To E.
I have lots of questions about relationships.
We all have.
One of the questions I have is about how I often feel that I want to give more affection to other people than they want to receive.
Do you want something from the other?
Yes.
So what do you want when you give more affection than the other person wants?
I want to feel loved or OK.
Does that work?
No.
No, and actually it is manipulation. We give to receive; and if you don’t get what you want, what then?
I have to meet the feeling inside me.
Do you meet it? Really meet it? It shows up, sure. Do you really experience how it feels when you don’t get what you want?
Not fully, because the pattern continues.
This is good insight. It will repeat, wherever we are, in whatever group of people we are with. It will show up again. Whatever wants to be met, will have to show up. I cannot promise anything else.
Thank you.
Some people like to hear that, some people don’t. In the lunch break I was speaking with a friend about relationships and I could see I had checked for myself every type of arrangement in our culture, and some outside our culture, to deal with a relationship. Marriage, open relationship, closed relationship, no relationship, being a monk, being on my own, sleeping around. Maybe there are some other options I don’t know about, but I have checked all these. The last thing I checked was what I wanted least: to be absolutely fully committed. In the present partnership, a thousand times I have had the impulse to leave or make her leave. And somehow I didn’t leave, and somehow she didn’t leave. I cannot foresee the future, but that very commitment has caused such an immense pressure in which I could see every possible justification to leave or make her leave. But we didn’t leave. It is just a willingness to experience whatever comes up; not to move. It is a knowing of the truth that leaving or looking for somebody else will not end the need to face whatever needs to be faced. And somehow things have been met inside myself that I could not ever have dreamt of. I could not have had the slightest idea that those patterns were there.
Sometimes it was hell for me and for her. So when we speak about relationships – all types of relationship, including friendship, teacher and disciple – only a few will stay with you long term. As long as we get what we want, everything is nice. The moment something shows up that is not comfortable and you are not clear enough to stay, either you go or sabotage things to make the other one leave. Nothing else is possible until we know about the possibility of living as awareness amidst the greatest pain. Some say that is the biggest power in the universe.
How does it feel to speak without illusion, without any promise that there is a realm of endless happiness in a relationship? How does that feel?
It’s a kind of relief.
Yes, otherwise you will be on the run for the rest of your life in search of some kind of perfection, or you will be constantly avoiding a relationship. To avoid any deep emotional connection, you can take some magic mushrooms or other drugs. But beingness is not the same thing as a good feeling.
Beingness embraces bad feelings also. So the invitation is not to relieve ourselves of bad feelings, because this is the trap, but to relieve ourselves of having to have a good feeling. Beingness embraces hell when hell is the reality and, in any profound relationship, hell will show up at times.
(From Florian Tathagata's book "Being")
4 comments:
"But beingness is not the same thing as a good feeling.
Beingness embraces bad feelings also."
This is so true. Relationship can only work with as little friction as possible when there is selflessness. It is selfless to give without expecting anything in return. It is selfish to try to give when it is not wanted or needed.
Emotions, pleasant or unpleasant, that spoil the relationship should be neutralised. It works best when they are neutralised in oneself first. Then everything can go on unspoiled.
When talking about neutralising the emotions, I think you are probably describing an internal process and I can't say anything to that, because the way each person internalises truth is his own.
For me, this process has become more or less automatic. This is not to say that there isn't hell in my personal relationships sometimes - even with my children. But it is enough for me to think of how awareness embraces everything in its love for expression and experience without wanting to change it; then I usually confront everything with a smile.
Yes, by neutralising I mean an internal process in the first order. However, I think it happens in everyone the same way. It only appears different, because people describe it differently, no one can "show" it to anyone else, and those who haven't done it can have no clue about its essence or importance from any description, no matter how logical or convincing, until they do it themselves. Until then they object to it in every way.
It's the lack of transparency and flexibility in internal processes that spoil people and their relationships. There are as if specks blocking the light going through. Well, it is not at all easy to describe. It is probably not meant to be described.
"It's the lack of transparency and flexibility in internal processes that spoil people and their relationships."
I agree with you entirely and I can put it in other words too: it's the patterns and places within us we haven't yet met that create tension in inter-personal relationships. Therefore, the acceptance of ourselves magically translates into an acceptance of the others at the same time.
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