Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

I have a problem.  No matter how much I read about losing one’s sense of being an individual, or a person, or of being impersonal, I can’t do it.  I am a person.  I am a human.  I am very, very flawed, and my sense of being vulnerable, in a sense, is my identity.   I am totally needy for love, to give it and to receive it.

Yes, yes, I know emptiness, and was and still am immersed in it for decades.  Yes, it permeates all my emotions and makes my body into an object permeated by nothing.  Still, I easily identify with my body.

Yes, I can obseve the entirety of consciousness and see it, know it as separate from me, but my emotions are real, powerful.  My need for others is as palpable, and actually much more so, than my endless experience of the Void or even the nothingness of sleep, or even my knowingness which precedes experience.

Consciousness is fleeting.  My body is fleeting.  My emotions even more fleeting.  But without devotion or being devoted too, life is nothing, brittle,  dry, worth less than a simple lick by my cat, or a glance from my Beloved. Love draws me back from the abyss of endless dryness, space, nothingness and roots me in my rare, rare existence as a person.

Essentially, all that I have taught is about comfort, distancing one’s self from suffering, from fear, from neediness.  It is used as a crutch by many, soothing words of space and the void, which are nice to know, but so very rare and short is my life. I value it so much, and more than anything else, to touch and be touched by my Beloved.