ROMANTIC LOVE

Disclaimer: I make no claim to be an expert on relationships - far from it. Regard me more as a wounded healer. I've made enough mistakes consciously, though, to have learnt something along the way. With your permission, I offer the results of those experiences to you now. Regard them as a journal about a work in progress. Use what appeals to you. Put the rest in your "Maybe" basket..........

Relationship seems to be the last great unknown frontier of human endeavour. God knows why -- it's hardly for want of being explored. Everyone, including the family dog, has been over it time and time again, yet still it remains a mysterious minefield.. Maybe because we're exploring it blindfolded. Perhaps partly because the landscape keeps changing. Perhaps, also, we're missing something, something that is staring us in the face, but we can't see it.

I don't have any answers; I'm just as lost as you. Maybe there are no answers that fit every situation. But I have made some discoveries that may serve as general guidelines, and that don't seem to be in any of the textbooks written by people who claim to know. If I can share them with you now, maybe ... just maybe ... we might be able to figure out a way through.

Firstly, an observation -- there is no such "thing" as Relationship. We cannot see it, touch it, feel it or smell it. We can see plenty of evidence of its existence, but we cannot see IT and, so far, no-one has been able to point it out to me. It remains a no-thing. Similarly, there is no such "thing" as "relationshit",  but I can sure recognise evidence of it from a long way off.

We do make some very basic mistakes, either in ignorance or through poor judgment. The first one that comes to my mind is that we think that, in order to be in relationship, either one of both partners have to give up something -- "In order to be with you, I (have to) give up something of myself." That's a recipe for dissatisfaction and hidden resentment if ever there was!

Another mistake we make is, when things get a bit bumpy, we try to "make" the relationship work (some people even justify that by saying it's "for the sake of the kids") . That doesn't ever really work, because we're going to work on the Consequence instead of the Cause. Relationship is a product, or consequence, of the interaction of who two people are. If we were to more authentically be who we are, and were more willing to express our self in a higher state of integrity than we're doing at the moment, then we could simply get out of the way and ALLOW a relationship to work. We could even do that now in our present state of being if we weren't so hung up on models of how it ought to work, but then we'd have to give up being "right" about a lot of the positions we're on, and our egos aren't going to like that!

We are too busy enjoying our suffering to see the bleeding obvious -- "I could be enjoying this if only I didn't feel this way about it!"  And relationships offer golden opportunities for suffering on the scale of Grand Opera. But how we feel about anything is entirely and individually up to each of us.

In relationshit, we don't relate -- we project. We pin masks and costumes on the other, costumes from our own wardrobe that we won't wear. We assign qualities we think we don't have (good or bad) to the other person, whether that person actually has them or not. And we also attribute our feelings in relationshit to the other person -- "You make me feel ......... (insert here a line from your favourite love song)". We shift our stuff, and the responsibility for it, onto the other. Is it any wonder we feel burdened? Is it any wonder, too, that Intimacy goes out the window? There's absolutely no hope whatsoever of shared "into-me-see" when either of us is focussed on the other person's space! Helloo-ooo!?

Another mistake -- we look in relationship for a Saviour -- someone whose job it is to take way a feeling that we don't like and cannot be with, and/or to supply us with a feeling we've grown addicted to, because we don't acknowledge that "I am the sole source of everything I feel". We didn't ever tell the other person we were looking for a Saviour, of course, and it wasn't even in the fine print of the Marriage Contract, probably because we didn't realise it. We look to relationship to alter our experience, when the purpose of all living is to HAVE our experience. We look to others for answers, when our here/now experience IS the answer we're seeking. We've just forgotten what the question was.....

I don't think anybody can have a successful relationship in integrity states of Uncertainty, Opposition or Disloyalty. [If you want to know more about those states, do read Ron Smothermon's book "Winning Through Enlightenment", or my book "Another Way".]

Successful relationships of any kind -- not just romantic ones -- 

exist in a Purpose and a Context, a way of being 

that is larger than the relationship itself.

What that Context is, is for you and your partner to create.

