Tlakaelel at Kalpulli Chaplin, Chaplin, CT, 10/03/07

Interpreted by Bert Gunn,

transcribed by Sharry Goldman

Bert: Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming.

T: Good evening everyone. I’m going to talk a bit about the theme we gave yesterday at the University in Harvard. We talked about love. We talked in the Divinity school. They study religions of all the world and all religions of the world talk about love. Love, it’s an element. It hadn’t been taken account of as a universal law. One of the universal laws most known is that which says in this universe nothing is destroyed. Everything is transformed. You know this principle, yes? It’s scientific. The material can turn into energy. Energy can become material. They are cycles. But love is as strong as this principle (relativity). I thought, “But why don’t people give it so much importance? Why don’t they find a mathematical formula to teach us what love is?” They’ve speculated a lot about what time is, what space is, but they don’t talk about this. I think it is as important as anything else.

Once I was in England. We went to the ruins of enormous cathedral, a gothic cathedral. Beautiful. There were religious problems there in England and the king prohibited Catholicism. So he said that all the people could rob or destroy all they wanted to from the cathedrals and a lot of people went and did it. There were just a few walls left. But beautiful ones. So much blood spilled, many people died, but there are many walls that are still standing. And I asked myself a question, “Why make such beautiful buildings? To satisfy the king? To demonstrate their richness or their power? No. The people did it for love. Love of their beliefs. They dedicated their lives to make this. And I thought about the pyramids. And the people made those also for love. That way they built great things. They left them for the future. Now we’ve received this message when we’ve seen such beautiful things. Enormous. We understand that it’s a message left by our ancestors. In their love, they left a message that says, “Here we left this. It’s a gift for you. We existed and we were thinking about you”. That’s how they left these monuments.

Love, we confuse it sometimes with desire, with sex. But it’s not like that. There are different kinds of love, like love of life, love of country, love of the children, love of art, music, and all the scientific disciplines. The mathematicians enjoy mathematics in doing them. With love, they discover math formulas; they try to explain the mysteries of the phenomenon of life.

Thanks to love, we exist. We are slaves of love. We don’t know. Just when we get to a certain age we’re attacked or invaded by the desire to procreate. We don’t realize it because the instinct of the conservation of the species. Nature forms us, especially for this. We are a perfect machine; we do what no machine can do. We grow. We have an ability. When we have health problems the body can heal itself. Medicines, pills, injections, all these kinds of medicine they just help the body, give it strength, give it tools to defend itself and to comply with the obligation to cure itself. Then the time of reproduction comes and nature makes a trick with us. Sometimes we don’t think about reproducing but the sexual desire intervenes. We think it’s a personal thing, a very intimate friendly thing. We don’t know that we are obeying. We are obeying the mandate of nature. So sex is just a trap, like putting out honey to attract flies. And we fall in like that…we fall for it.

How does this work? We see that nature created man and woman. Two energies. There’s always a positive and negative. We don’t know if the man or the woman is positive or which is negative. Like the North and South Poles. They have different signs. One is positive and one is negative. But which is positive and which is negative? We don’t know we have to realize we don’t know. The energy of the two poles comes together at the equator. And sex comes together like that.

