Module 6-Spiritual

Whole Persons live principled lives according to their faiths, and strive to grow in their spiritual development.

Page 1 Module 6- Spiritual

Spiritual

Here we are in the 21^st century. However, this is not the beginning of recorded time. Neither is it pre-recorded time. What do we mean by this? From the beginning of mankind’s awareness that there was something more to life than the human body, it has stimulated man’s thinking about the origins of mankind.

We learn from the Bible that God made man in his own image. He created Adam in his own image and Eve as his companion. The concept of a Creator constitutes the spiritual part of life in which we have faith about the creation, the purpose, and the reason for our existence.

By believing in a superior being and having faith that all things are possible, order has been created from chaos. For example, the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and the Torah given to the Israelites was basically a code of conduct by which a community of people was able to set standards. This concept was preceded by the Egyptians, Minoans, The Greeks, Romans, Barbarians, and even as far back as the Sumarians, all of whom created societies based on family units, dynasties, and like-minded people who had similar life experience, to the extent of becoming identified as communities.

Spirituality is much about the soul which abides in all of us. We can choose to use it or ignore it. Bear in mind that this is not about religion. This is about YOU. Who are you? What is your code of conduct? Did you learn your habits, needs and desires from those who went before you, as did they with their lineal descendancy. It is up to you to identify the good and the evil, the right and the wrong. Nothing and nobody is perfect. Everybody is equal.

So, ask yourself again, what is your spirituality and what does it mean to you? Are you going to be a leader or a follower? Life is a learnt experience beginning at birth and ending at death, but the mind and/or the soul may continue.

Somewhere accountability for your life will be called for and that is where you stand alone. Therefore it is important to cultivate good conduct, good habits and positive actions, and develop a love of all the glories that earth has to offer, from the sun rising, to the sound of the sea, the mooing of the cows, the chirping of the birds, and loving intonations of your partners.

Spirituality used in a good way will fulfil many of your dreams for a happy and rewarding life and will make your time on earth count.

Science, in the last 100 years, has uncovered many wondrous facts and information about the origin of our species – homo-sapiens. We here in the southern tip of Africa have been named the Cradle of Mankind and those that believe in evolution theories will tell you that the migration north throughout Africa led to the dissemination and later creation of most of the world’s populations.

The word Azania comes from the Greek and Arabic languages and refers to dark African people specifically. But as one human to another we all come from the same origin. Spirituality has always been a part of the psyche and will continue to form the foundation of the future of peoples’ life on the planet. Our purpose is to be the best we can be and fulfil the destiny that has been pre-ordained for us.

Incorporate spirituality in all that you do.

Following are detailed examples of experiences of ordinary people around the world.

Rise up and be counted. Never give up.

Now is the time to follow the wind, to walk alone And a star will show the way,

Above the clouds, beyond the sea. And now is the time, farewell,

And as we part you taught me well,
You gave me strength, you showed me the way; I’ll not forget you.

Like an eagle I will soar above the clouds;
I will spread my wings and fly into the sun.
Like an eagle I will race above the stars;

I will fly to places yet unseen, go beyond my wildest dream,

Knowing that you are watching over me.

And all alone I follow the stars above as my guide
I trust in you to show the way to me, beyond the sea.

And now is the time, farewell,
And as we part you taught me well,
You gave me the strength, you showed me the way;

I’ll not forget you.

I can fly with the eagle to the mountain high,

Race with the eagle to the rising sun

And soar with the eagle so far beyond my wildest dreams;

Like an eagle I will fly.

Love and The Human Potential

With grateful thanks to Leo F. Buscagia,Ph.D.

Before we begin this wonderful topic of love and potential I’d like to get us

on a common frame of reference. In order to do this I have to tell you something that happened to me about 15 years ago.

I started at the University of Southern California and I was an assistant professor, which is the bottom of the ladder. The assistant professors always get the large classes. And the classes that nobody wants. You know, the 101 classes that are required. You remember those. And I walked in front of this class and there were about 300 people there. It was one of those courses, as I said, where everybody is there, not because they want to be, but because they’re required to be. And I looked at these people and I thought, “How on earth am I going to get to them. How am I going to bring them close to me so that that wonderful bridge called learning from each other could be created.”

