A kiss is a transfer of energy; it’s a transfer of life. A meeting of Self to Self, consciousness to consciousness, heart to heart, core to core. It’s a meeting of equals.
Self-Love and the Open Heart
This series of newsletters has taken us into some of the deepest and most raw and uncomfortable places inside ourselves, the ones we often try to avoid. The point of this inquiry is self-love and the open heart. Finally, at the core, it is all about heart opening.
It’s impossible to be loving to anyone else if your heart is closed to yourself. And you are probably the last person you want to open your heart to because you know the horror that’s in there. You know the abuse that’s been perpetrated. You know how you’ve corrupted the truth, sold yourself out, and betrayed what you know in your heart of hearts.
Every inquiry in this course has been pointing you and inviting you inside to meet what is not wanted to be met—self-hatred. Self-hatred is our ultimate defect. We hate ourselves for the raw fact that we perceive ourselves to be separate from God, from goodness, a human being with all our human failures. We hate ourselves for our ignorance, for our behaviors, and especially for the way we treat one another. This is what has to be met because it is at the root of our unnecessary suffering, the continuation of the horror of the human condition. We are at war with self-hatred, and we project that war onto whoever mirrors it most closely.
Are you willing, once again, to experience this self-hatred—not just the edge of it, but all the way into it? I can tell you that, miraculously, you will find self-love. And self-love is capable of embracing anything and everything, however tainted or unwanted.
Self-love is whole. Self-hate is fragmented and shattered. No matter how much work you do to put the pieces back together, they just won’t fit. It is your great good luck that they don’t fit. It was my great good luck that they didn’t fit. Most people, with enough glue and string, patch everything up and coast through life. But that is not what you’ve chosen, or you wouldn’t be reading this.
Kissing the Toad
We’ve hated and cursed our self-hatred and tried to get rid of it, cover it, or dress it up. In Australia, they actually dress up the really big cane toads that can be as large as dinner plates. People put little scarves on them to dress them up. But underneath, it is still a cane toad. If you squeeze it, it’s poisonous. But if you kiss it, that’s a different matter.
In the ordinary, not-born-enlightened human being, there is a toad that’s repulsive, poisonous, and ugly that must be kissed to awaken from a dream. That is a kiss that is endless… When the ugliness is met and kissed and embraced all the way, it is news that’s unbelievable, endless, and all-inclusive.
Love Is Not Just a Four-Letter Word
We have great examples like Christ or Buddha who have gone before, but it finally gets down to you. When Papaji sent me to bring you his message, he was thrilled that it would be passed on in Western vernacular language. So we are speaking to one another as brothers and sisters in the same boat, the same earth boat.
But the word “love” can seem like such a paltry word: L-O-V-E, like Bob Dylan’s song, “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word.” It has become polluted.
It is only really love itself that can clean up such pollution, the polluted-ness of our souls, of our lifetimes, of our genetic strains, the history of humankind. All of that can only be cured by love. And that can happen for you, in your lifetime.
We are here to discover what’s here inside each of us regardless of anything else, to kiss that and to be embraced by what’s waiting from that kiss. Deeper, always deeper, always closer, always unexpected, is love.
If you are reading this, it’s time. It’s your time. Your name has been called. What supreme luck! And it is the supreme challenge of a lifetime. It is a divine call of Grace, and it can be rough at times, but that reveals deeper grace. I promise you that. I guarantee it.
“In the core of the horror of self-hatred is the absolute truth of self-love, the grace of truth.”
