Trying to make a decision the other way around – by collecting reasons first and then making a decision based on the impetus or the logic of the reasons – is maddening. Even a mountain of good reasons does not contain enough responsibility to make one little decision. You are the one with all the responsibility. Acknowledging your natural responsibility for making your own decisions makes it easier to trust yourself to make your own decisions, even if the decisions are massively life-changing.
Relationships end nastily when either or both partners try to avoid being responsible for deciding to end the relationship. The illusion is, if you can present enough evidence to prove to the world that the other person (is a jerk and) is the reason the relationship has to end, the relationship ending is not your fault. “I was forced by the horrendous circumstances to decide to end it.” However, since you are unavoidably responsible for every decision that you make, trying to avoid responsibility for the decision to separate results in a blame war, fabulous for Gremlin, not so fabulous for Adult men and women. The only one who profits in the case of Decisions vs. Reasons is the lawyer.
Succeeding or Not
A wedding vow is a fixed thing. Human beings are not. It is improbable that even on their wedding day two people have the same conscious and unconscious intentions, the same size of being, and the same interest in personal development. Do we expect ourselves to? As we live, we learn. As we learn, we grow. As we grow, we change. It is quite improbable that two individuals will live, learn, grow and change at the same speed or in the same ways. Do we expect that we should? Needs change. Priorities change. Sensitivities change. What is to happen if the one in us who made our wedding vows “dies” and a new configuration grows out of the ashes? What causes a relationship to continue? What is the purpose of relationship anyway?
After some years of natural development and growth, we may find that our relationship no longer nurtures our development. Then what? We may sense that we have to choose between the least of two evils: sacrificing our aliveness to maintain our marriage, or sacrificing our marriage vows to keep growing. That the vows are powerful is evidenced by the percentage of married people who, rather than ending their relationship, act as if their vows are true but work out “creative” ways to try to stay alive. Even though a dual life is excruciatingly destructive, we may come to the conclusion that feeding ourselves extramaritally is better than quitting the relationship and seeing ourselves as a failure.
If our relationship does end, the common tendency is to conclude that our relationship was a failure overall, perhaps even from the very beginning. We studiously think back and try to find the root causes of our split-up. We may even conclude that to have integrity we should never have made a commitment to relationship in the first place.
Looking at our situation, we assess the “alternatives”:
1. Use denial, belief systems, or drugs to imprison ourselves within the original boundaries of a now dead relationship to keep up the appearances of being successful.
2. Find extramarital intimacies, yet still maintain the appearance of being in a working relationship.
3. Acknowledge that we have failed and end the relationship in disgrace.
There is an additional alternative to consider. The other alternative is not common but it is imminently possible. The possibility is to use the pressing necessity in your relationship to commit to an intense experiment in radical honesty. You begin the experiment suddenly and for no reason, by taking every risk to bring your relationship moment by moment into the Adult responsibility of extraordinary human relationship. With a fierce, irrevocable commitment, you pay attention, stay alert and hold it there – in the extraordinary – wielding the sword of clarity in your one hand and your vulnerable heart in the other, never allowing behaviors that might drop you back into ordinary human relationship. Keep your center, express what you feel, ask for what you need, make boundaries, make decisions, go nonlinear, ask for help from the best help available (not just your usual friends) and let the cards fall where they may. If the relationship is already on the line, what do you actually risk by finally and extensively letting your authentic self be known?
If, after some months of maximum efforts to maintain extraordinary human relationship, the relationship still ends, then decide that the relationship ended because it was successful. From the perspective of extraordinary human relationship, the relationship has gone through its life cycle and has accomplished the evolution that it was originated to accomplish. By taking your relationship beyond your ordinary world of habits, and simultaneously bringing in contributions from all available resources, you wring out of your relationship every last shred of learning. That learning then stands as a foundation so that your next “relationship laboratory” can unfold with dignity for each of you.
Although you made mistakes, although you caused pain or felt pain, although someone else “could have done it better,” you could have faith that you both did the best you could.
You could decide to forgive yourself and your partner, and accept yourself and your partner, by having faith that actually you both did the best that could be done, because you were the only ones there to try.
You could also have faith that what you are doing right now is also the best that you can do. Certainly you might learn something later that will allow you to do better. But whatever you do better later will be done by a different “you” in different circumstances.