And so I looked around and the first thing I always do when I get up before a group is to look for what I call “kind eyeballs.” For me, kind eyeballs are those kinds of eyes that open up and say, “It’s all right, Buscaglia, if you forget where you’re at and you say dumb things. We’re going to let you in because we know that you’re a human being just like us.” And I looked around for these kind eyeballs in this auditorium and I wasn’t too fortunate to find too many because these students had already learned that if they kept their heads down, a professor can’t call on you unless he sees your eyes.

Anyway, I was looking around for kind eyeballs and I finally found them about five rows back in the eyes of a very attractive young lady. And I knew they were kind eyeballs because whatever I said she’d say, “wow,” and she’d write it down and look up again, ready to go, and I thought, “How marvelous, somebody sees me.” And just by knowing that somebody in that audience could see me I knew that I’d be safe and I could go ahead.

I have a lot of things in my classes that I call “voluntarily mandatory.” One of the things that’s voluntarily mandatory is that everybody in the class has got to come and see me at least
once during the semester. A lot of people are really intimidated by that. I try to explain to them that when you come I don’t want you to bring your books. I just want you to bring you. I want to sit across from you and I want to tell you about me and I want to hear about you.
Because the only way that any learning is ever going to take place is in some kind of a relationship where the two of us are communicating, human person to human person. As I said, this is an extremely intimidating thing. Then I add to the intimidation by saying I’m a very passionate Italian. I don’t believe you until I touch you. And so when you come in I’m going to touch you. And if that bothers you, bring your tranquilizers!

I was really waiting for the day when this beautiful young lady was going to come in to see me, because I wanted to tell her that in a very real sense she made me more valid. She made me a better teacher, because she was responding to me, human person to human person.

About five weeks into the semester her seat was empty. It was empty Monday and Wednesday and Friday and Monday and Wednesday and Friday for a couple of weeks. I became very concerned. I’m sort of ego-involved in the people that I love. So I went down to the area where she had sat and I asked some of the people about her, about where she was. Not only did they not know where she was, but they didn’t even know her name. Five weeks into a semester and they didn’t even know the girl’s name.

It made me flash on Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s wonderful statement when he said, “We are so much together and yet all of us are dying of loneliness.”

So I went to our dean of women and I said I’d like to find this girl and find out where I’ve failed her, what I didn’t do, perhaps. And Joan, who’s a very lovely lady, sort of paled and she said, “Leo haven’t you heard, this girl went to Pacific Palisades,” which is an area in Los Angeles where sheer cliffs fall into the sea, “and there were some people there having a picnic. They said they saw her acting rather strangely. She drove her car up, left the motor running, opened the door and walked zombielike across the grass, and without a moment’s hesitation she threw herself off the cliff onto the rocks below.” She was 22 years old.

For me one of the greatest losses in the world is the loss of human potential. It made me furious because I realized that we teach everything in the world but what is essential. We teach reading, we teach writing, we teach arithmetic, we teach how to be successful. But what is the good of all of those things if somehow or other you don’t have the human dignity, the love, the understanding of what is truly essential about life.

And so I did something that was unheard of. I started, at the University of Southern California 15 years ago, a class called “Love IA.” Boy, that raised eyebrows, I’ll tell you! And my colleagues were all saying, “Hey, Buscaglia, what do you do in that class? Do you have a lab on Saturday? Hahaha.” I said come on and see.

I had written 50 class cards for the Love class and submitted them. They’d gone very quickly.

On the first evening of the class I walked into my classroom and there were 250 students. I said, “You know, there must be some mistake because we only printed 50 class cards.” I said, “Would those students with class cards please raise them.” Two hundred and fifty class cards went up. It was the first time in the history of the University of Southern California that students bootlegged class cards. If that doesn’t tell you something about love then I don’t know what does.

