One day in India on my second stay, Maharaji said to me, “You don’t have
to change anybody; you just have to love them”. In relationships, when
the other person doesn’t fit into your model of how heaven would be, you
don’t have to play God. You just have to love individual differences
and appreciate them the way they are. Because love is the most powerful
medicine.
The key is that you aren’t even doing it manipulatively: “I love you,
now change.” You’re looking at another being, just the way they are, and
saying, “Let me appreciate God’s perfection.” You lost the key? Great.
You forgot to pick up the laundry? Right. If each of us is separate,
and yet each of us is part of the whole, but we got lost a little bit
into dualism and we’re finding our way back out, every time we’re in the
presence of unconditional love, we remember. And when we remember, we
open. And when we open, the light pours through us.
If you became a person who could love unconditionally, everyone you love
would flower before your very eyes. Every way you look would be light.
That’s one of the fringe benefits of this method. It’s breathtaking. At
every level.
- Ram Dass -
