A deep longing for annihilation tends to arise in this process. We may experience this longing as passionate love. Essential passionate love is absolutely annihilating. The deeper the longing, the more intensely the passion burns. The sense of being consumed with passion feels like the night encroaching upon you and annihilating your being and consciousness. This passionate love is nothing but the Guest touching the consciousness. We can experience it either as the Guest passionately loving the consciousness or as the consciousness passionately loving the Absolute. In reality it is neither: We are simply realizing the inseparability of the consciousness and the ground. The consciousness is completely annihilated in this impassioned embrace. The mystical images of sexual union with God likely come from such experiences. Unlike other kinds of love, real passionate love is self-consuming. Passionate love feels annihilating rather than giving and sweet. The more you are passionate, the more you disappear. You burn up from within, as if with black fire. You feel as if all your atoms are passionately in love. You don’t know at the beginning what it is that you love. You just feel consumed with passion and longing. You feel you just want to not be, until you finally disappear. And you want to disappear, out of passionate love. When passion completely dissolves the consciousness, then the Guest arrives. The intensity of the contact with the nearness of the Guest, like a hydrogen bomb, incinerates your every atom with passion. The consciousness burns like a raging fire until nothing is left.

On the other side of the rapprochement conflict is the fear of loss of autonomy. This manifests as threat of loss of independence, separateness, individuality, boundaries, being, self and so on. The student experiences the Personal Essence for some time, minutes or months, feeling happy and expanded. Then a longing manifests. By understanding the longing he reaches the state of the Merging Essence. He then experiences contentment, love, pleasure, security and boundlessness. This happens until the longing for autonomy surfaces again. This process does not stop; there is no such thing as compromise here. Autonomy is total and merging is total. One is either one or the other. When there is compromise then there is no essential experience, for compromise is possible only for ego. The student’s immovable conviction is that it is not possible to experience the Merging and the Personal Essence together. This is a reflection of remaining identifications with ego. This conflict manifests in an individual’s life in many forms. It can be a conflict between love relationships and freedom or work. It can manifest as conflict between security and autonomy. It can manifest as a conflict between marriage and free sexual life. The well known midlife crisis is an expression of this conflict, as are many of the conflicts of adolescence. It takes long and deep work, mostly working through one’s relationship to one’s mother, before the experience of a final resolution becomes possible. 

You need to see that you wanted the good father; but this longing reveals a hollowness that gets replaced by the brilliant presence, which you then recognize as exactly what you wanted from your father. In other words, by longing for the good father you are actually longing for Brilliancy. This association between father and Brilliancy is universal. In contacting the longing for father, you find your soul the way it was when its development was arrested. This is what I call the Soul Child. When you integrate the Brilliancy by working through the relationship with your father, you become the needed protective or guiding father for yourself, the father you never had. More accurately, Essence becomes the protecting and guiding father for the soul. As the soul grows and matures, it attains the qualities and capacities of Brilliancy. In this way, the soul becomes whole, integrated, and inseparable from the qualities and capacities of Brilliancy.

Our work on the inner path reveals the fundamental beliefs and assumptions of the mind. Our work is a matter of increasing annihilation of what is not true. If we are really honest with ourselves, if we let ourselves live in our aloneness, away from the influences of all that we’ve learned and been told, all the beliefs about the good and the bad, if we really delve into the matter, we see that the world is not what we think and that we are not what we think. For sure, your mother was wrong about who you are and never really saw you. How could she see you? She couldn’t go into the night; she barely lived in the day. What your mother didn’t see is your true nature, the unmanifest ground from which you and the world emerge. Whoever goes into the night will be eaten up, consumed in an instant, incinerated in a second. The night does not love you, does not do good things for you, does not have mercy on you, and does not make your life easy. The only thing the night can do is incinerate you. This is its only effect: absolute annihilation. This sounds scary, but when you see the falsehood of your entityhood and recognize the pure consciousness, you will be consumed with the passion to annihilate what is false. The longing for cessation is the ultimate desire that we have. It is the ultimate death wish, not the usual physical death wish. To die in total and complete annihilation means not knowing that you ever were or that you ever will be. It is absolute darkness, absolute peace. The Sufis refer to this as fana fi al-dhat, the death into the Divine Essence. Christian mystics refer to it as disappearing into the divine darkness. The Buddhists refer to it as the cessation leading to nirvana, or the dharmakaya of the bardo. All genuine inner teachings speak of this death and consider it the most definitive experience on the path.  

