Do you remember that Saturday Night Live bit with Eddie Murphy playing Buckwheat (or Buh-weet) from the Little Rascals, all grown up and singing songs from the 80’s? One of the hits on his compilation was ‘Wookin pa nub in all da wong paces…’, that could be the soundtrack for my early life. As early as I can remember, I was looking for love, the problem was, I had no idea where to find it.
So, you listen to society, and society tells you that your ‘other half’ is out there somewhere, your soulmate, two halves that make a whole. Your job, is to find that soulmate and hopefully, you’ll both realize it and connect, and live happily ever after. And so you go along, meet fantastic people, but all the while, you’re asking yourself ‘is she the one?’ And doubt creeps in. What if she’s not the one, and I miss ‘the one’ because I’m involved with this other person? So, you keep one eye peeled, while you hold hands with your sweetheart.
One day, I actually found true love, but it came from a totally different direction than I’d ever expected. I’d recently taken up mediation, because my search for love was not panning out, and I reasoned that I really didn’t know myself well enough to know where to look for love. So, one day, a rare day off, I woke up early and had time for a solid meditation. After the meditation, I was in a pretty bright and happy state of mind, when a friend called and asked if I wanted to take a road-trip. She wanted to talk to a friend about meditation, and she thought that my perspective as a person new to meditation might be of interest to her friend. So, we drove a couple of hours, took her friend to lunch, had a great conversation, then we left, spent a couple of hours walking and meditating on a fantastic beach, then hopped in the car for a long ride home.
Traffic was bad, so, she popped in a self-discovery lecture tape called Insights of Love, and we listened to the talk as we drove. The thesis of the talk was that what most people think of as love, is really a lower form of love. A form of love based on mutual attachment, conditions. True love was unconditional. True love wasn’t based in duality… meaning that there was someone ‘out there’ that you loved, and that they loved you. True love was a state of mind; a level of awareness. If you attained that level of awareness, then you loved, period. You didn’t love anything in particular, you just loved. You loved all things equally, because you sensed how all things were connected.
As I listened to the talk, I felt this strange tingling in the center of my chest, what I now know to be the heart chakra. The tingling got stronger and stronger, and was sort of pulsating. I imagined a rosebud, starting to bloom, and with every pulse, the bloom grew larger and larger. My friend looked over from the driver’s seat and said ‘whoa, if you could see the amount of light streaming out of you right now, you would be amazed…’, but I didn’t need to see anything, I was feeling it. I was feeling exactly what the speaker was talking about. My level of consciousness was rising to a level of Love. In that level, I just felt Love. Not for anyone in particular; actually, you could say I felt love for everyone and all things equally.
In that moment, I had found ‘nub’ (love) in the most unexpected place. Inside of myself. It wasn’t dependent upon anyone else, outside of myself. But it was the highest, most pristine love I’d ever experienced in my life.
It was a life-changing experience. Because I then knew, that the love we are always looking for, it is right inside of us. Yes, we can meet people and love them completely, but that feeling that tops all feelings, that thing that we’re frantically looking for all of our lives… that’s right here; right in the center of our chest. Meditation can help you to find that place. And, if you can open up to it, well then you can stay out of ‘all the wong paces…’
Urban Sannyasin 