How did our creator make these things? The woman every 27 days creates an egg, or two or three. But each month the man creates millions. Each ejaculation a man might have 200-250 million sperm. Why? Why does the man have the ability to reproduce in an enormous way and not the woman. It’s one of the mechanisms of love. I think in other epochs there were few men and a lot of women. It gives us the possibility for men to have a lot of women. I think maybe I’m cynical. Like I’m helping the macho man who wants to have lots of women. But no, this is scientific. Some of the little things of love. The time of reproduction might come and we do it. Nobody can stop this. We have to realize that to try to stop it, to stop a human being from reproducing, man and woman, it’s like trying to stop a river. You can’t stop it. It flows. It flows for desire. The desire comes together, combines, with the instinct of conserving the species. With love. We call it passion. Human beings have passion in the moment. It’s very intense this feeling. It’s not just sexual. It’s a series of forces that come together and obligate the human beings to reproduce. And then later the consequences come. So it makes a test of our love, because during the nine months of gestation, there are lots of problems. The woman has lots of problems. The woman begins to get heavy, she begins to eat a lot. She might feel bad in the morning. She gets tense. The poor partner, her husband, then she doesn’t want him as much as before. She doesn’t take care of him as much. She has other kinds of worries. And then he’s angry. So the grandmothers advise the girl, they tell the girls this is going to happen and prepared, but the husband he begins to relax and get to the next level. He says, “OK, I can handle this OK.” The child is born, and then the husband is not so important. Just the child. The woman has a big problem. During the gestation she feels very bad. When the child is born, she says, “Oh, The problem is all over now.” But that’s not true. The problems are beginning. The children demand a lot of attention; they demand a lot of things. So the mother loses her freedom and the father too. The child wakes up at night doesn’t let the parents sleep. They have to take him to the doctor sometimes, you are always watching and you’re tense and now the poor husband, he’s lost all his importance, the child is the only important thing now. So therefore, we are slaves to the children. It’s something that happens to everybody. We want this child, we love it, and we get used to caring for it. We get up early in the morning, and the money we get we stay poor. We don’t get enough to pay for the child. There are extra expenses. The money I earn is not for myself. The children are taking almost everything. And The mother, she can’t go visit the neighbors and talk , she can’t go play canasta with the neighbors, nor bridge. she has to take care of the child, so she’s a slave too. The mothers feel like choking the child sometimes, but they handle it. They handle the slavery, the man and the woman. Why? Because of love. They are complying with a sacred mission to create the next generation. It seems like that’s the most important thing in the life of a human being, to create and prepare the next generation. I think it’s the most important destiny of human kind, of humanity. To conserve the species. But not just the human beings. The whales, they go from the north pole thousands of kilometers to get to the place where they are going to give birth, and they reproduce. All year she is swimming and preparing just for this. Thousands of kilometers just to arrive at this place. For love. The salmon, they also reproduce inland the rivers, in the lakes, and to get there they have to swim against the currant. They make an enormous sacrifice just to get to that place. When they get there, they reproduce, they return to the sea and the children go back with them and they preserve the species that way.

All the plants, with lots of love also, they are born, they grow up, they reproduced and they give their descendants to the next generation, for the next year. That’s the mechanism of love. We are slaves of love. I wish someone could make a formula, mathematical, like they made the formula of relativity, like musical notes; some way to represent it graphically what love is. There are many examples. And all of you have had experiences. We all have it, but we almost always have it in an unconscious way. For love some people put bombs around them and they immolate themselves to combat an enemy for love of their heritage, for love of dignity, for love of honor. They give thir lives. Any one of us would give our lives if there was a child or another person in danger. We would instinctively try to save them. We don’t think if it’s our own child or not. Some would die trying to do it. It’s a manifestation of love. We are a manifestation of love. We are slaves of love.

A woman talks about her sacrifice raising her child and the love she has for him.

Tlakaelel: This is what love is. The sacrifice we do with pleasure. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning, you want to sleep a bit more, to spend more time in our dreams, but we get up to take care of our children. It made you happy and your happy remembering this.

A Man: I remember reading a philosopher whose name escapes me, a teacher, and he’s describing different types of love. He was describing mostly from the Greek, the love Eros, the sexual attraction, that was what some call love, and then the love which would be brotherhood or sisterhood, a love of another human being for who they are and a feeling of connectedness. And then another love which is spoken of in the Christian religion, of the agape love, the love of God, of Creator. And so I kept that in my mind, and when I would see something, or read something or hear people talk, I would think, “Which of those things is going on here?“Is it a mixture? Is it one? Are we using the same word for too many things and it’s making it too confused. So just maestro’s thoughts on those different aspects to the word “love”.

Tlakaelel: I think there are different aspects of one single thing. Love is a feeling. It’s a program. It permits the existence of the universe. It has many faces, many facets, like a diamond. And all of them are a synthesis. It is manifested in creation. Who made this universe? The great grandfather, or superior intelligence. He did it with love, with much detail, infinite details, and made things in a way that allows things to move for themselves. This is love in its different intensities, different faces. It permits the existence of the world. Fraternal love, of brothers, sisters, love of the arts, love for the women, the children, the animals, the plants the flowers, it’s the same love. Different forms, but it’s the same, like a hand. It’s got five fingers, but each one of them belongs to the hand. Each one is different, but their base is unified. Different manifestations of love, in our different ages, in eras, in life. Sometimes the intensity of love goes up or down and it’s channeled in a certain direction, but it’s always the same. It’s a beautiful sensation of love, of well being and satisfaction like we saw with Linda. She remembers her times of happiness, they’re so intense like this she can’t even find to the words to express all she feels. That’s pure love, the greatest manifestation that permits us to understand and feel our Creator. They haven’t given all the importance that comes from this factor..this love.

