(Most quotes in this section are from
Loving in the Moment: Moving from Ego to Essence in Relationships
Love is what breaks the spell of the egoic state of consciousness and releases us from the prison of separation. It’s love from others—from relationship—that ultimately frees us.
Love disarms the ego like nothing else. It breaks through the egoic state of consciousness and evokes love in us, which brings us into alignment with Essence and with the other qualities of Essence: peace, joy, serenity, happiness, kindness, compassion, patience, and fortitude, to name a few. That is why love is the greatest gift we can give another. Love is the gift that allows others to relax and return to Essence and the true happiness and peace that is our birthright.
Love is so powerful that even a little bit is potent enough to change our consciousness and the consciousness of others.
It’s actually possible to love anyone. There are people whose heart doesn’t close to anyone, no matter what someone looks like or how someone acts or how different he or she is, because they see beyond the person’s disguise to what is Real. The Real—the divine Self—is apparent in everyone if we choose to look for it. It’s easier to see it in some people than in others, but it can be seen in the eyes of anyone. The eyes are where it is most easily seen. Everyone knows what it looks like, although not everyone looks for it or chooses to see it.
Once we drop into Essence and feel love, it seems so easy to love and be at peace. And when we are identified with the ego, it seems so hard to get back to this place of happiness and love. What’s the secret, the key, to moving into Essence from the ego? It’s always a choice. You choose love over whatever the egoic mind is telling you about life, the past, the future, yourself, someone else, or what you should do. You recognize these messages as coming from the ego, and you choose not to listen to them.
The egoic mind takes us away from love. It causes separation. When we feel love, Essence is at work, not the ego. Love is how we can recognize Essence. Likewise, separation, contraction, negativity, and the absence of love is how we can recognize the ego. When we feel these, then we know we are identified and being led by the egoic mind, not Essence. It’s easy to tell when we are aligned with and listening to the ego and when we are aligned with and listening to Essence. One corresponds to the human condition and suffering, and the other to the divine condition and love.
When we are with another, we are most able to experience Essence when thoughts aren’t happening or being given our attention and when conditioning isn’t being triggered. Thinking can still be happening, but if we aren’t paying attention to it, we drop into Essence, and from that place it’s possible to experience Essence in someone else, even if that person isn’t experiencing it.
To experience Essence in another, it’s only necessary to experience ourselves as Essence. There is only one Essence, and experiencing ourselves as Essence enables us to experience it in others, however briefly.
The experience of Essence is simple and uncomplicated compared to the experience of thought. Essence is experienced as a quiet, peaceful contentment with life, all of which causes the heart to open and love to flow. This flow of love can be frightening to those who aren’t used to experiencing it. Love makes the ego feel vulnerable, weak, and out of control. It only takes a second for the ego to enter into that loving moment, feel this fear, and bring you out of the moment and into your thoughts. Suddenly, you are no longer experiencing the love and the moment, but thinking about them or something else. The love, peace, and contentment of Essence are gone, and you are back in the confusion, fear, and discontentment of the ego.
The way out of the egoic state of consciousness and into Essence is not a hard road after all. All it takes is paying attention to the love, joy, peace, contentment, compassion, wisdom, and happiness that are already here in this moment. Can you feel them—any of them—even just a little? That is your doorway into Essence. Even a sliver of love or peace or joy can take you there. Pay attention to that sliver—notice it—and then that will become your experience of the moment instead of your thoughts. Instead of noticing your thoughts, notice these subtle feelings and qualities that belong to Essence, and you are there! Making this choice isn’t difficult or unpleasant, but it is a choice.
We think we are being less superficial by loving people for their personality rather than their appearance, but the personality is just more programming. People have no more control over it than they do over their appearance. The personality is not the real Self, or Essence, although the personality can be a vehicle for Essence. More often, the personality is a vehicle for the ego. Whether it is a vehicle for Essence or the ego, it’s still just a vehicle—a means for interfacing with the world. The personality itself has nothing to do with who we really are; it’s merely a useful tool in this physical reality.
