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Some Thoughts on Loving Part I by Richard Kieninger Most people’s thinking
links love and sex. They’ve become so intertwined in our everyday thoughts
that they seem as if they’re one piece of cloth, but really they are very,
very different. 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. The
kind of feeling that you have toward your children and your parents
definitely is love. It is not sexually oriented. Loving a person is really
quite different than falling in love with a person, because falling in love
has erotic overtones. It’s an excitement that you feel towards another person
relative to bodily sensations which are strictly sex-oriented. You can love a
person for an entire lifetime, but you can only fall in love just at the
beginning of a relationship. After that you love the person. The great number of people
who get married solely on the basis of sexual compatibility—or the promise of
it—eventually regret falling into nature’s tender trap. They finally wake up
to find themselves wed to a person with whom they have little in common to
sustain a meaningful or a lasting association, maybe not even enough for a
friendship. A romantic relationship
provides a more joyful experience of that which is really you. The other
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.
However, these intensified awarenesses spring from your own internal thought
processes and really are not caused by the other person. To someone who’s in their
teen-age years or early twenties the strains and stresses of a romantic
relationship are really doing some good for their personality. While they’re
indulging in it because it’s fun, as a by-product they’re learning how to
relate to other people, viewing them as real people. In our society
youngsters are exposed quite a bit to pornography, which tends to
de-personalize females. They become objects for the gratification of a male’s
imagination, rather than real, feeling persons. It’s characteristic of a
romantic person to idealize partners. By extension, the person who is in love
with all aspects of life has really idealized his environment and may also be
in perpetual awe of the marvels of the universe, seeing goodness and beauty
in everyone and everything. That person generally feels very alive and is
charged with enthusiasm. Between a man and a woman, this tends to involve
your projection of what you like best in yourself upon your idealized
partner. Around your partner, you are experiencing your own essence of
humanness and worthiness and divine beauty, if you will. You simply cannot imagine
or perceive characteristics in your partner higher than your own finest
aspirations and knowledge of virtue. If you haven’t imagined it, you can’t
project it to another person as their possibly having it; and even if they do
have it, you can’t see it. So a person who has small vistas cannot see much
in another person. The more, then, that you know about yourself, the more
correctly you are going to be able to match yourself with someone else. That, like any other skill,
requires experience. There are just a lot of things a young person has never
thought about or never encountered. He hasn’t yet worked out the problems of
certain human relationships. They are callow, and wouldn’t get much of a
response from an individual who can see far beyond their limited, youthful
perceptions. So, young people tend to be attracted to young people and kind
of wallow around together in their inexperience and lack of perceptions. But,
as they grow, of course, they gain these things. It may be that at first they
know very little about love, and therefore are attracted to one another on
the basis of sexual attractiveness instead of on the deeper levels where
great gratification of life and its yearnings can be fulfilled. Increasing your ability to
love is a long, on-going process, which never really ends as long as we live.
A child has a potential for loving, but unless it’s given the proper
nurturance and the receipt of a great deal of love, it is not able to give
any love later on. The human ability to form
loving relationships and live in inner serenity and joy is built into us. We
can nurture our babies to have their natural heritage of being self-reliant,
light-hearted adults who have an ingrained awareness of their own goodness
and worth. If we prevent that from happening by not providing all of the
things that the child needs at the optimum moments of its neurological
development, the individual is definitely stunted in that area for the rest
of his life. In those cultures where
mothering is still inherently natural and beyond the command of the
intellect, bonding occurs as a matter of course. This bonding is an initial
establishment of a mysterious psychic rapport which is usually able to occur
during just the first four hours after birth. However, if a newborn is not
intensely nurtured through the next eight to ten months of the in-arms phase,
the bonding process is not complete. During the first four hours after birth,
if a mother is not permitted to caress her baby and bring him to her breast,
and to her heart, she feels a state of real grief. Even more profound is the
future effect on the newborn infant. At birth, a baby undergoes radical changes.