A man in group: In our culture, we talk a lot about love, and I wonder if it’s because we don’t have very much. In Vanuatu, I don’t ever remember hearing anyone talking about love. It’s just so natural, people share and people live together. Without having to put the words to it. That’s love too.

It’s a manifestation of love, living to do what they do in life. They don’t have the word “love” but they love. It’s like if someone arrives at a beautiful place, the native like you talk about, they live in a beautiful place, and one day someone asks them, “Do you know that you are living in paradise?” And they say, “Yeah, we know. That’s why we’re living here.” They don’t need the definitions. They’re living it. They say that in the western culture, we have a lot of songs of love; we’re always singing about love. They say the native people don’t think about love. They have songs about the sun, the rain, mother earth, the food. The indigenous people, they sing about the things they don’t have. So you all here sing about love because you haven’t got it. We know, we feel it. . These ideas we are expressing, I didn’t know I had them. We all do what we do for love. I think the greatest ceremony we can have is the salvation of the sun, we call the sun dance. When we get to the circle there, we’ve overcome a lot of problems to get there, a lot of difficulties, but when we get to the circle, everything is left outside. So I say “Creator, accept me. Accept what I do for you. My sweat, my tiredness, my hunger my thirst, my anguish, I offer my tears, my flesh and blood, accept it Creator. It’s a gift that I give. It’s the most valuable thing that I have. I offer this, I’m not asking for anything, I’m just offering that which is mine, that you gave to me, because you permitted my people to keep living and we did not disappear, that we keep existing. My family exists. Thank you. That’s what I offer. I think this is love. We don’t ask, we give. That’s the difference from the western culture and ours. They ask their gods for money, love, abundance, power, and we - we ask for strength so we can put our faces forward to the mission that you give us Creator. We don’t ask that you take away the problems, but the strength to overcome them. I think this is love, but we don’t say it. They don’t talk about love, they live immersed in love. That’s it.

Man:: With this talk, I think about love and also when there is no love where a child would be born and is without love, and how that affects a child where the birth was an accident and not a joining together in love and child even knows that he or she was born because it was not planned. It is something that someone I know experienced, and how she struggles with it and how hard that is for her.

Tlakaelel: The majority of us, by lack of education become parents, because there’s no parent school We are children of desire. Very few of us are really planned. It’s a reality. We need education. The children that are desired are the happiest. Those who are not, well, we struggle to survive, and the love of Great Spirit keeps us alive and active.

Woman talks about how she doesn’t like the idea of being a “slave of love”.

Tlakaelel: When I talk about slavery, it’s just a metaphorical sense. We don’t really have free will in this sense. Other forces are manipulating us.

Man;

I don’t want to repeat what happened when I lived with my parents, growing up without love, without nice words. We miss them when we don’t have them. It’s very important to demonstrate, demonstrating the love is more important than the words because anybody can say beautiful words, but to demonstrate them is stronger and harder. Up to this point in my life, I feel content with the two sons I have. The weekends I cook breakfast for everybody, and they are very content, especially when we have French Toast in the mornings. It is their favorite part. They want to help me and cooperate with me so I realize the difference between my childhood and their childhood, so I can feel the joy of theirs. The feeling we have together with the parents. Three weeks ago, I was talking with my mother. She said that she had 35 years marriage. And I asked how many of those years were happy. She said “none of them.” I had nine and I’m very content, very happy, because I have lots of love.

Tlakaelel: What he teaches us, is that we all need to give and receive love. This is the way to love.

Woman;: I too like as Lady said, there are times when I can feel the sensation of love, and if feels physical, almost like a massage, and I always think how wonderful it would be to hold that feeling so that my thoughts and my words and my actions come from that place. Because many times the shadows of fear or anger or other emotions can block that love, and then my words, my actions, my thoughts come from that place, and I think in this culture we almost have to learn to love again because we are so divided between races, between rich and poor, bet families, bet generations, and so love instead of being an unending giving energy, can become something compartmentalized, something finite that maybe we don’t have enough of, and we need more, and we forget that in giving the love is when we receive more love.