Every personality is unique. Think about that. What an amazing thing it is that there isn’t anyone, nor will there ever be anyone, exactly like you. Your appearance, personality, talents, circumstances, life purpose, and current and past life experiences are entirely unique. No one else is designed to have the experiences you are having through your bodymind and personality. That makes your life very precious, and it makes every other life very precious too, regardless of how another may seem to us. For this reason alone, all life is precious.
Our uniqueness is lovable. You can learn to feel love for anyone by loving their uniqueness. That’s what the Oneness finds lovable, and when you are aligned with Essence, so do you. By choosing to look beyond the qualities you don’t like or respect in others to their uniqueness, you can experience love in their presence. But you have to want to experience love before you will choose to do this.
If we are to get along with those who are very different from us, we have to find some commonality. In the absence of any commonality is Essence, which is what unites us all. We are united by the fact that there’s no real separation, only apparent separation.
Letting others be here in all their glory (or otherwise) makes it possible to have a relationship with them. However, rather than doing that, we tend to relate to our ideas about them instead of to the reality, not only the reality of what they are actually presenting to us, but also the real reality—their true Self.
The image we have of someone isn’t real—it’s only an image, an idea. To know someone, we have to look deeper, and when we do, we find the same blessed divinity in everyone.
Judgment is probably the most destructive force in relationships. It maintains ego identification, which is incompatible with love and relationship. Judgment is the primary way the ego sustains its sense of being separate and superior. The ego puffs itself up through comparisons and judgments of others. It makes itself better than others by hauling out a rule or a conditioned belief that proves its superiority. Relationships can’t thrive in such an environment. Judgment and criticism prevent love from flowering and kill it if it’s already there.
No one could possibly match every idea we have for our ideal partner because many of our ideas are unrealistic and contradictory. Even if someone has the qualities we’re looking for, we still have no control over how or when they are expressed. For instance, you may love it that your partner is adventuresome, but you don’t want that quality showing up when the taxes need to be done. Or you may love it that your partner loves to cook, until you realize that cooking and eating is all you ever do together. It’s not enough for someone to have all the right qualities if he or she doesn’t express them as we would like. It’s also not enough for someone to have all the right qualities if he or she doesn’t feel the same way about us! Finding a partner with all the right qualities, which are primarily features of the personality, just isn’t enough to make a relationship work.
The ego has its list of qualities and attributes it wants in a partner and in a relationship. To the ego, these seem to be reasonable and useful criteria for relationship. The ego can’t imagine being in love with someone who doesn’t fulfill most of its criteria. The ego is so sure of what it needs in relationship, and it probably does need these things to be comfortable and as happy as it can be in relationship. Nevertheless, meeting the ego’s criteria isn’t enough to bring real happiness because its criteria are too narrow and shortsighted. The ego lacks the vision to understand what is necessary for real happiness. It knows only what it wants, according to its conditioning, and those desires are its basis for relationship.
The most fulfilling relationships are ones in which the individuals are fulfilling their life purposes, either jointly or individually. The perfect relationship for you—the one that will make you most happy on the deepest levels—is one that supports what you came into life to do. That is the best basis for relationship.
When we are identified with the ego, being around others brings out judgments. Because the ego feels separate from others, it needs to feel superior to feel safe, so it sizes up the competition and brings the competition down to size by judging. Bringing the competition down to size allows the ego to relax a little in the company of others, but at a great cost, because there’s no joy in maintaining this position. Making others small makes us feel very small and only increases our need to feel better than others. This strategy actually backfires and leaves us all the more entrenched in the egoic state of consciousness, which is a state of contraction—of feeling small and impotent. So the more we judge, the more we feel the need to judge. But judging never gets us the peace or love we long for.
The real you—Essence—is willing to allow the beloved to live life as he or she sees fit. It may ask for what it prefers to have happen (“Would you mind putting these things away, or do you mind if I put them away now?”), but it accepts responsibility for having this preference and doesn’t belittle the beloved in an attempt to get him or her to comply. It doesn’t use judgment and anger as a weapon to manipulate others.
