Transpersonal Love within Committed Relationships

How do we manifest that?

If loving everyone can't be represented in the physical relationship realm, how do we represent it outwardly?  

I confess that I've run into some snags with a lover because I wanted to hold him with an open hand, and that made him really nervous.  He would rather we both be totally closed off to the idea of having other lovers.  However, he does look at alot of porn…  [rolls eyes]  I've wanted to integrate more of his reality into our relationship, but he has insisted that he be able to keep secrets.  This would be fine if I was free to have other lovers, but if he wants me to be his alone, then that doesn't work for me.  Splitting like that creates too many problems.  How do you make the leap to hyper-space here?

Incidentally, when I was married - and even before I was married - I can see how I was constantly trying to move towards the trans-personal within the relationship.  I would work to include more truth, more reality, more consciousness, and he would be resisting.  That always felt like rejection to me.  And he would feel threatened when I forced my consciousness into his dark places.  I think he was assuming that I wanted to put rejection there, or to use his darkness as weapons against him.  Fear.  In turn, I rejected his sexual advances into my physical space because I felt so fundamentally rejected that sex without feeling loved was exploitation.  I didn't understand why we couldn't resolve this conflict. 

I used my words like I was taught to resolve conflict, and the harder I tried to find solutions, the worse it got.  His struggle was a pre-verbal struggle.  I see that now.  But his refusal to work at putting words there was a refusal to put consciousness there and so there was no way to really solve things.

Looking back, I see that my struggle was also pre-verbal, but I know I would have been able to figure out how to go there if I had been given just a little encouragement.  All counselling to this effect went in the exact wrong direction.  It all asked me to care less, ask fewer questions, forget about truth, and prefer peace and non-conflict instead.  This was really destructive.  I have finally realized that there really is no model for this out there, and certainly no marriage counselling that can reliably take people there.  This is one of those places where drugs like X and mushrooms would be therapeutic if used intelligently.  But there is just a rip-roaring resistance to consciousness in relationship science out there.  I wanna see that change. 

~Ww

Re: Transpersonal Love within Committed Relationships

Last week, I became aware of myself “falling” in love.  I was descending into a Personal level because it was shaping itself into an ideal security zone for me.  As I became aware of this sensation of falling, I also realized that I was falling into an equally powerful threat zone.  That this place was totally conditioned.  And that eventually, sooner or later, the winds would change and I would feel threatened.  I marvelled at this - sensing the temporariness of it all.  And I felt compassion for myself.  And my lover. 

So, last night, that crash came and I felt the anticipated threat.  But I didn't feel completely threatened like I have previously during such Personal events.  I could almost sense an orgiastic pleasure - not perverse pleasure, but rather a sharp spike of compassion energized by the sense of tragedy - and this compassion felt extremely good. 

As I ponder this, I am reminded of a question that my current lover asked of me the other night, mid-session: “What does it feel like?  Does it tickle?”  I couldn't find words.  I could only shake my head and continue to gasp.  Then when I asked him the same question, he could only manage: “Good!”  LOL 

Could I have really grokked the compassionate impulse of True Non-duality before I had experienced it if someone had merely described it to me?  I don't think so.  Not in the way I've heard it described so many times, at any rate.  It's usually couched in very archaic and moralistic terms that shame me for “attatchment” and belief in “illusion”.  I experience those terms to be very anti-female. 

Last night, as I watched the Grammies, I marvelled at Shakira's wonderful art.  Not just her music, or just her dancing - but her frenzied, physical drive to simply give something beautiful to the eye - to the awareness.  All of awareness.  Unlike some other hip-hop work, she doesn't seem to be too distracted by the impulse to entrap.  Just to enjoy. 

Can't it all be like that?  Can't we just enjoy this?  Must we constantly be made to feel ashamed for “falling for the lie” or becoming a “slave” or some other such polemic? 

How does this strike anyone?

~Ww

Re: Transpersonal Love within Committed Relationships

Hello!
A very common psychological theory is that to fall in love is to be attracted to our shadow and projections, and that it can help us be more conscious about those aspects of ourself. This means that we are basically fooling ourselves when we are loving an other person, and that we will stop to love them when the spell is removed or the illusions are resolved. Or that some “truer” love might appear, as the first “superficial” love has evaporated.

There is probably a lot of truth in that, but there is an other theory that I like even more, that I heard from Sandra Maitri, my teacher within the Diamond Approach/ Ridhwan School.

