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Vajra Diaries: Transforming Love’s Passion into Compassion

     To my love: What is the reason we aren’t together much? Might it be that with all my faults it’s more enjoyable for us mostly being apart and enjoying just wanting to be together? But this is a conclusion, a consideration strictly of my own self-conscious making. It’s necessary we want this friendship to stay connected. It’s necessary to stay connected to be reborn. New relations, new relatives of our conscious choice. This is what creates the joy aspect in our desire, as it arises from a pure, all-accepting consciousness. And this is why we really want to be together. To become more conscious and unconditionally caring. 

     Love then is the joy of wanting to become more compassionate and wise and not having to say we’re sorry for any faults on either side. This brings us to our physicality, which can generate great bliss, which is clarity, which is also consciousness. It’s the glue of our relationship we should never forget to apply. 

     Having looked into it countless times, it’s the need to be reborn, to ‘book’ another womb, that our passionate desire and lusting is all about. All our meetings with desirable mates seems a flurry of connection, conjugation, and aftermath. Three things happening as if in three separate times, while not even one time can be validated, as the past is already gone, the future never to arrive, and the ‘present’ a constant flux, unestablishable, and anything but absolute—a necessity by which to established the other two times. 

     Looking into it in a ‘real time’ of nowness (a Trungpa Rinpoche coinage) ‘own being’ of self or other can’t be established. Images flood our awareness, creating a seeming motion—a commotion. Yet entering the eye of all this whirling busyness, at the center—a pervasive underlying support—all is perfectly still. This is awareness of mind. Deeply observing my own condition now, at the bottom tip of my spine, there’s a nervousness. This seems the source of bodily awareness—if not a mindful concern—and spreads anywhere the mind takes it. This becomes mindfulness of feeling. Asking who or what is feeling, joy arises. Wanting more joy, it becomes nervousness. Not wanting anything, I ask, where did it go? This is the mindfulness of phenomena. Vacuity becomes all and I ask myself, is this vacancy, emptiness, or just a mood? If I touch my body it arouses desire for the joy that is you. But now joy and nervousness arise together. This is mindfulness of body, but with no revelation of its nature, as it is only where a feeling focuses. A single focus, multiple foci, and an attempt to unify them soon becomes once again the mindfulness of mind. Is this mind more than what it’s just attempting to do? This is the all-accomplishing Buddha. Is it more than passionate desire? This is the wisdom of discrimination. Feeling is also a Buddha. So is bodily form, which is space. This is awakening. Is this the Buddha then, just to be awake? Ask yourself who is it that has awoken and you become just that as well.  

     So my love, who are you to me and me to you but ultimately a pair of “anonymous vacuity,” this to quote Nagarjuna on the emptiness of entities. Knowing this, I love you no more than all beings who want happiness, its causes, and not to suffer. Because to love just one is to be just ordinary and suffer the common dissatisfactions. While to love all others, without preference, is to realize our love for each other is extraordinary, an undying aspect of Great Compassion that realizes the equanimous—without attachment and hatred to those near and far. 

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