2. Making Vital Distinctions
A distinction divides one set of things into two or more sets of things through discerning important but previously unnoticed differences. For example, a bowl of apricots is only a bowl of apricots until you distinguish between under-ripe, exactly-ripe and over-ripe apricots. The apricot distinction can make a difference in your breakfast. The distinctions in this book can make a difference in your relationship.
Making distinctions is a foundation for expansive learning. Distinction-making creates clarity that you did not have before, which reveals options that you did not see to choose from. New options permit you to take relationship actions that you never took before; actions that can awaken previously undreamed-of aliveness, pleasures, and possibilities in your relationships.
The relationship distinctions made in this book are not made in our culture at large. We could not learn them from our parents, for example, because they did not have them. We did not learn them from teachers in school for the same reason. Without making and living these distinctions, and knowing what sort of relationship we are creating in each moment, we will automatically tend to create what this book refers to as “ordinary human relationship.” There is nothing wrong with creating Ordinary human relationship; it simply produces predictable, mechanical experiences in relating with other human beings. Without making new distinctions we may never even suspect that anything other than ordinary human relationship is possible.
But, then again, maybe we had hopes. Maybe, after looking around at hundreds of “ordinary” couples, we developed a deep heart’s desire to create something more profound with our life and our connection with another person. We may have had a silently pulsating wish, without knowing how, to make the moments of our relating into a sanctuary for ecstatic love.
Fortunately, in the domain of expansive learning, not knowing how does not matter. Rather, it is our intentions and our efforts that matter. This book can inflame our intentions with clear distinctions, and educate those efforts with practices. If we live out the rest of our lives and waste our potential, we will lose a precious opportunity and suffer a painful loss. With these distinctions in place, however, we have the potential to bring our relationships out of a shadowy chaos and into a bright vibrancy.
As you read over the relationship distinctions listed below don’t struggle to try to fully understand them all right now. They are presented here to give you an overview of where we will be going in following chapters.
Relationship Distinctions
1. Relationship is ongoing moment-to-moment creation in one of three domains: ordinary human relationship, extraordinary human relationship, or Archetypal Relationship.
2. We are either conscious that we create the quality of our relationship or we are not conscious of it and we try to avoid that responsibility.
3. If we try to avoid responsibility for creating the quality of our relationship then we unconsciously create ordinary human relationship.
4. If we are conscious that we create the quality of our relationship and take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and actions as an adult man or woman, then we can create extraordinary human relationship.
5. If we consciously create the quality of our relationship and take responsibility for the Archetypal context of that relationship then we can create Archetypal Relationship.
6. We cannot create either extraordinary human relationship or Archetypal Relationship unconsciously. Both take conscious efforts.
7. We cannot create Archetypal Relationship without first being able to consciously and sustainably create extraordinary human relationship.
8. We cannot consciously create extraordinary human relationship until we become (painfully) aware of how, when, and why we unconsciously create ordinary human relationship. (Welcome to your underworld!)
9. Gaining all that is required to create and enter the domain of Archetypal Relationship can take a long time and a lot of (guided) effort.
10. There is no better life than taking the time and making the efforts to learn to create Archetypal Relationship. (This last, of course, is not a distinction; it is just my own personal opinion.)
3. Getting on the One Team
All the readers of this book together form one exploration team. There are no passengers. On this adventure everyone has jobs to do. We are all crew. It is not an us vs. them situation, the haves and the have nots, the privileged and the marginalized. The work we are doing is taking place at the edge of the known, the edge of culture. You are here, so you too are responsible for the success of this journey. If you sense that you have something to say, we depend on you to say it. This might not be fair, but as science fiction writer David Gerrold says, “Nobody is the enemy; we’re all just martyrs to evolution.”
This conversation we are having right now is the leading edge of the evolution of consciousness in human relationship. Your experiments cut new forms of consciousness that open pathways for others to more easily follow. There are thousands of people around the world on the edge of discovery waiting for someone to go first. As mentioned in the Introduction, when you go first everyone benefits. We are one team. So, document your discoveries and let them be known. Use your intelligence to test everything. Use your voice to share what you find.
If you think that what you are discovering is already common knowledge, go stand in a bus station for a couple of hours. Hang around in a Wal-Mart and watch people interact with their kids. Out of a million people, what percentage do you think are doing experiments like those described in this book? Look around. The answer is: almost none. Every effort you make to learn about radiant joy expands the limits of human consciousness and human understanding. Every moment longer that you can tolerate the intensity of the experience of brilliant Love creates a building-block substance that is used to transform the world. I beg you to keep doing whatever you can.
4. Thinking Beyond Separation
This book is not a course in philosophy, religion, or exobiology. We are here to expand our learning, and thus expand our competence in creating relationship. Expansive learning includes asking a number of dangerous questions, like where does the urge for relationship come from? And what is it that does the relating? These are questions we may not commonly consider. Exploring answers to these questions can provide us with insights for taking actions that create results we do not commonly achieve. Let’s begin with a question about consciousness.
