SENTIENT TIMES June/July 2003

In search of enlightened relationships

By John Darling

Almost always in my life, a man has been here—a friend (sometimes two, even three), a growth warrior to talk to, someone with whom I could say and hear anything, ruthless, no buffers, no couching or mincing anything, yet maintaining gentlemanly courtesy, drawn together by the inexorable beauty of truth—whatever truth we could best attain to as who we were, ever reaching for the Universal, yet always willing to drop down into that yeasty, personal, wounded version of truth, too, laughing as we went at our folly, anger, pain, fear, then speaking the truth to that too: look at me, behold this vague, wounded shadow child, crying alone. And you, my friend, can hear him.

The other night, in his backyard, smiling in the rain and whipping wind of this most perfectly blustery spring, so matching our moods, our quest, our confused, groping pain—hey, “bring it on, man,” we always say—John Miller and I, pulling on the deliciously biting cigarette we share, speak of love and the other Great Mystery, the quest of the soul, ah, no matter the grinding pain, for the truth. The personal truth. And the other kind: the stuff Spirit gives to you, as Aeschylus said, “drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will comes wisdom.” Bring it on, Spirit.

Coming out of a relationship, too, he’s at the peak of middle age, fit, a hunk, a catch, rich in experience, one of the best minds I’ve ever engaged, resilient, facile, ever willing to call his own stuff, marvel at it, find books explaining it, ‘fess it up eagerly to me, meet it with a big grin and pour a wee bit more wine. We are temperate. As Socrates said—wine full strength to celebrate the pagan joys, but dilute it by half with water when Truth is to be the guest.

He says he won’t do it any more, this romantic pair bond thing, this coming together so deliciously with all the young soul’s hope, this gradual crashing and being crushed on the shoals of ego and mind. And emotion: the body’s reaction to mind. He’s quoting Ekhart Tolle—The Power of Now—the mind builds the ego, an actual sense of “self,” but an illusion. This is not the Self. The mind’s processes may go on and on, repeating its past stories of shame, its fanciful nonsense of future fears and hopes, but two such minds coming together as lovers—how can they “love?” There can be no love, only the ego defending the mind’s house of cards.

I won’t look at him as he rants. He asks why. I say I’ll look at you when you stop lying. (Guy warriors can talk like this to each other and take no offense!) I tell him: I think he’s afraid of love, unworthy of it (like most of us), more comfortable living in his head, his “spirit,” protected by his self-improvement books. He’s “ascending” as Robert Bly (Iron John) said, rising above the messy, painful work of feelings, of hanging in there with a lover till all the self-rightness dissolves in the sheer, sobbing need for love, till all your projections (so convincing!) come home to you—and the defenses give up, the heart cracks open, so it can function.

He’s smiling. He hears it all. He just doesn’t agree. That’s not what he’s doing. He tells me I’m projecting, because I want to drown in that safe, familiar addiction again. He calmly explains he’s never going there again, but will beat the house of cards. He’s going to go out of his mind. Up, out of it, into what? Into those promised places we touch so rarely but are possible to live in: Being, Tolle calls it. Higher consciousness, comprised of soul, heart, awareness freed of time. The Great Self, in Hindu. The Oversoul, to the Transcedentalists. It’s possible to train the mind, so we can live there. Then we can love all people, all things and creatures. That’s how you know you’re there. It all shimmers in the ineffable Now.

Nice, Miller. I’ve been there, spent whole evenings there—and not on drugs. It was beautiful, I tell him, and I’m looking forward to it when I die. But for now, the authentic, passionate pagan man will not try to love everyone, will not retreat to some cosmic concept, but will love the one person, right in front of him, rife with human flaws and, like him, only able to visit the Great Self once in a while. I tell him that cliché, that “love brings up everything unlike itself” and the dysfunctional relationship one is in happens to contain all the keys to unlocking and freeing the heart center. Self-help books and meditation won’t do it. I quote Emerson to him: “Give all to love, obey thy heart.” I imagine myself eager to plunge back into it, knowing the blissful half-year of getting to know the person, aka dating your brains out, then comes the real stuff and the journey must be about accepting the other completely as she is.

Ach, give all to love, Miller says—done it! Pain. He tells me he can now imagine a life never having another pair bond relationship, not the romantic drill, anyway. It must be an emotionally responsible love between two conscious people doing the deep work. On themselves. He meets many appealing, intelligent women at work, he says, but within a minute or two, all the gender games are laid bare and the toxin of romance stands naked. It’s lonely, but the deeper journey must go forward. Anyway, it’s getting rather nice, all this freedom. And this phenomenon of never getting under anyone else’s skin. In coming days, I think much about his words. Something really opens my eyes. I talk to a woman newly in love. She says it’s working because he needs her. I clearly see the reverse is true, too. She doesn’t mention that. She knows “need” has a shady reputation.

