romantic love toward self--our original state or peak experience?

I was busy at work organizing a resource fair and now it just finished. So I start to unwind a bit during the long weekend.

Usually after unwinding bit, the familiar calm and peace come back, the original state deep down starts to surface.

It feels like romantic love. Everything feels great and beautiful, only it's toward myself and anything about myself. I admire myself. I silently call my own name as if calling a lover. I smile at myself internally. In dreams, everyone admires me and I know I am different. In reality, people also notice.

Some call it peak experience. I see it as our original state.

Although I have been in that place time and time again and know what it is like, I can still lose the connection with it when work gets busy.

I found that needs and wants cause me to look to the future, look to things that happened and then go back and forth, creating a blocking to the connection with my inner self. Impluses to act and mind plotting and chatering are in the way of the connection.

When inner self is not present, the ego take over and operates on needs and wants, in orer to play a role that the mind wants it to be.

"This emotional life" on PBS is a lump sum of everything emotional well being. One thing mentioned in that is that zebra doesn't stay stressed after being chased by a lion. Once escaping its death, there is some action to come out of a freeze response, and its stress hormone goes back to normal again. In human, sometimes we stay stressed even after the stressor no longer exists but don't know how to turn it off. This is the cause of stress and-- physical illness.

SO why do we have needs and wants? After awakening, is there needs and wants?

My experience is that when we are strongly connected with our inner energy, the strength is so strong that we don't feel lacking. Anything just comes off as physical sensation and nothing more.

If we are hungry, we feed ourselves with some food. If we are tired, we rest. Just like what a zebra would do. If someone else rub our food, we protest and stand up for ourselves.

It is the interpretation toward these sensation that differentiate us from zebra. Once everything is over, we still keep the whole thing in our head and play it over and over, or to plot our next step. The mind activity not only takes our emotions on a roller coaster ride, it also stirs up phyiscal sensation and stress response. Sometimes it doesn't get turned off for days.

That's why the saying "Be careful of what we wish for." When finding us too attached to a certain target, ask why. Whether it's the credit of the job well done, a person, or even the calm inside. Why do I need it?

Feel how it feels like as if we don't have it.

Even getting too attached to the calm inside can takes us away from it, because once we get busy, we resent the fact that we are not in that calm state.

How does this thing matter when I am on my death bed? The moment we leave this world, there is nothing we can take away with us. We come alone and we leave alone.

But in fact, this calm can follow us if we are aware of it. This is the only thing that comes with us and will follow us when we leave.