Every time we feel a deficiency, a hole, a gap, there is a longing for that particular missing quality that resulted in the hole. But with that longing there is an additional subtle, underlying longing for the completeness, because each hole, each deficiency, makes you feel incomplete. So it is true that if there is a deficiency of love, for instance, you feel incomplete in your lack of love and you will long for the Love aspect. But you will also long for the completeness because the loss of Love destroyed the completeness. Likewise, the loss of Will destroys the completeness, the loss of Peace destroys the completeness, and so on. I think it is a beautiful thing to recognize that the human soul has the potential to feel and be utterly complete. You see, the Brilliancy is our nature, the brilliance of who and what we are. That completeness, that contentment, that sort of complete deliciousness, happens by completely abiding in our nature, our Being, by not going out of ourselves. We find it by realizing presence itself. It is not found by trying to get pleasure or presence, or by trying to enjoy the presence. It is just being the presence. 

Remaining in this emptiness, and not resisting or reacting to it, clarifies the nature of the sadness and loss. Sometimes the sadness becomes a deep longing for the dissolution of our separateness from everything. We feel what seems to be the deepest and most expanded longing, from the depths of the universe, a longing to lose our personal boundaries and to be part of the whole. Thus, this longing is for the dissolution of the self-entity structure, which is the barrier to the currently arising dimension of Being. At this point in our process we are identified with Being, but the boundaries of the self-entity structure seem to limit us from experiencing our Being in a more profound and expanded way. 

Another discovery is that we see this unity and oneness as our very self and identity. We experience: “I am everything. I am everyone, the bodies, thoughts and feelings of everybody, inseparable from all objects. I am the ground, essence, and source of everything.” No wonder we have been longing for the dissolution of the separating boundaries; the self intuited that the arising manifestation of Being is boundless and infinite. And no wonder we need to be seen as the most special. Pure Being is the most precious thing in reality because it is the preciousness of everything in reality. It is most special because it is the precious ground of everything that is special. In fact, it is what ascribes specialness to anything. This is the reason some students experience the narcissistic need as to be seen as the most special person. 

So far in this exploration of the relationship with father we have seen how we identify with him, how much we become like him. But you need to remember that identification is partially a way to defend against the desire and longing for father; it is a way to feel we have father. If we feel that we have father, we don’t need to feel that we want him and thereby avoid acknowledging our longing for him. But having father means having all the qualities of Brilliancy: a sense of being safe, a sense of intelligence and guidance, a sense of capacity, responsibility, and brilliance. We believe we are getting all of these by becoming like father, which is why we often become like father without even knowing it. There is a deep, inner need for those qualities; and because in one way or another we associate them with father, we believe that the only way to have them is to become like our father. But to be able to truly embody these qualities, you need to see what you really want when you identify with your father in that way. Then, by seeing what you really want with this identification, it is possible for you to regain, or re-own, that part of yourself. 

The particular maturation of the soul that fosters true practice involves the awakening of a fourth drive, the enlightenment drive. Although similar to the instinctual drives, with similar energies and intelligence, the enlightenment drive is not completely biological. Its aim is not a physical one; rather, it is about the quality of inner experience. We may recognize the enlightenment drive as the religious drive, the longing for God or divine union, the desire for enlightenment or truth, or the love of discovering the secrets of existence, what life is all about. As we recognize the truth of this drive, we learn to work on the instinctual drives and harmonize them into the enlightenment drive. True nature, our inherent beingness, has its own dynamic force. As the soul matures, this dynamic force appears as the drive within us to go toward greater actualization of that nature, to bring that nature forward and display it in full consciousness, in full awareness. True nature has inherent in it the drive to reveal itself in our experience. We call this dynamic force the enlightenment drive—the drive toward enlightenment, toward freedom, toward liberation, toward awakening, toward reality, toward truth, toward the genuineness and authenticity that is the truth of Being. 

