The ego has co-opted the relationship for self-actualizing increase and egocentricity must seek to negate the purpose of relationship and that is to share increase between two or more. What you get as one is NOT true, but what is shared equally must be truth because it breaks free of egocentricity and is a non-exclusive equality.
Inequality, by its very nature, shares nothing but conflict and that experience of suffering will be exclusive to each individual.
Every relationship has the potential to awaken to truth, but only when you surrender the “truth” you have imposed upon it. You don’t ‘know’ because those who taught you did not ‘know’ and if you inherit ignorance you can only pass it on until you finally realize what it is. You have every means at your disposal to disengage, alienate and estrange, because you were taught how to fear. But you are completely at a loss how to deeply engage in order to share the truth such engagement discovers.
You were not taught how to love and nowhere in the world is that teaching available, because every teacher teaches an outcome. There is no outcome to love because it is an infinite state of mind that cannot be conceptualized through individual egocentric thought.
Do you believe you have discovered love? best keep going, you’re not there yet. Love is an infinite game and you have yet to begin playing.
This is the real “Hero’s Journey” and it’s traveled together in the joint enterprise of mutual discovery. Intimacy is the final frontier and infinite in scope. To fully engage in the infinite game of relationship you must understand the rules you play by and determine the outcomes you each hope to achieve…
…so that they can be dissolved and you can learn your purpose together.
This is how the self invents itself and knows itself in sharing fully with others. Full engagement opens the mind to full exposure. This is how the self changes, not in the solitary exodus to find spiritual truth, but through the rabbit hole of infinite understanding. Dare you go there?
If you wish to awaken to truth, then you best engage the one your with, because your truth is with them, as theirs is with you and it has always been this way. This requires no special knowledge because relationship is a natural as breathing (although most breathe very poorly). No need to review the textbook because there is none. No need to refer to the research because science doesn’t have a clue, since it always demands a finite outcome. Love is a mutual reward and there are only winners.
The practice is simple. Once a week spend one hour (or more) together with no distractions and in that hour focus on the rules of your relationship. See how the rules imprison, rather than free the mind. You are estranged and alienated because the correspondence was lost as rules were imposed. The world does not support intimate depth, because the world is a product of egocentricity and individual egocentricity only skims the surface. The fear is down deep and to get to it you must both plunge inward together.
Look to the state of your mind to measure depth. Gradually the fear of alienated strangers will be replaced with the increased understanding of intimate knowing that has NO limits. Love is a state of mind entirely free of egocentricity, because it's an infinite game.
Artwork by Laurie Lipton - "Remote Control"
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