|
|
||
|
|
A Collection of Thoughts on Loving Relationships By Richard Kieninger Love and sex are so
intertwined in our experience with the opposite gender that they seem to be
but different manifestations of a single source. Nevertheless, it doesn’t
take much examination to recognize that some relationships can be wholly
based on sexual excitement, whereas others can be devoid of sexual overtones
while clearly expressive of warm admiration and recognition of both persons
being on compatible “wavelengths”. Relationships based
principally on gratification of the biological sex drive are usually spurred
on by the novelty of exploring a different partner, or by your felicitous
wonderment that a certain person of the other gender finds you acceptable as
a sex partner, or by your partner being so readily able to achieve sexual
climax that you are flattered that you are an exciting operator and so are
inspired to even greater feats of excitability and performance. As thrilling
and satisfying as such natural physical couplings may be, the great number of
people who get married solely on the basis of sexual compatibility, or the
promise of it, usually soon regret their subordination to Nature’s tender
trap and eventually wake up to find themselves wed to a person with whom they
have little in common to sustain a meaningful, lasting association. Another class of sexual
activity is seen in the person who mainly finds abnormal sexual excitement in
dirty or pornographic aspects of the genitals and personality abasement,
which is usually a response based on his or her psychologically buried,
violent anger. Often the person is rebelling against the “nice” persons of
the other gender by performing sexual acts in aggressive or vilely
contemptuous ways against himself and “bad” persons of the same or opposite
gender. These liaisons usually do not result in long-range associations or
marriage. In romantic relationships,
on the other hand, what you seek from the other person is a more joyful
experience of that which is really you as an Ego. That person’s effect on you
is such that your awareness of the marvelous human potential within you is
heightened, and feelings which are usually not stirred by your routine
activities come to the forefront and become alive. But these intensified
awarenesses spring from your own internal thought processes and really are
not caused by the other person. It is characteristic of a romantic person to
idealize a partner or partners. Indeed, the person who is in love with all
aspects of life has idealized his environment and may also be in perpetual
awe of the marvels of the Universe. That person generally feels truly alive
and is charged with enthusiasm, and he may be able to sustain active devotion
to Christ and God. Wherever he goes, he puts his attention on the beautiful
aspects of and the goodness in everyone and everything. The romantic relationship
between a man and woman tends to involve your projection of what you like
best in yourself upon your idealized partner. This idealization is essential
to sustaining romance. It is not a fault but rather a requirement for a long
and satisfying love affair. You are really saying (unconsciously), “You are
me, and I love me.” Around that person you are experiencing your own essence
of humanness, worthiness, and divine beauty because you have externalized
your identification with such things upon that other person. You simply
cannot imagine characteristics higher in your mirror-partner than your finest
aspirations and knowledge of virtue. Evidently, sexual stimulation due to
contemplation of a prospective partner’s physical attractiveness, admirable
personality, and outward classiness elicits pleasurable psychological and
physiological responses which set the stage for opening yourself to further
expansiveness of self-awareness. The lessening of your fear and reticence is
wonderful and inspiring. The exhilarating experience of exploring a new
partner (really a renewed exploration of one’s own nature in a fresh context)
is so seductive and addicting to some persons that they habitually pursue new
partners, and usually their relationships last for only about eighteen months
on the average. All the internal, beneficial feelings which arise out of
romantic love are what you are in love with, but, unfortunately, you are
conditioned by the mythic customs of our society to attribute the cause of
your love to the other person (reinforced by every love song) rather than
recognizing that what you love is yourself around the person to whom you have
assigned idealistic characteristics. Thus, you deprive yourself of the
possibility of owning and being responsible for your own experience of love. When you give another
person power over your sense of well-being, it can only lead to the eventual
deterioration of your well-being; for if you ascribe your experience of your
own true nature to the presence of someone else, you will end up needing that
person. This leads to needful attachments and to the desire to have control
over the other person who is the “source” of the beauty, fulfillment, and
excitement in your life. Your focus is thus misplaced, and fear of loss
produces misery instead of expansiveness. The tighter you try to control the
other person, the more the other person (if healthy minded) is alienated and
seeks to flee. Once you discover that love
manifests through channels within yourself, you need never be without it. But
that is a difficult trick of counter-conditioning the belief structures
instilled by our culture and is usually accomplished fully only by mystics.
The fact remains that you need not be dependent upon others whom you could
never really control anyway. Jesus and other advanced Egos are thus
remarkably self-contained. It is inherent within us that we need never be
threatened by the withdrawal of someone’s nearness or by the absence of their
intimate attentions. Most people’s relationships
are built on need. Such people feel they can’t make it without the other
person. But demands based on dependency and weakness are suppressive and
binding rather than supportive of individual growth and freedom, and,
naturally, persons upon whom such demands are placed are threatened by them.
