It’s Friday, it’s summer, and I ain’t got no job! Dang! I’m good! LOL
* * *
-=[ Expressions ]=-
-- Marianne Williamson, from: A Return to Love
Every day, every waking moment, you desire to do many things, from hugging your lover to earning money. Why is this? What is the underlying motivation or feeling behind all your hopes and dreams? This is the dynamic tension between who you really are and who you assume yourself to be. Our desires reveal who we really are.
Let me explain, dearest…
Take your desire for an intimate relationship as an example. There are countless reasons for engaging in a relationship. But the fact is that you only feel completely fulfilled in intimacy when you and your lover trust each other so implicitly that you feel free to let down your guards, open, and love. This is your deepest desire in intimacy because the actual truth is that you are love, but you perceive yourself to be a separate, isolated individual. So you scheme and often manipulate, and dream to experience in your relationship what, in reality, you already are.
Here’s a good one, one I grapple with as well: we want to experience financial security. In truth, however, we are abundance, although we assume only sustained effort will provide a feeling of ease. You engage in high-risk behavior because you perceive it as living on the edge, but the truth is that every moment you are at the edge of death -- the ultimate edge of winning and losing -- but your fabricated security makes you seek risks. You want to eat that box of chocolates because, dearest, deep down inside in your heart of hearts, you are blissful fullness, though you may have closed yourself from its pleasure and seek its aftertaste instead.
And in this way you wander through your daily acts of “living,” seeking to approximate the truth of you are -- the you that you have lost contact with. This drama of approximation is the story of your life. You even admit at times, when the lows get too low. You never quite succeed like you really hope to. You never quite get the love you really want. And so you either get on the treadmill or give up trying. In either case, you are missing the point of existence.
The uninhibited expression of who you really are is the only thing that will set you free from the trauma of feeling incomplete. The truth is, dearest, you are what you want.
The farther you stray from your genuine self, the more you crave the qualities of your genuineness. Since you have blinded yourself from the love that you are, the love that lives inside of you, you look to your lover to cherish you. Exiled from your home of unlimited openness, you seek instead to expand the sphere of your influence, the size of your stock portfolio, the borders of your country. Seeking the freedom of ease that is already your part of your inherent nature, you try to discharge stress through masturbation, watching TV, and all those secret habits of release. You miss the simplicity of being, so you seek it in the warmth of a heroin rush, a fluffy bed, unsafe sex, or a box of chocolates.
Then there are the times you fret over your appearance, seeking outside of yourself to find the radiance already possess. And you think to yourself constantly, almost obsessively, in order to provide a mirror reflection of your own presence. Yet, in truth, you are sheer presence, whether or not you reflect yourself by thinking.
Dearest, whenever you are ready, you can stop trying to find what you’re dismissing and start being who you are in truth. Yes, to surrender in this way, this completely, is utterly terrifying -- all that work you’ve done on your self image instantly vanishes. Yet, this is the only real way to live. Otherwise every moment you live you live missing who you truly are, and in that way you create a self-image that isn’t the real thing. You feel a lack. This tension of a deficiency winds into an intense knot of desire. Eventually, it warps you.
Divorced from and craving the depth that you miss, you may find yourself engaging in risk-behavior, self-abuse, and manipulating and terrorizing others -- or perhaps just sitting in front of the TV and indulging in “comfort food.” No matter how extreme or mundane your misplaced efforts become, you always have the option of opening as your source. In the grips of that obsession with chocolate (or a cock), you can open as the abundance of the life-force that you are. How would you act if you connected with your inherent abundance? Open as you are, the knot unwinds…
Caught in the trap of the Gordian knot of your desires, your most naughty moments of perverse indulgence, as well as the rounds of daily life, you are missing who you truly are. Instead, through constant practice, you can open as every twist and hope. You can live as love, alive and spontaneous. The fact is, dearest, your deepest desires are who you are.
Love,
Eddie
