Each morning I clamber out of the quarantine of our tiny condo, climb into our old Honda Civic, and drive the five blocks to the quarantine of my even tinier Rolfing office. What I do there now, instead of Rolfing people, is slouch in the one chair and scribble in spiral-bound notebooks for four to six hours.

I do this so that Carolyn and I do not strangle each other. Also, Carolyn needs a lot of solitude. As in, time away from me. Usually I don’t take this personally. I mean, like, a fairly heroic percentage of the time.

Yesterday, however, was different. It had snowed. And it had iced. It had snow-iced. It’s a Minnesota thing. I glanced out the window down at our car, and it looked like an igloo on wheels. Plus, moments before, when I was meditating, I’d heard people down on the street scraping the ice off their cars. It sounded so loud and violent, like they were scraping stucco off the side of a house with a shovel.

Now you have to understand: I am profoundly lazy. Gazing down at our tundra-entombed car, I thought, no way am I scraping that off. Plus the sidewalks were covered in ice. I could see, down the block, a person tottering along like a drunken two-year-old wearing roller blades. Nope, I thought.

“I think maybe I’ll stay at home today,” I said to Carolyn, after I finished meditating.

“Oh,” she replied, distractedly, apparently transfixed by something on her phone, “okay.”

Now here’s where things got complicated. The problem was that her response did not contain nearly enough joy at the intoxicating prospect of a whole day with my luminous, self milling around the ole’ homestead. Obviously, if she loved me, she would have swooned with delight at the merest whisper of my presence. Her response, by contrast, was a little on the muted side.

I commenced sulking immediately.

I launched into full-on pout-mode, bustling around our condo, noisily packing up my backpack, putting on my coat, sighing melodramatically. Whatever was on her phone must have been incredibly captivating because she seemed unaware of my entire performance. Finally, all suited up, backpack slung over my shoulder, I hovered near the door. “Well, I think I will go to the office after all,” I said, struggling to say it in a neutral way, the way I imagined a normal, non-pouting grown-up might say it.

“Oh, okay,” she said again, still bewitched by her phone. Then she looked up quickly, flashed me a smile, and said, “Have a nice day, baby!”

It wasn’t until I had sulkily smashed the stalactites of ice from our car, sulkily driven through the empty roads, and gotten sulkily set-up in my dystopian office building (dystopian because I’m now the only person in the whole building), that I finally saw what I was doing. (I’m a little slow.)

Adi Da, my radiant Guru, said that the fundamental mood of the ego is the mood of  “you don’t love me.” (The following quotes come from one of Adi Da’s Source Texts in which he employs a unique use of upper-case letters; try to bear with it.)

“The egoic (or self-Contracted) individual Is…Chronically Bound To The Ritual Of Rejection. The emotional (or emotional-sexual) Career Of egoity Tends To Manifest As A Chronic Complaint That Always Says, By Countless Means, “You Do Not Love me.”

Once the mood of you don’t love me – or the mood of betrayal – really gets rolling, my attempts to pretend I’m not sulking, my attempts to act cheery, by sheer willpower, fail badly.

But every once in a while I actually crowbar my attention off of myself and notice the everywhere-presence of my Guru, which is the everywhere-presence of the love-radiance or the Holy Spirit or whatever you want to call it, of everything.

And then I get silent and happy and the whole weird betrayal-sulk-drama thing is gone. In fact it’s so gone I could swear it never happened. And then, without even trying, I’m behaving almost exactly like a normal adult. I mean, the similarity is almost spooky.

Takeaway

Stressful situations – plagues, pestilence, locusts, things of this nature – can exaggerate our egoity, including this egoic mood of “you don’t love me.” Being trapped in a quarantine can make anyone want to strangle anyone, which can exacerbate the mood of you don’t love me even more.

Here’s what Adi Da has to say on the topic. 

“The egoic Ritual Calls every individual To Defend himself or herself Against The Wounds Of Love and The Wounding Signs Of Un-Love (or egoic self-Contraction) In the daily world. Therefore, Even In The Context Of True Intimacy, The Tendency (Apart From Spiritual Responsibility) Is To Act As If Every Wound (Which Is Simply A Hurt) Is An Insult (or A Reason To Punish).”

Instead, we should do as follows.

“For those who Are Committed To Love (and who Always Commune With The One Who Is Love), Even Rejection By others Is Received and Accepted As A Wound, Not An Insult.”

He goes on to say,

 “As A Practical Matter, You Must Stop Dramatizing The egoic Ritual Of Betrayal In Reaction To The Feeling Of Being Rejected. You Must Understand, Transcend, and Release The Tendency To Respond (or React) To Signs Of Rejection (or Signs That You Are Not Loved) As If You Are Insulted, Rather Than Wounded. That Is To Say, You Must Stop Punishing and Rejecting others When You Feel Rejected. If You Punish another When You Feel This, You Will Act As If You Are Immune To Love’s Wound. Thus, You Will Pretend To Be Angrily Insulted, Rather Than Suffer To Be Wounded. In The Process, You Will Withdraw and Withhold Love. You Will Stand Off, Independent and Dissociated. You Will Only Reinforce The Feeling Of Being Rejected, and You Will Compound It By Actually Rejecting the other. In This Manner, You Will Become Un-Love. You Will Fail To Love. You Will Fail To Live In The Sphere Of Love. Your Own Acts Of Un-Love Will Degrade You, Delude You, and Separate You From Your Love-partner (or Your partners In Love) and From Love Itself.”

Therefore, the thing to do is…

“To Enter Fully Into The Spiritual Life-Sphere Of Love…By…Entering… Into The Company Of The Divine Person…and (Submitting) To The Divine Embrace Of Love, Wherein Not Only Are You Loved, but You Are Love Itself. Then You Must Magnify That Love-Radiance In the world of human relationships.

“If You Will Do This, Then You Must Do The Sadhana (or Concentrated Practice) Of True Active Love and Real (True and Steady) Trust.”

Easy enough, right? (Totally kidding! Not easy!)

Want to stop me, your faithful blog author, from collapsing into the mood of you don’t love me? I know just the thing! Subscribe to this blog! Then, whenever I put up new posts you’ll get ‘em right there in your very own email box. How fun is that?