Ego or Love - There is Nothing in Between

When I was younger, I enjoyed watching pornography; today I can't. I mean, of course I can, but I don't feel well afterwards. It is a little like drinking alcohol. When I was young I could drink a lot; these days, two glasses of wine is as good as it gets, afterwards I just don't feel so well.

So what is this all about? The alcohol has something to do with the aging of my body; I am sure some in my age group have had a similar experience. The porn experience is about the aging of my soul; it is a spiritual thing. It is hard to see love in pornography. It is a deliberate act to take us on a pleasure ride. The ego says, "yeah", but the spirit turns away. By the way, I didn't write this note to beat up on porn, I wrote it to explain the intrinsic choice in everything: love or ego. 

As long as we operate in this body the ego will always be meaningful to us. There are dimensions that we simply need to satisfy. The desire to have our means of living; the right for a healthy body; the hope to see our children and spouse do well economically and health-wise, et cetera. Yet, as the decades go by, we grow also spiritually. Longings that in the olden days sent us on a robot-like hunt we suddenly experience as a conscious choice: ego or love; the answer is simple indeed for us spiritual traveler: love. There is nothing else in-between.

The laws of spirituality, philosophy and life more generally, can be boiled down to one simple choice: love or ego. The world appears so multi-dimensional because we are pulled in all kind of directions; our animal instincts, evolutionary biology, the influence of our parents and environment and the longings of our soul. There often is a voice in our head - a feeling in our heart - "what can I get out of this situation". Enlightenment happens when we realize that we are not necessarily this voice or this feeling. Yet, the spiritual super-ego, "choose love no matter what", will also not be without conflicts. It takes spiritual maturity to experience that we are not this drive.

True liberation happens when we feel that we are part of this moment and when we see love in every interaction. The voice "What can I get out of this situation?" may still babble in the background, but we know that we are experiencing this moment with the intention to choose love. That's when we are finally Home. When our intention is love and when everything that we see is love, the Way has become a no-brainer.