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WHAT’S NEW? The Ego’s Search For “Love Relationships”…
For those of you in US – Happy Veterans Day! They definitely deserve our love. 🙂
Make sure you scroll down and read the excerpt by Eckhart Tolle on love relationships – it’s very powerful.
And last of all – if you are interested in Bhutan this is the time to let me know as it is last call for this truly amazing journey!
Blessings and love, Sheri Rosenthal
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EVENTS, JOURNEYS + WEBINARS!
Mastering the Buddha Nature Within, Bhutan
Dec 7-18th, 2014 – LAST CALL!
Not many people have actually heard about Bhutan – Land of the Thunder Dragon, or even know where it is located. For many years this little country about the size of Switzerland has been off limits of foreigners. You must realize that Bhutan is not like any place you are likely to travel to. The people are Tantric Buddhists who have a Shamanistic background called Bon – and a fantastic history filled with legends and mythology.
Everyone who visits is touched in the most astonishing ways, by the landscape, the heart of the people, and their philosophies. By the time we leave, the experience will have opened your heart in a manner that that is totally unexpected.
Author Sheri Rosenthal and Lisa Tully invite you to join them on this magical and sacred pilgrimage – through meditation, chanting, prayer and ceremony we will expand our consciousness and cultivate the compassion and loving-kindness of Buddha within.
Thankfully we’ll have the opportunity to spend a day at the Druk Wangyal Festival. Held at the Dochula Pass which is an incredibly scenic location – you’ll have a panoramic view of the Himalayan mountain range – simply stunning! We’ll also spend time visiting the very rare and endangered Black Necked Cranes in Phobjikha. And as a special gift, a Lama will be preparing a prayer and blessing ceremony just for us.
Trip tuition: $5599 USD per person double occupancy, all meals, and your flight from Bangkok to Paro is included (~$850 USD).
OUR FEATURED ARTICLE
The Ego’s Search For “Love Relationships”
What is conventionally called “love” is an ego strategy to avoid surrender. You are looking to someone to give you that which can only come to you in the state of surrender. The ego uses that person as a substitute to avoid having to surrender. The Spanish language is the most honest in this respect. It uses the same verb, te quiero, for “I love you” and “I want you.”
To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change. The ego singles someone out and makes them special. It uses that person to cover up the constant underlying feeling of discontent, of “not enough,” of anger and hate, which are closely related. These are facets of an underlying deep seated feeling in human beings that is inseparable from the egoic state.
When the ego singles something out and says “I love” this or that, it’s an unconscious attempt to cover up or remove the deep-seated feelings that always accompany the ego: the discontent, the unhappiness, the sense of insufficiency that is so familiar. For a little while, the illusion actually works.
Then inevitably, at some point, the person you singled out, or made special in your eyes, fails to function as a cover up for your pain, hate, discontent or unhappiness which all have their origin in that sense of insufficiency and incompleteness. Then, out comes the feeling that was covered up, and it gets projected onto the person that had been singled out and made special – who you thought would ultimately “save you.” Suddenly love turns to hate.
The ego doesn’t realize that the hatred is a projection of the universal pain that you feel inside. The ego believes that this person is causing the pain. It doesn’t realize that the pain is the universal feeling of not being connected with the deeper level of your being – not being at one with yourself.
The object of love is interchangeable, as interchangeable as the object of egoic wanting. Some people go through many relationships. They fall in love and out of love many times. They love a person for a while until it doesn’t work anymore, because no person can permanently cover up that pain.
Only surrender can give you what you were looking for in the object of your love. The ego says surrender is not necessary because I love this person. It’s an unconscious process of course. The moment you accept completely what is, something inside you emerges that had been covered up by egoic wanting. It is an innate, indwelling peace, stillness, aliveness. It is the unconditioned, who you are in your essence. It is what you had been looking for in the love object. It is yourself.
When that happens, a completely different kind of love is present which is not subject to love / hate. It doesn’t single out one thing or person as special. It’s absurd to even use the same word for it. Now it can happen that even in a normal love / hate relationship, occasionally, you enter the state of surrender. Temporarily, briefly, it happens: you experience a deeper universal love and a complete acceptance that can sometimes shine through, even in an otherwise egoic relationship.
If surrender is not sustained, however, it gets covered up again with the old egoic patterns. So, I’m not saying that the deeper, true love cannot be present occasionally, even in a normal love / hate relationship. But it is rare and usually short-lived.
Whenever you accept what is, something deeper emerges than what is. So, you can be trapped in the most painful dilemma, external or internal, the most painful feelings or situation, and the moment you accept what is, you go beyond it, you transcend it.
Even if you feel hatred, the moment you accept that this is what you feel, you transcend it. It may still be there, but suddenly you are at a deeper place where it doesn’t matter that much anymore.
The entire phenomenal universe exists because of the tension between the opposites. Hot and cold, growth and decay, gain and loss, success and failure, the polarities that are part of existence, and of course part of every relationship.
~ Excerpt from an article by Kim Eng quoting Eckhart Tolle
Photo credits: marc falardeau Love is in the air
OUR UPCOMING JOURNEYS
~DELICIOUS DECEMBER JOURNEYS~
Mastering the Buddha Nature Within
Bhutan – LAST CALL!
Trip Leaders: Sheri Rosenthal + Lisa Tully
Dec 7-18th, 2014
~JAUNTY JANUARY JOURNEYS~
Unconditional Love in Action
Siem Reap (Angkor Wat), Cambodia
Trip Leaders: David Ault
Jan 21-31st 2015
~MAGICAL MAY SOJOURNS~
Communicating with Animals – Following in the Footsteps of St. Francis
Assisi, Italy
Trip Leaders: Lisa Tully, Cheri Harris + Pea Horsley
May 17th – 23rd, 2015
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Want to see our whole line-up for the upcoming year?
Visit our Trips at a Glance page.