Relationships based on need deteriorate into contests over whom has most
control of the other partner in order to manipulate the source of the
satisfaction of needs. Then the old battle of the sexes is activated to
control and maintain the partnership even though it means killing all joy and
suspending the adventure in their life. The time-honored manipulative
routines include child-like dependencies; being sick; not letting the other
person make it with you; having children in order to bind the relationship;
invoking guilt and shame. In short, madness-engendering entrapments. People
who have not learned to support their own sense of well-being certainly
cannot be supportive of a partner who likely suffers a similar deficiency. If
each partner has developed his or her personality to only a fraction of
wholeness, then the product of their coupling must be less than what they
individually started out with. Their mutual demands and interlocking
dependencies diminish each other. However, society has traditionally been
concerned with the economics of marriage and the role of a family in
providing for children. Only recently have we begun to recognize the
legitimate need for psychological health and spiritual fulfillment in all
members of the populace; and so “new” criteria for man/woman relationship are
being developed to better assure truly healthy marriages and happy children
being reared within the ideal climate of those marriages. The real aim of any
relationship is for both the principles to experience love and Egoic
advancement. Each partner is entitled to a creative environment in which his
own adventure of life is encouraged. Everyone wants to experience himself as
a loving, capable, worthy human being; and if a relationship is to work, both
partners must commit themselves to supporting the well-being and spiritual
growth of each other and stick to it. You want the opportunity of working
together to make a contribution which is of joyful service to yourself, your
children, other people, and the world. It is what every person hungers to do,
and the Brotherhoods provide a ready framework to make it easier to
accomplish. In every human relationship, you should aim to support each other
through companionship and a shared passion for the experiences of life and
love. This also implies a sense of humor regarding the lessons each has to
learn and the foolishness each has to recognize and outgrow. Once such a
commitment is made and acknowledged, the relationship will survive anything.
Love is not gazing into each other’s eyes; it is being together, gazing out
at the world. Living a lifetime is
largely experimental, and you, like everyone else, need room and time to find
what is best for you. Having a relationship with someone is experimental, and
the only way to learn how it will turn out is to pursue it. Unfortunately,
most people couple into a union with the attitude that two people can protect
themselves against life better than one, but that inward-turning attitude
works against Egoic growth. If the relationship is not contributing to each
partner’s expansion beyond the limits of your own individual reality, then it
is not a creative relationship for you. If there we certain lessons that you
have to learn, which the other partner is not in a position to support you in
learning, you need to be free to go outside the relationship to where you
will get that support. What do you value most: courage to take affirmative
actions toward creative soul growth, or obedience to demands by others? An
equitable balance must be arrived at between those two tensors. Moreover,
there needs to be some spaces in your togetherness. If you are totally in
union, you can’t experience one another for the mergence of self in the
union. There needs to be separation in the unity so that ever-refreshing
uniqueness of individuality is kept alive. Mature love is the
experiencing of somebody’s essence and his special expression of it while not
allowing him to submerge the beauty of his real self. Having mature love is
being so self-assured that you are concerned with another person’s
relationship with his own life rather than with his relationship to your
life. You can appreciate his acquisition of mature love knowing that since
his relationship with himself works, his relationship with you will work
automatically. If your own life isn’t working, then your relationship with
another person isn’t going to work either. The person who is free of
dependencies upon others and who is balanced and complete is in fundamental
harmony with every other person whose life has turned out in a happy
understanding of what love is like. The empathetic unity that
naturally exists between loving, lovable people allows them to move
appropriately and graciously through life. When you are with a group of
people who are able to be themselves unpretentiously and who are not
preoccupied with their status or with having facades which they have to try
to keep from being seen through, they convey an atmosphere of well-being and
loving acceptance and surrender (to surrender is to give up power over).
People who are okay within themselves are always comfortable to be with.
Separation and conflict is absent in them, and what comes across is a sense
of fullness, joy, and serenity—a celebration of love which is beyond need for
attachment. Such people convey the power of love that emanates from God, for
that power flows through them unimpeded. You can sense it, and you know they
are so complete with themselves that they accept you without being threatened
by who or what you are. They need never say, “I love you,” since you already
know it implicitly. Lest there seems to be an
implication here that persons who are capable of mature love eschew sexual
intercourse, they are usually very active sexually and seem to have no
problem attracting appropriate partners. But theirs is not a compulsive grab
for goodies, but rather a decisional intention to enjoy the fullness of life
and the blessings of a close union with another beautiful human being.
Healthy sex is regarded as very valuable to them for their spiritual balance
and as an aid toward intense closeness with their loved one. People who have
healthy and mature sexual relationships do not place demands upon their
partners which lessen them. Mature people are open and forthright in stating
their expectations of one another in their relationships. They arrive at
clear agreements and operate honestly within those agreements. Very few people can ask for
what they want of another person in an open fashion without feeling guilty.
If you operate on the premise that it is rude to ask, you may wait a lifetime
and never get the things you want and have the right to enjoy. People seem to
operate on the belief that if our partners really loved us, they would know
what we wanted and give it without our having to ask. This is a crazy
violation of communication. An individual who hasn’t yet figured out what he
wants, frequently expects the partner to know what it should be and supply
it. Maturity can be judged by the extent to which a person knows what he
wants, is able to communicate those wants clearly, and is able to induce
people to be delighted to supply them because they have learned that they
will gain as much in return from him. It is not necessary that
you pursue a one-on-one relationship with a person of the opposite sex just
because you find you are mutually attracted and are both able to love. You
need only to state your recognition of mutual compatibility, if you like, and
know that the other person is out there impinging favorably upon your
environment. More often than not, there are other, prior relationships or
agreements which make such liaisons inappropriate; but we often are afraid to
state our love since that seems to safely assure that an inconvenient or
uncomfortable sexual involvement won’t arise. But sex and love are two
entirely separate things even though they are naturally expressed in mutual
reinforcement of one another. Being in a constant state
of love is the natural human condition, but our patriarchal culture has made
love a rarity in the face of the aggression, fear, conflict, and hatred
spawned by our sick religions and our possession-oriented values. We have not
been discussing some form of egocentric narcissism when we speak of
self-love. One’s extension to other persons of the best he perceives within
himself is a fine aspect of one’s mental health and sociocentricity. |
|
|
|
|
|