Most of us don't even know that possibility exists. Dysfunctional relationships slop around in default conditions  that happened either by habit or by accident. So we fall eventually out of relationship into a condition of relationshit.

Here is an exercise-cum-meditation that you might find enlightening. Put on some quiet, pleasant music, and sit yourself comfortably in front of a good-sized mirror. Look at your head and shoulders and face. Take some time to settle with that. Then, when the traffic of thoughts has quietened down a bit, look into you own eyes and ask your self "Who do I want?"  When an answer pops, follow up with, "Then who do I want?............... Then who do I want?......" Gently keep repeating the question -- until you get  it. Get what? You'll know -- when you get it.

THE HUMAN AND THE DIVINE

We live in a spectrum of two natures -- one is Human and the other is Divine. We are both. But in daily living we experience varying levels of the two modes of awareness, levels that fluctuate from moment to moment. We are never either fully secular, or fully divine; we slide around.

In the context of Love, the purely Divine perception is very simple -- Love is All, and All is Love. There is nothing that is not an expression of Love. Hatred and Indifference are just as much expressions of Divine Love as are Affection and Empathy. End of discussion.

In this article I'm addressing mostly the Human end of the Love scale -- the end where Love ceases to be a single awareness and becomes a multiplicity of experiences that can feel as different as heaven and hell. This is the end of the scale where we experience conditions that we label as "Not-Love", "romantic love", "altruism", "sympathy", "empathy", "indifference" .. and so on. In this condition, there are also a lot of things we mistake for "love" that, in the human sense, are not love at all. Let's go exploring................

Romanticism seeks to restore a lost sense of the Divine side of our nature. Romantic love opens up bits of our inner life, our "better nature". Romance inspires the power of our imagination to create beauty, poetry, music, myth, dream and vision. So far, so good

Romance also triggers a longing we probably did not know we harboured -- our longing for the opposite-gender side of our nature. Every man is looking for his female-ness - his anima; every female is looking for her animus. We meet someone who sends our hormones into a spin and we think we have found what we were looking for. Sometimes we may have, but we stuff that up by thinking that what we've found is coming from the other person. No. The other person just triggered a release of our own yummy stuff.

It is our longing for our better and our opposite gender natures that unites us in a state of romantic love.

Somewhere down the line, however, things come unstuck because we have misused the romantic ideal and confused it with "Love". Rather than relating authentically with the real flesh-and-blood human being in front of us, we mis-place our version of love over onto our partner. Rather than take personal responsibility for connecting with our Divinity, we pursue it in another, and expect the other to fulfill for us an idealised image of our own opposite-gender soul. ("You make me feel........., and I expect you to keep on doing that through better and worse, through richer and poorer, 'til death do us part.") That is an impossible burden to place on any other person, but we blindly do it to each other. Such romanticism carries within it the seeds of  its own inevitable destruction. In a state of sudden euphoria, we mistake where our feelings are coming from -- ("You make me feel....") and put the relationship  under a strain it cannot sustain. This simple mistake means that we jointly end up destroying the very human relationship that we experienced, for a moment at least,  as Divine. We get dis-illusioned, confused and hurt, and we blame the other for not perpetuating what was only ever our fantasy in the first place.

Romantic love is a hallmark of adolescence, a necessary stage in our psychological evolution. It is our path for a while. But we are supposed to grow through it and out of it, and come out of the experiences much the wiser. But many of us, including myself, got trapped inside, going around in circles of repeated experiences, vainly looking for an exit. I'd love a dollar for every 3am call I've taken from someone who is still agonisingly trapped in their adolescent notions of  "true love". "True love" is a natural desire for fulfillment, completion and happiness that gets misdirected onto other human beings.

Real love,however, has a different texture to it. Among its attributes are a deep and genuine desire for the whole well-being and happiness of your beloved, just as he/she is -- un-renovated. Real human Love is not a grand drama of passion at the expense of the other person.

