So life is about love, right? The problem is that, for the ego, love is always tragic. Romantic love is a form of bhakti, devotion. In fact, you could say that every form of suffering is a form of bhakti. Our neurotic suffering is always a result of mis-directed devotion that leads to devastation.

One of the great thinkers of the twentieth century who has explored the unconscious mind of human beings, perhaps more profoundly than anyone in history, is a French theorist named Jacques Lacan. Toward the end of his life, he made a very important pun in French on the word symptom, referring to it as Saint Thom, which in French is pronounced the same as symptome. He was alluding to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic philosopher. Lacan implied that every symptom is our attempt at sainthood. Every love object becomes our cross to bear, and the site of our crucifixion.

We are all suffering for love—a love that cannot be consummated at the level of the heart as long as we are in ego consciousness. Lacan referred specifically to Aquinas because of what Saint Thomas Aquinas actually discovered and taught. He held that the universe is a copy of a copy of a copy, a replica of the divine world which is itself a representation of the Logos. It emerges out of the cosmic dance of Emptiness and Form, or Awareness and Light.

This world is a simulacrum that ultimately derives from the archetype of the divine couple, known by many names, including Sita-Ram, Shiva-Shakti, and Yin-Yang. This archetypal concept is common to all of the various mythologies of the great religious traditions.  But these powers of Absolute Love cannot be actualized at the level of the ego. This is because the ego mind is split. So we must do as Aquinas suggested, which is to go beyond the world and the manifestations that are copies of the objects in the Divine Mind, and reach the original. And in that there is freedom at last; there is liberation from the symptoms of suffering that arise from being cut off from the Absolute Other. Once we were cut off, we became devotees of an object that symbolized wholeness. But real wholeness is only to be re-found in the Absolute. This can only happen when we realize that the Absolute is not Other. The Absolute is the Self.

In every culture, there is a saying to the effect that each individual is a whole world. Each of us indeed is a world, the world of our own projections. Within the ego, we do not actually touch anyone else’s world. We think we do, but we are actually simply projecting our world onto the other. We are bringing others in as characters within a script, a film, a matrix, but we are not seeing the others as they are or realizing that they are also in a world of their own. So we believe we have contact with another person, but we usually don’t. We only have contact with the projection that we superimpose on them. And we remain within our little bubble world and they within theirs and we pretend there is contact but there really isn’t, until the moment when the other doesn’t act according to the script, and the projection flickers and falls away. And then you are furious, and it is all over, you see. When the bubble pops and you realize there was never a connection, it is unbearable. So one replaces the positive projection with a negative one, blames the other for failing you, and one flees, to seek yet another object of devotion. It never works out, of course, and there is only an ever-lengthening trail of tears.

What Lacan found is that the reason for our inevitable failure in love is that our mind is fragmented. Our conscious mind desires a heart connection and the fullness of love, but the unconscious mind actually desires something else that is very different. It may want revenge, or dominance, or masochistic submission to the other, or some other fantasy. But it does not want real love. And it will project on the partner that they are a mother or father, or breast, vagina, or a phallus—or even an anus, or a demon or a god. Or all of the above. And for these two kinds of objects of desire, the object of the conscious mind and that of the unconscious, Lacan created different terminologies. One is the big Other, which is conscious, and the second, the object of the unconscious, that causes our desire, is the small other.

The object that causes our desire isn’t what we desire but it is projected on an object in the manifest world. This superimposition of one object on another makes desire impossible to fulfill. We will choose an object that cannot be reached in reality, because it is only an illusion secretly placed on a physical object. This is a secret even to ourselves. So even though our words, our "I of the statement", desires to have a relationship with another, the unconscious mind, the "I of the enunciation", wants a relationship only with its fantasy object. This is what makes love impossible.

