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April-June, 2008

Undoing the Illusion of Needs

by Nouk Sanchez

We all are conscious that we have needs, needs that perhaps are not yet fulfilled and ones that are. And we don’t want to lose those things that we have so far acquired do we?  Unconsciously we set up expectations and strategies that the ego uses to protect and defend them. Realizing this you can ask then, what are your perceived needs? Do they include increased income, a home, an experience, to be a parent, more love, family, status or approval? 

It’s not until we’ve arrived at a point of trust in the Holy Spirit that we can begin to see that there exists an illusion of needs and truly understand why this is so. Until then, we resist the idea that any perceived need (other than forgiveness and waking up) is not real.

We seem to have many needs, most of which are unconscious and uninvestigated and therefore they lurk in our minds and reappear as outer projections that we often react to. And the minute we react to an exterior trigger we temporarily feel/believe we’re a victim of it. For example, many years ago I believed that I needed my husband’s love and I also needed both my mother’s and daughter’s love too. But acting from the unquestioned ego I thought I knew what love was. I was wrong.

To me back then, the idea of love came loaded with personal and collective desires or needs that I believed should be met by my husband, mother and daughter. These unquestioned desires arose from the ego’s addiction to special love. I had a set of needs for my partner, my mother and another for my daughter. And my belief that they should meet my ego’s needs caused us all conflict when those needs were not met the way I expected them to be.

I had special (conditional) relationships with my loved ones including my aging mother. As a mother myself I found I was still acting as a child with my own parent demanding she give me the love and approval that appeared to be withheld from me when I was growing up. And with my daughter there seemed to be another set of needs as well. What I didn’t realize back then was the ego’s purpose of these perceived needs, which is always to preserve the specialness of our relationships that leads to separation in various forms.

As a mother, I finally sat down and asked myself a simple question, “What do I need my daughter for?”  During radical self inquiry I had to say that I needed her to love me. But because I did not yet know love (hadn’t undone the ego) I wanted her to meet my ego’s expectations. These included some of the following:

•  Do what I ask; be good at school, clean up, eat well, pray.

•  Behave as I ask and expect; be affectionate, kind, thoughtful, helpful.

•  Agree with me; don’t argue or whine.

•  Share my interests: art, ACIM, writing, my sense of style, my values and ideas, etc

In other words I needed my child to mirror to me my self-worth. My identity as a ‘good parent’ was at stake and I depended on her meeting my ego’s perceived needs. I, as a mother, made the common mistake of perceiving her as a child and me as the superior mother in the ego sense. While we as parents must provide ‘parenting’ for our growing children much of our parenting is unconsciously rooted in ‘form’ and not ‘content.’ We forget that the focus of any relationship is always ‘content’ not form. Content arises from being mindful in everything we do. The bottom line in all our relating is to ask ourselves, “Is this arising from fear, resistance and the need to control or is it coming from love, forgiveness and trust?”

Too often, as parents, we respond automatically from the ego to a child’s seeming conflict. We forget that all conflict is purely a disguised call for love and therefore deserves a loving response.

Our children are our teachers. Every time they press our buttons we’re being asked not to employ the ego’s usual resistance, avoidance and control tactics. A sign of conflict is an opportunity to do the opposite of what the ego advises. In allowing a Holy Instant without judgment, the Holy Spirit can inspire profound healing and increase our ability to trust.

For instance when our 15 year old told us that she just could not do another day at school, we nearly flipped out. We knew she was experiencing a crisis but to leave school?

The incident called both Tomas and I to ask the Holy Spirit for guidance and the guidance we got flew in the face of the world’s idea of help and ours as well. As it turned out she required an 18 month leave from school that helped her recover her sense of Self (not ego) and undo a significant block she had harbored to the awareness of Love within and without. This was a difficult period as some family, friends and peers strongly disagreed with our guidance insinuating that as parents, we were being irresponsible to say the least. Yet through this lesson we learned to trust the Holy Spirit and therefore increase our trust in the journey of unlearning that we call ‘undoing the ego’.

When we talk about our ‘needs’, we must stop and ask, “Is this true?” And honestly inquire, “What is this for?” Try it next time you find your buttons pressed by someone or something. If you feel conflict or unease it’s because you believe a thought or value and it’s really your own resistance that’s causing you distress. No body and no thing outside you can cause your problems, only your thoughts or judgments can be the culprit. This is one of the quickest ways to undo the ego, the thought of separation. The ego is the “I” you think you are, yet Who you really are beneath the ego along with the immense joy this awareness brings, will surpass your wildest imaginings!

The Ego Wants You to Need…

The ego wants you to keep on needing. Why? When you feel deprived, it’s the ego’s voice that you’re listening to. And when you believe it then you will follow its instructions and not the Holy Spirit’s.

Exercise: Let’s try this exercise where we transfer the meaning of the word ‘need’ to the word ‘use.’ In other words, take the question, “what do you need your partner, children, friends, parents, income, career, holiday, etc for? Name something/someone you feel anxiety about and substitute the word ‘need’ here with the word ‘use’. So the real question would be, “what do I use my _________ for?” Or “What do I use my career, sickness, health, body, pet, for?” or “What do I use the idea of scarcity for?” “What do I use money for?” Be specific and radically honest. While on the surface we use these things for positive reasons, can we dare ask Holy Spirit to really reveal how the ego uses these to keep us trapped in a cycle of fear and distrust? 

In any area or with any person you feel conflict, this exercise can be very revealing and healing. It can show you where you unconsciously hide the fears that cause your projected reality including all conflict of which you may feel victim. Once the ego’s unconscious intentions are revealed they can be dispelled but it takes our commitment to ‘look’.

Radical honesty, looking at your perceived needs with Holy Spirit, calls in a loving Observer Who will reinterpret whatever is being brought to the light of Truth. Just looking with Spirit allows correction and transformation. Be willing to look without guilt; that is all that’s asked of you. Watch the miracles unfold!

If You Need Something From Someone Then You Cannot Love Them.

The seat of the special relationship lies in the ego’s belief that its needs should be met by others. When they are met we call that love and when they’re not we call it hate, or conflict. It takes a lot of unlearning to appreciate why we can’t really love someone (partner, parent, child, friend, etc) while we think we need something from them. Why? Because when we think we need something from another we unconsciously see them as being different than us. The ego says they ‘have’ something that we ‘lack’ which immediately calls in the ego’s addiction to dependency and differences. An unconscious dependency is fueled by the ego’s investment in making you feel deprived. After all it thrives on deprivation because without it you wouldn’t believe that you are lacking in any way. You’d remember your natural inheritance; absolute love with no opposite and all your relationships would reflect no needs and therefore, no dependency or difference. So when we think we need something from another we can’t really love them; in place of real love is the ego form of special love.

In the ego state (deprivation) as children we needed approval, acceptance, and validation from our parents. Even as adults we sometimes still try to wrestle these things from our aging parents especially if we didn’t receive them when we were young. And in our relationships with partners we do the same. All our sense of ‘needing’ here is at the level of form and is always related to our body including our emotional body. The one thing that makes us think we ‘need’ is a sense of deprivation. But there’s only one real thing we do need. That is to heal our perception of the sense of separation that goes way back to our original decision to make a self that willingly entered this life (a dream) apart from God.

And the one remedy for all our needs does not rest with the body but within our mind. Our mind is the only cause. Therefore all needs are really just the ego’s manipulative ploy to distract us from our one need; which is to awaken through forgiveness.

© 2008, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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