Love Thy Neighbour
Dear All,
I share these words with you in love, in the hope that they may serve as a loving and gentle reminder to remember what is truly important in life, in your life.
The following written work is a work of a rather personal nature, although all my works are personal to the extent that they attempt to start from personal experience, this story is charged with a large anecdotal slant which tells about a vulnerable process that I have been able to go through in recent years. The title may evoke recognition for those who are familiar with the Christian tradition, the well-known statement “Love Thy Neighbour” is rooted in everyone who feels attracted to the teachings of this tradition. Although I will conclude this piece with the deeper invitation and especially universal application of this statement, I want to start the story at the beginning, namely with the ability to love your neighbour, or in my case the story of how I learned to love my own neighbours.
Years ago my wife and I found ourselves in a new destination, after years of wandering the country and living in different places, it felt necessary to pause our wanderings and put down roots in a place where we could stay longer. So it happened that, through a wonderful combination of circumstances, we arrived at the place where we had the pleasure of living simply with several like-minded people. This was by no means an intentionally set up community, in fact, it happened almost “by accident” that a very conscious target group of people showed up at this place in a short period of time without there seeming to be any reason for it, people seemed to find their way to this place naturally. It is one of the miracles of life how these kinds of events continue to happen when you live from what is intuitively dictated and you dare to open yourself to unknown paths. Of all the people we had the pleasure of sharing the joy of this place with, there are two people in particular that this story is about, or rather, two people to whom I owe my gratitude for enabling me to learn important lessons in my quest for a life of love; namely the people who came to live next door to us and who would become our neighbours for years to come. It didn't take much time to discover what wonderful people we came to live with. Both were joyful, attentive and extremely warm-hearted, overflowing with a kind of ‘joie de vivre’ for the smallest of moments as well as a lust for the greatest adventures. He had designed his own Tiny-House without any previous experience and built it entirely by hand in just a few weeks. A few months later he left our home in the Netherlands to cycle all the way to China and then two years later, a few days after their wedding, walked from this same home to the North Cape with their dog. Years before, she had already crossed New Zealand on foot and had experimented with living without money. So I mean it when I say that these are quite exceptional people, people who have done everything they can to bring about the change that they feel is needed in the world without ever imposing it on anyone else, simply through their own optimism they know how to inspire people to make new choices.
“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
From the moment we moved in they made every effort to get to know us and it took no time at all to see what wonderful people we were living next to. But, still, I was unable to see it fully, yes, I could perceive it but I was unable to meet them in the same generosity as they extended it to me. Time and again, when they invited us for a spontaneous meeting, such as joining them for lunch, a sporadic cup of tea or an evening around the campfire, I experienced resistance. This kept repeating itself, many invitations followed but I was unable to see beyond my own resistance to what was really happening and to respond to the warm gesture that was being shared. Stories and thoughts started to form in an unconscious attempt to avoid having to witness my own inability and so, so the projections began. Every time I saw them, I was confronted with my own inability to open my heart to the same extent that they could. They were able to open themselves so openly to the other and this aroused resistance in me, only because I could not manage it and so I convinced myself that we had nothing in common and that it was simply not possible to connect with each other. So it was better to just leave each other alone. This is where I made things very difficult for myself for far too long as the projections became a kind of "security software" for the ego to avoid confronting myself. It took a long time before I could see how strong my own projections were, because the stories had become so convincing that they formed a barricade around my heart that seemed to get worse over time. Until, until a very special "intervention" occurred that fundamentally changed the course of our relationship.
At the end of last year (2023) I was going to work at a retreat during New Year's Eve and my neighbour asked me with great enthusiasm about this specific retreat and eventually decided to participate. Over the weekend, on New Year's Eve after all, something magical happened. The day's program was over and part of the group was still sitting in the ceremonial room after enjoying a beautiful day when my neighbour walked past. I said goodbye to her and she knelt down next to me, instead of an everyday chat we looked deeply into each other's eyes, not in the way we said goodbye every day nor in a way in which the gaze could still be clouded by projections. No, our eyes managed to reach beyond everything that could ever prevent us from meeting each other fully and truly. Beyond the person, beyond the concepts and constructions, beyond our carefully maintained ideas with which we identify ourselves, there, in that moment we knew how to really meet each other for the first time. The many stories that were woven like chains around my heart broke and my heart burst open, everything that I had not managed to do until then suddenly seemed so obvious. It turned out to be a turning point in my life, in the following months I experienced how the relationship between me and our neighbours had completely changed, that I no longer projected or experienced discomfort but that I could approach them with the same joy and openness. In this entire process I have been able to experience the power of a true encounter and how it is able to shine through all (self-created) barriers, obstacles and stories, like bright sunlight on a rainy day bursting through the clouds.