We see here that intelligence is the functioning of completeness. Brilliancy appears as an intrinsic intelligence. Because Brilliancy has everything in it, it imbues the psyche with intelligence by providing it with all the qualities it needs for its functioning. And it provides them in a synthesized way, creating a complete synthetic capacity. The psyche can now function in a complete way, which is bound to be an intelligent functioning. Just as the longing for Brilliancy can manifest as the longing for intelligence, so it can also manifest as the longing for completeness; and the absence of Brilliancy can be experienced as incompleteness. So when you feel incomplete, you usually try to get rid of that feeling by completing yourself, right? If I feel incomplete because I feel or think I am not smart, I go to school. If I feel incomplete because I am weak, I take up weight lifting, right? If I am incomplete because I’m not compassionate enough, I go about learning to help people. But all these activities indicate that you believe the completeness will happen by adding something to yourself. You believe that by putting things together and collecting all the necessary elements, you will then be complete. In reality that doesn’t work, because completeness is an affect, a feeling, of our true nature when we experience it completely and fully—and you can’t assemble your true nature from its different parts. The completeness can happen only by confronting the incompleteness head on, by recognizing it as incompleteness, and not by acting according to the delusion that we can complete ourselves by getting this or that. 

However, if we’re stuck in our belief in the ego principle, in the concept of being a separate individual entity, the boundaries remain opaque. The light is dim and the love is not there. But then we experience the longing for love, a longing to be one with somebody else. There is a desire for contact, closeness, sharing, and togetherness; a yearning for intimacy and merging. And this is all because we don’t recognize that we are already one with the other. So I say I want to share myself with you. What do I mean “share myself”? I am you. How can I share myself with you? My wanting to share myself with you, us wanting to share with each other, is motivated by the fact that unity underlies all our experience. There is a desire to share because this unity is being expressed through duality. It’s being perceived through the filter of the ego principle, which thinks there are two people who can share, and that by sharing maybe love will emerge and bring us closer together.

So the longing for a carefree condition reflects the longing for divine love. I’ll read you something from my journal, from around the time I was learning about divine love. It will give you an idea of what can happen when this longing arises, one possible story of its unfolding.  

 “Yesterday, I woke up feeling a deep sadness. Eyes full of tears. I do not know the cause of the sadness. In meditation, I start with the desire just to be aware. After a while I see the futility of it. I see that even paying attention is doing, is effort, and is based on desire. It’s not always based on desire, but this time I am controlled by the desire to be free. I feel deep tears again. The sadness is connected with a longing and yearning for a completely free condition, where there is no need to even be aware. Where just being, by itself, is enough. I see and feel that I do not know what to do to reach such a state. I feel there is nothing I can do in this situation. Everything I do is effort and effort does not work. Also, it’s not what I want. I decide to not do anything. I don’t want to keep making efforts. I want an effortless and completely carefree condition. If I always have to pay attention and be aware, then I am defeating myself. I give up trying. I give up practicing any technique, even awareness. I just let myself be there—whatever happens happens.” 

I’ve talked a lot about the divine, melting quality, when the boundaries are disappearing and your consciousness melts and merges with everything. This sometimes manifests as feeling as though who you are doesn’t stop with you. You look at other people and it is as though you were them. If you look in the distance, you don't just feel yourself only here, you feel yourself all the way over there. That is when you recognize that the drop is becoming part of the ocean. The drop is becoming part of a golden, sweet, amazingly, exquisitely content and fulfilling nectar-y ocean.  When we are longing for merging, longing for dual unity, what we are really yearning for is that state of contentment, that state of unquestionable happiness. We are seeking an intrinsic ecstasy, as if each atom in you were ecstatically contented. But it is an ecstasy that is not an excitement. It is not like a fire; in fact, it is the opposite of a fire. It is an ecstasy that flows downward, as opposed to burning upward. It is more like a discharge than a charging up. It is similar to what results from a full orgasmic spiritual discharge in your soul, bringing the merging essence as a deep relaxation and a great contentment.  This happens in a clear and distinct way if we work through all the issues of the symbiotic wish. If we work out all the longing in the relationship with the mother—including the issue of negative merging—to the point where we finally experience the hole or lack of the positive merging, then essence arises and we recognize it as what it is, and we feel all of its qualities.  

Two of the many manifestations of Being—two major essential aspects—are associated with the parents. If we look at our formative experience in childhood, we can see why. In the first few months and years of life the infant’s primary relationship is a dyadic one, mostly with the mother. This insight is now generally accepted in depth psychology, especially after Margaret Mahler’s research, which culminated in her theory of separation and individuation. As a natural continuation of the bond formed during pregnancy, the early relationship of the child is primarily with the mother. The mother’s intimate physical relationship with the child is expressed through the whole nurturing process and represents the central element of maternal care. The maternal functions are directly related to the essential aspect of the Merging Essence, which therefore becomes the primary aspect associated with the mother. Merging Essence is a kind of love that has a relaxing, merging, and melting quality. It is a heart manifestation in the sense that it feels like love, contentment, nourishment, softness, and warmth. Thus, the longing for mother often reflects a disconnection from the Merging Essence. 

