There are only two things going on ever: the Truth and falsehood. The first is God, Consciousness, Reality itself, the Mystery. The second is the delusional ego-I. I am not. I am only ever God. God is all. There is none other than God. God is the ocean, I am the drop or I am the ocean and God is the drop; it doesn't matter which.

Knowing that there is only falsehood and Reality simplifies matters... and it allows you to be clear in regard to the complexities of both, as well as the longing, the impulses, and inner conflicts.

The Love of the Physical Mental and Emotional Form "I Am"

Love of god is mirrored in love of self ... Love of God, love of Love. Find where your love (or awareness or attention or desire) lies, then locate it as a feeling, as a felt experience... in your body. Somewhere there originating in your psycho-physical organism is an impulse, out, away, from you and toward... something. Now this may be money or a girlfriend, a husband, your child, toward food, drink, drugs, but whatever this is, it is a sublimated call to the Divine. Deep down you long for your own immortality, the life eternal, and the name for this traditionally is God.

But there is one love between you and God and you and the outward object of your longing. Between God and the material form there is one other... it is you, of course it is yourself.

Now this sense, the self-sense, your apprehension and felt sense of "I"—remember not your belief or intellectual appreciation or the thought "I"—no, your actual, experiential familiarity with yourself has provoked a great love... a great love. Deep down whether you express it overtly as self-appreciation or self-love or covertly as self-chastisement or self-destructiveness, since you appeared in form you experienced the love of the physical, mental, emotional form. It is called "I Am."

"I Am" arose out of the ground of being. This ground of being is the goal of meditation. It is the non-arising, non-exciting, non-creating level of contented being, space and tranquility in which nothing occurs to break the silence of eternity, of infinity, of the universal beingness.

You can notice, if you have meditated with discipline for some time, that you as a separate self do not participate in this tranquility. But on your return from its mighty thrum, you are filled with longing to return, to leave this mortal place, to be in eternity. Every moment proffers the opportunity to live in eternity, to touch the infinite. What prevents any of us, like the great adepts of the perennial philosophy, the sages, saints, and prophets, the avatars of the Great Tradition of humanity from living permanently in the eternal, in Wisdom and Love, in God, the knowledge of whom passeth all understanding?

The answer, as I have said, is the delusion of selfhood. One thin veil of self between you and the Truth... that's all it is and all it can be... is it any wonder the ego-processes are so filled with hatred, anxiety, and worry... phantasms of terror at the prospect of its own lies being found out, of its own pretense, of its own demise.

Have you noticed the difficulties we are having with relationships, love relationships, primary love relationships? Could it be because we are so filled with love of our personal sense of self, of I me mine, that when we project that love onto a special other, the one who completes me, my soul-mate, my life-partner, and he or she eventually does not conform to our wishes, does anything but complete us, that we are faced with opportunities of love, accepting and respecting another being in the world alongside us? Could it be that this misfiring of our dearly-held ideals reflects the misapplied love we experience for the form "I Am," when it is really meant for God, for pre-form, for eternity, reality itself, the endlessness, the infinite love of which every human being is capable?

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #179