The Mastery Of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship

X Seeing With Eyes of Love

IF YOU LOOK AT YOUR BODY, YOU WILL FIND billions of living beings who depend on you. Every cell in your body is a living being that depends on you. You are responsible for all of those beings. For all those living beings that are your cells, you are God. You can provide what they need; you can love all those living beings, or you can be so mean to them.

The cells in your body are completely loyal to you; they work for you in harmony. We can even say they pray to you. You are their God. That is absolutely the truth. Now what are you going to do with this knowledge?

Remember, the whole forest was in complete harmony with Artemis. When Artemis fell, she lost respect for the whole forest. When she recovered her awareness, Artemis went from flower to flower to say, "I am sorry; now I will take care of you again." And the relationship between Artemis and the forest became a love relationship again.

The whole forest is your body, and if you just acknowledge this truth, you will say to your body, "I am sorry; now I will take care of you again." The relationship between you and your body, between you and all those living cells that depend on you, can become the most beautiful relationship. Your body and all those living cells are perfect in their half of the relationship, just like the dog is perfect in its half. The other half is your mind. Your body takes care of its half of the relationship, but the mind is the one that abuses the body, that mistreats the body, that gets so mean with the body.

Just look at the way you treat your cat or your dog. If you can treat your body the same way you treat your pet, you will you see that it's about love. Your body is willing to receive all the love from the mind, but the mind says, "No, I don't like this part of my body. Look at my nose; I don't like my nose. My ears – they are too large. My body is too fat. My legs are too short." The mind can imagine all kinds of things about the body.

Your body is perfect the way it is, but we have all those concepts about right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. These are just concepts, but we believe them, and that's the problem. With the image of perfection we have in our mind, we expect our body to look a certain way, to act a certain way. We reject our own body when the body is completely loyal to us. Even when our body can't do something because of its limitations, we push our body and our body at least tries.

Look at what you do with your own body. If you reject your own body, what can other people expect from you? If you accept your own body, you can accept almost everyone, almost everything. This is a very important point when it comes to the art of relationship. The relationship you have with yourself is reflected in your relationships with others. If you reject your own body, when you are sharing your love with your partner, you become shy. You think, "Look at my body. How can he love me when I have a body like this?" Then you reject yourself and make the assumption that the other person will reject you for the same thing you reject in yourself. And when you reject someone else, you reject him for the same things you reject in yourself.

To create a relationship that takes you all the way to heaven, you have to accept your body completely. You have to love your body and allow your body to be free to just be, to be free to give, free to receive, without being shy, because "shy" is nothing but fear.

Imagine how you see your pet dog. You see the dog with eyes of love and you enjoy the beauty of that dog. It doesn't make any difference whether that dog is beautiful or ugly. You can go into ecstasy just seeing the beauty of that dog, because it's not about possessing beauty. Beauty is just a concept we learned.

Do you think a turtle or a frog is ugly? You can see a frog, and the frog is beautiful; it's gorgeous. You can see a turtle, and it's beautiful. Everything that exists is beautiful -everything. But you think, "Oh, that is ugly," because someone made you believe what is ugly and what is beautiful, just as someone made you believe what is good and what is bad.

There's no problem at all with being beautiful or ugly, short or tall, thin or heavy. There's no problem with being gorgeous. If you walk through a crowd of people, and they tell you, "Oh, you are beautiful," you can say, "Thank you, I know," and keep going. It doesn't make any difference to you. But it will make a difference to you if you don't believe you are beautiful and someone tells you that. Then you are going to say, "Am I really?" This opinion can impress you, and, of course, that makes you easy prey.

This opinion is what you think you need, because you believe you are not beautiful. Remember the story of the Magical Kitchen? If you have all the food you need, and someone asks you to let him control you for food, you say, "No, thank you." If you wish to be beautiful, but you don't believe you are, and someone says, "I will always tell you how beautiful you are if you just let me control you," you will say, "Oh yes, please tell me I'm beautiful." You are going to allow that to happen because you think you need that opinion.

