AND IF YOUR HAND CAUSES YOU TO SIN, CUT IT OFF, IT IS BETTER TO ENTER LIFE MAIMED THAN WITH TWO HANDS TO GO TO HELL . . . AND IF YOUR EYE CAUSES YOU TO SIN, PLUCK IT OUT; IT IS BETTER FOR YOU TO ENTER THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITH ONE EYE THAN WITH TWO EYES TO BE THROWN INTO HELL. —MARK 9:43ff.
When you deal with blind people it dawns on you that they are attuned to realities that you have no idea of. Their sensitivity to the world of touch and smell and taste and sound is such, as to make the rest of us seem like dull clods. We pity persons who have lost their sight but rarely take into account the enrichment that their other senses offer them. It is a pity that those riches are bought at the heavy price of blindness and it is quite conceivable that we could be as alive and finely attuned to the world as blind people are without the loss of our eyes. But it is not possible, not even conceivable, that you would ever awaken to the world of love unless you pluck out, chop off, those parts of your psychological being that are called Attachments.
If you refuse to do this you will miss the experience of love, you miss the only thing that gives meaning to human existence. For love is the passport to abiding joy and peace and freedom. There is only one thing that blocks out entry into that world and the name of that thing is Attachment. It is produced by the lusting eye that excites craving within the heart and by the grasping hand that reaches out to hold, possess and make one’s own, and refuses to let go. It is this eye that must be gouged out, this hand that must be cut off if love is to be born. With those mutilated stumps for hands you can grasp nothing anymore. With those empty sockets for eyes you suddenly become sensitive to realities whose existence you have never suspected.
Now at last you can love, till now all you had was a certain good-heartedness and benevolence, a sympathy and concern for others, which you mistakenly took for love but has as little in common with love, as a flickering candle flame has with the light of the sun.
What is love? It is sensitivity to every portion of reality within you and without, together with a wholehearted response to that reality. Sometimes you will embrace that reality, sometimes you will attack it, sometimes you will ignore it and at others you will give it your fullest attention, but always you will respond not from need but from sensitivity.
And what is an attachment? A need, a clinging that blunts your sensitivity, a drug that clouds your perception. That is why as long as you have the slightest attachment for anything or any person, love cannot be born. For love is sensitivity, and sensitivity that is impaired even in the slightest degree is sensitivity destroyed. Just as the malfunctioning of one essential piece of a radar set distorts reception, and distorts your response to what you perceive.
There is no such thing as defective love, or deficient love, or partial love. Love like sensitivity either is in all its fullness or it simply is not. You either have it whole or you have it not. So it is only when attachments disappear that one enters the boundless realm of spiritual freedom called love. One is now released to see and to respond. But you must not confound this freedom with the indifference of those who have never passed through the stage of attachment. How could you pluck out an eye or amputate a hand that you do not have? This indifference that so many people mistake for love (because they are attached to no one, they think that they love everyone) is not sensitivity, but a hardening of the heart that has come about from rejection or disillusionment or the practice of renunciation.
No, one must brave the stormy seas of attachments if one has to arrive at the land of love. Some people never having set sail have convinced themselves that they have arrived. One must be able-bodied and clear-sighted before the sword can do its work and the world of love can arise in one’s awareness; and make no mistake; this is only achieved through violence. It is only the violent who carry off the kingdom.
Why the violence? Because left to its own devices life would never produce love, it would only lead you to attraction, from attraction to pleasure, then to attachment, to satisfaction, which finally leads to wearisomeness and boredom. Then comes a plateau. Then once again the weary cycle: attraction, pleasure, attachment, fulfillment, satisfaction, boredom. All of this mixed with the anxieties, the jealousies, the possessiveness, the sorrow, the pain that make the cycle a roller coaster.
When you have gone repeatedly around and around the cycle, a time finally comes when you have had enough and want to call a halt to the whole process. And if you are lucky enough not to run into something or someone else that catches your eye, you will have at least attained a fragile peace. That is the most that life can give you; and you can mistakenly equate this state with freedom and you die without ever having known what it means to be really free and to love.
No, if you wish to break out of the cycle and into the world of love, you must strike while the attachment is alive and raw, not when you have outgrown it. And you must strike not with the sword of renunciation, for that kind of mutilation only hardens, but with the sword of awareness.
~From Anthony De Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello
