More Teachings of Yogi Amrit Desai

The Urge to Merge

By Gurudev

Excerpt From The Yoga of Relationships available at www.amritkala.com

Love is the elixir of life, the nectar that nurtures every level of our body and being. Our inborn, evolutionary urge to merge compels us to search for love and the promise of completion it brings. We seek love in its myriad forms and in every expression of life, craving the experience of ecstatic union, where the walls that separate us from others dissolve into oneness.

With our first breath in, we arrive in this life pure and without attachments, yet it is an existence devoid of consciousness. As infants, we live purely in the moment, delighting in our own toes and giggling at whoever shows us affection. In these early years, our demands are purely biological. When we are hungry, we cry and are fed. When we are wet, we get irritable and our clothes are changed. When we are tired, we get restless and are tucked into bed. At this stage, closeness to our mother is not personal affection, but an instinctual bonding for the fulfillment of basic needs and the preservation of life.

It does not take long for the innocence of childhood to wear off. In ages past, it was said that a child was with God for the first seven years. Today, with the influence of mass media messages, it is closer to two or three years. By this age, the individual personality is already developing. The demands are no longer purely biological; they come with conditions because the sense of “I” and “mine” are very strong natural inclinations in children. Any parent of a toddler knows how conniving they can be. Parental and societal responses to experimental behaviors have a lifelong effect both on the individual and everyone around them. This is the beginning of the self-image we show to the world. Our self-image, or ego, is conditioned over time by our parents, society and culture.

We think of the self-image as ourselves. At this age, we are too naive to realize the falsity of this impression. We have no ability to separate the truth from fiction. The ego has needs; it makes demands. And when needs are not met, it leads to frustration, anger and resentment. We believe we are looking for love, but it is not love we are seeking. It is our ego trying to fill its insatiable void. It is at this juncture that the word love gets its bad name. The ego’s hunger for more and more can never be satisfied, leaving us feeling confused and miserable. If we never reach the realization that we are not only individuals, but simultaneously part of the whole, we develop self-centered behaviors.

This is natural and happens to all of us in varying degrees. In short, our self-image creates the world we live in. We exist in a fantasy world, not the real world. Distorted by our perceptions, our happiness morphs into sadness, loving becomes revenge, and satisfaction turns into expectations. With duality comes unconscious separation. This sense of the false self develops separateness from others as it acquires definitions, concepts, memories and expectations of how life should be. Our immature emotions become a roller coaster of ups and downs, continually counteracted by their polar opposites. This a difficult trap and sometimes it feels as if we will never escape the cycle of disappointments. We repeat the same mistakes. We get stuck in our own patterns of self-destruction. But life is a perpetual therapeutic irritation. It is a school for learning our lessons over and over again until we get it right. The merry-go-round of life always gives us another chance to grab the brass ring.