“Gradually, as our perspective deepens, we begin to experience our own lives in the context of a wider purpose. We begin to look at all our melodramas and our desires and our sufferings, and instead of seeing them as events happening within a lifetime bounded by birth and death, we begin experiencing them as part of a much vaster design. We begin to appreciate that there is a wider frame around our lives, within which our particular incarnation is happening.”
What I describe above is not really a personal story, yes, the specific details belong to the story that I experience as “my life” but seen from a larger overarching perspective this is an illustration of the way in which life has arranged the development process of all life. Not only in the human domain but in all regions of life, life provides exactly those circumstances and experiences at exactly that moment when a specific part needs to be learned for the benefit of its growth and thus the continued growth of all life. For us humans, if we can start to view ourselves as life itself, then we can also see the process of our lives as an integral expression that serves the total further development of all life. The extent of our individual growth depends on the extent to which we can recognise our events and experiences as lessons that come to us instead of as random circumstances that happen to us by chance. For me this has been a precious learning process, one that took me many months to understand, but I feel immensely grateful that I was able to experience it and that, in a cosmic wink, my greatest teachers have been living next door to me all this time, disguised as neighbours. Looking back on this process, I see how we can make it so difficult for ourselves, how our projections are like the projector on which the theater play of life is played and we absorb these stories as if it were a dramatic movie. We seem to be completely absorbed in what we tell ourselves without being aware that we ourselves are building the wall around our hearts, but the invitation that has been sent to us by all the great saints, teachers and mystics throughout the ages is to learn what it means to live in love. That is not a feature film, not a play nor an imaginative projection but a timeless invitation that connects us with the true essence of being (human).
As promised, this brings me to the title, because literally learning to love my neighbours served as a reminder of the same learning process that all great traditions aim for. The well-known teaching of Yeshua (whom we have come to know by the Greek name ‘Jesus’) in turn cited this text in reference to the Old Testament in order to go beyond the apparent moral implication and thereby gave insight into a much deeper reality, into the nature of existence. My understanding is that when he referred to “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ” he spoke this from the inner place from which it can be perceived that fundamentally nothing can be pointed out, no one can be met and nothing can be experienced that does not deeply belong to the same essence as yourself or, that nothing does not belong to “the Self”. The Self is therefore not "yourself", it has nothing to do with an individual self from which you are accustomed to perceive life. It is the point of awareness that precedes all, before any personal construct develops or springs forth. It speaks to the deepest nature of who, or rather, what "you" really are. This teaching in its original form (in the Old Testament) was merely a moral commandment but in the deeper (non-dualistic) view — the point of awareness from which Yeshua spoke — it points to the importance of being able to see through the illusion in which we are literally born and inevitably find ourselves; the illusion that makes us believe in the identification of a separate 'I' and the subsequent action that arises from the attachment to wanting to maintain this belief. Learning to “love your neighbour” is merely the gate that can lead to deeper insight, it is the journey in which we are given the opportunity to purify the heart of everything that prevents us from perceiving life in this way. The great Sufi poet Rumi puts it similarly when he says “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion — and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.”
Dear friend, that is quite something to conclude this seemingly personal account with, isn't it? As you can read, I consciously try to devote my life almost exclusively to this learning process and yet, I often fail to do so. It is an enormously complex process to understand the densified human condition, but it is possible and certainly not limited to the prophets or saints that the world has known, in fact, that is what we are “doing” here together. Living through the human experience is fundamentally an opportunity to further develop into that greater potential, in that memory of which we are fundamentally not orphaned. We have only temporarily forgotten it, blinded by the many stories, concepts and ideas in which we are raised, but the life of everyone is the path to remembering what we really are. And that, that is ultimately what my dear neighbors have helped me to remember.
In love and reverence, sven