What is important are not all those opinions from others, but your own opinions. You are beautiful no matter what your mind tells you. That is a fact. You don't have to do anything because you already have all the beauty you need. To be beautiful you don't have any obligation to anyone. Others are free to see whatever they want to see. If others see you and judge you beautiful or not, if you are aware of your own beauty and accept your own beauty, their opinion doesn't affect you at all.

Perhaps you grew up believing that you are unattractive and you envy beauty in others. Then to justify the envy, you tell yourself, "I don't want to be beautiful." You may even have a fear of being beautiful. This fear can come from many directions, and it's not the same for everyone, but often it is the fear of your own power. Women who are beautiful have power over men, and not just over men, but over women. Other women who are not as beautiful as you are, may envy you because you attract the attention of men. If you dress a certain way and all the men are crazy about you, what are the women going to say about you? "Oh, she's a loose woman." You become afraid of all those judgments people have about you. This is nothing but concepts again, nothing but false beliefs that open wounds in the emotional body. Then, of course we have to cover these wounds with lies and denial systems.

Envy is also a belief that can easily be broken with awareness. You can learn to deal with the envy of other women or other men because the truth is that each of you is beautiful. The only difference between the beauty of one person and the beauty of another is the concept of beauty that people have.

Beauty is nothing but a concept, nothing but a belief, but you can believe in that concept of beauty, and base all your power on that beauty. Time passes, and you see you are getting old. Perhaps you are not as beautiful as you were from your point of view, and a younger woman comes along who is now the one who is beautiful. Time for plastic surgery, to try to keep the power because we believe that our beauty is our power. Our own aging starts to hurt us. "Oh my god, my beauty is going away. Will my man still love me if I am not as attractive? Now he can see other women who are more attractive than me."

We resist aging; we believe that because someone is old, it means she is not beautiful. This belief is completely wrong. If you see a newborn baby, it is beautiful. Well, an old person is also beautiful. The problem is the emotion we have in our eyes to perceive what is and what is not beautiful. We have all these judgments, all these programs that put limits on our own happiness, that push us to self-rejection and to reject other people also. Can you see how we play the drama, how we set ourselves up to fail with all these beliefs?

Aging is something beautiful, just as growing up is beautiful. We grow from a child, to a teenager, to a young woman or a young man. It is beautiful. To become an old woman or an old man is also beautiful. In the life of humans, there are certain years when we actively reproduce. During those years, we may want to be sexually attractive, because nature makes us that way. After that, we don't have to be sexually attractive from that point of view, but it does not mean we are not beautiful.

You are what you believe you are. There is nothing to do except to be just what you are. You have the right to feel beautiful and enjoy it. You can honor your body and accept it as it is. You don't need anyone to love you. Love comes from the inside. It lives inside us and is always there, but with that wall of fog, we don't feel it. You can only perceive the beauty that lives outside you when you feel the beauty that lives inside you.

You have a belief about what is beautiful and what is ugly, and if you don't like yourself, you can change your belief and your life will change. It sounds simple, but it isn't easy. Whoever controls the belief, controls the dream. When the dreamer finally controls the dream, the dream can become a masterpiece of art.

You can begin by doing a puja for your body every day. In India, people perform pujas, or rituals, for the different Gods and Goddesses. In the puja, they bow to the idol, they put flowers near the idol, and they feed the idol with all their love, because these statues represent God. Every day, you can offer a devotional love to your own body. When you take a shower, when you take a bath, treat your body with all your love, treat your body with honor, with gratitude, with respect. When you eat, take a bite, close your eyes, and enjoy the food. That food is an offering to your own body, to the temple where God lives. Do this every day, and you will feel your love for your body growing stronger each day, and you will never again reject yourself.

