Regarding relationships:
From Addictive to
Enlightened Relationships
Love/hate relationships
Unless and until you access the consciousness frequency of
presence, all relationships, and particularly intimate
relationships, are deeply flawed and ultimately dysfunctional. They
may seem perfect for a while, such as when you are in love, but
invariably that apparent perfection gets disrupted as arguments,
conflicts, dissatisfaction, and emotional or even physical violence
occur with increasing frequency.
It seems that most love relationships become love/hate
relationships before long. Love can then turn into savage attack,
feelings of hostility, or complete withdrawal of affection at the
flick of a switch. This is considered normal.
If in your relationships you experience both love and the
opposite of love attack, emotional violence, and so on then it
is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and addictive
clinging with love. You cannot love your partner one moment and
attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your
love has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need
for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other
person temporarily meets. It is the egos substitute for salvation,
and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation.
But there comes a point when your partner behaves in ways that fail
to meet your needs, or rather those of your ego. The feelings of
fear, pain, and lack that are an intrinsic part of egoic
consciousness but had been covered up by the love relationship
now resurface.
Just as with every other addiction, you are on a high when the drug
is available, but invariably there comes a time when the drug no
longer works for you.
When those painful feelings reappear, you feel them even more
strongly than before, and what is more, you now perceive your
partner as the cause of those feelings. This means that you project
them outward and attack the other with all the savage violence that
is part of your pain.
This attack may awaken the partners own pain, and he or she may
counter your attack. At this point, the ego is still unconsciously
hoping that its attack or its attempts at manipulation will be
sufficient punishment to induce your partner to change their
behavior, so that it can use them again as a cover-up for your
pain.
Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move
through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends
with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to alcohol,
food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person you are using something
or somebody to cover up your pain.
That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so
much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do
not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and
unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that.
Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you
anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever.
This is one reason why most people are always trying to escape from
the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the
future. The first thing that they might encounter if they focused
their attention on the Now is their own pain, and this is what they
fear. If they only knew how easy it is to access in the Now the
power of presence that dissolves the past and its pain, the reality
that dissolves the illusion. If they only knew how close they are
to their own reality, how close to God.
Avoidance of relationships in an attempt to avoid pain is not the
answer either. The pain is there anyway. Three failed relationships
in as many years are more likely to force you into awakening than
three years on a desert island or shut away in your room. But if
you could bring intense presence into your aloneness, that would
work for you too.
From Addictive to Enlightened Relationships
Whether you are living alone or with a partner, this remains the
key: being present and intensifying your presence by taking your
attention ever more deeply into the Now.
For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong
enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the
pain-body and mistake them for who you are.
To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness
underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain,
is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
To disidentify from the pain-body is to bring presence into the
pain and thus transmute it. To disidentify from thinking is to be
the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior, especially the
repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the
ego.
If you stop investing it with selfness, the mind loses its
compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and
so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain.
In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what
is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy,
for peace.
First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your
partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is
complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without
needing to judge or change them in any way.
That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all
addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no
perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused.
This is also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into
somebody elses unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to
continue. You will then either separate in love or move ever
more deeply into the Now together, into Being. Can it be that
simple? Yes, it is that simple.
Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep
within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is
not dependent on some other body, some external form.
In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless
and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your
physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every
other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of
form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is
love.
Although brief glimpses are possible, love cannot flourish unless
you are permanently free of mind identification and your presence
is intense enough to have dissolved the pain-body or you can at
least remain present as the watcher. The pain-body cannot then take
you over and so become destructive of love.[/url]
