All forms of human union are possible only because there is such a thing as essential union and ultimate union. And because they are reflections and manifestations of that fundamental union, they are not only valid in their own right but, more fundamentally, they are helpful for our work. Any relationship with another person can be used as a bridge, as a stepping stone, for us to recognize and move toward the ultimate, fundamental union.  That is what we mean when we say that our deep human connections are based on the prototype of ultimate union that makes all forms of union possible, and desirable. In other words, all beloveds are expressions of the ultimate Beloved. In our movement toward anything we are attracted to, there is a very deep primordial longing for that union. The heart gravitates toward experiences of many different types of union, but as we are beginning to recognize, it does so because the heart loves to be united with its true Beloved.  This is one way of understanding “being in the world but not of it.” We live a life of togetherness, social interaction, intimacy, connection, and union in the way humans experience these things, but living in this way is a direct expression, manifestation, and fulfillment of the union of the soul with its ultimate Beloved.  So we need to look at our life and our humanness from that perspective. We need to learn that if we are going to arrive at that ultimate fulfillment, we don't want to get stuck forever at any one station on our journey. We want to keep rending the veils until union is complete—because nothing else will truly fulfill the heart.

People naturally want to spend their life doing what they feel most passionate about. That is the desire of the heart. But whatever they want to do is an external reflection of the deep longing of the heart to unify with its ultimate Beloved. The passionate love that we have been talking about is what propels the soul on its search for the Beloved.  As we have seen, passionate desire is not a gentle wanting. No, when we are passionate, our soul is on fire, and the longing of our heart is like a flame. We find that the more passionate our love is, the more we are willing to surrender, to give ourselves up to the truth, to the Beloved. And the more passionate we are, the less we will meander along the way; the less we will be constrained by the barriers we encounter; the less we will get stuck in or distracted by our various positions and identifications and issues. That’s because we’re so passionately in love with the Beloved that we don’t sit around trying to resolve this issue or that problem: “Oh, my husband never remembers our anniversary” . . . “My therapist wasn’t very empathic today” . . . “The other guys at work are so shallow”—all the little things that can grab our attention. Forget all that. That's not it. It's just part of what you see on the road, and you need to keep going and drive as fast as possible. 

This becomes an intense encounter when the student experiences the dissolution in the heart. She becomes aware of the shell as a membrane around the heart, where she feels the heart as the emptiness and the sense of poverty. As she accepts the poverty, the inner emptiness in the heart transforms into inner spaciousness, which is the absolute depth of Being. She recognizes she has been a lover and now has found her beloved, the true fulfillment of her heart. She feels that what she beholds now in her heart is what she has been searching for all her life. Her heart has found many lovers, but never one so perfect as this. She has always been searching for this beloved, but has seen him in one object or another. They were all idols standing between her heart and its true beloved, distracting her even more as they drew her closer. They were all veils, and now the beloved has been unveiled. The depth of oral longing is simply a reflection of the deepest longing of the heart for its ultimate beloved. One has mistaken the libidinal exciting object of the oral stage for the true beloved, thus embarking on a never-ending journey of estrangement. By turning outward for fullness, the soul disconnected from her inner Being, then sought it in outside objects. 

We are unfolding a story. As you fly, the thread of love weaves this story together. We have seen that love is basically the magnetism between the soul and its ultimate Beloved, between you and the mystery. That magnetism, that pull, we call love. And that magnetism is a sweet, pleasurable liking and appreciation. The magnetism is what we experience in our ordinary condition, which is the relative world where duality between the soul and the Beloved still exists. But love, of its own nature, of its very nature, tends to bring you nearer to the Beloved. That means its tendency is to eliminate the duality. More accurately, love opens us to the other world, the invisible world of spirit. The soul not only loves the ultimate nature—whether we call it God, the Absolute, the ultimate self, or something else—it loves it to the extent of dissolving into it, uniting with it. 