The ego doesn’t actually want to consummate the relationship that seems to exist in social reality, but only the one that belongs to the fantasy realm. So the conscious mind blindly continues its hopeless quest, like the gerbil in the cage, going round and round, seeking its impossible object. But the conscious mind cannot understand what is happening and cannot get out of this trap. To get out of the trap, we have to follow the teachings of St. Thomas, and move out of the condition of being a replica of our real Self. This is what the ego is, a simulacrum of the Self. And the ego's desire, meaning the object that causes desire, is return to a lost relationship we thought we had with a mother or father who weaned us, abandoned us, betrayed us by emotionally separating from us--and the ego demands to re-unite with that lost entity.  The ego will not settle for the one who is actually present, but can only be happy with what will always be missing.

As long as we are in ego consciousness, we are doomed to dissatisfaction. That’s why Buddha had to confront those three women who came in front of him to tempt him away from Buddhahood, who were named Desire, Satisfaction, and Regret.  He said to them, “No, thanks.”

Buddha renounced desire because he realized it was an impossible dream. The only connection that is possible, the only love that can save our soul, is the love of the Buddha Nature, which is another way of saying the love of God, of the Absolute Self.

All desire drops away naturally once we realize that we are already one with all that is, because we are light, we are love itself, we are pure awareness, the very essence and substance of the universe in all of its forms. Then there is love that is without desire and therefore without the inevitable remorse of dissatisfaction. We finally come to terms with the fact that the love that we want at the level of the ego always leads to buyer's remorse, because what we wanted is not what we actually bought.  What we really want is the bliss that union with God can alone grant, but we refuse that option, because the ego cannot want the fulfillment of its heart's deepest yearning, because to fulfill that yearning means that the ego must die in that very act. The ego prefers to create a replica of liberation through acting out some virtual or actual suicidal scenario.

The ego, to maintain its own pattern in being, must frustrate itself and ultimately destroy itself. For the moth to actually dive into the flame and dissolve means the end of the moth, so most moths circle around it. They get burned a little bit, but they jump back and keep flying in larger circles. It’s a rare moth who will dive all the way in. Only then is love born from the flames. The moth is also the Phoenix bird of Greek mythology. Love is born from the conscious death of the ego. Love does not come from the desire of another human being. It can only come from the ultimate Source that remains when all else has burned away. Love is the true essence of all that is. It manifests when desire dies. If we try to find a surrogate of love in the manifestation of desire of a human form, and hold on to that while keeping our ego alive, then we are always going to be frustrated.

We can be in the state of grace always, but only at the cost of letting go of the false identity which we have been wearing almost since we came into this world.

We must return to the unborn, un-incarnated state of pure consciousness. That is the Buddha mind. It is the mind that is unborn and therefore has no identification with a physical organism, with a gender, with desire, or with any kind of object. It is simply by realizing that the Emptiness of pure Presence is bliss, the fullness of the Absolute, that liberation is achieved.

Once the ego acquires language, the mind is always split. The words are never at one with the meanings. Many people think, “well, first let me try to understand myself,” and they go through years of therapy, but they never attain real Self-understanding, it’s useless. Even if you have a good therapist, who has some understanding, or a good theory, the ego can engage in psychobabble that is convincing, but it cannot truly know itself. This is because the ego is utterly unreal. You must extract your consciousness entirely from this pseudo-identity. The ego can be modified, it can become more intelligent, there can be less suffering, there can be gaps so that the light shines through, but that is not enough to attain inner peace. We have to go through those gaps and reach the light. Only from there do we have the power to dissolve the ego. But from within the ego, you are a character in the movie of the unconscious. And that character has no power to re-shoot the movie. So first we have to come out of it and realize we are nothing and no one, and then we have the power to change the script, this rut that we have found ourselves repeating over and over again. We must come to realize that the fulfillment of desire comes only from the letting go of desire. Not even desire for God is ultimately helpful, because God is also a projection. The ultimate truth, the ultimate Real, is beyond any concept of God, or concept of Buddha mind, or any other concept. Even the idea of an external world is a myth.

When all of that has been transcended, then we will realize the bliss of what we have always been. We shall see through the mirage of this phenomenal world and recognize the sacredness of it. Its whole purpose was to lead us beyond illusion to the dimension of truth and bliss and light, to the Supreme Power that enables us to transform this world and not be victims of it, but be servants of God, Bodhisattvas, within it.