Sense-of-self and loving others
Hi darling,
Happy New Year 2023. The past year has been quite an eventful one for me. It was mostly a year for recovery and getting back on my feet, but also a year for growth. 2022 was a year of preparation for 2023 which should be even better. 2022 ended with a profound realisation which has given me a lot of clarity in my thinking. I am sure you will find it useful sometime in your life.
Your dad's life changed around September 2021 with an incident whose impact is such, that I still do not know how to bring it up to you. I hope in the future, I have the poise to explain what happened.
We learn to love in our childhood. In our adult lives, we give love back to our partners the same way we saw it in our childhood, maybe in our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. The forms and modes of our attachment and our love language is created on our young impressionable minds. We express that when we grow older. For example, I picked up in my subconscious that making the other person laugh is a love language from my father, who used to make everyone laugh.
But, there is one thing, we DO NOT learn. From childhood, we are certain of the fact, that the people we love, nobody loves them more than us. We know that OUR parents, OUR grandparents or maybe OUR favourite uncle or aunt, nobody loves them more than us. We take comfort in the fact that we love them the most.
This does not work in the adult life and we have problems accepting the fact that someone else can love the person we love, MORE THAN US.
We are never primed psychologically or emotionally to accept the fact that someone else can love the person we love, MORE THAN US.
Our ego and by ego, I mean the sense-of-self (not the usual parlance of the word ego), comes in our way of accepting this hard fact. Our sense-of-self can accept a lot of things depending on our personality, maybe it accepts someone has a better job than us, someone earns more money, someone is more fit or good-looking, but accepting that our love "lost" to someone else is a very difficult pill to swallow.
I am reminded of two simple, beautiful and profound lines by Tagore.
Aro preme, aro preme.
Mor ami dube jak neme
It means, give me so much love that my sense of self vanishes. This "ami" which is I needs to vanish. The core essence of Advaita Vedanta philosophy is to destroy this sense of self. I believe I have partially succeeded in doing so, I just wish I can do it further.
Yours selflessly,
Dad
P.S - I hope you get peace and comfort when you are heartbroken and it feels like you are alone in this world. The picture is from Old Dubai, December 2022.