And the amazing thing is that over the past 15 years I have learned so much. I wrote a book on love. The interesting concept of that was that when I wrote this book I called it Love, My publisher said, “Now, Buscaglia, you know you couldn’t get that because someone has already copyrighted that title.” I said, “Let’s send it in and see what happens.” Three or four days later we got back the copyright on Love. I have the copyright on Love. Now how do you like that?

Since then I’ve watched people around the world expecting friends, children and others to become lovers in a world where there aren’t too many models of love.

You know, the best way to learn is not in direct kinds of confrontations but through modeling, which is what is happening with you now. You see models, you emulate them, you think about them. you wonder what made them what they are. And this is the best possible way of learning.

I was recently on an airplane and got some more insight. I’m constantly on airplanes. And this was a 747, flying to New York. As I approached my seat I saw there was a man in the seat next to mine. He saw me coming and said, “Oh, damn.” That was my greeting. And I said, “What’s the matter?” And he said, “Oh, I was hoping this seat would be empty.” And I said, “I’ll tell you what, if there’s an empty seat on the plane as soon as it takes off I’ll move and give you the empty seat.” And he thought that was pretty nice. We sat there for a little while and a woman with a baby got on the plane. The man looked at her and he said, “Aw, damn. You know that baby’s going to squawk all the way to New York and ruin our trip.”

A minute later he picked up the menu from the seat and looked at it and said, “Garbage! They never have what I want.”

The stewardess got up and went through that thing she’s got to do . .. there are two exits in the rear and two exits on the side . . . you know that kind of thing. And the man said, “Look at that dumb broad. If this airplane goes down do you think she’s going to know what to do? She’s just here to meet a millionaire.”

I thought, “Good grief, we haven’t even left the ground yet!” And then they announced that there was a smoking and a non-smoking section. And he said, “All smokers should be shot.”

By then even a lover had reached his zenith. I said, “All of them?” I have a couple of friends who are smokers and I think they are really great people.

Then we got in the air and, luckily of course, there wasn’t an empty seat on the plane. So there I was with this man the whole trip. I guess he thought he’d better make the best of it, and he said to me, “What do you do?” And I said, “Well, I’m a professor at the University of California.” He said, “What’s your subject?” I said, “Love.” And you know what he said? “Thank God there’s another lover in this world. Boy, we really need them.”

All of a sudden it flashed on me that everybody in the world thinks they’re a lover. Have you ever heard anybody say I’m not a lover? It’s not important what you say, but what you do, because there are an awful lot of people in the world today who are not lovers.

And that bothers me a little bit. Do you know that in an average day in America 9,077 children are
born, and that’s good; 1,282 are given up for adoption; 2,740 run away from their parents, run away from home; 1,986 couples on an average day in America get a divorce; 416 beautiful, incredible people commit suicide. Someone is raped every eight minutes; murdered every 27 seconds, and robbed every 78 seconds. A burglar strikes every 10 seconds and a car is stolen every 33 seconds. And the average relationship in the United States today is three months. Three months! That isn’t even time enough to know whether she likes pizza.

Many of you know Harvard sociologist Sorokin, who’s no longer with us except in his wonderful work. He wrote a book called The Ways and Power of Love; And he says this: “The sensate minds, our minds, emphatically disbelieve in the power of love. It appears to us as something illusionary. We call it self-deception, the opiate of people’s minds, idealistic bosh and unscientific delusion.” We’re biased against all theories that try to prove the power of love in determining human behavior and personality and influencing the course of biological and social evolution in effecting the direction of historical events in shaping social institutions and culture.
In the sensate milieu they appear to us to be unscientific, unconvincing, prejudiced, ridiculous, naive
and superstitious and, therefore, we’re all confused and dying of loneliness. Love is a learned phenomenon. Everybody grows with the potential for love, but so few people dedicate themselves to discovering it. If we gave just as much time to love as we do each day to reading the newspaper we might find that wondrous, incredible things would happen in our lives. But all of us believe that love is there. All we have to do is wait long enough and when you get to a certain age, all of a sudden it is fully developed. Well, we must, if we are practical, look at it and realize that this isn’t what happens or I couldn’t have reiterated statistics like I did.