Like most of our early lives, we got it all backwards. Let's take "Did you miss me?" What is that about? If I'm asked that and my answer is "Yes, I missed you like crazy", I know there's some unfinished work for me to do around a belief in inadequacy, but she gets an ego goose. If my answer is "No, I didn't miss you", I'm fine but she gets offended. We have a definition of Love that says "If you really loved me you'd be unhappy unless I'm around", and we feel somewhat betrayed when they're not suffering in our absence. That's not Love! It might be a lot of other things, mostly unhealthy, but Love is not one of them.

Romantic love is fun to play with, but as a seriously entertained way of life it is an "unwholly" muddle of Divine and Human loves. Our Divine love includes an urge toward the inner world, and our human soul's reaching for its divine origins. Our Human love is the divine's hankering for real flesh-and-blood human-being experiences. Like Michaelangelo's great fresco, the Divine and the Human reach out to each other in Love. Both loves are valid and co-operate to give us the richness of experience that is the condition of being human. But culturally we've got them muddled and we have nearly lost them both.

The great flaw in Romantic Love happens when we seek one love over the other..... when we try to attain the Divine without the human; or we wallow in the human without regard to the divine  There is no single Love. There is a unifying context called Love-ness that includes ALL kinds of love in complete balance. But there is no One Love -- not in a dual universe. No matter how flat you squash a coin, there are still at least two sides to it. One Love is a romantic fiction.

What about the concept of Soul Mates? It's a concept with beliefs wrapped around it. If that's how you want to see it, god bless you. If it enriches your feelings for each other, go for it. But it is still only a concept with beliefs.

Now I'm going to stir up the hornets nest. People in (romantic) love are not actually in love with each other. They are in love with a feeling they get -- for the moment -- when they are in each other's company. Unwittingly they are using each other as conduits to access the intense, passionate experiences they would otherwise not give themselves permission to have, This, whether we admit it or not, is what romantic love is, using another to create passion and drama for its own sake. I didn't say that was wrong, but there are possible consequences you might like to know about in advance. If you don't want to know, skip to the next paragraph. When we pursue passion and drama for its own sake, we risk becoming junkies for it. When our partner no longer serves as a ready connection, we either shut down, or go looking for our "fix" of passion and drama somewhere else (usually, but not necessarily with another partner).

When we are genuinely in love with another person, it is a spontaneous act of being. Love is a recognition of the other person that causes us to acknowledge our own wholeness, to affirm, value and honour her/him in toto. and to desire nothing more than happiness and well-being for both of us.

There are two marriages we should consider making. The first is an inner re-union with our own Soul. We do that by going both inward and outward, observing, engaging with and experiencing all that is there. The second marriage is a connection with all other beings. This connection does not have to be manufactured, it already exists. Just acknowledge and declare it to be so. In declaring our connection, we become connected. It is that easy! Then everything "else" is embraced, just as it is. When these two marriages are consummated, romantic love takes it's appropriate place in the scheme of things -- as a rite of passage in growing up.

Romance, as a game, does not disappear. It is enjoyed for its own sake as a way of honouring and celebrating each other. Romance also helps us avoid the trap of Withholding in relationship.

THIS ONE ISN'T IT


When you woke up and rolled over in bed this morning, who did you see? Someone who still embodies the qualities you saw in him/her when you first "fell" in love and chose to "be with", or did you see someone else? Well, whoever you saw, that was your creation, not your partner's.

Somewhere in the attic of our mind, there is a silver box containing images of our ideal job, ideal home, ideal family... and ... ideal partner. When we first get into relationship, everything is usually fine and dandy and the other fills our waking days. But as we get used to each other and some of the gloss begins to wear thin, we surreptitiously duck up to the attic every now and then and compare what we think we've got with the perfect image in the silver box. The differences begin to show. "Uh! Well, this one isn't quite what I wanted" So we start to withhold some of the joy and spontaneity we've been bringing to the table, keeping something on ice in case, one day, Mr. or Mrs. Right should suddenly turn up out of the blue. Then, maybe, we keep some more of ourself in reserve in case this partner dies or quits on us one day in the possible future.

