Chapter 9

The Essence

The world is no more than the Beloved’s single face;
In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist.
-Ghalib

It is clear why many great masters, thinkers, and artists choose the path of relationship as a potent metaphor for coming home to essence. The male/female dance is the dynamic interplay of interconnected opposites, of masculine/feminine, rational/intuitive, aggressive/receptive, warm/cool, solar/lunar. It is on the passionate, metaphorical stage of intimate relationships that spirit dances in chaos, magic and mystery. In our most human love we are shattered and made whole constantly by a divine force infinitely more powerful than our minds. Love says: Listen to the essence beyond words! Speak from the essence that nourishes the heart and soul of things! It is the essence of the Invisible Wedding that we will explore in this final chapter.

Below are fifteen key principles that express the core teachings on spiritual partnerships.

What Is at the Core of an Invisible Wedding?

The Invisible Wedding is the weaving together of each person's inner wholeness.

There is a poignant section in the New Testament when Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding feast of Canna. The wedding is a spiritual metaphor for wholeness, for the inner alchemical weaving together of masculine/feminine energies in the enlightened state. It is a symbol for the reawakening of wisdom, integration, and truth.

Water becoming wine is symbolic of consciousness as we evolve from a state of suffering in duality to one of freedom in unity. The spiritual purpose behind marriage is to help mend the inner split between heart and mind, between the feminine and masculine, and thereby come home to the realization of our essential wholeness.

Our partners become powerful mirrors of our inner opposites. We find we cannot be intimate with each other without connecting with these deeper parts of our selves. This is the yoga of spiritual partnership. Lovers diving deep into the heart naturally become more poetic, intuitive, creative and wholesome.

Disillusionment is a masterful Teacher because it can force us to turn within.

There was a time in childhood when we were aware of our intrinsic happiness. We were safe in our bodies, and we knew that we were loved. It did not matter that there was conflict at home, or that our parents got angry. We were still living primarily in our hearts, not our judging minds.

Thus, everything was well in our world because all was well within. As our egos gradually came into play—and with this the budding of the rational mind—the feeling of wholeness began to fade. The feeling of unity gradually gave way to one of separation and the disturbing sense that we were not loved. This stage in life marks a fundamental (though only notional) break with our native life-force, our link with source, our Beloved.

From that point forward, the mind searches restlessly for that special feeling of well-being that comes with being loved. We pursue relationships of all types looking for that special someone or something—sky diving, meditation, drugs, power, money— to turn us on again.

Falling in love always begins with the incredible sense of being loved—and a dramatic increase in energy and well-being. We feel bright, happy, healthy, and alert. Once again we feel connected within to our source. Once again all is well in our world because all is well within. We feel loved. But we attribute this feeling to the other—and this is the grand illusion. In romance we project our unconscious Self-love (that which was repressed in the formation of our egos) onto our new lover. But falling in love is only a replica of that original experience of feeling unconditionally loved and at home within.

Like a built-in homing device implanted by God, we have a natural urge to be in love, connected to essence. Romance can be a doorway to this essence in the heart, but typically our hearts get broken first. Disillusionment—and the disappointment that follows—is simply that point on the journey where once again we begin to lose the nourishing feeling of being unified. Instead of being the source of love, our partner becomes the cause of our suffering. Usually something is said or done by one of us that runs counter to an emotional need of the other, and suddenly our defenses riot and our separateness returns. Only now it is magnified because we contrast our disillusionment with the recent high of romance. This is why lovers’ quarrels can be so intense. Disillusionment is a junction point that can either intensify our suffering or release us, depending on our awareness.

It is at this turning point that we may be tempted to project our disappointment onto our partner. Instead, we need to keep in touch with our feeling of disappointment and feel it as deeply as possible, experiencing it in all its naked qualities. The mind will try every trick it knows to run from this moment. It will argue, blame, project, spin out, justify and conceptualize. It will seek another object (a new partner) for its gratification. But we must not veer from our commitment to look within ourselves. It is in such raw moments of vulnerability that love can bloom. Disappointment can encourage the mind to turn inward, leading our awareness back to the primal wound of abandonment and broken-heartedness, where separation was first woven into the fabric of our experience. When we allow ourselves to experience this level of awareness, life-energy is released—and our fear turns to a feeling of love. In this way, disillusionment, like romance, can become a doorway into the heart. When welcomed, it delivers us to a place deep inside, to our true essence. From essence we realize that we do not need a partner to be content, peaceful, in love. We are all these in essence.

Eventually we will begin to feel loved again but in a whole new way. For the first time perhaps, we will be able to reach out to life with real openness and receptivity, rather than fear and wanting. When we do, we discover a new sanity within our relationships. We approach things with an open, gracious, big heart. We stop grasping for something external and rediscover our completely natural sense of wholeness. Wholeness is the only basis of a genuine loving relationship, allowing us to come together with the spontaneous desire to give and nurture.

Disillusionment is life’s way of waking us up and driving us inward, where we discover that we have always been loved—that we are born into love, grow into love, and die into love.