For a whole afternoon I grok (Heinlein: grok, to understand, embrace and love new information or experience so deeply you become it, even if briefly) this and believe this is my blind spot. I’ve never really needed whoever I loved. I couldn’t do that. This has not been greeted with universal acclaim. But usually my pain-on-parting reveals the fingerprints of addiction. Ach! I was indeed not taking care of myself, not being responsible for maintaining my personal power, not telling the truth, most of all to myself. If you can’t be honest with yourself, you can’t really know or love yourself and you then can’t be honest with or really love anyone else. The mind-driven ego is free to project, then blame the projections it beholds. Your standard romantic—and most unconscious—relationship.

What, then, is this self-love we hear so much about? It’s not loving yourself when you’re having a really nice day, I tell Miller. Anyone can do that. Sorry, but self-love is loving the Shadow, no matter how mocked as me-generation self-obsession. All our great poets and writers have done it—Henry Miller, Walt Whitman—“O me! O life. Of myself forever reproaching myself, for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless? O myself I sing!”

I present it to Miller, this need thing. He pretends to barf. Whatever consciousness is, need is its opposite, he assures me. I am put in mind of an old (1911) Ambrose Bierce aphorism which I quote him, “Marriage, n. - the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.” That defines it—codependency, we call it now. Cynical or truthful? You decide. Do we finally have no choice? We have to grow our Self? It’s consciousness or bust?

I’m not going to get away with it, this wanting to believe in need-as-love, am I? There’s no escape from freedom, though we human sheep long for it. I talk with Heather, my daughter, in her early 30s now. You’ve got maybe three months, she says. Then the real person emerges. I thought it was six months, I said. Sometimes a year. No, it’s down to three now, she says. It’s coming out faster. And meaner. I tell her I’ve been having whole ten-year relationships—charming beginning, mistrust, betrayal, big fight, explain big fight, apologize, feel I’ve been dissed, can’t take it anymore, divorce—all crammed into a couple emails, a phone call and one café meeting. You’re lucky, she says, you can get through it so fast. Ya, I do it all on five to 10 dollars tops. We laugh. But I realize, hey, I’m joking but there’s that kernel of truth to every joke, isn’t there?

I go off to grok it. I’m interviewing some New Warrior honchos for a story. One, trainer Dennis Mead-Shikaly, tells me that men maintain dishonest relationships with women. Behind the mask of strength, ego, domination, all that patriarchal posturing, men unconsciously relate to women from fear, dependence and mother-fixation. It’s all in the Shadow, says Bill Kauth, one of the founders of New Warriors. The Shadow contains the shameful and uncomfortable parts of our minds that, because they are denied, will rise up and destroy our best-laid plans and relationships.

Embracing the Shadow sounds noble, almost fun, until we read Tolle. He calls it the pain body—a deep and dysfunctional sense of abandonment or incompleteness in all of us—and the main function of Mind, as it’s developed in us, is to cover it up with incessant, self-justifying, repetitive thought which imprisons us in the past and future and denies the present, where everything real is happening. The pain body is “the dark shadow cast by the ego.” It’s an entity with its own agenda and motivations, chief of which is to survive and to justify its existence by hanging onto childhood pain and manifesting new pain in relationships. As such, the last thing it wants is for you to live in the present.

But that’s the way out. The instructions are simple: you watch your thoughts, all the while realizing “I” am not my thoughts. I am Soul, Being, Presence, Higher Self, Oversoul, Great Self, whatever—and this Presence lives only in the now. Miller says he’s able to do it for up to 30 seconds now. Wow, man, I say, I can’t go that long. I’m up to maybe 15 seconds. But I keep doing it over and over. And once, it happened, I tell him. I shifted up into Oversoul and it went on all day. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t care, either. I just lay in my bed looking out at the amazing blue sky, the red blossoms on the crab apple tree, the new, green leaves coming out, the hawks circling. Ah, and there it is: I experience complete love and acceptance for all beings, things and situations, exactly as they are. Miller claps his hands, grinning like a fool for growth.

But its more than a personal high—and Tolle sums it up: “What we’re doing here is part of a profound transformation in the collective consciousness of the planet … We are breaking mind patterns that have dominated human life … It is a quantum leap in the evolution of consciousness, as well as our only chance of survival as a race.”

John Darling is an Ashland counselor and writer, contact him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.

SENTIENT TIMES
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