So it’s time that we looked at love as a scientific learning phenomenon, study it, interact with it and learn what it means. It’s too bad that so many people wait so long before they discover that great experience. But it’s yours and it doesn’t matter that you weren’t loved when you were a child or you never encountered love.

People say, “Oh, Buscaglia you were so lucky because you were raised in a family of 11 bambini and you had a loving mamma and loving pappa and, therefore, it’s obvious you were lucky.” Well perhaps that’s true, I was. But if you think that our home was a bed of roses, it wasn’t. I learned love from mamma and from pappa, not because they taught it to me but because they showed it to me. They were free to cry, free to laugh, free to emote.

If you want to take full responsibility to become a lover you can do it as of this minute. That’s the wondrous thing about anything that is learned. It can be unlearned and it can be relearned. You know Nikos Kazantzakis, the wonderful philosopher, says, “You have your brush. You have your colours. You paint paradise and then in you go.” When you find
that out, you’re free. You have full responsibility for creating your own environment. Why paint it dim colours? Why make it miserable when you’ve got orange and magenta and yellow and pink and you can paint this wonderful backdrop? If you don’t like it at any time in your life you can cancel it out and start all over again. It’s never too late.

Sure there are external forces that will act upon us, over which we have little control. But it’s how you respond that makes the difference.

I had a very interesting background. I was born in Los Angeles, and when I was a year old I was taken to Italy because my father and mother had to go there to settle some things. I was brought up in a little town at the base of the Swiss Italian Alps. It was really a wonderful thing. Everybody loved everybody in that little village.

When I was sick people lit candles in the churches and they prayed and they brought chicken soup. Then when I was five years old I was taken back to Los Angeles. Talk about cultural shock. A person there could drop dead on the street and people would step over them. I didn’t know what was happening.

Another thing that happened to me there was we moved into a neighborhood where there weren’t too many Italians. And we were immediately labeled Dagos and Wops. Remember that? It was a very satisfying thing for people to say, “Those damn Dagos moved in. Our property value is going to go down.” Well, that was a pity because labels are distancing phenomena and
they keep us from building those bridges. And by creating those islands and putting us on one, they missed so much about us.

For instance they didn’t know that mamma was the greatest medicine man in the whole world. She knew the cure for everything. It was garlic. You know she used to line us up, all 11 of us, every morning, rub the garlic, put it in a little sack and tie it around our necks. You’d say, “Mamma, it stinks!” She’d say, “Shut up!” She was a very non-directive counselor.

But I’ll tell you one thing about mamma, we always knew where we stood. Nobody ever had a problem. When mamma said shut up, you did. And then she’d send us off to school and you know I never missed a day. I never was sick as a kid. And I’ve got a theory that it’s because no one ever got that close to me.

But also not only were they satisfied with labeling me a Wop and a Dago, I’d say, “Pappa, what’s a Wop; what’s a Dago?” “Never mind, it’s just a label. It doesn’t mean anything” he’d say. But, you know, it used to hurt. Because they didn’t approach me.

Also at that time a very officious man tested me and because I didn’t speak English too well he classified me with another beautiful label, mentally retarded. And so for the first two years of my educational career I was labeled mentally retarded. That was an incredible experience because it happened that in that class there was a real truly loving person. The first truly loving person that I met in the United States and her name was Miss Hunt. And she weighed 300 glorious pounds. And she didn’t care that I smelled of garlic and she didn’t care that I was mentally retarded. What she cared about was that this was a little kid and like all little kids he needed love. He needed attention. And I remember one of the greatest things was to raise your hand and she’d come over to your desk to help you. And she’d lean over you, and you’d disappear in her. For that kind of attention you’d learn anything.

