We Discover the True Nature of Love Only Through Surrender

Happy new year everyone, I hope everyone is well. I have decided to try something a bit different on my blog this year and to open things up a little bit by including some commentaries on some of my teachings from my students. I will post this along with an audio and a transcript of the teaching. I hope this will be interesting and helpful. Here is a short piece written by one of my students the other day. It comments on the teachings in Chapter 16 of my new book, The Survival Guide to Staying Conscious; There’s Only Love and Not Knowing It, p.148.

We Discover the True Nature of Love Only Through Surrender

How Easy Is It To Learn To Concentrate? - comments by a student

“I think, for me, this is perhaps one of Burgs most important teachings especially at a time like this. For all the relief that comes with understanding that life is always changing and that you actually don’t have to hold onto things or the understanding that life isn’t personal and for all the relief that comes with being able to momentarily still my mind and become calm, until I started to connect to this teaching, I don’t think I ever really got close to any real sense of life being complete. I was never really able to trust it. I know life can be exalted at times but I also know that this is changeable and short lived and that I remain at the mercy of what happens and whether I like what happens or not.

So without this teaching I found no real sense of everything being ok. It was temporarily ok as long as things were organised how I liked them. But I never had a deep sense of even if things are really unstable something is there to carry us through it. As I look around at the world and see what appears to be an ever increasing sense of hopelessness it can seem overwhelming. I feel the sadness of everything we are doing to our world. But I realise there is no choice other than to surrender into it and keep the faith. Within this surrender I realise I have no control of anything and I don’t need control. As I surrender into the process I have started to feel there really is something there that is supporting everything. The implications of this I cannot fathom but I don’t need to, it just gives me hope. And what seemed like a time of hopelessness is in fact, still full of hope. For all the suffering that is going on everywhere this process is just overwhelmingly deep and I have faith in life and this serves as an antidote to our current predicament. It is so wonderful to have the faith that there is something beyond all the madness that cannot be undone by it and being with it is a source of great inspiration. Thank you for this precious teaching.”

There’s Only Love and Not Knowing It

Below Excerpt from the The Survival Guide to Staying Conscious to get a copy please click here. (Ref Chapter 16)

“…Have you ever seen an ugly snowflake? Since nature is always and everywhere beautiful, I do not posit the fact that it is just a mundane type of consciousness that brings all of this into being. I posit the fact that it is a profoundly intelligent and loving consciousness that underpins our lives. When I look at the world and everything in it, what I see is just love and not knowing it, and that is all there is everywhere. Life as an expression of love, and life as an expression of not knowing that love. It is the pain that we experience when we do not know love that drives us to do all the other things that cause us such suffering. There is no judgement. Not knowing love is only worthy of compassion. There is no other way that you could possibly look upon another being that doesn’t know love.

So perhaps we might reflect upon that: life everywhere is a reflection of either love or not knowing it, and that’s all you’ll see everywhere. When you look out at nature you will see that love expressed all around you. When you see people confused, don’t judge them, they might just not know that love yet, or they might simply have forgotten it. So try to learn to love them to death anyway, whether you can make sense of them or not, and I think in that way the world would be a happier place for it.”

Only Through Surrender Do We Discover The True Nature of Love

Only through surrender do we discover the true nature of love - To surrender our sense of self is the greatest act of courage. To let go of our stable ground and tune in to what is in the background. But that is what we came here for.