Any withholding in any situation, for whatever reason -- good or bad -- saps the life out of everyone and everything involved. When we withhold, we shut the doors on aliveness itself. We then hang around for some crisis, some calamity, or even death itself to unite us with our silver-boxed ideal, with our fantasy-dream of opposite-gender perfection. Even in other partners. we still find only tormentingly partial reflections of the divine vision we hope for. Forlornly we give up on this relationship and dream of meeting our Ideal Love on the other side of this grave we're stuck in now.

But what if there is only Nothingness after death? Or, what if we've died already, and THIS is heaven(or hell) What if this life here and now is IT, and we're missing it while we're searching for something else?

DEATH AND TRANSFORMATION IN ROMANCE


What on earth does Death have to do with Love? Quite a lot as it happens.

Death seems to be the object of so much of our longing. We make the despair component of earthly human experience bearable by holding to a plaintive hope of perfection, beauty and happiness in a world to come.

But what if the absence of what we don't like takes with it what we do want (ie. it's polar opposites) Then we're left with Nothing. You cannot lose the negative and keep the positive. Like the proverbial coin, they go together. Ooops!

Or what if this perfect and beautiful realm lies latent within us here and now, lying hidden inside what we say "No" to?

What if --  we have lived lifetime after lifetime for eons, failing to get the message that all the great spiritual leaders have been saying through the centuries of recorded history -- that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand". Not tomorrow, not next Friday just after lunch, but right here, right now, waiting for us to stop looking for it and notice it.. The Kingdom of Heaven -- we're standing in it., with our eyes shut, our ears plugged up with our iPods, and saying "This ain't it!"

It's not Death we're afraid of; it's not Death we're looking for. We are after -- and afraid of -- what we've been told that Death will give us -- liberation, and transformation. Well, I'm not at all sure that Death will deliver either liberation or transformation. It's my limited experience that Death delivers Nothing. I watched my father, a lifelong devout Christian, face death, and what he saw as he drew nigh to the threshold was a long way from the bliss he'd been promised. For the first time in my life I saw terror on his face.

What I am sure of, because I have already experienced a measure of it, is that Liberation and Transformation are available in this life,  here and now. No need to wait for anything. If that is so, though, why don't we all go for it? Our egos get in the way because, to our egos, Transformation is a death threat.

A man had spent his life looking for God. He knocked on doors, searched cathedrals, temples, soup kitchens asking everyone he met if they had seen God. Finally, one day, an unlikely man came up to him and said "I believe you've been looking for God. I know where He lives. It's not far from here." He gave the man the address. Eagerly, the man went straight around there. Sure enough, a small brass plate on the letterbox carried the legend "God. No junk mail".

 The man was beside himself with excitement. For 6 decades he had been searching for God.... He walked through the front gate and up the path to the front door. He reached out to press the doorbell. "The search is over!" hit him like a thunderclap. Slowly he withdrew his hand, turned, and walked away.

We get addicted or inured to the search -- even to a point where the search becomes more important than what we're searching for. You can let your ego put off and resist the inevitable. You can fight anything and everything that challenges you to give up your ego's ideas, opinions, concepts and beliefs -- all to perpetuate The Search. While you are searching, you are not finding. If you truly want to find, give up searching. Searching is an impediment to Finding.

You can wait, if you like, until the last few hours/minutes/seconds of your life to discover that what you've been looking for has been right in front of your nose all along. Or you can get it now, and then get on with enjoying your humanity for a change.

Imagine now that your life in this body is ebbing away. You are being drawn towards the white light beyond that door. Question:----- Do you think in that moment any of your long-held opinions, beliefs or ideas will matter a tuppenny damn? I've been there. They won't. Only one question will occupy your mind -- "Do they know I love them?"

What has all this to do with Romantic Love? Romantic love is a bit of a death-wish: it guarantees suffering. And how we love suffering! Imagine a romantic storyline that goes --

Boy meets girl.

Boy and girl fall in love, get married

And live happily ever after.

Nobody's going to buy that! They've gotta suffer somewhere!