He experiences for the first time the pains of hunger, the temperature around
him drops, and yet he is able to adapt to all this. Within that tiny body,
Nature has built in a set of expectations for certain things to occur in its
environment. Nature works to provide these things by instincts which have
been built into the mother and inflexible, inborn needs which have been built
into the baby, which mesh perfectly. For example, having been
totally enveloped by his mother’s womb for nine months, if he is not, upon
birth, comforted by the sensations of being embraced, he will cry in an agony
of motionlessness. To find a semblance of relief, he’ll flail his own arms
and legs around and tense his body until a sleep of literally terrified
exhaustion overtakes him. What will become lifelong habits of body tension
and the expectation of this despairing want and intolerable impatience have
begun. When mother doesn’t come no
matter how desperate the cries, this treatment teaches a person, from
infancy, to expect disillusionment, doubt, suspicion, fear of being further
wounded, and sadly, resignation. On the other hand, when an infant’s natural
expectations are met, and he finds gratification as a contented, in-arms
baby, then the foundation is laid for him as an adult to be able to enjoy his
environment and to form loving relationships. Whatever deprivations a baby
experiences in his early months will be maintained throughout his life. Those
first impressions indelibly stamp him with this outline of his learned
expectations. Either parent can be the recipient of that bonding process; any
full-time nurturing person can do it. In the first three days
after birth there are certain chemicals from nursing which are essential to
diminishing the large amount of serum adrenalin in the baby’s system. If it
is not removed during those first few days, the child will continue in a
situation of extreme tension and literal muscular pain for two and a half
months. If you’ve ever felt the tension after you had a narrow miss with
driving, that pain lasts for just a few seconds—it actually hurts. A newborn
infant who is not nursed on a breast for the first three days feels that same
kind of pain continuously for over two months. And they would like to spend
most of their time sleeping in order to diminish that. In our modern Western
society, the newborn is traumatized by immediate removal from everything that
he has known for nine months and then is deserted in the confines of the
nursery in a hospital. His needs cry out for the presence of the woman’s body
that had been his only world. The vogue has been to let the baby cry. “You
don’t want to spoil him!” He is experiencing a terror of a limbo deprived of
living sensations, and he just ends up screaming until he falls asleep. In whatever areas where
the built-in expectations of our species are not met, then development is
halted. The surroundings our patriarchal culture thrusts upon our offspring
has little relevance to the built-in expectancies that were put there by our Creators. In cultures where mothering
is still instinctive, the baby is in close contact with the mother’s body
from the moment he emerges from the womb, and the baby is seldom separated
from his mother’s arms. He experiences the rhythms, the motions, smells,
sounds, and light changes that continually vary with the mother’s activities,
so the infant is stimulated and enriched by these sensations. The baby and
his mother are regarded as a unit by the community for the first weeks, and
the mother is free to devote all of her energies to her baby while members of
the community take responsibility for her usual occupations. Whereas, in our culture,
efforts to make giving birth more “scientific” and to remove any
possibilities of pain have created almost two generations, now, of people who
are not able to love because of the deprivation of mothering required for
them to be fully functioning. With the deprivation of concentrated mothering,
our society is bringing forth people with impaired intellects, lack of conscience,
shrunken emotions: kind of pitiful beings who experience diminished joy,
grief, good humor, or love—they feel very little. We can identify many of
these victims: the sloppy person who wants to be loved unconditionally but
won’t improve his habits in order to receive better treatment from others;
the person who gets sick in order to receive attention and to escape having
to cope; the person who wants to acquire things as if from his mother without
having to pay for them; the battering parent who expects, in vain, to receive
mothering love from the child; the Casanova who searches for mother-love and
can’t find that special love which would assure him of his worth; the scholar
who finds the school a protective mother. In general, the people who were
deprived of close mothering tend to establish relationships on the earliest
infantile characteristic: a satisfaction of need. This has become so
prevalent in our society that now it is the norm. The way we communicate love
and the language of the smile and the embrace are learned as a babe in arms.
When the baby is grown he uses this love and this language when he falls in
love himself.
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