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Ego and Relationships
"When we begin to discuss deep, personal relationships, we are led to talk about unconditional love; because that is the eventual goal. And unconditional love cannot be experienced without help from the Source itself. With that help, it is possible one day to realize you have left possessive, dependent love behind."
~ Bartholomew

Bartholomew, Planetary Brother
The ego. It lives deep inside your mind. It thrives on fear, judgment, expectations, jealousy, hatred, bitterness, control, selfishness, greed, doubt, separation, anger, and many other negative thoughts and emotions.
Hard as it to believe, the ego does have a useful purpose in our consciousness. Before we lost our way on planet Earth aeons ago, our ego was in perfect balance with the rest of our mind, and was responsible for keeping us out of harms way. However, after the Fall of mankind into three-dimensional reality, its influence increased far beyond its intended role and eventually dominated the way we thought. For many today, the ego still causes too much out-of-balance, fear-based thinking and choices. During our journey of self-perfection on planet Earth, our goal is to return the ego to its rightful place.
The ego, which is famous for making judgments about others, is also the root cause of most failed relationships, especially the romantic kind. In the wonderful book, Bartholomew, Planetary Brother, the Spirit Bartholomew has some very insightful things to say about the ego and relationships. His words and insights are much better than mine so I'll let him speak for himself...
"When we begin to discuss deep, personal relationships, we are led to talk about unconditional love; because that is the eventual goal.
Many of you feel this kind of deep love is beyond your reach until you 'fix' yourself and your life.

That will never happen...you will never be fully content with yourself and your life when you view it through the ego.
Your ego would like you to believe love is complicated.
You have all had moments where you experienced deep love...those moments are difficult to maintain when they are shattered by the arrival of perceived differences, feelings of superiority, judgment, inferiority, and separation.
With the arrival of separation, the feeling of love seems to disappear... what has happened to that feeling?
Let's say you meet someone and find yourself enchanted by this person...deep within you something moves...you feel, not just excitement, but a sense of being comfortable, of being safe, of being in the presence of something so important and so special that you find yourself willing to share your life with the person you think gives you those feelings.
When you meet someone whose energy field moves you in such a way, some aspect of your soul, the God-part of you responds.
In those early days, weeks and months of the relationship that feeling is built upon.
Here is a person you can share everything with...who, from the depths of their being, shares who they are with you.
In the presence of each other, you both find yourselves more forgiving...things that would, in the past, agitate you terribly fade into the background.
When you have this love in your heart you become more allowing, more understanding, more loveable yourself...these are truly magic moments.
This coming together is a moment of recognition, when the possibility arises that there may be one person who will find enough value in you to stay steady in your life thereby, giving you the opportunity to find out who you really are.

Then one day, perhaps without even knowing where it comes from, there arises in your mind a judgment.
'Hmmm,' says the lover about the beloved, 'I don't think I like what is happening...I think it might be a little uncomfortable to live with that characteristic for the rest of my life'.
At this point nothing is said; but the moment that first small judgment comes in, you begin a process that you may be stuck with for the rest of your relationship.
The process is...judgment leads to doubt, which leads to more judgment, which then accumulates over the years.
Of course, the other person is in the same process so at the very earliest stages, this separation begins to arise, and it will continue if nothing comes to break the pattern.
At the start of the relationship, when the soul began to move toward a partnership of deep union, that yearning was so powerful it was able to silence this judgmental little voice.
But the little voice (ego) is speaking quietly in the background all the time, whispering things like, 'He or she didn't do it right, didn't do it quickly enough; or my beliefs, or family or background are just a little more 'right' than his or hers'.
When this powerful, new love energy wells up, the small, insistent, nagging ego-voice seems to cease...remember this, because this is where your hope lies.
It is possible to begin to silence the ego by getting in touch with how you felt when love first sprang up in your heart.
Most people, however, try to find another person to feel this with instead of trying to find what once was."
I could go on for quite some time with Bartholomew's wisdom on relationships and the role that ego plays in weakening them. In essence what he is saying is that there is a real purpose behind relationships, especially the romantic kind. That is, in the early stages of romance, we love every thing and every one. All is sacred. We are patient, tolerant, accepting of the other's faults, forgiving and understanding, gentler, kinder,

giving, joyful, and we become so lovable ourselves. This is the divine goal of romance; to bring us to an understanding of unconditional love, feeling it, and then living it the best we can.
In the process of being unconditional love, the ego slowly recedes into its rightful place within our minds and we awaken more and more to God-centeredness and our true spiritual nature. Then we are free as we were a long, long time ago.
Bartholomew also tells us that we enter relationships because we are seeking God. What does that mean? It all starts with your soul, which is a portion or spark of All That Is. As a part of God, what the soul really wants, what it is always seeking is the experience and feeling of being God. It can only achieve this through love. Said another way, the feeling of love is how we can experience God, which is exactly what happens when we "fall in love."
Falling in love is a very profound experience. It serves to remind us that love is the highest emotion we can feel and the grandest experience we can have. We need to realize that seeking intimate love with another is no different than seeking it with God. And it is the highest choice we can make.
There are many ways to make relationships as loving and rewarding as possible. The ones I list below are primarily for the romantic kind, but can also be applied to any we might have. The key is to use the relationship for its divinely intended purpose: to help you decide who you really are and what you want to do with that profound knowledge.