The Spiritual Life - Awakening to what Love would have me do.

The Spiritual Life - Topic Seven

What would Love have me do?

From Maturity: The Responsibility For Being Oneself by Osho

In the second birth he is going to gain what was available in the first birth, but the society, the parents, the people surrounding him crushed it, destroyed it. Every child is being stuffed with knowledge. His simplicity has to be somehow removed, because simplicity is not going to help him in this competitive world. His simplicity will look to the world as if he is a simpleton; his innocence will be exploited in every possible way. Afraid of the society, afraid of the world we ourselves have created, we try to make every child be clever, cunning, knowledgeable—to be in the category of the powerful, not in the category of the oppressed and the powerless. xii

This is the original sin, the socialization by society. It is necessary for human functioning, but it destroys innocence. Socialization obliterates any memory of the Divine essence from which we have come.

The irony is that we don’t even know that we have forgotten our natural inheritance. It is this lack of memory and experience of our natural inheritance which the mystical traditions call “sleep.” The mystics teach that people need to be awakened from this sleep, this dream world that their socialization and conditioning has encumbered them with.

Plato’s allegory of the cave explains the idea well.

Waking up from this lack of memory and awareness can be gradual or sudden. It can be episodic or less likely continuous. Waking up takes us to the sixth stage of spiritual development in Fowler’s model which is cosmic consciousness.

Osho teaches that the way to this awakening is meditation. The first step in this awakening is just knowing what you don’t know and remembering that the socialization and conditioning on the ego plane is not real. It is illusory, impermanent, and will never provide the peace and bliss that we humans yearn for.

In twelve step programs in the third step, a practitioner is encouraged  to “make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.” This third step is the willingness and decision to surrender our ego and enter onto the path of the Spirit. It is a willingness and decision than can transform our lives. This practice is as simple as asking ourselves 100 times a day, “What would Love have me do?”