This Nourishment, or Milk Essence, is a state of Being, and is always available to the human being. But because it becomes associated with the mother’s physical milk it becomes almost impossible to experience. Every individual has a deep longing for this nurturing presence, but it is not allowed into consciousness, because one is now an adult, One student writes when he feels the deep longing: “When I experienced the emptiness of not having my mother’s nurturing, I seemed to be faced with staying a child or being an adult,” meaning that as an adult he cannot take the need for Milk seriously, because one can have it only as a baby. So the longing for this aspect is usually deeply repressed because the adult individual feels it is too late to have mother’s milk. But this aspect is part of oneself; it can be realized, and it is needed for complete autonomy, which is the Personal Essence. 

This unfoldment, however, is invisible for a long time because it is so hard to separate our notions of guidance from the early imprint of being led through life by a wise and kindly parent. This deep unconscious association blinds us to the liberating reality of inner guidance. True guidance is nothing but the awareness of the intelligence in the dynamism that permeates all manifestation. As we have seen, the dynamism of Being follows an organic path of unfoldment as it draws all manifestation toward the realization of its true nature. This optimizing force is inherent to the dynamism itself and is therefore operating at all times. However, at the surface of consciousness where our soul has become identified with external life, the optimizing force is generally obscured by the soul’s outward fixations. The unconscious longing for parental guidance continues to dominate the soul’s journey through life. From this level, the soul, as it develops, appears undirected, ignorant, and therefore in need of external guidance. As long as our orientation goes outward in order to seek meaning and direction, we will be unable to recognize the optimizing force that is already operating within us. True guidance appears only when we are willing to value our own experience as it is, and in that way attune ourselves to the signs and messages of optimization that are always present in the field of our experience. 

Some women begin to feel a desire to become pregnant when they are working on the issues of the Personal Essence, and the presence is coming closer to consciousness. They usually feel an emptiness in the belly, just as Natalie did, and the emptiness manifests emotionally as a deep longing to feel a warm fullness in the belly. The longing is actually for the Personal Essence; the emptiness is nothing but the condition of absence of this sense of Being. But since the fullness feels something like pregnancy, it becomes unconsciously associated with it. The longing is actually, then, to have the feeling of a being in her belly. We know that the longing for pregnancy at such times is actually for one’s own Being and not really for a child, because the longing often arises when the woman is certain on a conscious level that she does not want to be pregnant and that her practical life situation does not allow it. Of course, a woman can have an unconscious desire for pregnancy or for a child even then, but our observation is that when the woman does become aware of the fullness of her Personal Essence, the desire for pregnancy very often disappears just as suddenly as it appeared. We are of course not implying that all desires for pregnancy are really for the Personal Essence. The two desires might be there together, and the desire for pregnancy might remain after the realization of the Personal Essence. 

So the approach of divine love can emerge in our soul as a longing for it, which can be felt as a longing for release and complete freedom from care and worry. Nevertheless, there may be barriers against feeling that longing for release. For instance, we might not think this release is really possible. We might have all kinds of doubts and worries about whether we could ever reach this carefree state, and say, “Well, what’s the point in trying or even thinking about it?” We may feel so hopeless about it that we don’t allow ourself to even feel the longing for it. The problem then is that focusing on whether or not you will get what you long for cuts you off from the movement of your heart. You’re not allowing the divine presence to touch you from within, and not allowing it to awaken in you the feeling of wanting to be closer to it.

This longing, this personal and intimate yearning for the desireless state, is the longing for the essential aspect of samadhi. As it pushes forward to consciousness, it not only exposes the issues, it also brings to consciousness the awareness of the lack of peace and the quietness of mind of the state of non-desiring. This awareness of deficiency, this hole in the being, this lack of the complete peace of mind of the desireless state of samadhi, makes the person long for this essential aspect, even if he doesn't know that there is such an aspect. What a teacher essence is! It exposes the issues, makes us look at them as dystonic, makes us feel the lack of the essential aspect, makes us long for the aspect. Now the teaching about desire becomes our personal concern. It is no more only Buddha's concern, it is now our own personal concern; and it is such a burning issue for us, such a burning question that it makes us ache and long for an answer, a solution. We cannot rest. The nearness of essence does not let us rest until we find the answer, until we come to the solution.