The inability to resolve differences causes many relationships to crumble, either slowly or quickly. Judgment undermines relationship little by little (or more quickly), but the result is the same—the demise of the relationship. A little bit of ongoing judgment is just as bad as a lot of it, because, over time, it’s enough to kill a relationship. Judgment is more pernicious than we would like to think. It seems rather innocuous in minor doses or over small matters, but like poison, a little is enough to kill when administered repeatedly over time.
When two people are meant to be together—to enjoy love and life together, to help each other, or to learn something—love is just there. Where it comes from and why is one of the great mysteries of life. You don’t and can’t make love happen; it just happens. Love shows up, and you had nothing to do with it.
Love isn’t something we can understand because it’s not able to be grasped by the mind. Love is not in the mind’s or the ego’s domain. It’s a quality of Essence—of who we really are—and that is too mysterious for the mind to be able to contemplate. And the mind doesn’t want to. Yet love is where fulfillment lies and why relationships are so important to us.
Not only is it not our business to change others, but it’s also harmful to relationships to try to do so. Ideas are just not worth the price paid in love lost. Love is more important than any conditioned idea or belief, but if you take your conditioning more seriously than love, you will lose love. The other person will withhold love from you because it will be too painful for him or her to love you.
Fortunately, love is less than a breath away, if only we turn our attention away from our judgments and onto the moment, which is full of exactly what we are looking for: love that is perfect just the way it is.
Happiness, joy, love, peace, and contentment are not arrived at by trying to get them, but by noticing that they are already here. Just check: Is love here now? Is happiness here now? Is peace here how? Is contentment here now? Noticing these qualities draws us into the experience of them.
To align yourself with Essence and experience love and the other qualities of Essence, all you have to do is notice love. When you notice love, you are, in a sense, choosing love over the ego’s ideas, and that choice brings you into alignment with Essence.
Essence lives for love and is not dissuaded from it by ideas or judgments or differences. It loves because it sees similarities, not differences. It sees how others are like itself—how others are itself. From Essence, you experience Oneness and unity with all life, and from this place, it is easy to love.
It’s not our partner’s responsibility to change just because we have conditioning that demands that. Wanting our partner to change is not enough reason for him or her to change, although the ego thinks it is and tries to manipulate by claiming, “If you loved me, you would change.” If we want a loving relationship, we have to take responsibility for our conditioning and the feelings generated by it, and choose to give up our judgments and attempts to change our partner. When we do this, we discover true love because our partner will love us for being so loving, accepting, and allowing.
There is nothing that opens someone’s heart more than someone with an open heart. Conversely, there is nothing that closes someone’s heart more than someone with a closed heart—and that means someone who is judging.
Even if you don’t feel loving in the moment that you choose not to express your judgmental thoughts, your partner will appreciate your act of love, and your relationship will benefit from the accumulation of these small acts of love. In time, you will come to see how worthwhile it is to choose love instead of judgment, and doing this will become automatic.
Nothing is ever lost in choosing love. Your judgments never worked anyway. They only created anger, hurt, and separation. When you see the truth of this, it becomes much easier to choose love over judgment.
It’s ironic that so many arguments in relationships are caused by a conflict of desires, because desires are really not worth fighting over. For example, if you want to go on a trip and your partner wants to spend that money on a new sofa, or if you want a traditional wedding and your fiancé wants to elope, are those desires more important than love—more important than your relationship? Desires are conditioning, and conditioning is not more important than love. When you drop into Essence, you know this.
Arguing doesn’t happen when both people are in Essence because there’s nothing to argue about. Negotiation can certainly happen, though. From Essence, conditioning is just conditioning; it’s nothing more than an idea, and how much substance and importance is there in an idea? Essence’s point of view is that no idea is worth losing love over.
We expect so much from our partner and our relationship. We have so many desires and expectations tied to relationship that it’s no wonder we get angry at our partner as much as we do. If unfulfilled expectations and desires create anger (and they do), then we are going to be angry a lot in relationships because we have so many expectations and desires related not only to our partner, but also to relationship in general. We have lots and lots of ideas, including desires, when it comes to relationship. We really do hope (and expect) that our partner will fulfill our desires as a mate and give us the kind of relationship we want. But that’s an impossible task.
