Love and Gratitude

We have an innate desire to reach out to the world around us - to be connected. That is our unconscious understanding of being part of the whole. But our expanded ego has turned that into something else - possessiveness. Look at all the problems in the world today. A large proportion (if not all of them) can be traced back to a desire to possess. We strive to possess land, power, control over others, money - in the belief that these things matter - that they will somehow make us happy. Ultimately they do not make us happy - we do that ourselves. Frequently our pursuit of them leads to unhappiness - for others as well as for ourselves. So why this drive to possess? It is the ego, filtering our desires to be part of The All and attempting to manifest them in the material world by pushing us to reach out and possess The All. But we already possess all there is. We are already The Complete All. We are simply seeing things from one point of view, and forgetting that everything around us, every other person is all part of the same thing - one Consciousness - one Godhead. Yet our ego has become so overblown that it has effectively overpowered the connection that we should always feel to one another, and instead insists that we are independent beings - separate and divided from each other. Hence all the problems that have plagued us since we lost that connection. And how did this happen? Well, it’s possible that as life became less about simple survival, as we became able to look farther than the next mouthful of food, our ego (which is the core of our fight or flight response) kept looking for something to be afraid of. It found, ultimately, or own mortality – the last thing to fear. And how do we control something we cannot control? How do we cope with having no control over our ultimate demise? By controlling something else – the time we have to live, and how it looks. Frequently we do that by filling our life with baubles and money and words like security, commitment, trust, protection and justice. These are simply things to fill the space between where we are and the place we do not truly know, but are relentlessly heading for. There is another way to be, another way to see, another way to live, and love. Imagine a hollow sphere, filled with pairs of eyes pointing inwards. The sphere represents the single consciousness. We see through all sets of those eyes simultaneously, but in order to give the sense of separation, in a material existence we only see through one set of eyes, and see the others looking back at us. In this scenario, it is all about you, because you truly are the Universal consciousness. But there is no sense of absence, want, or need, because what you have, we all have. What others experience, you experience. Everything is merely a point of view. And if you ever want to find yourself - simply look into the eyes of another. Now ask yourself - would you want a part of yourself to go hungry? Would you want a part of yourself to suffer needlessly? Would you cut off your left arm so your right arm can have a nice leather driving glove? If you controlled your life completely - how you felt, how you looked, how you behaved, would you rather feel happy, healthy and loving, or angry, sick and full of hate? Well, the good news is, you do control your life. You are doing it now, whether you intend to or not. You are completely and utterly in control of your reality. But the trick is to realize you have that control. To realize that when you interact with the world around you, you are in fact interacting with yourself. The only thing that is stopping you from realizing this, and from truly taking control of your life and the world around you (which is also you) - is that great Fear-factory: the Ego.