Do you long for love?

Most of us do. The intimate touch of another soul is most powerful antidote for all-too-human experience of aloneness. It may be most compelling and pleasurable experience there is.

So why do we spend so much of our time and energy avoiding intimacy by defending ourselves, being angry, critical, closed and judgmental – in short, blocking experience that we most deeply want?

DEFENDING THE EGO GETS IN THE WAY OF LOVE.

The answer is that we are wired to constantly reinforce our limited ego-based identity, our sense of who we are.

This ego-based identity plays a very important role in human life, but it does not have power to love. Ego is all about self. It can and does experience need, and need is often easy to mistake for love. And it can certainly love how another person makes it feel.

But these things aren’t true love. True love and intimacy doesn’t come from ego. In order to experience power of true love you have to get in touch with a different part of yourself – part that lies beyond ego.

THE TRUE NATURE OF EGO.

This process is easier when you understand true nature of your ego-based identity: It doesn’t really exist.

Although it functions as if it’s most real thing about you, in actual fact your ‘identity’ is only a perspective. It’s kept alive solely through stories you tell yourself about life, others and yourself.

You could literally say that your ego is all talk – an incessant monologue whose sole purpose is to reinforce your sense of self – who you are and who you aren’t.

Most of time it goes something like this: “I’m better than he is, uglier than she is, smarter than him, richer than her, worse than I should be. I can do this, I could never do this, I shouldn’t have done that, they shouldn’t be that way. Life is good, life is hard, he’s right, she’s wrong, I’m great, I’m no good, it’s my fault, it’s their fault…” and on, and on, and on...

Just as a whale identifies its location through bouncing sound waves off nearby objects, your ego pinpoints its own presence – defines itself - by relating to people, ideas, and objects around it.

This process is continuous. Your identity must be continuously reinforced or you will quite literally lose sense of who you are.

That’s why it can be so very threatening to have something or somebody confronting your ego – your beliefs about yourself, others or world. Since ego is actually made out of these beliefs, perspectives and opinions, and you identify ego as ‘you’, when your beliefs are threatened it can feel just like a threat to your very survival.

Quite simply, more you get to be ‘right’ about things, more real and solid you feel, and more you have to be ‘wrong’, more threatened and diminished.

WHO ARE YOU REALLY?

This would be really bad news if not for fact that there is another part of you. This part – your core essence, your authentic self – has an intrinsic reality. Unlike your ego-based identity, its existence is not dependent upon outside circumstances or stories. And unlike your ego, it’s not threatened by someone else’s success, or enhanced by their failure. In fact, opposite is true.

You could visualize your ego/identity as like surface of ocean; changeable, vulnerable, reflecting sun, sky, and clouds, affected by every wind. Your core is vast, calm, still, deep water beneath. Those deep mysterious waters teem with every kind of life and potential, but this life is invisible from surface.

All transformation involves a process of seeing beneath changeable surface and connecting with vast deep life-giving waters beneath. This process usually involves a level of discomfort as your identity is shaken out of its placid solid form and made to expand and reflect a deeper level of reality.

But it’s worth it.

MY LITTLE WAKE-UP CALL

Last year I had a very typical experience from which I learned an uncommon lesson.

I was upstairs in my bedroom. My husband was late getting home and had failed to call me to let me know. I wasn’t really worried about him, but I still began to get more and more agitated by fact that he hadn’t come home when he said he would.

“…I would ask, ‘Why was universe created?’ Because then I would know meaning of my own life.” -- Albert Einstein

G-d is infinite and ungraspable. By definition, more we understand, more there is to understand.

But to know how G-d created this world, His intent and purpose, not only is possible, but part of our mission on this earth.

Kabbalah is key.

Some traditions describe our world as a school; a place where souls come and go in order to learn important lessons. But, even though incarnation in a physical body is vehicle through which soul expresses itself and its potential, this is far from whole story.

Life in a body does more than usher soul through a series of developmental stages. The ultimate aim of life in a body is to provide us with chance to become intimate with G-d, to ‘know His thoughts’.

Kabbalah explains that there are many levels of spiritual beings, such as angels, and that all of these are powerfully aware of their spiritual source. In fact, this experience is most important feature of their existence. It defines who and what they are. To these beings, experience of G-d is all encompassing. They relate to Him like a humble and insignificant servant relates to a great and mighty king. The servant’s entire life is devoted to king; king is his whole reality. But two remain separated by an enormous, unbridgeable chasm. The servant will serve king faithfully, but he will never be able to relate to him.

This is not true for us.

Paradoxically, it is precisely through our limiting experience as souls in physical bodies that we can come to know G-d. We will know Him not only from a distance, as servants, but up close and personal. Passionately. Intimately.

Let’s look at why.

G-d is ‘above it all’, independent of, all circumstances; Creator and source. He is only reality. Everything else that exists is only a highly limited expression of Him. The beings that inhabit many spiritual worlds all take vast pleasure in His presence, praise and serve Him. But beyond that they are passive recipients. Like rays of sunlight to sun, they experience and express light of their source, but no more than that.

Physical beings are different. By definition, we physical beings, in our untransformed state, cannot sense our spiritual source. Instead of experiencing G-d as center of our existence, as sun, and ourselves as a ray of sunlight, we feel like center. We ourselves, and our own perspective, are more real to us than anything else.

It is our nature to feel sourceless, separate, alone, and centered in our own unique and limited experience. Despite fact that G-d is only reality, our experience contradicts this fact. Instead, we inevitably experience ourselves, our circumstances and our perspective as real and G-d as a concept.

This is as far as you can get from truth.

In addition, this essential isolation and self-centeredness is root cause of most of conflict and suffering that human beings experience. We are cut off from larger picture. We are disconnected from each other. We feel insubstantial and vulnerable. We compete for resources, like love, attention, success, recognition and money. Much of time we experience life as struggle for physical and emotional survival.