Romantic love also gives us a bunch of inspired feelings, akin to transformation. That's why it feels so "right". The huge appeal of Romantic Love is:--

• the Death of our humanity (which around adolescence really sucks anyway!), 
• redemption through suffering,and 
• the promise of Transformation. 

Don't nearly all of our great myths follow the same trajectory?

Death of an old way --------> Redemption -------> Transformation

In our psyche,, suffering is deeply connected to the quest for Growth and Understanding. Death is also seen to be the possible birth of self-awareness. But these are lies. Despite what I was taught every Easter, suffering is no guarantee of transformation, nor is death any guarantee of anything more than a fading flash of self-awareness. Death, the end of duality, is the demise self-awareness and the end of transformation. It's too late then. But we don't know that yet. We long to fill the vaguely perceived "missing" in our lives -- that unlived spiritual dimension. We go looking for it in suffering, particularly in the powerful suffering of romantic love. If we weren't so intent upon the pain of our romantic suffering, we'd realise that we've never felt so alive, and that we're having the time of our lives!

I could be enjoying this if I didn't feel this way about it!

The "death" we seek though Romance is Redemption and Transformation. Despite, or maybe because of, our egos, we are inexorably drawn towards Transformation. So is the whole of existence. That is our deepest "death wish", except that our Divine nature knows that there is no death --  to anything except the ego.

Religion gets into the act, too. Church and State combined have managed to wangle their way into birth, marriage and death, but nowhere is religion more tightly wrapped than around the riddle of Death.

Our religion itself is Romance. Most of the stuff I was taught in Sunday School about Jesus Christ was pure romance -- just look at the pictures they draw! When we were children we imagined "heaven" to be out there amongst the stars.  But when we slipped into,puberty, we shifted the location of heaven from the firmament onto other people -- the ones with whom we fell in love -- and we brought some of the stars along to pepper up our love poems.

The "death" that awaits us at the very centre of religion and romance is the flowering of our inner world, and the promise of paradise. We're looking for

• Freedom from fear and guilt
• Responsibility
• Authenticity
• Inter-dependence
• Sovereignty
• Surrender
• Serenity.

Romance promises to supply all of that. But the promise cannot be sustained by romance alone. Something else has to happen as well......

When you next experience a moment of peace and wholeness in the arms of another, try an experiment. Try  acknowledging that you, alone, are creating those feelings for you, that you have known them before without the presence of this person, and that you can have them again -- with or without this person. You are grateful, to say the very least, for the the other's presence and enrichment of the moment, but your experience is yours.

When you own your experience and your partner owns his/her experience, you have a clean relationship. What usually happens, however, is that we credit and project our perception of paradise onto the other person. At the same time we take a snapshot of the moment and silver-box it. From then on, every subsequent opportunity for a fresh, unique experience with this person is killed off, firstly by an expectation that the other "do it to me one more time"  and, secondly, by us taking a peep into the silver box while it is going on, to see how this time compares with the snapshot. No wonder the intensity fades! We no longer see the other as he/she is. We no longer experience this experience as unique and fresh. We no longer see our Divine inner vision for what it is; We are so far away from the reality of it that we muddle everything up into a mess. The Divine and the Human both become mangled and dishonoured.

Romantic love is like the booster rockets on a space shuttle. The passions of Romance get us off the ground and carry us through the trials and necessary adjustments of the getting-to-know-you phase.  But like all human "highs", they are not meant to last. Solely Romantic relationships burn out; they are supposed to. Otherwise we become so exhausted by the sheer intensity of it all -- the ecstasies and the battles, the partings and the reconciliations -- that there is finally nothing left to do but suicide. Could Romeo and Juliet have carried on like they were into old age? Bill Shakespeare knew a lot about romantic love.

Unless we pay conscious attention to it, we will not have generated enough enduring life force, goodwill and genuine affection with which to love and companion someone at the human level. After the honeymoon our souls find us, waiting patiently for the divine nourishment that was promised just before the honeymoon, and not finding that satisfaction. We come up short, but rarely with enough insight to see where we got it wrong.

Romantic love is not the full symphony; it is just the prelude.

There is real LIFE after the honeymoon.

To be continued .........................