And very soon I was labeled a normal kid and I was taken out of the class and I missed Miss Hunt forever. And that’s one of the great tragedies. But how crazy to have labeled us. They didn’t know for instance that pappa was a mad man for education. He had only a fifth grade education himself, but he was one of the wisest people I know. If you are impressed by labels you are foolish. Some of the stupidest people I know have Ph.D.’s. Pappa had a
fifth grade education and he was one of the wisest, most dedicated men I’ve ever known. He raised 11 kids, he never asked for a handout. He said you’ve got to make it yourself, kids.

But what he did give us, which was the greatest thing he could possibly have ever given us, was a lot of love and a lot of humanity. Pappa was never reticent to let us see him cry. Mamma was never reticent to laugh. She was an enormous woman and it all came from laughter.

And you can choose your own way. You can choose your own life. You can choose your own responses. Sure, there are external forces that say you will have no money, you will be ill. But it is how you respond to that illness. We say that yesterday very poignantly, will depend on who you are, not the external forces, but the internal forces.

There’s a beautiful thing written by Viktor Frankl called Man’s Search for Meaning and I want to share that with you. An extremely wealthy man, he was in Vienna during the Second World War. He had practically everything. He was a neurologist, raised in wealth. Never knew a day of despair or misery and then the Nazis came in and overnight this beautiful, sensitive, incredible man was incarcerated in a concentration camp. When he came out, his whole life had changed, and he said this:

“The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There are enough
examples, often of a heroic nature, which prove that apathy can be overcome. Irritability and fear sup-
pressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom of independence of mind even under the
most terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember men who walked into the hearth to comfort
others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offered
sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last and the greatest of human
freedoms; to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. To choose one’s own way of life.”

Why, when we can choose love and tenderness and joy, do we so often choose despair? It’s a
puzzlement. But you know in order to be able to choose love, we have to first come to terms with
death. And not in a morbid sense, but in the realization that death teaches us incredibly wondrous
things.

First of all, it’s the most democratic thing in the world. No one is going to escape it. Freud said at the basis of neuroses is the fact that most of us think we’re going to live forever. Well you know, I’ve got news for you, you’re not. Because death teaches you that it is a lifegiving force. It says live now, it says don’t wait. It teaches you to let go, it teaches you that everything is in a situation that can easily go. It can easily disappear. Nothing is permanent. What wondrous lessons to learn.

We never know when it’s coming either. And that’s one of the wonders. Because it also says therefore don’t miss now.

During the Vietnam war a beautiful young lady came into my office and she put this little poem on my desk and I want to share it with you because it tells us that death is a friend
because it teaches us the wonder of the moment, and all of those magic moments put together is what makes your life. Life is not a goal, it’s a trip. If you live it in joy when you meet that goal you’ll meet it in joy because you understand as Elizabeth Kubbler-Ross says, “Death is the final stage of growth.” It’s not an end. Her poem read this way:

Remember the day I borrowed your brand new car and I dented it?

I thought you’d kill me, but you didn’t;

And remember the time I dragged you to the beach and you said it would rain and it did.

I thought you’d say I told you so but you didn’t; And remember the time I flirted with all the guys just to make you jealous, and you were.

I thought you’d leave me, but you didn’t;

And you remember the time I spilt blueberry pie all over your brand new car rug.

I thought you’d smack me, but you didn’t; And the time I forgot to tell you that the dance was formal and you showed up in jeans.

I thought you’d leave me forever but you didn’t; Yes there were lots of things you didn’t do, but you put up with me and you loved me and you protected me;

And there were lots of things I wanted to make up to you when you got back from Vietnam, but you didn’t.

The time to love is now. Putting it off for tomorrow can be singularly the most destructive thing. The time to tell the people you love, that you do love them, is now. Pick up the phone, dial it. Say, “Honey, I just thought I’d tell you that I love you.” Bonk. You know if the poor woman doesn’t die of a heart attack, when you get home the most magnificent magical things in the world may happen. Tell your children now. Who said it’s not macho to hug your kids? That’s a thing of the past. Hug them and love them and let them know now.