Dangerous complexities do not stop people from wanting to come together as couples. It has not stopped you. Think of that. Even after all that has happened to you so far, you still want to come together with someone, with a partner. It is the purity and innocence of your simple wish to come together with someone that you can trust. Coupling is an Archetypal form that we are deeply attracted to living into. Every moment enlivened by extraordinary human love brings benefit to the world. Let your inner wish to come together move you to learn and grow and do experiments that bring you more fully into living as an expression of your inner wish.
CHAPTER 7
Edgework
The term “Edgework” is extrapolated from a discussion in Seth Godin’s energetic and wise little marketing book called Free Prize Inside. Seth explores ways to expand a market. We explore ways to expand the Box – in this case, expanding the Box of relationship possibilities. One effective and interesting way to expand the Box is through Edgework. Edgework is about responsibly opening up fresh opportunities in several dimensions of your Box at the same time. Fresh opportunities are most abundant at the edges of your Box where there can be intersections with the unknown.
Through doing Edgework you take responsibility for creating what is important for you in your own life. Nobody can do Edgework for you. If you succeed in taking actions with enough momentum to break free of the culture’s gravitational field that incessantly pulls you back toward its definition of “normal,” you are creating in a way that can potentially transform the culture. True creating is accompanied by a joyous edginess, an “invention stress,” caused by being at risk for producing from the unknown something that did not exist before. Responsible invention stress builds matrix for extraordinary human relationship.
These ideas may at first seem unusual. But as soon as you begin seeking extraordinary human relationship they immediately fall into place and start making sense. Edgework is not ready-made, and not something that you do once. In extraordinary human relationship, Edgework becomes your way of life.
The Contest Between You and Your Box
As discussed earlier, each of us has created a Box. The Box acts as a giant multidimensional filter between you and the world. The Box determines everything that you can perceive and everything that you can express. The purpose of the Box is to ensure your survival. From the Box’s perspective, its present design has been successful because you have survived. Therefore, the Box concludes that if it can continue to protect itself first, then it can continue to protect you. The Box is therefore justifi
ed in defending itself at all costs.
Over time, you may find that you are unwilling to pay some of the costs that your Box is still willing to pay. This difference of opinion begins a contest between you and your Box. The Box may want to continue spending your energy and attention on actions like trying to be perfect, keeping resentments, staying in isolation, putting on the “show,” constantly competing to be the best, not letting others know about your true inner experience, constantly struggling for survival, being secretly hypercritical of others, hiding your inadequacies or your superiority, or questioning the value of life itself. From the Box’s perspective, these actions are how you survive. From your new perspective, these actions produce unnecessary suffering. Some of the suffering the Box is willing to endure are no longer worth the false security attained by remaining in such a well-defended Box. The question is: Who will win? You or your Box? If you do not engage in this contest with focused intention and with all efforts, then your Box will continue creating what it has designed itself to create – ordinary human relationship. To create extraordinary human relationship you face the challenge of expanding your Box. Exactly here is where we apply Edgework.
Edgework is a way for loosening the grip of your Box on your limitations. With certain restrictions eased, you will be able to start taking what were previously forbidden actions. Your new actions, small though they might seem, will permit you to enter previously inaccessible areas of extraordinary human relationship. The procedure for Edgework is to go to an interesting “edge” of your Box, to stay at that edge, and while staying there do Edgework experiments. Edgework brings your life to life.
SECTION 7-A
The Marshmallow Zone
Contrary to what we might assume, we do not live in our whole Box. We live toward the center of our Box, well away from its edges, in the warm, soft, familiar, and sweet “marshmallow zone.” Life in the marshmallow zone is secure, predictable, controllable and safe. If we are honest we must also admit that the marshmallow zone is restrictive, boring, lifeless, frustrating, and in some ways dead.
You have wrapped yourself into the comforts of the marshmallow zone because you know what it feels like to get too close to an edge. Just thinking about going to the edge of your Box sends a cold chill running down your spine. Try to remember the last time this happened to you. Perhaps you accidentally found yourself in a homosexual apparatus shop. Or your boss asked you to give a speech to the board of directors. Or your partner accused you of having an affair. Or an ill friend asked you to accompany her as she approached death. Or you turned a corner and were suddenly face to face with a rough looking gang of teenagers. Or you clicked on the wrong icon and found yourself in a triple-X sex website. Or you got a tax bill from the government for several zeros more than the balance of your bank account. Or you got a flat tire in a ghetto neighborhood alone at night. Or someone misinterpreted what you said, considering it to be seriously flirting. Or you thought your lottery ticket contained winning numbers. Or someone at the train station tried to sell you heroin.
