On the ego level, we usually feel most personal when feeling deep emotions or being in emotional situations with others. This is in marked contrast to the personal element of Being. Being is not on the emotional level. Being is a much deeper and more profound level than emotions. Emotions are responses of the nervous system, very much linked with the organization of past object relations. Being personal on the Being level can mean some kind of sharing and communication, but not necessarily. One can be personal and completely alone. It is a way of being, a way of experiencing oneself and a way of living. One is personally involved in, is intimately in contact with whatever one is doing or experiencing.  

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.

When you know your essence, you can allow yourself to experience merging love with another person; you don’t feel the need for barriers between you and the other. When you feel your beingness and the beingness of the other, it is okay for them to become one beingness. When there is no issue of me and you, of boundaries and separation, then there is no issue of us as One. Merging love creates a state with no barriers. There are no barriers then between you and anyone or anything, between you and your body, your surroundings, your car, the whole universe. You feel you are sharing in everything, you are part of everything, melted with everything. Your heart is open and melting like butter. This is a deeper aspect of who you are, a deeper realization of yourself. You begin to know yourself without reference to your body, your feelings or your environment. You are a depth. You look into the distance and you don’t feel you are looking at the distance; you are the distance. You look up into the sky, into the clouds and you don’t feel you are looking into the clouds. There is no distance between you and the clouds. You are the clouds. You are here and everywhere. Your boundaries are gone and the belief in boundaries is gone. They have melted away. This kind of love is one of the most difficult for people to experience in love relationships even though it is exactly what they say they want. 

Aloneness. That’s true. So as you go through that, as you recognize the experiencer, and your own experiencer recognizes there’s no need to share it, you feel the aloneness. The aloneness is a real thing here, and it’s a transition. Alone doesn’t mean that you’re lonely; you’re just accepting an existential situation. The desire to share and the feeling of aloneness both reflect the truth that you are not that separate experiencer, but they are interpreted through its filter. Which tells you that if you are an individual, separate experiencer, then there are other ones too who you could share things with, right? And, also that you can be alone. However, if you are the boundless divine presence, what does it mean to share your experience? There’s no need, really, to share it then. Not because of the absence of feeling that need, but because it just doesn’t make sense. And aloneness is also a concept that does not fly any more. So sharing is you wanting connection, which is really a reflection of wanting boundless love. That’s why we always want to share, because boundless love is our real nature, so the longing for it comes from some deep place. It gets expressed in all kinds of ways of communicating, sharing, and having intimacy. But as we go deeper, we begin to experience the aloneness, and the aloneness can be the transition then to that state of boundlessness.

We will describe the characteristics of the Merging Essence, which should make it clear why this aspect is connected with the symbiotic stage.

1. It is a presence, a state of Being, a certain form of self-existing consciousness.
2. It is not an emotional reaction or an image.
3. It feels soft, tender, gentle and very sweet. It feels like a form of love. This form of love feels like the presence of goodness.
4. This love has the quality of sharing in it, of feeling it with someone else. The sharing feels like the sharing of the goodness one has  . . . 

Our heart yearns for, longs for, union, but as we will see, we do not understand very well what the term “union” means. Most of the time, the closest we come is in our longing to be in the company of somebody else. So it may be difficult at first to see that being with a lover, sharing intimacy with a friend, feeling a sense of connection and bond with one’s children are not only reflections of the original union but are actually veils over the true situation of union.  Remember what veils are: Their very nature both hides the truth and reveals it. Veils hide the truth because we don't yet understand what we are actually desiring and longing for: What is this condition of union? But at the same time, these veils show us something; they reveal that our longing has something to do with intimacy, with nearness, with openness to one another, with a love and sweetness that connect us together. They show us that the deeper truth is warm and gentle, sweet and satisfying, and creates a deep bond. So the veil expresses something about the original situation that we want, that we might have lost, or that we are not in touch with. And that something is the actual union, the actual connection, the actual bond we seek—which is the complete intimacy with that truth.  

A deep understanding of reality can follow from such a realization of desire. We can see that dualism arises when we are separated from our nature, for it is then that we experience the desire to fill ourselves. We believe there is something external that we need to have, and we deeply believe that we don’t have that something. However, with the energy of desire, when we feel it as the blissful wanting of another—but with a sense of sufficiency, not from lack —we don’t feel the same kind of otherness we do when we have a dualistic perspective. We feel that the other is arising from the same ground as we are. There is a sharing of a blissful communion, and that communion is a recognition that both of you are one reality.

Our nature, in its purity, is complete. You can’t say that something is missing from it. It encompasses everything because our nature is the nature of everything; our experience of fundamental reality does not exclude anything. So when we are in the vastness of the ocean of consciousness, the experience of reality feels transcendent. But we might feel that we are missing something if we don’t have relationships. If we’re not sharing with another person, we start missing that. How often have you gone on a spiritual retreat and sat for a week, or have gone walking in nature and had an epiphany, and find that you can’t wait to go tell your friend what happened? There is something about sharing it, about saying it, about expressing it. There is something about letting other people know that a wonderful thing happened. This thing that happened to you, you want them to know it, too. So we all want to share what we love. In doing this, we are sharing the very nature of what we are, the very beingness of what is all. We share with others our love for them, but we also want to share this freedom we have that is beyond anything in the world. The question of how to live from this freedom usually presents us with a disparity, puts us in a bind. How do we remain in our experience, unencumbered by worldly concerns—outside the world and its limitations, feeling complete freedom, freedom from all the sorrow and the suffering—and still participate in the world we live in? How can we be free and completely separate from all the limitations that we thought we had and yet be in the world with all of its limits? How to reconcile these two realms, these two loves?  

In addition to all the other kinds of activities and delights that we have, we find our personal relationships very important, near and dear, to us. People differ in the value and emphasis they place on personal relationships, but we can guess that the majority of people do value them. Our children, our spouses and significant others, our friends as well as our families—these are the people we enjoy life with. So there is not only enjoyment of life, but also enjoyment of the people in our lives. As human beings and social creatures, we enjoy loving, we enjoy being loved, we enjoy sharing. Human beings have these precious experiences with more varied colors and richness than any other species, as far as we know. We are consciously able to develop relationships that continue to open and show great treasures beyond this physical existence. We go through various stages of life, sharing with our friends, acquaintances, and loved ones the things that we are learning, that we are excited about, that we are struggling with. We enjoy sharing whatever we love.