I have a professor friend who recently had a massive coronary. His wife got all upset, of course. He only had a 50/50 chance of survival. She immediately called their daughter who lived in Arizona who got on a plane and immediately flew to Los Angeles to be with her dad. She left her kids with a sitter. She rented a car in Los Angeles, got on the freeway and was instantaneously killed in an automobile accident. She was 26 years old and she’s dead. Her father is 55 and he survived. What’s the meaning, and what are we looking for in meaning?

I’m constantly getting letters because of my books, my articles and my TV show, asking why death, why pain, why despair? Why must children suffer? I answer, “How the hell should I know!” I’m engaged in the process of living, and you know living is not only joy and magic and wonder and ecstasy and, yes, even rapture. It’s also pain, misery and despair. And it’s how we handle all of those things that are a part of life.

I see life as an enormous birthday present that’s given to you on the day you are born. And most people don’t even bother to open the ribbon. And if they do and they pull the lid off, they look inside and they expect all joy and magic. It isn’t all joy and magic. There is pain in that box. Embrace it like you do joy and learn from it and then let it go.

But you know if you want to be a lover the greatest step is moving toward yourself. And I don’t mean an ego trip. I mean the simple realization that you can only be to others what you are to yourself. So it’s got to start with you. If you want to teach your children love, then you’ve got to be the model of love. If you want to teach sincerity and beauty and joy, then you have got to be sincere and beautiful and joyful. No dead person has ever taught life. No bored person has ever excited anybody. And when you are bored you are usually boring. And you wonder why nobody wants you around. Come alive and watch how you can teach everybody.

You know I love walking down the campus and saying hello to everybody. It really shocks people. I love to go down the streets in New York and say hello. Have you tried it? It’s amazing, it’s such a shock they don’t know how to get over it. I walk around the campus and I say good morning. That doesn’t hurt anybody. But people act as if it does. Some people say to me, “Do I know you?” And I say, “No, but wouldn’t it be nice?” And you know sometimes they say, “No it wouldn’t.” And that’s okay. If I have the audacity to say hello then I should be able to take a little rejection.

But I also have wonderful defense mechanisms. As I walk away, I say what a pity that they don’t want to know me. Because I’m nice. And so when I see them again I’m going to try again. I’m going to say hello again.

You know to love the unlovable is the real virtue. And so as I see them I run across the campus and I say, “Good morning.” “Do I know you?” “Yes we met yesterday.”

So if you want to move toward others you’ve got to move toward you. You’ve got to build you, the essence of you. You know Meisel the wonderful, wonderful Jewish writer who’s written so many great things wrote a book called Souls on Fire and in it he says the most wonderful thing. He says that when you die and you go to meet your maker you’re not going to be asked why you didn’t become a Messiah, why you didn’t find a cure for cancer, all of those incredible things. The only question you’re going to be asked is why didn’t you become fully YOU. When I gave you all of the wonder and magic that you are, why didn’t you get in touch with it and develop it so that you could share it with everyone
else. Because you know everybody in this audience has more potential than they use. I don’t care how impressive you are, you’re nowhere. And you are sure nowhere when you think are you some where.

No matter how wise you are there is more wisdom. No matter how broad your reality you don’t even know the beginning of reality. So get in touch with that limitless you. You know we’ve never been able to discover a limit to human potential. Einstein, in his last book, decried the fact that only a small portion of himself had been realized. You have so far to go.

Elizabeth Kuhbler-Ross in her studies on death has found that those people who scream the loudest at the point of death are those people that haven’t discovered who they are. But those people who are in touch with themselves can smile, can open their arms, and not ask, “Why me,” but can embrace it and say, “I’ll struggle because I love life. But when it comes I’m ready.”

So you’ve got to embrace yourself. Embracing yourself is a difficult trick, because it means that you’ve got to constantly be evaluating who you are and where you’re going. And that means an internal trip, not an external trip.

There’s a wonderful story of the Mullah who was out one day on his hands and knees and he was searching in the street and a friend of his came and said, “Mullah, what are you doing down there?” And he said, “I lost my house key.” His friend said, “You poor man. I’ll help you find it.” And he got down on his hands and knees and they were feeling around. Finally he said, “Mullah, where did you lose it?” Mullah said, “I lost it in the house.” He said, “Then why are you looking for it out here.” Mullah said, “It’s lighter out here.”

