How much I love the Beloved
- Feb 6
- 3 min read
How much I love the Beloved
[An excerpt from our friend Sergio Antonio’s new book, A Map to Awakening.]
I have often heard distance cited as a factor that makes relationships impossible: "He lives fifty miles away, how could we be together?" This sentence misses an important postulate: how could we be together without changing our life habits, such as traveling more or changing residence, job?
It then happens that the beloved is two thousand, five thousand miles away, and yet, in the presence of a willingness to change one's life circumstances, the relationship becomes possible. One moves, changes jobs, abandons what is less important to embrace the more important.
Sometimes it is a simple lack of clarity of vision that prevents us from dropping the old to embrace the new, exchanging the known for the unknown. It may be that we do not know what ensnares us: if we have not learned to shed light on our habits and their causes, it will seem impossible for us to change -- like those people who were born in a country that, however lacking in attractions and opportunities, is all they know and from whose food, landscape, climate, people, impressions, smells, they cannot conceive of detaching themselves. It can also happen to travelers who are willing to move, but for whom no food is good except that of home, no culture is as deep as their own, no landscape equals the view of the courtyard in front of their window. On the one hand, we can say that they have moved with the body, but the dominant I’s have remained at home; on the other, that certain home experiences that are able to bring them into a state of essence do not find easy correspondence in foreign habits, which are instead learned from the personality side, a side that can never match in intensity the meatballs the way mom makes them or the profile of that particular mountain where we grew up. Yet, how useful is this clashing with what is different! This alone can make us perceive, when faced with habits that are foreign and absurd to us, how equally absurd our own are. The real journey is a change of point of view - which in turn leads to an important realization: any point of view can be changed; we can use the way we look at things instead of being dominated by them.
We are identified with habits on which we have not shed light; we can then be identified with other aspects that instead we have illuminated -- but from which we cannot separate ourselves because of stubborn identification.
These obstacles, real or imagined, are the measure of how much we love the Beloved, the price we are willing to pay to join Him. Almost always the price we have to pay is made up of attitudes, habits, identifications, fear or narrow-mindedness that prevent us from seeing the wealth of options that lay before us like a landscape. Every time we give up an identification a range of possibilities magically opens up.
In the tradition of Persian poetry, the Beloved symbolizes Higher Centers. These are never far away: it is the state of the I’s in which we come to be more or less distant from them. But, giving up the identification of the moment or our lazy attachment to a dreamy state of imagination where we can believe we are what we want, that connection becomes accessible immediately, in the blink of an eye. What are we willing to sacrifice to cover that distance?
Sergio Antonio’s "A Map to Awakening” is available from Amazon, at this link:
Feast of the Gods, Giovanni Bellini and Titian
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