Having chosen the path of enlightenment, where have you imprisoned your dark side?
You can meet ascetics dreaming of lavish feasts, monks longing for a family and vegetarians craving meat. Do you think their path is more evolved because they have put labels on themselves and buried their desires deep into the ground? Do you seek to follow their example?
They are being consumed by their hidden lusts because they have not understood the most important thing — they have elevated form over meaning.
You will not get anywhere by running away. You will try to climb to the top of the mountain only because you will want to look at everything from above, not because you cannot bear being in the valley any longer. You will take the heavy rocks in your pack with you, and they will burden you on the way to the top, they will become shackles that block you from taking the next step. You will fall back down because of the baggage inside you.
By denying the opposite of what you called virtue, you have created a civil war within yourself. Like a child playing hide-and-seek, you have covered your eyes and decided that no one can see you. Even if you are calm now, this is calm before the storm. Everything that you have taken such great effort to hide from yourself and others will one day burst forth into the open.
Only by accepting all parts of your soul, by realizing that nothing is inherently good or bad, will you find wholeness.
All these people living within you. How do you deal with them, when one wants to get drunk, another wants to join a monastery, the third wants to dance, and the fourth wants to stop questioning and start afresh? Which one gets the right to speak? Is it the one that receives most appreciation from the people around you?
There are as many personalities within you as there are stars in the sky, and each one of them wants to be the one to live your life.
Accept all of them. Let them live, let them exist. By accepting them, you are allowing them to join forces for a common goal.
By denying the bad in yourself, you are also destroying the good. One cannot exist without the other. You are the one to call something bad and something good, but before it was named, it existed as a whole, originating from the same source. Both what you call good and what you call bad came from the same source.
You can only learn by accepting your ignorance. You can begin to love by admitting your hatred to yourself.
At one point, every true Lover had to accept that he hates everything and everyone including himself, and it was the first step into Love — loving the self, loving the Other, loving all of humanity and loving all that is. Until then, “love” is just an empty word, underneath which hide hatred, selfishness and fear.
Accept your duality, all your darkness and light, and you will gain understanding of who you really are. Don’t fear the silence — within it, you will hear all the truth about yourself. And you will find yourself within, everything in yourself and yourself in everything, merging with it and expanding infinitely…