They say that we in the first experience of love actually are seeing and responding to the soul, and then feel immense love in seeing them more or less as they are. Then we are becoming less and less in love as our defences gradually will build themself up again. So that after a while we will iin fact often be more of the illusion of our personality than in the beginning, when it was a more “pure” perception.

Somehow a more or less oposite theory! In the eyes of the Diamond Approach the struggle is to keep our first perception open, and not let all our fear and stuff overtake us. Or, since it is more or less impossible for this not to happen, at least we should do our best to work with all of these sheets of our personality as they are becoming present.

The first theory of more normal psychology somehow thinks we are seeing things more clear when the magic of the other disappears, and we are all becoming dull again, while DA thinks that this magic is always within reach, but must be worked for.

Love from Øyvind in Norway!

Re: Transpersonal Love within Committed Relationships

My opinion is closer to the normal psychological approach than anything else.

“Falling in Love” is something that most of my community views as a drug.  We call it “New Relationship Energy” and it is that period of infatuation that begins a relationship.  This is the euphoric phase of first meeting this bright, shiny new person, who fits every wish we could ever want filled!

Many of us have seen people make horrible, disasterous decisions during this phase.

The thing is, this phase really is just us projecting ourselves onto the other person.  As we get to know the other person better, we get to know that person's quirks and failings.  We learn how the person truly lives eir life, and all of the layers of joy and hurt that makes em.

Somewhere in there, we either form an emotional attachment to the other person, or we do not.  Either way, somewhere in there, as we learn about the person and learn how to truly open up, that is when we find out who e really is.  Should all goes well, and should we not hurt each other too much in the process, an actual loving relationship begins somewhere in during the NRE, and then survives or even thrives when the euphoria wears off.

Re: Transpersonal Love within Committed Relationships

Greetings, Pantergnosis.

I'm very familiar with Shadow Hugging and I love to talk about it now with the other person while it's happening.  It's thrilling.  I love understanding why I'm feeling what I'm feeling.  I don't necessarily feel any impulse or motivation to stop the process simply because we've taken the masks off and now we understand that it's an “illusion”.  The process automatically becomes less charged when we both take the masks off, and that's wonderful!  But I enjoy putting them on and taking them off and on and off.  It's like a game of “peekaboo”, and it makes me laugh.  It also creates a space, much like Voice Dialog does, where fear falls away and all form and contraction is just as precious and holy as emptiness.  This, to me, is a space I want to share with an other.  Preferably all others, but just one would be a huge improvment over alone.  I cannot describe the joy of being in the presence of another without fear or shame.  “They were both naked and felt no shame…”

The sexual act creates this field for a few moments, but if the partners can't consciously expand into it, then it can't be held and it collapses again.

I find the other theory compelling as well, and ironically, equally true.  It seems familiar to me, prolly because it resonates with something I remember from one of C. S. Lewis' writings.  “The Weight of Glory”.  It would take too long to find the quote, but it is essentially that each of us has the capacity to expand into what would seem to be like an angel, or contract into what would seem to be a demon.  That we are always walking around teetering on the edge of these, all the time, and we each have the power to push one another further towards one side or the other. 

I have to go for a while.  Extreme exhaustion…

~Ww

Re: Transpersonal Love within Committed Relationships

transpersonal love sounds to me like what the ritual of marriage is designed to accomplish, and yet so rarely actually does accomplish.  i used to hate the institution of marriage, because it seems so un-christian, un-transpersonal.  it seemed like marriage was
'lock the doors, you're mine and i'm yours'. 

but the actual ceremony of marriage states just the opposite.  the synergy of the bonding love is to be shared as deeply and completely as possible, and the institution was made (imo, based on the words in the ceremony) to exercise that intimate sharing potential.  and therefore the effect would seem to be a continually (infinitely) expanding family that embraces the universe in a way that is a devotional surrender to All Things (gross, subtle, causal and every way).

so how can we manifest that?

there are probably infinite different ways, and the first step is intention.  and then maybe a mission statement that clearly defines the intention.  and then a continual open communication with myself that is shared with my partners when i feel certain that a connection to this intention is mutual.

If loving everyone can't be represented in the physical relationship realm, how do we represent it outwardly? 

this is why i like polyamory.  i can be totally committed to another and all are welcome to find every appropriate gesture of loving that continues to build on the base of powerful effective loving.

Re: Transpersonal Love within Committed Relationships

Re: Transpersonal Love within Committed Relationships

That's a good point Gabriel and well worth keeping in mind, maybe also when going into a new relationship to check whether the compatiblity and mutual desire to grow is really there? Seems like a good criteria actually?