Summary: Ep.03 ~ Bearing Witness<br> Unconditional love, it’s a word, it’s a phrase, it’s hard to connect with that. Unconditional love. Just think about the sun. It shines evenly all the time on everything. On the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the high, the low. It shines on those miserable people who kill people and murder people and treat people like shit and it shines on the people who care for people and do charity and help people every chance they get. The sun shines equally on everything and everyone. That’s what it is. That’s unconditional.”- Krishna Das<br> An explanation of bearing witness to suffering without judgement.<br> So, I said nothing was happening when we were sitting with Maharajji, that’s not exactly true. I don’t want to mislead you. So much nothing was happening, that it was like, the whole universe was happening. We were being loved in a way that we had never been loved before. Period. End of story. When I think about that, just imagine what it would be like to be loved in just the way you want to be loved, just the way you would imagine, “If I could only be loved that way, I would feel this way.” That’s what it is. That’s what it felt like at that time. That’s what real love is. It didn’t involve another person. Maharajji wasn’t a person although it appeared to us that there was this body sitting there throwing fruit at us, laughing. But that wasn’t exactly the point. Nothing, He didn’t seem to be doing anything except shining like the sun. Unconditional love, it’s a word, it’s a phrase, it’s hard to connect with that. Unconditional love. Just think about the sun. It shines evenly all the time on everything. On the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the high, the low. It shines on those miserable people who kill people and murder people and treat people like shit and it shines on the people who care for people and do charity and help people every chance they get. The sun shines equally on everything and everyone. That’s what it is. That’s unconditional. When I was in Auschwitz with Bernie Glassman, we got there, I think it was early November, and there was green fields and the trees were autumn, were just alive, blossoming colors, exploding with all the colors, all the leaves, right? It was so beautiful. And the first thing the polish woman said, who was our guide, she said, “You see all this green and these colors? There was nothing except mud and dirt because the prisoners ate everything they could eat. They ate the bark off the trees. The ate the grass. They ate the dead leaves. Anything they could put in their mouth, they ate.” Oh. And so then we were taken around the camp and were given, pointed out things, what happened here, what happened there. You know. And every day I would come to that camp and I would look up at the sun and I’d say, “How dare you shine on this place? How can you shine on this place?” Really, my heart was exploding in anger. “How can you shine on this place? What’s wrong with you?” he said. Well, we were there for a particular purpose. The reason Bernie takes people there is to bear witness to the suffering that happened there. To bear witness to the Beings and the Souls who suffered there and he feels their presence there and he feels by coming there to bear witness to their suffering, we dissolve the isolation and the loneliness that they must feel and in so doing, remove some of the suffering. It lightens the load of suffering by bearing witness. Bearing witness is an interesting concept. Witness. It’s not judging. The witness tells what they see. It’s the judge who gives the sentence. The witness simply witnesses. But I wasn’t able to do that. Every day I went there and I said, “How can you shine on this place?” And I would walk around and I was really, it was a heavy dark place until one day I looked up at the sun and I recognized, that’s what the sun does. It shines everywhere on everything. It shines on the inside and the outside.