Man in group: Maestro, is it possible that the love on Tanna is different than the love we have here? It’s almost that the love on Tanna is a connection with the spiritual world, and we’re not involved. Is it like that here too?

Tlakaelel: It’s a just different capacity of expression of love. They don’t talk about it, they haven’t got words, but they do it, they live it. When we talk about how people could have the ability of put explosives on themselves, and explode themselves, it’s an expression of love. Different way of expressing, different intensities. I think the people of Tanna they live closer to nature, closer to Mother Earth. It’s a synthesis with creation. They don’t need to think about love. They are love and we’d be happy if we could think like this. But you say there’s no money, there are no chiefs, no social positions, everybody enjoys it. That’s what love is. I wish we could do this. It’s like an ideal, so maybe we’ll be able to achieve. I think that when we retire, we’re free with our time, maybe we have a little pension of money. We dream. We dream to live like this. I saw in Switzerland, the elders, when they retire, they get a good pension. Better live in Switzerland. There are other countries to live, where there are beaches, or better climate. They struggle their whole lives to find a paradise, and they achieve it. They are happy living with the natives. They mix with them. They are happy. IT’s paradise. Some people live in paradise like this.

Man in group: Just as we were speaking , it seemed to me perhaps, that the state of being in love is the opposite of the state of being in the ego. The satisfaction when we are slave to the ego, we become incapable of being in that state of love and yet so much of western culture encourages the ego, you know the independence, the self...just that’s what it seems like. So we’re training people not to be in that state in our culture. So we’re trying to find love in a place that it can’t exist. It’s like we’re trying to find light in where it doesn’t exist.

Woman: There are many kinds of love. I never seem to succeed at the romantic end of it all, and I know you’ve talked about the blissfulness of love. I have felt that many times, sometimes from meditation , good pure diet like you’re on a fast, and you get right there to that state of bliss in love. And I also believe what you put out, you get back. And that even when you smile at people, most of the time they smile back, and it grows and grows.

Woman: Well, I’m a little confused about the statement about ego, because I feel the ego is important so we have a sense of who we are,

Man: might be my interpretation of ego

Woman: …rather than the arrogance of ego? Ok so that’s it, but what I’m hearing throughout everywhere, that there’s a desire to stay at home with oneself. To know oneself, and to stay connected through knowing oneself to each activity and all the emotions. And love is wonderful. Many beautiful things were said tonight, so I’m enjoying this very much. Thank you.

Man: It’s always interesting being first and last, and showing up late. Just have a story I guess. A year ago over the summer I met someone and I was attracted to her, but not like a normal she is beautiful, but her energy, and I was just happy to have met her. And I was planning to just go home, and I met this beautiful person, and it was great. I am really lucky to be her boyfriend. And now we fast forward to another year, another summer and I saw her again and it’s great being with her. We’re engaged now. Yeah. But now it’s really hard again, because I am here and she is there.

Bert: That’s love

Man: I’m on the phone with her and were both really sad, because she’s there and I’m stuck here. All our conversations come down to that and I’m just really happy that one of us on the phone always has the strength to say, “we’re gonna make it.” She’s not anywhere near me. So that’s love for you.

Bert: Love isn’t always happy.

Tlakaelel: That’s what we call passion. The desire, the love, the union of all, the instinct of the conservation of the species, the hunger to love a loved one. It’s a passion, so it is what moves the world. Congratulations. This love that you feel now, it’s suffering. You are suffering. That’s the passion. It’s the force that moves humanity. Congratulations.

