A person who does not have a heart cannot hate, cannot be angry, cannot be hurt, cannot be jealous. Without love there is no such thing as jealousy, hurt, fear, hatred, or anger. All of these things are reactions to the absence of love, to the blockage of it, to the non-perceiving of it. To be aware of the real relationship means that there is always awareness of love. This never goes, in any relationship. There is always the lovingness, and love has understanding in it. Love has forgiveness and acceptance in it. Love has compassion, appreciation, pleasure, happiness, strength, and gratitude. All these are elements of love, and it is there all the time; it is part of our nature. The courageous heart is the heart that is always present, regardless of what happens. If your heart is present only if good things happen, your heart is not yet free, not actualized. You are still a coward, still afraid. You have a heart, but not yet a courageous heart. So to have a true relationship, a real relationship, means to manifest the courageous heart.

In fact, to have a courageous heart means you are able to be inwardly alone and independent. There is no true autonomy without a courageous heart. And there is no courageous heart without true autonomy. To have a courageous heart means to continue loving in spite of the situation, which means your heart is really autonomous. You have achieved the aloneness of the heart. It does not mean you are weak or relinquishing anything. It does not mean you are being exploited. It does not mean you are a dupe. I am saying all this because that is how most people see it: If someone has done something bad to you, you feel that you shouldn’t love them, that you are dumb if you do. No, you are being courageous. I am not talking about continuing to love someone and letting them walk all over you. No, that is not what I am talking about. That is not love. That is dependency. That is need. I’m talking about real understanding, forgiveness, appreciation, joy, and pleasure. That’s the love I’m talking about. I’m not talking about a situation where there is negativity, the person hates you and exploits you, and you still stick around—that’s not love. You are probably just engaged in the frustrating relationship then, the mental relationship. Real love is courageous, it is strong, it is no bullshit. If someone does something hateful to you, you deal with it with strength, but you do not stop loving. You do not eliminate the good just because there is bad. You do not eliminate what is really there just because there is also something you do not like. So your courage is in being real, and in being real, you are truly courageous to see the other person as who they are, the whole package.

Forgiveness: This is the complete letting go of the past, and the full embracing of the new. It is a freshness, an openness, a new beginning. When there is no Forgiveness, there is an attachment to what has happened in the past. The memory of the past determines what one experiences in the present, and disposes the future towards certain patterns. This eliminates the possibility of essential experience, for Essence is Being, and Being is the Now. We are briefly mentioning some of the subtle aspects like Acceptance and Forgiveness partly to show that they are not emotional states. They are not ego states, for ego is, in its very nature, a rejection of the present and a holding on to the past. All these aspects are necessary for the realization of the Personal Essence.

Each time we try to change something in our experience, we are also trying to preserve something else. For instance, whenever we are trying to improve our experience, we are preserving a certain ideal or goal. By shaping our experience to be a particular way instead of letting it unfold the way it wants to, we are really trying to maintain a certain image of ourselves, an identity that we don’t want to change. Let’s say that a business partner you trusted just cheated you out of a lot of money. If you carry an ideal of being a forgiving person, you probably will make it a goal to forgive your partner. But what if your immediate reaction is anger and hurt, and you are not ready or don’t want to forgive that person? If you force yourself to do it without being with the experiences that are arising in you, you are not being where you are or who you are; you are trying to hold on to a self-image that is not you at this moment. It is true that you could reach a point where forgiveness is authentic, but you don’t need goals and ideals for that to happen. In fact, the insistence on maintaining the self-image of being a forgiving person is likely to delay or maybe even block the natural resolution of your feelings. If your True Nature includes forgiveness, eventually that is what will arise, on its own, when the issues and feelings around the incident are faced consciously.

This is Christ’s message. For me, when we celebrate Christianity, this is what we celebrate. We celebrate that the actual world, including our true nature and our concrete lives, is goodness, is love, is harmony, is peace. Christ is not bringing peace from somewhere else to some spot in the world. Understanding Christ's message, we see that the whole world has the nature of peace, harmony, goodness, and love. We see that the world as a whole is heart. The Buddha saw that the world is mind. Christ saw that mind and said it is made of love. The world is heart. So the whole Universe is revealed as the heart of the Absolute. And that whole Universe as the heart of the Absolute is Christ. And to see the Universe as heart is to see it as harmony, to see it as love, to see it as goodness, to see it as forgiveness, to see it as beauty, to see it as peace.

As we go on, we discover that true understanding requires much more; it requires compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, love, clarity, strength, and will, among other things. Although these aspects of our being are cut off by the patterns of our personality, when we work in the dimension of essence, we begin to see things in terms of the interaction between ego and essence. We see that the work of liberating our essence involves understanding both our ego and our essence. This process ultimately leads us to the actualization of the true self, true individuality, true consciousness, and to the actualization of all the essential aspects.