The First Miracle of Separation
El Primer Milagro de la Separación
A reflection on how the sense of self contracts into ego, cutting us off from deeper desire, and what it means to reconnect with what the universe wants to live as us.
The First Miracle of Separation
A reflection on how the sense of self contracts into ego, cutting us off from deeper desire, and what it means to reconnect with what the universe wants to live as us.
The first miracle is the creation of separation. In psychology, you would talk about it as ego. A human child, if everything goes well, will develop an ego and will then believe it is only the ego. Exclusively. Nothing more.
But what was it before there was an ego? It was something. So what happens when an ego appears? Does what it was before now die and become limited to ego? No. What it was before simply identifies. What we were before, the instant we were born, we did not have ego, but we were.
Identification and contraction
When the mind develops an ego, there is the attachment: "I am this and only this." As we grow up, we still operate under that belief system, and at some point it creates friction with life. We can resist that friction, or we can learn to mature and wake up, which is to see that we are not ego, not body-mind. A more accurate way to say it is that we are not only ego. In fact, ego is a very small part of what we are. It is so small compared to what we are that it is more accurate to say we are not that. It is not that we are ego and then we become a little more when we realize what we are. We do not become more. We simply see that we were so contracted into such a limited sense of self.
What does the universe want to live as you?
And so the question: what does the universe want to live as you? Do not contemplate this by making the universe into a god out there. This is not you talking to a divine entity, which is more of a mental process. You can see and know what the universe wants as your own desire.
For the mockingbird, who has no obstruction, no illusion, when the universe desires to sing as a mockingbird, it sings. The mockingbird experiences that as the sudden urge to sing. It comes from the deepest part of the mockingbird, but it is the whole universe singing. The blood flowing is from the universe. There is no separation; it is a complete, unified energy.
What has happened to us as humans, when we identify and contract, is that we lose touch with those deeper desires. It is not a black-and-white cut that we then break. It is more of a flow. At times in our life, we take some risk and move from something deeper. At times we do not. The more we are contracted and identified, the more we push away what truly wants to move through us.
The nature of true desire
True desire is always new, always creative, always mysterious. It is always pro-life in the sense that it comes from a vastness. It could be creativity in the sense of painting or making music. It could be a romantic desire. It could be for cooking, for working, for anything. It could be for simply sitting and looking at a tree.
But what has happened is that we lose touch with that deeper desire. The narrative, the belief in what you are, can feel like a wall, because there is a need for breaking through into a deeper part of yourself. You will know it through the question: what do you truly want?
Why true desire feels threatening
Usually what we truly want is scary, because it comes from a place that does not care about ego. It comes from a place where ego is a leaf blowing in the wind. If we are attached to and identified with that leaf, true desire is going to feel like a threat.
My teacher used to say that society is a conspiracy for ego protection. Everybody is working hard to protect their own and everybody else's ego. That is what we can begin to break free from.
You can notice what these deeper desires are, for example, by noticing something that feels very scary, but upon discernment, the fear turns out to be irrational. It feels like death, but it is only crossing the street, or only going to talk to somebody. The experience feels like too much, so much so that we actually forget what we want. We are so out of touch with that deeper desire that we no longer even recognize it.