Some people are bound to the ritual of rejection. This tends to manifest as a chronic complaint that always says, by countless means, "You do not love me." The abusive complaint is itself the means whereby the need to reject, avoid, or fail to love others is enforced. Indeed, this complaint is more than a complaint. It is a self-image, the heart-sick and self-pitying and precious idea that "I" am rejected.

The rejecting person is chronically and reactively contracted from all relations. Fear is the root of this self-contraction, and the conceived purpose of this self-contraction is self-preservation, even self-glorification. Indeed, fear IS the self contraction. Therefore, all of the self-preserving, self-glorifying and punishing efforts of the rejecting person only preserve, glorify and intensify fear.

All of fear, self-contraction and un-love is only suffering. It is only destructive, and it is entirely unnecessary. The ritual of rejection can be transcended only if it is summarily replaced by love.

If you will be love, you must constantly encounter, understand and transcend the rejection rituals of others who are, even if temporarily or only apparently, bereft of wisdom. You must skillfully transcend the tendency to become un-love in reaction to apparent lovelessness of others, even when circumstances require you to make difficult gestures to counter and control the effects or undermine and discipline the negative and destructive effectiveness of the rejection rituals performed by others.

For those who are committed to love, rejection by others is received and accepted as a wound, not an insult. The necessity to love and be loved is a wound. Even the fullest realization of love is a wound that never heals. The rejecting ritual calls every individual to defend himself or herself against the wounds of love and the wounding signs of un-love in the daily world. Even in the context of true intimacy, the tendency is to act as if every wound is an insult and a reason to punish.

The reactive riuals of rejection must be released by the practice of love. This requires vulnerability (the ability to feel the wounds of love without retaliation), sensitivity to the other (the ability to sympathetically observe, understand, forgive, love, and not punish or dissociate from the other) and love itself (the ability to love, know you are loved, receive love and to know that both you and the other, regardless of any appearance to the contrary, are vulnerable to love and require love).

It is not necessary or even possible to become immune to the feeling of being rejected. You would have to become immune to love itself. What is necessary and also possible is to love. Not only are you loved, but you are love itself.

If you will do this, then you must stop dramatizing the ritual of betrayal. You must stop punishing and rejecting others. When you punish another, you withdraw and withhold love. You only reinforce the feeling of being rejected, and you compound it by rejecting the other. You become un-love. You fail to love. Your own acts of un-love degrade you, delude you and separate you from your love-partner and from love itself.

Love does not fail for you when you are rejected or betrayed or apparently not loved. Love fails for you when you reject, betray and do not love. Don't stand off from relationship. Be vulnerable. Be wounded when necessary, and endure that wound. Don't punish the other. Communicate to one another, even discipline one another, but don't dissociate from one another. Realize that each one wants to love and be loved. Therefore, love.

The habit of reacting to apparent rejection as if it were an insult always coincides with and only reveals the habit of rejecting others. Anyone whose habitual tendency is to reject others in the face of their apparent acts of rejection will tend to reject others even when they are only loving. If you remain vulnerable in love, you will still feel love's wound, but you will remain in love.

To be weak in love is to be independent, insulted, empty with craving, in search of love, manipulative, unhappy, and moved to punish, betray and destroy all relationships. Such a weak one already feels rejected and is never satisfied. Such a one isn't lovable.

Those who love ARE love, and others inevitably love them. Those who seek love aren't love, and so they can't find it. Only the lover is lovable.

Paraphrased from: The Dawn Horse Testament, by Adi Da, pages 355-359.

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