I suppose one of my questions is whether it is possible for a person to strip away the ego, to become less self-conscious and more self-aware, or if we are doomed, like Adam and Eve—that after the fall from grace there is no going back, that there is no way to return to “paradise,” because there is no way to become unself-conscious just as it is impossible to unbreak a window. Is this part of the underlying sadness of the human condition? It almost seems to be that this conditioning-bound ego style of existence must have an underlying sadness and disconnectedness. Which fits well into the idea that happiness is the recognition and letting go of the illusion of the ego-self.
This pandemic yearning—or craving—for love seems to cause a lot of problems. I wonder what the effects are on people who never felt that love in their developing childhood years. Are they doomed to crave love the rest of their lives, trying to quench an unquenchable thirst?
This becomes, of course, a hardship and difficulty not only for themselves, but for the people they love and who love them. Since such people were never truly loved, never saw love, as children, they have never really known what love is, it has not been a part of their development and conditioning. Thus, misguided from the outset, they love with a craving, insatiable ache, a need to be loved even though they know deep down that they cannot trust and accept that love, partially because they do not know how to be loved; they are not worthy of love. Like a servant, they do not accept it, knowing their place; that as a servant, they know that regardless of what their master says or does, they can never truly be looked at and treated as a peer. A servant is not loved, a servant is paid; a servant is used. They are like the crippled boy in the wheelchair who, no matter how much he wants to play the game with the other children, knows, in a very sad, very adult way, that it just isn’t for him.
The only real love is an unselfish love, but for the above reasons, I think it is hard for people who did not grow up feeling love to trust, believe, or accept it if it comes along later in their lives. For them, as adults, to love unselfishly is to be a sucker, for no one they meet loves unselfishly, and the ones that seem to have the same problems they have.
.
From my personal notes, 11/27/99.