Just imagine how you will feel the day you adore your own body. When you accept yourself completely, you will feel so good about your own body, and you are going to be so happy. Then when you relate with someone else, your limit of self-abuse is almost zero. This is self-love. This is not personal importance because you treat others with the same love, the same honor, the same respect, and the same gratitude you use with yourself. Can you see the perfection in a relationship like that? It's about honoring the God inside each other.

When you make it your goal to create the perfect relationship between you and your body, you are learning to have a perfect relationship with anyone you are with, including your mother, your friends, your lover, your children, your dog. When you have the perfect relationship between you and your body, in that moment your half of any relationship outside you is completely fulfilled. You no longer depend upon the success of a relationship from the outside.

When you do a puja with your own body, when you know how to have that devotion for your own body, and you touch your lover's body, you touch it with the same devotion, the same love, the same honor, the same gratitude. And when your lover touches your body, it's completely open; there is no fear, there is no need – it is full of love.

Imagine all the possibilities in sharing your love this way. You don't even need to touch. Just looking into each other's eyes is enough to fulfill the needs of the mind and the needs of the soul. The body is already satisfied because it has all your love. You are never lonely anymore, because you are fulfilled with your own love.

Wherever you turn your face, you will be fulfilled by love, but not from other humans. You can see a tree and feel all the love coming from the tree to you. You can see the sky, and it's going to fulfill the needs of your mind for love. You will see God everywhere, and it will no longer be just a theory. God is everywhere. Life is everywhere.

Everything is made by Love, by Life. Even fear is a reflection of love, but fear exists in the mind, and in humans, that fear controls the mind. Then we interpret everything according to what we have in our mind. If we have fear, what we perceive will be analyzed with fear. If we are mad, what we perceive will be perceived according to anger. Our emotions act like a filter through which we see the rest of the world.

You could say that the eyes are an expression of what you feel. You perceive the outside Dream according to your eyes. When you are angry, you see the world with eyes of anger. If you have eyes of jealousy, your reactions will be different, because the way you see the world is through jealousy. When you have the eyes of madness, everything will bother you. If you have the eyes of sadness, you are going to cry because it's raining, because there is noise, because of everything. Rain is rain. There is nothing to judge or interpret, but you are going to see the rain according to your emotional body. If you are sad, you see with the eyes of sadness, and everything you perceive will be sad.

But if you have the eyes of love, you just see love wherever you go. The trees are made with love. The animals are made with love. The water is made with love. When you perceive with the eyes of love, you can connect your will with the will of another dreamer, and the dream becomes one. When you perceive with love, you become one with the birds, with nature, with a person, with everything. Then you can see with the eyes of an eagle or transform into any kind of life. With your love you connect with the eagle and you become the wings, or you become the rain, or the clouds. But to do this, you need to clean the mind of fear and perceive with eyes of love. You have to develop your will until it is so strong that it can hook the other will and become one will. Then you have wings to fly. Or being the wind, you can come here, you can go there, you can push away the clouds and the sun is shining. This is the power of love.

When we fulfill the needs of our mind and our body, our eyes see with love. We see God everywhere. We even see God behind the Parasite of other people.

Inside every human is the Promised Land that Moses promised his people. That Promised Land is in the realm of the human mind, but only the mind that is fertile for Love, because that is where God lives. If you see the ordinary human mind, it is also a fertile land, but for the Parasite that grows the seeds of envy, anger, jealousy, and fear.

In the Christian tradition, you hear of Gabriel coming with the trumpet for the Resurrection, and everyone comes out of his grave to live the Eternal Life. That grave is the Parasite and the Resurrection is the return to Life, because you are alive only when your eyes can see Life, which is Love.

You can have a relationship that fulfills your dream of Heaven; you can create a Paradise, but you have to begin with you. Begin with complete acceptance of your body. Hunt the Parasite, and make it surrender. Then the mind will love your body and will no longer sabotage your love. It's up to you; it's not up to anyone else. But first, you are going to learn how to heal your emotional body.