As long as we are identified with the ego, we believe we need something to be happy, and we expect our partner to provide that. Even if our partner can provide some of what we think we need, no one can provide everything because there’s no end to what the ego believes it needs. When it gets something, it wants more of it or the opposite. Your partner can never win at the game of trying to provide you with what you need, and you will never be able to provide that for him or her either.
There’s a deeper satisfaction to be had, and it isn’t based on having anything but on being. When you are happy just being, then you don’t need your partner to be anything for you. You don’t need anything. Then it’s possible to have a truly loving relationship, one based on celebrating the truth—the ultimate reality of who you are.
Since we all have conditioning that interferes with loving, finding reasons to not be in a relationship with someone is easy. What isn’t so easy is overcoming conditioning enough to love. It comes down to this: Do you want love and relationship more than you want your desires and other conditioning met? Do you want love more than you want your conditioning?
We make the mistake of thinking that fulfilling each other’s needs is the purpose of relationship and even the way to express love. Although it’s true that when we love someone, we often gladly give to them, it’s not true that love or relationship is about fulfilling the needs of another. That happens, but that’s not the purpose of relationship. It may be the purpose of relationships between egos, but it’s not the purpose of an Essencebased relationship, whose purpose is love. Love is not about needs, but about seeing beyond our conditioned needs and desires to the Essence of the other person and sharing at that level. Essence’s purpose in relationships is to experience Oneness with another—to experience love. It has no other purpose. It’s not trying to get anything from the other. It’s just happy to be with the other and celebrate that beingness together.
Rather than looking for someone who will make us feel butterflies and goose bumps, being present to the one we are with from Essence will allow us to feel the love and connection we have always wanted. This love is more real, more fulfilling, and more substantial than butterflies and goose bumps. It often isn’t for lack of the right partner that we don’t feel this real love, but for lack of alignment with our own Essence and the Essence of another.
In many cases, accepting our partner’s way of being is just a matter of counteracting any complaints the ego has with a positive statement of acceptance, such as, “Let it be,” “Everything is perfect,” “Love is more important than this,” or “He’s just the way he is.” These are expressions of truth from Essence, and we can use expressions like these to neutralize or change our relationship to our egoic mind, which judges and resists the many ways our partner is different from us. We can remind ourselves: “That’s just the ego. There it goes again, trying to cause trouble!” Conflict is not inevitable in relationships, and we can learn to avoid it through ignoring our partner’s conditioning and letting him or her just be the way he or she is. This is one of the greatest gifts we can give our partner.
We are here to learn love, and relationships teach this. If your relationship isn’t helping you to learn love, but, instead, is fostering enmity, then you need to consider leaving it. If interactions within your relationship are overwhelmingly negative or abusive, and you are unable to turn that behavior around, then it’s likely that you and your partner aren’t meant to be together. If you have tried everything you can to transform the negativity within you and within your relationship and you haven’t succeeded, then staying in the relationship might not be appropriate. Sometimes love means loving yourself enough to leave a negative or an abusive situation.
It’s never too late to say “I’m sorry.” These are tremendously healing words. They can stop a conflict instantly and drop both people into their Hearts because “I’m sorry” comes from Essence. “I’m sorry” concedes that you were wrong in pushing for what you were pushing for. It stops the ego, which is trying to be right, in its tracks, and immediately allows the partner to relax and feel sympathy and love for you.
It’s surprising how just saying “I’m sorry” softens you and your partner. Suddenly, there’s nothing more to argue over because you have conceded the fight. There’s no more reason to withhold your love, which we often do to try to manipulate our partner, and the result is that love begins to flow again. Suddenly, you both remember what you love about each other. It’s funny how the ego clouds this, but it does so only momentarily if we are willing to concede our position and apologize for any hurt we may have caused. Your partner will love you for that, and more important perhaps, apologizing makes it possible for you to love your partner again.
