For many of us, relationship is about meeting needs. Finding someone willing to love us, offer companionship and sex. Perhaps support for a family. In response, we reciprocate with what we think the other needs, often a mirror of our own needs.
Sometimes there can be disconnects between expectations and understanding. Communication is paramount, but also a compatibility of needs. Trouble is, peoples needs change. If we identify ourselves with
our idea of what the relationship is, a changing partner appears to be breaking an unwritten promise. If trust is lost, the capacity of the relationship to deepen goes with it.
Relationship has a kind of synergy. A blend of the interactions and energy of the 2 together. It’s like an entity in itself. As each party to the energy changes, so too does the blend.
As one awakens, there is a falling away of attachments to our idea of the other person. We slowly lose the unwritten list of expectations. While our karmic obligations do not depart, our tendency to cycle them yet again begins to end. We step off the wheel of relationship debt.
We gradually lose any sense of identity with what is around us, including our relationships. Our world no longer defines us. This can have a considerable effect on existing relationships. The motivation of needs becomes much less. One may seem to no longer care. But this is just a transitional step. As the barriers of individual fall away, the higher values of the heart begin to kick in. Relationship shifts from being needs based to sharing and connection. The dawning of true compassion and connection.
The awake can find their sense of awakeness is strengthened around some others awake. The story of life is changing, so it can become exciting to share the adventure, the gradually revealing secrets of what is.
The heart seeks to flow, so having a form to flow to can become important. For some, this may take the form of a personal God. Others will find such a vehicle in relationship. If the partner is willing to allow this, a profound flow can arise in the context of relationship. A flow of love that is the direct flow of God. There is no longer a need for a vehicle to love, but a form serves to allow flow.
Many years ago, a teacher described how the very awake keep some hint of ignorance, some separation in the One to allow for the flow from master to student. In complete Oneness, the process of experience collapses, experiencer merges with the experienced, the observer with the observed. For the flow to happen, there has to be some slight duality so that the process of observation can take place.
What is the process of observation? Look around you. Everything you experience is because of the process of observation. The movement of awareness. And that movement of awareness is love. The celebration of the recognition of being.
That is the ultimate relationship, of the One with Itself. That is the flow of pure love. And that is why you are here. You are a relationship with Oneness.
Davidya
Last Updated on November 11, 2017 by Davidya
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Hi David,
I’d love to know your comments on this:
“The adoration of the impersonal Divine would not be strictly a Yoga of devotion according to the current interpretation; for in the current forms of Yoga it is supposed that the Impersonal can only be sought for a complete unity in which God and our own person disappear and there is none to adore or to be adored; only the delight of the experience of oneness and infinity remains. But in truth the miracles of spiritual consciousness are not to be subjected to so rigid a logic.
When we first come to feel the presence of the infinite, as it is the finite personality in us which is touched by it, that may well answer to the touch and call with a sort of adoration. Secondly, we may regard the Infinite not so much as a spiritual status of oneness and bliss, or that only as its mould and medium of being, but rather as the presence of the ineffable Godhead to our consciousness, and then too love and adoration find their place. And even when our personality seems to disappear into unity with it, it may still be—and really is—the individual divine who is melting to the universal or the supreme by a union in which love and lover and loved are forgotten in a fusing experience of ecstasy, but are still there latent in the oneness and subconsciently persisting in it. All union of the self by love must necessarily be of this nature. We may even say, in a sense, that it is to have this joy of union as the ultimate crown of all the varied experiences of spiritual relation between the individual soul and God that the One became many in the universe.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Mystery of Love (from “The Synthesis of Yoga”)
Thanks, Uli. Beautiful quote.
Here he touches on the distinctions between a personal and an impersonal approach to God. And he rightly says this isn’t about rules and logic. The choice arises naturally late in Unity consciousness and unfolds as it does. “the individual divine who is melting to the universal” puts it well. And yes, devotion and love can take many forms.
In this context, it’s useful to take a bigger perspective. This is the part of the process of unification with the divine that takes place in consciousness, climaxing with God Realization.
That can become the door into the Brahman stage where the relationship with the divine ends because there is no separation but also because it was a relationship in consciousness.
With time in Brahman, the much more subtle nature of pure divinity becomes apparent (not something I knew at the time of this article). But in this case, it’s more like we’re absorbed by/ recognize ourselves as That. We can’t say “relationship” because there is nothing but. But devotion and love are very much present.