As we allow ourselves to experience that sense of separation and all the feelings associated with it, we will see that it is a specific hole, a particular type of emptiness, an absence that feels like a longing for something we love that we feel is missing. Longing always indicates both a separateness and a love. What is important to understand is that the state of separateness we are talking about here is a specific deficiency, a specific lack, which is the lack of the merged condition itself.  We can learn about it first, however, if we allow ourselves to stay with the lack of it, the state of absence, of separateness. Absence, or separation, is a state in which we feel empty, dry, isolated, alone, not nourished, cold. If we allow that state to happen without pushing it away, without reacting, without trying to get the merging by going toward one relationship or another or by seeking out this or that situation, then Being itself will manifest in the merged quality. If we allow that emptiness from the perspective of wanting to rend the veil and know the truth of what it is, we will see that our being will manifest itself in a specific quality. Essence itself will manifest as what we call the merging gold aspect. We will see why we use this terminology as we explore its experiential phenomenology.  

I experience myself now as a person who is not trying to defend or protect himself. The inner condition is naked, exposed. No more defenses, no more pretenses. There are vulnerability, helplessness, weakness, not knowing, some innocence, and a very deep sadness. The person feels all these emotions. The sense of self, with its accompanying emotional state, appears simultaneously with the ego-line, indistinguishable from it. The contraction at the ego line feels harsh and prickly; there is a feeling of deep anguish. I feel curious about this person whom I have known for most of my life, the person I have taken myself to be for many years. I wonder whether this person wants something. To my surprise, a longing arises, a longing for the absolute. I see the mysterious blackness of the absolute, and as the empty and helpless person, I feel a definite longing to annihilate into it. The longing arises first as a sad and gentle yearning. Then it gradually transforms into a deep and intense love for the absolute. The love appears after the longing, as if the longing has been hiding it. The love first manifests as an exquisitely faceted form of presence, a form that combines all aspects of essence in one manifestation. I feel it as intense, pure and selfless love, of various flavors and colors. The sweetness is heavenly, and the appreciation feels so pure it has a sense of divinity.

So to practice using the Diamond Approach means to be present with what is happening without judging it as good or bad, without holding onto it or pushing it away. You stay with it, open and curious about what it is, loving the truth of it as it reveals itself. This is really an expression of love for Holy Truth as it unfolds in its various manifestations. This is real freedom, and is the basis of nonconceptual freedom in the Diamond Approach. If you do not understand what Holy Freedom is, you will try to live your life by manipulating your outer experience in order to get your own way; or, if you are a spiritual seeker, you will try to manipulate your inner experience one way or another, rather than surrender to the universe. Either way, you end up in the specific suffering of ego: being locked in inner combat with one part of yourself pitted against another. Only after chasing one state and then another over and over, to the point of realizing you truly cannot will what happens, only then does the deep longing for the end of suffering bring true surrender to what is. 

There is as well an aspect that is specifically impersonal. When one experiences it there is no personal quality present at all. This is one of the formless dimensions of being, which is in a sense the entry into the formless realm. Its manifestation is a direct consequence of realizing the Personal Essence and understanding the personal element. The full realization of the Personal Essence brings about the longing for the impersonal. This happens when one realizes that subtle ego identifications still exist (because some dimensions of Being are not yet integrated), and one begins actually to perceive these ego structures. One realizes slowly but steadily that although there has been tremendous transformation, there is something that has not changed. It is not easy to see what it is that has not changed, although it is becoming more and more ego alien. It creates contractions in the psychophysical organism, discomfort and loss of complete identity with Being. It finally dawns on the student that the totality of his personal experience still has the same old flavor, and because of this ego boundaries and self keep being reinstated. This unchanged quality begins to feel undesirable; one feels clearly, without any sense of condemnation, “I am the barrier.” 

The absolute is majesty; when it manifests its crystal brilliancy it also has beauty. The beauty evokes passionate love; the crystal form of love attains a deep pomegranate color. The feeling is more than love; it is more like bedazzlement. The beauty bedazzles and enchants. I feel a deep devotional and passionate love, and desire for it to take me and completely annihilate me. That is what I have always wanted. A subtle understanding further illuminates my situation. I see that when I feel increasing longing, devotion and love I become more identified as the person, the one who longs. As the longing person I am only a shell over the mystery, veiling it even while longing for it. In other words, even by loving the absolute I assert myself, as the individual, and thus become a veil over what I love. To completely have the beloved, my love must annihilate me totally. I can have the beloved when only the beloved is. 