So many of us are looking for what cannot be found out there. It can only be found in here. And this is the place to look. This is the center from which all things emanate. When you realize that, then you can stand tall and beautiful and you can say not, “I am,” but “I am becoming,” which is the beauty of it all. And as you become more you and and get in touch with that uniqueness that is you and hand it to everybody, that’s what life is all about. And that certainly is at the heart of love.

One of the most profound things in love class was a young lady who one evening said, “Now I realize why I’ve been so unhappy for so many years. I expected to be loved by everybody and that’s a human impossibility. You know I can make myself the most delectable, most delicious, most incredible peach in the world. But there are always people who are allergic to peaches.” Now that’s real insight! And then she added, “And for their sake, because they like bananas, I may try to become a banana. But no matter what I do I’ll always be the second best banana, because I’m a peach.” You know when you recognize this you liberate yourself and you liberate everybody around you. You say, “I’m sorry I’d love to be your banana, but I’m a peach.” And if you develop the peach long enough one of these days a peach lover will come by. Guaranteed.

The hardest battle you’ll ever have to fight is the one of being what you are not. When you are genuinely YOU it’s such a simple process because you say, “Here I am in all my humanness. I forget, too. I’m imperfect, too, and therefore I allow you to forget and I allow you to be imperfect.” I always tell my students that I will demand perfection from them when I am perfect, and therefore they’re safe.

Anthony Shore said a beautiful thing in this respect. He said, “It is surely one of the basic fears of personkind that we shall be treated as things and not persons. Manipulated, pushed around by impersonal forces and treated as if we are of no account.” This is not so. You are important. And each of us may be a tiny atom in an enormous universe but we need the illusion that we count, that we are unique, that we are special, that our individuality commands attention and that to be totally disregarded as a person is a kind of death in life against which we are compelled to fight for the rest of our life and with all of our strength. You are unique in all the world. There are no two people in this gigantic audience that are even similar. How can you make yourself in another person’s image? Your major responsibility is to become all that you are. To develop that and to share it with everybody. Because my world will never be complete until you do.

Then there’s another aspect about love that is absolutely essential and that is that you get in touch again with joy and madness. You know we’ve become the most serious society in the world. We worry about everything. Even realising that 90 percent of what we worry about never happens anyway, we go right on worrying.

We’ve got to learn to laugh again. And not canned laughter like our televisions are full of. Don’t you wonder sometimes when you’re sitting there listening to this uproarious laughter, what the hell are they laughing at. Or is there something wrong with me. I remember at home we cried a lot but we laughed a lot all the time. I don’t hear too much laughter in homes anymore. It worries me.

I was impressed yesterday with how sharp you all are and how much laughter there is in this auditorium. I’m delighted, too, because that’s the stuff that will save us.
Recognize that you are crazy and if you think you’re not crazy, you’re crazier than most.

The love I’m talking about is not that sentimental hogwash that we hear so much about. It’s the practical everyday kind of stuff. Saying hello to people. The reaching out to people. And not hesitating to say to people I love you. You’re special. Hugging them. Touching them. Having no existential problem, no fear about your identity.

I want to end with Leo Rostin’s statement, which I love, and encapsulate everything I’ve been trying to share with you. He said, “In some way, however small and secret, each of us is a little mad. And everyone is lonely at bottom and cries to be understood. But we can never entirely understand someone else and we will always remain part stranger, even to those who love us.” And I love this. This is so congruent with all the things I’ve heard that you’ve been talking about. It fits. He says, “It is the weak who are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.” Isn’t that wonderful? And those who do not know fear are not really brave, for courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined. And you can understand people better if you look at them no matter how old or impressive they are as if they are children. For most of us don’t really mature, we simply grow taller. And happiness comes only when we push our hearts and brains to the farthest reaches of which we are capable. For the purpose of life is to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

Love is the greatest of all human experiences and each of us have an unlimited potential to realise it. Please don’t miss it.