The Heart loves. It loves and accepts everything that happens in life because it loves life. However, although the Heart accepts everything, it moves us and life toward love. The Heart allows the ego to move away from love, but the Heart is always moving us toward love. Eventually the Heart wins out, and we all end up feeling love, gratitude, and appreciation for life and for all that life has brought us, for that is how the Heart, or Essence, feels in every moment.
The Heart desires love above all else. It isn’t willing to exchange money, safety, power, prestige, success, or anything else for love. Love is the Heart’s priority, and that is how we can tell Essence from the ego. The ego isn’t willing to choose love over these things unless it sees love as an avenue to these things.
In any moment, the Heart is choosing love, while the ego is likely to be choosing something else. What are you choosing? When we are unaware of the possibility of choosing love or when we are unaccustomed to choosing love, we may not see that we have a choice. And yet every moment holds the possibility of either choosing love or choosing the ego’s way of being and seeing. What is the loving choice in this moment? What would Essence do? When those questions become a part of every moment, life flows and flowers.
The loving choice draws love to it, which is all we have ever wanted anyway. Love is the most powerfully attractive force in the universe, more powerful than beauty, power, wealth, success, or anything else we might want. When we choose love, we align ourselves with Essence, with the Heart. We drop instantly into Essence, where other qualities of Essence, such as gratitude, peace, contentment, and happiness, can be felt.
This sounds so simple, but if dropping into Essence were easy, there would be much more love in the world. The reason doing this isn’t easy is that we are programmed to pay attention to the egoic mind, the voice in our head, and giving attention to anything is the same as choosing it. Whatever we give our attention to, we identify with. If we give our attention to love, we identify with love, and if we give our attention to our thoughts, we identify with (i.e., believe) them.
Choosing love requires consciously choosing to put our attention on the present moment and on the qualities of Essence instead of on our thoughts, and that takes awareness and the will to go against our programming. Once we are convinced that our programming, or conditioning, isn’t worth paying attention to, giving our attention to the moment isn’t so difficult. The challenge is that we are programmed to believe our thoughts and follow our conditioning.
Choosing love requires seeing beyond the ego’s desires, needs, and conditioning. The ego only knows what it wants, what it feels it needs, what it believes, what it was taught, and what has worked in the past. When we are identified with the egoic mind, we make choices and act on the basis of the ego’s needs, its knowledge, and its perceptions, which often doesn’t result in the best response. Only Essence has the wisdom to know what is best for each situation, not the ego.
Even trying to answer the question, "What does Essence want?" might not give us the answer. We might only get the ego’s answer to that question. Still, this question is worth asking because doing so interrupts the automatic identification with the egoic mind that is our default position long enough to allow the possibility of Essence to inform us of the truth in Essence’s own way.
Asking that question stops us momentarily and invites us to listen, and listening is key to aligning with Essence and with love. Because we are usually busy listening to the egoic mind, we don’t hear Essence; but if our involvement with the mind is interrupted with that question, the answer may come forth from Essence. The answer isn’t likely to show up as words, but as spontaneous action in accordance with love or as a sense of knowing what action would promote love.
From Anatomy of Desire