Bert: I have to switch gears. I think people have lots of different words, and different manifestations of one thing. To me it feels like, I was alluding to earlier, an energy that has different ways of experiencing it. It’s hard to think of the words to put it in English too. Like electrical energy can be converted into light, into heat, into motion, and it’s the same basic energy underneath all that. Love somehow is at the bottom of all these manifestations, is the glue that holds the Universe together. They just haven’t been able to discover it, like magnetism, we imagine all these things about it, put all the words on it and all that, but it’s a phenomenon that we feel in different ways. And we humans, we try to imagine things in a tangible way, things we can’t understand. And love is one of these things we can’t understand. We all know that there’s connections between people that we feel without seeing them, without touching them, without hearing them, there’s some kind of an energy, a vibrational energy that transfers between people. We know that’s there are certain people that we cross by there’s a feeling, there’s an energy, there’s an attraction, there’s a whatever, we don’t know the form it’s going to take, we don’t know the proper manifestation of it, we confuse it, we mix it up all the time, we make it romantic usually and it’s not that way most of the time. The confusion of trying to make it romantic messes up all kinds of things in the universe. And I think in our culture we somehow magnify this romantic part. In many cultures romance does not exist, or it’s a very rare thing. The sense of cooperation, the sense of connection, the sense of unity is much stronger than all that. And maybe the passion we feel is something either that we have in our genes that is new, or we culturally learn it or we just got it from books or we got it from the Victorian era, or who knows what, but what’s under all that I think is a calm and steady universal love that we can feel for an animal, a plant, we can feel it for humanity in general and we’re touched maybe by a movie, we’re touched by some action we see in somebody, by someone’s words, and we’re reminded of this universality, this universal connection we have with all of life. I think it’s much more simple than we make it. We make it complicated somehow. We imagine all these things from it, we want all these things from it, but it just exists and it’s not looking for anything from us except we just feel it and pass it on. But we’re looking to make it more, for it to fill all the holes we haven’t got filled and that certainly doesn’t happen from other people. It happens within ourselves. We can find that fulfillment, that sense of peace, that sense of contentment when we give to anybody. The best way to come out of a depression, or out of feeling sorry for yourself is to find someone that needs something, to find a real way to give and that takes us out of all this need we have. So this need we have is mostly imagined I think, and it’s more often the need to give than the need to receive. We think it’s the need to receive love, but more often it’s the need to give.

Tlakaelel: it may be a synthesis of some factors, like desire, that pushes us to fulfill the conservation of the species. The energies that draw, attract or repulse us, are a set of principles that likes repels and opposites attract, or we’re talking about foramens, another factor, these are like the traps, the things that push us for the procreation.

Woman: It’s a simple thing, but it’s a big, big thing. And it’s not easy. And it’s incredibly powerful but the part that is the simple thing is that to be able to feel the magic, the intensity that is love, or whether it is for a partner or a tree, its needs the simplicity of stripping the ego, of stripping and just be connected with that feeling and allow that feeling to come to you but it’s very scary because there is always that fear of losing someone or if it’s for a tree or a beautiful sunset that the fills you with love, but it’s something that is for that instant.

Tlakaelel: So thank you every one. I think we shared our points of view on something very beautiful. We’re slaves of love, and love enslaves us. “Somos pocos, todos locos” (We’re just a few, but we’re all crazy). [one of Tlakaelel’s favorite sayings]

Woman: And free enough.

Man: We’re participants.

Woman; It is a decision on some level.

Man: When I go to Tanna,, what I feel is sort of like being in a river, floating in something, and what I see so much and what I do when I’m here, I attach an idea to want something, I say “I love it, I love her, I love him,” but when you’re attached to one something, you are afraid to lose it, but when the whole river holds you up, there’s no way you can lose it. You float.

Man: But in a river, you can never touch the same place twice.

Man: Don’t carry that analysis too far.

Man: But you can go down the river with somebody. Or with plenty of people.

Tlakaelel: Thank you all for your words, and your feelings. I want to remind you we have the moon dance coming up in three weeks. Hope you can go, all of you. If not, pray for us. We’re making great effort to be able to do this, we have to help them. Those of you who can’t go, think about them and the women that will be on the mountain. They’re doing it for love.

So, Thank you. We may see some of you at the Dance of Xochimilco.

            We had a big meeting in the highest tribunal in Mexico, in the executive palace in Mexico City. It was a great meeting. We talked about the need to unite and they gave me recognition and I’m proud of it. They named me the grandfather of grandfathers, and they asked me to guide them, and be their spiritual guide. They also named me the defender of Anahuak. Anahuak is the continent. It’s a new title that I have. And I’m content. And I wanted to share this with you. It’s a big responsibility, but with much pleasure. I never expected this. I never look for applause, or recognition. Because what I do, I do it with love. Transcending. We will go, but our work will continue. So we have conquered time in this way, we have conquered death. We continue living in our communities, these organizations, the kalpullis. And all that we’ve done. Transcending is the goal.

Ome Teotl