How many consciousnesses are there?
Relationship originates between unique and separate human beings. If people were not unique and separate there could be no distinguishing relationship. We would just be together, all as one. The fact that we can conceive of so-called relationships, and the fact that we act as if relationships exist as something to speak about and to develop, causes us to assume that individual people are separate from each other. This could be a false assumption. It could be the case that all people who have ever existed, who exist now, and who ever will exist are but uniquely reflecting facets of one, whole, brilliantly jeweled, radiant consciousness.
For a moment, let’s consider this possibility that our assumption of separation is false. Let’s ask the question: If instead of separate, individuated consciousnesses, we are all manifestations of one consciousness, where is that consciousness?
Let’s start by imagining the possible “one consciousness” as the light from the sun. You do not see light from the sun until it hits something, which is why the night sky looks black. At night, we are in the shadow of the Earth, so the sun does not hit the atmosphere. In space, the only things out there for sunlight to hit are the moon, comets, and satellites. Even though just as much sunlight “goes by” at night as goes by in the daytime, we don’t see the sunlight “go by” when there is nothing for it to hit. In this same way we do not experience omnipresent consciousness until it prisms through a physical object. Consciousness could be everywhere, but between objects there is nothing to indicate the presence of that consciousne
ss.
When light strikes an object, the quality of the light that we see (for example, the color, transparency, shape, texture, brightness) is determined by the physical quality of the object that reflects the light. Similarly, the quality of consciousness that we experience (for example, intelligence, attention span, flexibility, radiance, creativity, presence) with any animal, vegetable or mineral is determined by the physical structure of the object reflecting the one consciousness. The more sophisticated and complex the structure, the more sophisticated and complex the consciousness that it manifests. For instance, a stone is less conscious than a flower is less conscious than a worm is less conscious than a bird is less conscious than a cat is less conscious than a human is less conscious than those structures that manifest a consciousness greater than the human being, and therefore too complex for us to perceive their existence.
The fact that we human beings tend to regard each other as separate beings is not wrong. It is just that the separatist view is only a partial picture, a distortion created by circumstance and perspective.
We human beings can act as individual particles when we hold and defend our personal opinions, preferences, territories and attitudes. We also sometimes act as connected wave formations such as during mass hysteria, shopping sprees (7 million copies of Harry Potter sold in one day!), and the experience of communion. A more holistic picture of a human being, then, would allow that we are neither solely particles nor solely waves. We are, instead, potentially capable of expressing both particle and wave behavior.
We contain this potential to act as either a wave or a particle within us at all times. In physics, an object with such qualities is called a “wavicle.” Human behavior is more like the behavior of wavicles than the behavior of either waves or particles. As you recognize your wavicleness, you expand your learning and add dimensions to your abilities to interact.
5. Taking Your Time
This book will explore ordinary, extraordinary and Archetypal domains. Through taking the time to study the maps and practice the soft skills presented here you will be discovering previously unrevealed dimensions of relationship. You obviously want these skills … and now! Right away! Perhaps you are already asking, “Does true love itself exist? If so, prove it. How do I get there?”
The answer to this and every other “how to” question is, “You get there one step at a time.” Learning in excruciating detail exactly what we are up to now is the first step to the possibility of being up to something else. Seeing how we trap ourselves in the ordinary propels us to leave the ordinary and enter the extraordinary and the Archetypal.
While you are reading this book and experimenting with these ideas the possibility is open that you may encounter the extraordinary. If the extraordinary happens to you try not to overreact. This whole universe is extraordinary. If you notice and appreciate extraordinariness happening in the microcosm around you, make the time to write it down. Writing down your experience changes it from subjective to objective, which is the same as saying if you don’t write it down it didn’t happen. Keeping notes on your journey can prove to be invaluable for building matrix.
There are some hints that make your writing more effective in transforming extraordinary experience into objective reality. When you write, try to not figure it all out or psychologize it. Don’t write what it means to you personally. Just write down “what happened.” Allow yourself to savor the deep sensual nuances of the experience and keep exploring. Don’t get off the elevator at the first floor; instead stay with it and keep going as high as the elevator can take you. Practice tolerating the extraordinary for as long as you can endure it. Practice this every chance you get, over and over again. Ask the next question. Do the next experiment. Write what happens by splitting off only ten percent of your attention. Write as a side effect without laboring over the writing, while using the rest of your attention to have the experience.
Do not succumb to the temptation of being reasonable by going into your head to analyze, judge and criticize what you are experiencing. Slow down. Stay on the edge. Thinking about experience brings you into your head. Going into your head when you are having an experience removes you from the experience, so you don’t get to have it. Just because you have been trained to go into your head by your culture and times does not mean that you have to do it.