As the soul begins the journey of descent, the station she feels she has to leave is that of union with her ultimate Beloved and home, which she clearly knows as the deepest of all truths. She finally learns to surrender to the flow, mostly out of love for the absolute ipseity, for she recognizes that it is the source of all unfoldment. She recognizes that her inner journey to the absolute has been a journey of ascent, of moving from the lowest and grossest dimensions of experience to the summit of subtlety and truth. In this journey of ascent, the process has been primarily that of discrimination, separation, purification, and resolution. Her nature reveals itself as simpler, more subtle, and increasingly devoid of forms, qualities, determinations, and concepts. The journey moves toward absolute simplicity, through a process of continual shedding. All forms and dimensions are shed, to reveal the perfect simplicity and emptiness of the absolute. Absolute simplicity turns out to be absolute transcendence, the transcendence of all forms and dimensions of manifestation. Her journey has taken her deeper and deeper, steadily leaving behind more superficial dimensions, until she has arrived at the absolute depth of all experience, as the dimension of depth itself, which is simultaneously the transcendent summit of all dimensions and manifest forms. 

I think this is a very clever and subtle way of understanding the indeterminacy of the essence of our Being. However, the adventure of inquiry is based on a slightly different perspective on the mystery. Some would say that you cannot say anything about the mystery because whatever you say is going to be inaccurate, and therefore it is better not to say anything. The perspective I prefer is that the essence of Being is amenable to descriptions. You can actually say a great deal about it, just as the mystical poets have been doing for thousands of years. You can say it is emptiness, you can say it is mystery, you can say it is stillness, you can say it is peace, you can say it is neither existence nor nonexistence, you can say it is the ultimate beloved, you can say it is the annihilation of all ego, you can say it is the source of all awareness, you can say it is the ground of everything, you can say it is our true identity, you can say it is dimensionless nonlocality, and so on. Each one of these descriptions is saying something about it. Thus the mystery of Being can be seen as having two different implications. I believe the more fruitful one is not that there is nothing you can say about it, but that you can never exhaust what you can say about it. We can describe it and talk about it forever. So instead of calling it indeterminacy, I think a better word is inexhaustibility: The mystery is characterized by the fact that it is inexhaustible. You can never know it totally.

For a long time, you do your work from the outside, by seeing the distractions and letting them go. As that happens, it is as if the Secret, as if the Guest, is coming closer. The nearness of the Secret is not like the closeness of any other lover you’ve ever experienced. The Secret will burn you up from within, will incinerate you. It will boil you to total evaporation through passionate heat. This Secret, the ultimate Beloved, is not like any other lover. It will not appear in the heart, it will not come to its abode, as long as there is anyone else there. As long as you have another lover, it won’t arrive. The true Beloved is the most jealous of all lovers; it is absolutely possessive. It either has you completely or it will not even bother to show up. The poem says the Guest arrives only at night, when everything is gone, when all that you love is thrown away, detached from, sacrificed. The inner poverty, the inner destitution, becomes so complete that there is total darkness, nothing left to see at all. Even you are sacrificed, dissolved, gone. This situation cannot be conceived by the mind. 

The beloved could be the absolute Beloved, or it could be one of the manifestations, such as another person. It is true that when I am loving you personally, I am loving the ultimate Beloved—but I am seeing and loving the particular beauty that is manifesting here and now in you, in this moment. And remember, the seeing and the loving go together, because the heart has its own eyes.  You have seen that Rumi uses the language of the lover and the Beloved. Rumi's way is not the way of universal love; his way is personal love. He loves his Beloved and his Beloved loves him back, and they have a relationship until it is completely annihilated as love intensifies and moves into nonduality. So personal love does not even mean that you have to think of yourself as a person. As essential presence, even as a boundless infinite presence, you can love somebody. You could be the absolute nature—infinite, boundless, undefinable—loving the individual soul that is you or loving somebody or something else.