“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty. It is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.” ~ Mother Theresa
Yes, this is true. The challenge is to finally accept that ‘loneliness’ can only be relieved by falling in Love with the Self. If I loved the one I am alone with, I would never be lonely. The ‘hunger for love’ cannot be satisfied by anyone or anything from the outside, even though, briefly, I may well have that experience. In the long run, it will never work. The ego’s shabby substitutes – i.e. ‘patriotism’, ‘membership’, even ‘marriage’- may bring a short lived illusion of joining, or Oneness, but it cannot be sustained because each is a frantic attempt to create Oneness in separation. Our hunger for love IS the hunger for God. It is the hunger of an unconditional experience of Oneness. Love, Diederik
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AuthorsDiederik Wolsak is program director at Choose Again Archives
September 2017
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