Love & Wisdom - 10.27.09

“Love without wisdom is inadequate,” as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” But, “Equally, wisdom without love is absolutely futile, and we know so many philosophers who have a great . . . capacity to think, but they can’t love their way out of a paper bag. And thinking alone won’t get you out of the box of the ego; the two must be integrated.” Likewise, there are also two manifestations of love in action. Karma yoga is the essence of love in action, “to act without greed, possessiveness, the desire for some ulterior agenda to be fulfilled by the ego, then that will be able to unravel the ego’s knots and unwillingness to love. The second one is community because it’s not just a matter of ‘What do I do,’ but the real test is can I help form a communion of love with other human beings—cause that’s the ultimate test isn’t it? Can we live together in love?”

Without love, as modern society has proven, things fall apart. But we need wisdom to “recognize that the source of what is unloving in ourselves is the ego. So the first step of wisdom is the realization that ‘I must disidentify from the ego.’ . . . And because we have come to live in a world of representations, of symbols and language—rather than in the feeling and in the essence of our innermost being—we have lost touch with that, and we have deceived ourselves into thinking, ‘Oh I can just talk the game, I don’t have to really walk it.’ So with the wisdom to form the talk, and the love to “Walk the talk,” we can live in harmony with ourselves and with those around us. Recorded the afternoon of Tuesday, October 27, 2009.