritual scene.

What we are left with is relationships. The desire to love and be loved is too powerful ever to be extinguished, and fortunately a spiritual path exists based upon this unquenchable longing. The expression path to love is not simply a metaphor; it reappears throughout spiritual history in many guises. The most ancient version is the bhakti or devotional tradition from Vedic India, in which all forms of love ultimately serve the search for God. The Sufis of Islam have their own devotional lineage. Rumi, who I quote so often, was more than a poet; he was a great teacher of this path. To him God was the sweetest, most desirable lover, whose touch he could feel against the skin:

When it’s cold and raining,

You are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me

even closer to Your Lips.

The Inner Secret, that which was never born,

You are that freshness, and I am with You now.

Christ initiated another version of the path in his supreme teaching, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Jesus always spoke of God as a loving father. The Christian version of the path is therefore a relationship not so much between lovers as between parent and child or a shepherd and his flock (we shouldn’t forget, though, the image of Christ as bridegroom and the worshiper’s soul as the bride).

So it isn’t the tradition that is lacking. One might more fairly say that in most religions the teaching of love, as originally presented, seems to have faded, to become more an ideal than a practical reality. But amidst all the confusion and breakdown of traditional teaching, there is still the spark of love that brings two people together, and out of that a path can be made.

Like the tiny spark of fire that consumes a forest, the spark of love is all you need to experience love in its full power and glory, in all its aspects, earthly and divine. Love is spirit, and all experiences of love, however insignificant they seem, are actually invitations to the cosmic dance. Within every love story hides the wooing of the gods and goddesses.

In a different age the most fleeting of infatuations had spiritual meaning; the nearness of God in the beloved was taken seriously. Since the advent of Freud, however, psychologists have assured us that falling in love is illusory; the sense of ecstasy that is part of falling in love is illusory; the sense of ecstasy that is part of falling in love isn’t realistic. We must learn to accept the temporary nature of romance and disregard the “projected fantasy” that we might be as immortal and invulnerable as passionate lovers feel. We would therefore have to be skeptical of Walt Whitman when he rapturously declares,

I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

~Deepak Chopra, MD