Did I say that you wouldn't have a reaction? You're just asking what everybody else is thinking... because "I can't wait to find an exception to what you're saying, Guy. I want to know that it's OK for me to be angry; I want to know that it's OK for me to be sorry." And it is! You can't not do it. That's a problem, and it's immense. And yet it's so simple. In hell, everything devils do is natural. Nobody jumps into a flame down there and goes, "This isn't natural. Bathing my feet in lava - that's natural." Hatred is natural to evil. Fear, pain regret, sorrow - all those things belong to a nature that is natural to feel. That nature that's natural to feel is a time nature. It is a consciousness enveloped in wrinkle after wrinkle of time and conditioning.
When you understand something - at last - about what is eternal, you will have reactions in time, but you will not be governed by them. Your identity won't be derived from the sudden darkness that overwhelms you when you lose someone or something you love. Because you'll understand you can't lose someone that you love. You'll see, for a fact, you can't die. You'll know it. You won't think about it! You won't be reading books and saying, "I can't die. I'm eternal. I'm love on a stick." Dope on a rope more likely! But you mustn't imagine that.
If that reaction is the very nature of creation, and out of that creation new life is always coming, that means that in the space between that reaction and the awareness that one has of that reaction, that is an eternal space. That is a place in which rebirth never stops taking place, in which the Christ lives, loves, and dwells - that place. And what if you actually knew that?
I wept for my dog when it died. I'll still weep. But there will be someone watching the weeping and listening to all the voices saying that it was this and that, and bringing up pain, bringing up memory so it can suffer what it says is love. And love doesn't suffer over conditions. Love suffers for the sake of transcending the condition so that real love can be expressed, and that you could be an actual instrument of that goodness instead of the instrument of something that loves itself and worships itself through what it identified with.
I can't fix you. It's impossible. But I can show you something. I know people that, to this very day, still talk about what was done to them as children... and how their bitterness and their anger is all because of what someone or something did. Why did those people do whatever they did to you? Why did they do it? What's evil? Unconscious identification. They did not know what to do with their pain. You became the instrument by which they escaped themselves by having someone or something to blame for their suffering. They were a machine, living out a mechanical life, producing another mechanical creature in their own image - which is what all of humanity has become.
But you have a chance to not be a mechanical man or a mechanical woman. You have a chance to turn the other cheek seven times seven. You understand that "He prepares a feast for me in the presence of my enemies," as here is this moment and everything in me wants to come up and be tempted to blame and hate and get rid of the pain of that reaction. No. I will not get rid of the pain of that reaction. I will enter the space in which something tempts me to give that a name so that I can be consoled. And I won't do it. I'll climb Golgatha myself. I'll carry what I have to carry in order to be free of what has been carrying me through this world so that I no longer have to crucify the men and women in my life with my ambitions and my desires and my hatreds and my fears.