The more we drop our attachments and abandon our inner idols, the more we are filled with grief and loss and sadness. The whole universe will turn into an ocean of tears. As our heart empties itself of its idols, it sacrifices too its yearning and its longing, and even its love. You don’t feel you long anymore. You don’t even feel that you love anymore. There remains only the direct condition of being consumed by an ocean of hot tears. This is some taste of nearness of the Guest, but we experience it for a long time as the grief over the loss of all the things we are shedding and sacrificing. We willingly sacrifice everything, but we cannot help but feel such deep sadness and tears. However, this again is another story the mind tells us, trying to explain something it does not and cannot comprehend. The mind cannot see that it is the Secret drawing nearer and beginning to melt us, to dissolve us. We can say that it is the heart passionately longing for and loving the Secret. But we can also say it is the Secret touching you, completely and passionately burning you up. For a long time you do your work from the outside, by seeing the distractions and letting them go. As that happens, it is as if the Secret, as if the Guest, is coming closer. The nearness of the Secret is not like the closeness of any other lover you’ve ever experienced. The Secret will burn you up from within, will incinerate you. It will boil you to total evaporation through passionate heat.  

When a person learns what it is to be oneself, the process of inner development, realization and understanding of truth involves continual discovery and expansion, with surprises and celebrations during the whole process. There is no end to the exploration and discoveries. Many of you can feel a very deep yearning, a subtle flame, a longing for that true life—to live our life as a continual celebration and freshness. In some part of us we know this is possible, and that it is the way life should be. If we don’t live this way, there is always a feeling of incompleteness. The understanding of what it is to be oneself unifies the spiritual and the mundane. It unifies the teachings of people like Christ and Buddha with the yearning of the ordinary person. The enlightened masters and teachers talk about renouncing the world, about being free of ego, and about their desire to live a true life. But an ordinary person is always wanting such things as pleasure and the fulfillment of his desire. We want the experiences of the physical world. Why do we have all these desires and dreams? If there is no such thing as a life of abundance and celebration in a personal, ordinary way why do we desire them? These desires must come from somewhere. There must be some truth to both the universal spiritual teachings and the personal longing experienced by the majority of people. There must be something which unifies these so that they are not in contradiction. And to really make that unification, not theoretically or mentally but experientially, to see the two as one, is the door to knowing what it is to be oneself. Without this unification of spiritual and personal, even cosmic and divine experience lacks the aspect of celebration.

But if we explore attachment, we recognize that it is in fact a negativity, the result of a frustration of the heart. We can see that attachment is a negative kind of merging—it’s not real merging. It’s a desire for the state of divinity, for this divine love that is everywhere, but it’s frustrated by the sense of boundaries. We are this unity, which is beautiful and harmonious, liberated and complete, so when we are experiencing ourself as something limited and constricted, we can’t help longing for that unity. If our obscuration is somewhat light, we experience it as a longing for union with the divine, with God. If our obscuration is a little thicker, we experience it as a longing to unite with somebody else. If our obscuration is even thicker, we experience it only as frustration—frustrated desire. Attachment means you are having the divine love without having it—the ego believes it has the unity that way, but it doesn’t really have it. In a state of attachment, although you are holding onto something you think you want, inside the attachment is frustration because you’re not getting what you really want—the loving union.

Eternal presence permeates everything all of the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. Many things are possible because of this truth. When we feel ourselves in touch with this presence, we can feel the power of it arising as energy. We feel it bubbling up like a fountain, an upwelling in the fullness of love. Then it is possible to feel a desire that no longer is a longing for what we are missing. Instead, we want to share and connect with another of like kind who is from our home, from the deep and awesome nature that is our source. Our humanity shows itself as the wave that is full of its ocean, wanting to share itself with another of the same ocean. The physical body is one way that our individual consciousness appears in the world. Each body and form is unique and beautiful as the expression of the one consciousness appearing as many. The ocean of consciousness can express itself as currents of uniqueness that can feel the pull toward one another with a fullness, velocity, intensity, and energy. Rather than a hunger spawned by a sense of missing something, it is a wanting to give and a wanting to receive at the same time. The desire to unite is the expression of the ocean that knows itself as the unity arising as currents within it and that feels a charge, an attraction between those currents. The currents—particular individuals, each a unique consciousness expressing the ocean of our nature—sense this energy and desire between them since they are fundamentally not separate from one another.