By Ohad Ezrahi
Translation by Yasmine Ariel
Two Challenges
In my work with people, both individuals and couples, I repeatedly encounter the same phenomenon - two basic things that are very difficult for human beings.
The first is creating true intimacy, and the second is letting go of the things we have become accustomed to and allowing change to take place. One is connection and the other is separation both are equally difficult to resolve.
This observation, of myself and others clarifies the essence of spiritual work for me: spiritual work allows a person to grow so that they have the ability to connect with love to everything worthy and real, and to detach from the superfluous, allowing it to change without clinging to it.
We come to the world open. As babies we are open to creating intimacy with everything, but the process of growing up involves building our grown-up personality as separate from others and the world.
This separation, which creates the feeling of the separate self and identity, is important but it is also our prison. Within the boundaries of the separate self, people suffer alienation and loneliness.
True Love
Spiritual work involves gradually learning how to create real connections with things and people, and remove the veil of the separate self. But, I have to explain myself: everybody wants to be loved, but I believe real loving is not always easy.
Loving someone requires taking real steps in our hearts to remove the separation from the other person.
To love someone is to be one with him or her, to be happy for them, sorry for them, spontaneously feel what they feel, like a mother feels her baby.
Unity
This is true for every kind of love. Someone who loves their work, for instance, reaches a kind of unity with it, in which the split in consciousness between the person and the job disappears and they become one.
In different methods influenced by Zen, the practitioner cannot “get it” as long as he and the object are separate from each other.
Oigen Harigel talks about his frustration with his lack of ability to learn how to shoot a Japanese bow, up until the day when suddenly “it shot.” The shooter, the bow, and the arrow were no longer separate things. In that moment of complete unity the “one” is discovered. When the protective veil of the separate ego disappears, then “it shoots.”
People are scared of intimacy, because in intimacy the veil of separation disappears. Some people are unwilling to let go of the veil. That is why I repeat in my lessons that “intimacy is sacredness.”
Sacredness reveals itself whenever we get over separation and discover oneness. Sacredness is revealed in every moment of true intimacy.
Not Holding On To Externals
However, the moment we manage to create intimacy we usually cling to the outward manifestation of the object, and it is very challenging for us to let go of it.
Herein lies the other side of spiritual work, the ability to not cling to the outward manifestation because this is endlessly changing. The river flows, the body ages and dies, and the economy is always in flux. That is the nature of reality in this world.
In this world we are presented with gifts of spirit every moment, but they are wrapped in matter.
The gift of ‘sweetness and delight’ comes wrapped in chocolate for example. The gift of ‘the freedom to do what I like to do’ sometimes come in a package of wealth.
Those who do not ‘open the gift’ think that chocolate or money is everything, they cannot separate the essential and the superfluous, and they become addicted to the illusions of this world.
The same is true for love: through our lovers love itself is being presented, but love is a spiritual power – divine, absolute and eternal.
Most of us do not ever ‘open the wrappings’ and therefore cling to the outward manifestation of the lover, who will naturally disappear in time, either because the relation ship will end or because death will eventually separate us.
Getting To The Source
Whoever opens the wrappings and enjoys the gift itself learns how to feel freedom through the money, and the sweetness through the chocolate, and love the divine love itself which is always there, whether someone is portraying it for us or not.
Such a person enjoys chocolate but does not become addicted to it, enjoys money but is not enslaved by it, and enjoys love of the highest intimacy but is not addicted to their partner.
They know the nature of this world, everything flows through them and everything changes in them.
For such a person there is no need to cling to what changes because they ‘open the gift’ and touch the essence, which is eternal, always there and never changes!
So what does spiritual work do for us? It teaches us to accept the gift of life, open the wrappings, enjoy the gift itself, and not cling to the outer wrapping, but let it become recycled as nature intended.