We live in mostly urban environments, whereas 150 years ago we lived in mostly rural environments. The world, 150 years ago or so, was mostly an agrarian world. People lived and grew their food and that was their mode of survival. They ate what they grew, and they lived in very, very small villages, or towns.
I’ve traveled around the world a little bit, and what I’ve seen is that, in much of the world, is a migration from these villages to the large urban centers. So you end up with cities that have twenty million people in them, and you end up with rural areas that become emptier and emptier.
In America there have been other pressures on the rural agrarian culture. Essentially agro-business has bought up all the farms, and now corporations on the farms, and the small individual farmers have a very difficult time surviving. So they’re also forced to move to urban areas.
Now, you would think that with all those people teeming close to each other there would be more intimacy between people, but in reality what happens in the urban areas is there is less intimacy. People can live next door to each other for years, and years, and years and never get to know each other, never speak. There’s like a distance.
New York, especially, has this reputation of being cold and people not speaking to each other, people just walking by each other. It happens because of a lot of reasons. In a lot of the urban centers people are a little afraid. You have crime, and people don’t necessarily want to get involved with other people because of that fear. There’s also this fear of when you get involved with other people you create obligations, or there is the possibility of rejection and the possibility of difficulty.
I know when younger people are dating; dating becomes a really cathartic experience for a lot of young people because of rejection, and because of the complexity of entering into personal relationships.
Well, if one is fortunate enough in this world of so many different ways, and means, and possibilities to find a teacher, a mentor, a guru, a sheikh – who is a true sheikh, the sheikh provides many different kinds of experiences for his disciples. And one of the things that the sheikh provides is a place to find intimacy.
The sheikh, when you approach him, when you come close to him, the first thing you notice from the moment that you meet him, and I’m speaking from personal experience, is that love exists there. And it’s deep, and it’s profound, and it’s available to you. And that love is an intimate experience.
Somehow, no matter how hard the shell is, that you are encased in, when you come before a being who is the exemplar of love, he’s capable of breaking through that shell and touching you in your innermost being…