Experience is rare. It only happens now. If an experience turns out to be a wondrous experience you can think about it later. Have the wondrous experience now. Love only happens now. Not going into your head when love is happening takes practice. Take the time to practice.
And, while we are on the subject of time and experience, remember that the good news and the bad news is the same news: all things pass, including wondrous experience. A heavenly experience is just as temporary as a hellish experience. The Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist Master Chögyam Trungpa said, “When you are in heaven, be in heaven. When you are in hell, be in hell.” The rest of the time you can think about it.
Without experiencing true love personally you may not suspect that relationship can offer such surprising possibilities. This book invites you to start over again with relationship and this time to come in through a different doorway. The new path blows away the mists of fairy tales and confusion, outrage and doubt, and enables you to create a relationship full of mystery and ecstasy that will take a lifetime to explore.
Embracing radiant joy and brilliant Love is completely possible, and you need to be cautioned: it takes focused intentional efforts, and time. Unfolding the Archetypal Woman and Man takes time. It may even take luck. But certainly lots of time.
6. Letting Your Patterns Disintegrate
We have been trained that learning involves pattern recognition. To an even greater degree, however, learning (especially expansive learning) also involves pattern disintegration.
Patterns disintegrate through learning new core ideas, called “memes.” A meme is a fundamental instruction for the design of your mind in the same way that a gene is a fundamental instruction for the design of your body. This book is filled with “memetic viruses” that can spring back to life in a moment through contact with the living medium of your mind.
The memes in this book are very clear and have a tendency to replace any memes you presently have that are less clear than the new ones. Developing new competence in creating relationship means the old patterns must be released from their grip. Our old view must disassemble. Give yourself permission to wholly experience the annihilation of your present relationship memes.
Our usual modes for being in relationship are simply patterns of behavior that we learned long ago and continue to implement because they are familiar. What you are doing by reading this book and experimenting with new behavior is saying, “The buck stops here. With me. Now. I want to make changes.” By taking responsibility for starting new patterns you simultaneously destroy old patterns.
During the reordering of your understanding you may experience some moments of confusion. This is normal. Confusion is one sign of grief; you may be grieving the passing of the old familiar ways. For example, you may see that you’ve been mistrusting and even denying your own intuition in favor of what others tell you, or in favor of some system of doctrinal belief. When this awareness hits, head on, let it come with honest wails and tears, if that’s what it does, rather than trying to keep an already dead thing alive so as to avoid the pain of recognizing that it is dead. As Marilyn Ferguson said so long ago in The Aquarian Conspiracy, “a falling apart precedes a falling together.” I encourage you to let the reordering happen uninterrupted, and as thoroughly as you can. You short-circuit the process when you attempt to cover it up or deny it. Take care to nurture yourself through it all. Go for a walk. Take a long hot bath. Listen to sweet music. Enjoy the sunset and a good meal. Go to bed early.
If you succeed in leaving your known territory and entering the unknown where everything seems new, one thing you can be sure of is that the mind will not leave you alone for
long. It is uncanny how the mind will rustle through the ashes of our burnt down house of cards and without effort construct another way of looking at things in almost no time. Pattern disintegration is a prelude to a new world view. The mind puts itself back together without you having to do much of anything.
If you experience pattern disintegration and renewal often enough you will start to see that this is how evolution happens. Expansive learning means that you can learn to recognize and participate in the evolutionary flow. As the bright warmth of summer fades into fall, so too does the deathly chill of winter inevitably blossom into spring. Such transitions are natural and, in the big picture, unstoppable. The force of evolution does its mysterious work during the transitions between solid phases. Get used to being in transition.
Through making efforts to shift your basic life strategy from mere survival to full-out living you align yourself with forces that are greater than yourself. You start to play a role in what author Rogan Taylor calls the “death and resurrection show.” In the heat of unexpected opportunities your old ideas blaze and crisp, making way for new ideas to sprout. Through fire after fire you slowly come to discover what philosopher Karlfried Graf Durckheim refers to as “that which is indestructible.” Life can be more intensely profound and exciting than we have ever been led to believe, including our life of relationship.
7. Being Okay with Looking Bad
You are going to look bad in this expansive learning process. There is no way around it. In the paradigm of defensive learning we have been convinced that looking bad is the worst possible circumstance: If we look bad to our peer group they might cast us away. Deep down we fear that being banished from our core group is a death sentence. And a long time ago it used to be. In some cases now it still is. But, look at it this way – seeking peer acceptance is typical herd behavior. Survival through herd behavior is an instinct we acquired long before we crept down from the trees and stood upright on two feet. Although the urge to follow our ancient herd instincts may feel strong, we do not have to follow them. In particular, herd instincts do not serve us when we are doing un-herd-like things, such as learning. Expansive learning is not herd behavior. Expansive learning is individual behavior. When learning expansively you may tend to stand out in a crowd.
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