Relating

For over a year I have been meeting someone in whose presence I receive a lot of messages, clarity and even a transcendental experience. And yet, thanks to the conditioning of a traditional system coming from conventional family values, my mind was forever caught on a spin to turn it into a relationship that led to marriage, kids, etc. All of this regardless of the fact that the man in question had already been married and was into his own spiritual quest.

So the whole journey went thus –
First, thanks to the intensity of our interactions, I accorded him ‘guru’ status
Second, I tried to build up stories in my mind, terrorized by the fact that I felt a deep urge to go and sit in his presence and feel his physical touch.
Third, in order to justify the urge to “merge” with him, I started slotting it as the love of my life, the relationship of my dreams, the man I had always been waiting for.
Fourth, to add to this whole mess, I started getting visions of us both together doing something beautiful in our togetherness. This led to me further getting into doership – trying my best to make that vision come true. (I learnt not to take visions so seriously)
Fifth, expectations built up, mind maps came up – since he was sensitive, I expected him to care about my feelings. Since the energy in him was so resonant, I held him responsible to clear the mess that would come up in our interactions – for example I felt like I had to wash my hands before touching him, and I expected him to stop making me feel dirty or poor. I felt inferior compared to him and I expected him to make me feel superior by appreciating or complimenting me. Hence, his compliments became twice as important to me as would any other person’s. And yet, when he didn’t fulfill any of these expectations, I held him responsible. (GD clarified this beautifully that when we are with someone carrying a higher energy than us, our dark rooms start getting lit up and the cobwebs start revealing themselves)
Sixth – regardless of how hard I tried, every interaction was something completely different, unknown and unpredictable. What I became in his presence was different every time. What I felt afterward ranged from depression to an ecstatically high state and everything in between.

Now my plane is landing back on the ground.

Going back to basics, I remember Byron Katie’s Work and especially one question in it –

Who would I be without this story?

Sitting with GD recently, all these stories started coming to light. The story of how a perfect relationship should look like. How I turned something so simple into something so complex that kept me locked in a treadmill.

For the past few days I have been writing to myself. Writing what the interaction was, and what all meanings and stories I attached to them. What were the physical sensations involved in these interactions, and what all meanings I gave to these. How I blew up the whole experience of transcendence. Doing a lot of Byron Katie’s Work and seeing through all the judgments one at a time. All of this is slowly nourishing me and bringing me back to ground.

What if the UniVerse sent this man my way for just one job – to bring me these high energy experiences?
What would it be like if I stopped making this about this person, stopped attributing so much to him, that he should fulfill these desires too in addition to the experiences that naturally flow through him?

As GD humorously put it, what if he is like this wonderful masseur who gives you transcendental massages… would you expect him to be the man of your dreams just because his massages are so wonderful? He asked me to do an exercise about this whole blow up –
First write down all the ways in which I have been trying to make this into a relationship.
Second, write down the simplest versions about these interactions, completely removing the word relationship.

When I wrote that, it turned out to be very much similar to the masseur analogy.

For a long time I just stood reading this version.

There was no such thing as a relationship. All along life just gave me an opportunity to experience a high state of being. If anything, I should’ve been thanking life, for I can clearly see he is not the first person in whose presence I’ve experienced such energy. But just because it’s a man this time, stories have come up. In fact I thank life now for making sure that it defied all my moral principles, conventions, traditional upbringing, clauses and contracts of what I thought was love. I thank life for failing me this time and giving me exactly what my soul has been craving for – transcendence. Straight, simple, direct with no conditions fulfilled. I thank life for “graduating” me – for last time it was a woman and this time it’s a man 🙂
Life really wants us to get “real” and “get” the message – regardless of how beautiful, wonderful and transcendental the experience feels or looks like, it has nothing to do with the people involved. The two people are just incidental. They can choose to build stories or they can choose to just enjoy what life has brought them together for. And when it passes, I can see that I am back to where I was – to my own consciousness that has remained unchanged, unaffected through it all. Then why not stay tuned to consciousness if that’s what we are going to end up to anyways? I wonder now.

When I look around there are many of us who might be experiencing such high states in the midst of a person of the opposite sex. It definitely isn’t new or special. Perhaps that’s where the guru ends up having sex scandals and disciples end up feeling used. But what if atleast one party could step back and see what life is trying to give you through any of these urges? What if neither the guru or the disciple were involved and this was purely an experience of life seeking life? And the only way to feel your way through it is to ask yourself, “does this experience make me feel good, expanded or contracted and fearful?”

I still feel love in my heart for this man. That hasn’t changed. In fact now that I am off this whole rollercoaster, it has become clearer what true love is. In our togetherness there have been flashes from our past lives together (talk about occupational hazard!). But he has no recollection of any of this. For me it becomes a case of flowing from that unconscious space. And yet this does not make him any less aware than I am. It is a learning for me to trust my intuition completely and surrender to it, as well as stop expecting another to see or feel the same level of intensity. And yet, these glimpses are a one-off thing. The intensity, the exchange is different in every interaction. Talk about lessons in unconditional relating where everything is unpredictable every moment! I sat down using Eckhart Tolle’s quote in Stillness Speaks to relate to him all over again and bring freshness to my own eyes:

“When you look upon another human being and feel great love towards them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who you are, your true nature. The outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence. That is why love and beauty can never leave you, although all outer forms will”

This left me with a great deal of space in my way of relating to him in my own head. I am repeating this exercise to drop every notion of him with every thought of him. The lesser he exists for me in my mind, the closer I am in being to existence itself that is all about love.

Contemplating a few lines GD often cites:
* Relationship happens between two personalities.
* Consciousness has no sense of time and so it just knows how to relate.
* When there is no I, there is no such thing as a relationship.

Relating is recognizing who you are in another form when the form loses all meaning.

Deepening this awareness I am writing to myself what would it be like to live in a world where there is no such thing as a relationship? What would the world look like without that word? That’s my homework now in being who I am.