Reflection 163

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The True Lover

The wonderfully strange and happy fact is that this Self-seeing (which is perfect anyway) is self-forgetting: with the result that (for example) the once painfully-self-occupied public speaker, now wholly occupied with the audience, talks fluently and spontaneously and unanxiously; and the once painfully-self-occupied lover, now wholly occupied with the beloved, loves similarly well. In falsely self-conscious loving, which begins by being inefficient and ends by being impossible, each is using the other for personal satisfaction; each is attempting to enjoy his or her own body instead of the other's - so the enjoyment dwindles. In truly Self-conscious loving, on the contrary, each is the disembodied enjoyer of the other's body; each consciously makes way for and is occupied by the other, feels the other, knows (in the biblical sense) the other - and the by-product or bonus is that physical enjoyment flourishes, perhaps as never before. (Douglas Harding. Quoted in Seeing Who You Really Are by Richard Lang)

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