Love is the attractive force that draws to us the help, companionship, information, and other things we need to flourish. Love creates the good karma that keeps the good going out and coming back, which makes the world go around.
Whatever we put out in the world, tends to come back to us, although not necessarily right away. Whether feedback from others or from life about our actions is immediate or not, we receive feedback instantly internally: When we act in accordance with our true nature—with love—we feel good; when we don’t, we don’t feel good. This is how life teaches us love: It rewards us for love and doesn’t reward the opposite. So if life is rewarding loving behavior, what does that mean? This would seem to be evidence for a loving force behind life, a force that is guiding us toward love and away from whatever undermines love.
What you can notice when you are identified with the ego is how bad this makes you feel, not to mention how bad it makes others around you feel. And you can acknowledge that feeling bad isn’t what you want. You want to feel good. You want to feel love. So you forgive yourself for being human because you don’t want to suffer anymore. You see that you can have your position and suffer, or you can feel good and be loving. All it takes to free yourself from suffering is to forgive yourself for being human—for having an ego. Having an ego isn’t your fault anyway.
The only way the pain from the past can be stopped is through a conscious act of will to not dwell on painful memories when they arise. Dwelling on them only creates a painful present. We are free to choose, of course, and many do choose to dwell on those memories for a very long time. But it’s exhausting, and it destroys relationships. Do you want love more than this pain and drama? The ego actually doesn’t, but Essence does. When you are able to find that place within you that is willing to forgive and forget, then love is possible.
To love, we have to fall in love with reality—with what’s true right now, not with what might be true in the future or with what we want to be true in the future. Love happens in the now (like everything, really). That’s why the ego doesn’t know about love—because love is the experience of being in the now, or the present moment, and as soon as the ego experiences the now, it runs.
Commitment takes a willingness to fall in love with reality—with the real partner who is in front of you—rather than seek something else, either actually or through fantasy. What you commit to is what’s here right now. Who knows what will be here next? All you ever really have is what’s here right now, so it makes sense to commit to that—in other words, to give your full attention, your love, to that.
It’s possible to love whoever shows up in your life. In fact, it’s very wise to do that if you want to be happy. If you don’t want to be happy, you will reject whoever shows up in your life. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be discriminating. Loving and saying yes to those who show up in your life doesn’t mean getting sexually involved with them unless you want to. Essence says yes to others—is open to them—because Essence is curious. And then it is very wise about getting more involved with them.
Essence commits itself to someone only when love is flowing in both directions and the relationship is rewarding on many levels. The ego, on the other hand, may commit out of sexual attraction or because some other need is met through that relationship, neither of which is a good basis for commitment.
Commitment only makes sense when there is love, but the ego isn’t capable of love. It forms relationships based on needs, and that’s when commitment falters. As soon as someone’s needs aren’t getting met, then the commitment is questioned. Those who are identified with the ego much of the time have a very difficult time committing, while those who are identified with Essence are able to love and therefore able to commit. Eventually everyone learns to love, but relationships can be pretty volatile when egos are in charge. Even so, because relationships provide the ego with many of the practical things it values—sex, security, affection, companionship, support, and help—people who are in relationships for egoic reasons often end up discovering love. This is how life draws people out of the ego and into Essence.
Love sees beyond the costume and beyond the character that your partner is appearing as. Look into your partner’s eyes, and see the true Being behind the costume. That’s what you fall in love with—not someone’s bank account, hair, body, power, or any of the other things the ego values so much. You fall in love with what shines in the eyes, with what is loving you back.
When we love someone from our depths—from Essence—we draw the other’s Essence out from hiding so that he or she can more easily express it. This is the greatest gift we can give someone— to create a loving and accepting environment where love can flourish. This kind of connection is what everyone is looking for, and it’s available to everyone. You don’t need to look a certain way or have anything. But you do have to be willing to drop out of the judging mind and be very present to the person in front of you or, better yet, to the divinity of the person in front of you.
You are here to find love, not just for yourself, but also for the divine Self, which has been hiding love from you in this world of form just so that you could have the pleasure and amazement of discovering it in the simple quiet of this moment—and in your beloved’s eyes.