Self-Awakening: The Foundation of Healing With Love from an interview by Jeffrey Mishlove

Self-Awakening: The Foundation of Healing With Love

Excerpts from an interview by Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Thinking Allowed
series

DR. MISHLOVE: A moment ago at the end of our last segment, you
suggested that love and truth and awareness – pure awareness – are all
the same.

DR. LASKOW: Uh huh.Yes, let me explain what I meant by that. This is
an insight that came through. Love seeks unity. And when love finds the
unity that it seeks, what happens to the love? It ceases because, for
love to exist, there must be that which is loved. In other words, the
essence of love is –

DR. MISHLOVE: Attraction.

DR. LASKOW: Well it is relativity, duality, something between.In
order for attraction to exist, there has to be more than one.

DR. MISHLOVE: Yes.

DR. LASKOW: So love becomes aware of its connection, its attraction,
and desires to merge with it.What happens to the movement of love once
it realizes the object of its love?

DR. MISHLOVE: Well then there is self-love, I would think.

DR. LASKOW: Yes.

DR. MISHLOVE: The is ness of love.

DR. LASKOW: Yes, well when love finds that which is seeks, it merges
with it.And even love disappears into stillness.So stillness is another
metaphor for pure awareness – emptiness, nothingness,
everything/nothing, the ground of being.In the same way, knowing seeks
truth.And when it merges with that which it seeks, it too
disappears.There is only the truth.There is no knowing.There is the
truth.And that is stillness as well.

DR. MISHLOVE: Referring, for example, to the quiet mind of a
meditator.

DR. LASKOW: Exactly, exactly.Of course, I mean, the ultimate seeking
of truth is to become one with source and that which seeks it disappears
into the one.You can do that.There are the known paths to doing that,
the path of the Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga –

DR. MISHLOVE: Uh huh, then yogis of knowledge and the yogis of
devotion.

DR. LASKOW: Exactly.And the karma yogic path of action.And once
you’ve completed your action, there’s only the stillness.The action
disappears.

DR. MISHLOVE: Uh huh.

DR. LASKOW: There is no doer, there is no doing, there is only, as
you said, the “is ness.”So ultimately the paths of truth, the path of
love, and the path of action lead to the same peak – awareness itself,
present awareness.Is ness, stillness.

DR. MISHLOVE: Really, I do concur with you, but I am aware that in
the literature, for example, you have some very eloquent writers, the
existentialists, for example, who talk about the horror of the
stillness, the agony of being totally isolated, totally in nothingness,
you know, Sartre, Camus have all written very powerfully about that
state of nothingness as part of the terror of existential reality.

DR. LASKOW: Yes.And that is because the perception takes place from
the position of the mind, looking at the emptiness.And that is what’s so
beautiful about any self-awakening process.When you shift from the
context of mind to the context of pure awareness, there is just in the
stillness peace.And then you can look back at the discontented mind, the
mind that has a fear that it is nothing.And that’s the truth –

DR. MISHLOVE: The ego or mind is terrified of its own annihilation
and yet that is precisely what the mystic seeks.

DR. LASKOW: That is exactly so.But the key thing is the
misidentification with the body/mind.As long as we’re identifying, which
is I have to say natural to the human condition –

DR. MISHLOVE: Sure.It’s kind of a biological imperative.

DR. LASKOW: Yes. It’s the human condition.We’ve come in here with
this condition and reversing it is part of the evolutional imperative of
spirituality.