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That sense of separation -- separation from God, separation from Source, separation from Home, and separation from one another -- is the fundamental pain of the soul. Every life pain, when we really trace its tendrils, reaches down to that root pain, the basic belief of separation from the Eternal. Every hunger, every craving, is an attempt to spread a thin layer of pleasure over that pain. Every self-inflicted hurt is an attempt to overpower that great ache with the sharp intensity of the moment. Most actions, when carefully dissected, are an attempt to distract ourselves from that terrible emptiness.
You can see that so much of our life force is spent in avoidance of confrontation with that gulf between the individual and the Eternal.
Most people look away, spend all their life running from that canyon of separation. But the mystic sits on the cliff edge and, though frightened, stares endlessly into the great space… until suddenly an amazing thing happens -- in a flash the emptiness is seen to be not a distance but a connection, a joining. The gulf is itself the bridge spanning the distance, and we discover that we can walk upon it, that there was, in fact, never any separation or distance.
It is the very intensity of our yearning that is finally recognized as the point of connection with the Eternal. And then the pain flips, turning to such sweetness.
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