MAP OF THE MARSHMALLOW ZONE
We live in the center of our Box, far away from the edges. the marshmallow zone is familiar, comfortable, routine, normal, linear, predictable, stuck and boring. We choose to stay in the marshmallow zone because there at least we think we are safe. The Box is strong enough to block evolution.
Over “there,” as in the examples cited above, beyond the edge, is the scary unknown. Being at the edge is risky! Control slips through your fingers, and mysterious and unending, although nameless, dangers wait for you. Long ago, perhaps out of your awareness, you decided that the best place to be was far away from those scary edges, in the safety of the marshmallow zone, no matter what it cost you.
The marshmallow zone is protection against life’s greatest paradox: death. The marshmallow zone gives us the illusion that death does not exist, or at least “does not apply to me.” It is exactly here that the paradox reveals its necessity. Unless you are aware that at some point all life inevitably comes to an end, you are not really living. Life thrives at the edge where the old dies and the new is born, the intersection between what is and what could be. In other words, life thrives through evolution. The paradox is that evolution does not occur in the overprotected marshmallow zone. Our difficulty is that evolution is the catalyst for sustaining extraordinary human relationship.
In the conflict between the Box and evolution, nothing is automatically decided. It is completely your privilege and your responsibility to choose whether or not you use the force of your free will to defend yourself from the influences of evolution. It is clear that if you are single and live alone in the marshmallow zone, years can go by unnoticed because you have chosen to not let anyone near enough to press you with alternatives to your Box’s view of reality. If you choose relationship, but you still intend to stay in your marshmallow zone, then it is guaranteed that you will generate only ordinary human relationship. Locked in your marshmallow zone your partner does not get to be in contact with you. The closest they can come to you is the periphery. Relationship itself soon turns stale and dry, suffocated by lack of possibility. Interactions are theoretical and do not feed you or your partner. Conflicts arise because your heart and your soul are struggling for their lives. Your partner’s are too.
The marshmallow zone is like a bath. No matter how warm, safe, soft and familiar it feels, sooner or later you have to get out of it. Especially if you (as a man) intend to engage in “parley” with a Pirate Sorceress Warrioress Queen Goddess Woman! Or if you (as a woman) wish to join adventures with a Pirate Magician King Spiritual Warrior Man! (We’ll discuss these possibilities in depth in Part IV, Chapters 10 and 11.)
Happiness and a fulfilled relationship are never permanent and achievable objectives. Joy is dynamic and fluid, discovered over and over again, each time in a new way. Such exploring demands that you have access to a robust set of resources. A baby chick does not fulfill its destiny except by cracking out of its protective shell. A butterfly does not stretch into its beauty except by splitting its chrysalis and taking flight. You will not unfold into extraordinary human relationship except by pulling the stopper and draining your marshmallow zone dry, then going to the edge of your Box and stretching outward.
SECTION 7-B
The Edges of Your Box
Edgework involves three steps. The first step in Edgework is to find an edge. The second step involves staying exactly on that edge. The third step is doing Edgework experiments at that edge. Clearly, a strong understanding of edges is crucial to the success of Edgework.
Imagine your Box. The Box portrayed on page 223 is a simple six-sided cube. Your actual Box is far more complex and sophisticated than a simple cube. Each surface of your Box is assembled out of basic mental and psychological components: beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, interpretations, conclusions, opinions, projections, and stories. Everyone’s Box is built of the same structural components, but each Box is constructed in its own unique design, with edges that are short or long, straight or curvy, dull or sharp. Each edge is our personal declaration about what we are committed to hold as real. All edges are arbitrary. For example, one person may believe that making one or two mistakes is a sign of total incompetence, whereas another might completely accept three or four mistakes as a sign of being a truly creative artist. One person may have an edge that assesses eating cake and coffee as, “I have no self-discipline,” whereas another might assess the exact same behavior as, “I passionately love to experience the abundance that life has to offer!”
Evolution occurs most dynamically at the intersection between two media. Think of the intertidal zones between ocean and land. This is where creatures first learned to breathe and crawl and eventually fly. Think of the interface between the fields of biology and physics. This is where biophysics and biotechnology develop medicines and diagnostics like x-ray, ultrasound and brain scan. Evolution is most rambunctious at the edges, so for extraordinary human relationship,
it is to the edges we go.
Since we live within the perceptual limits of our Box and the Box confidently reassures us, “This is all there is,” we sometimes forget that there are vast domains just beyond the edges of our Box – full of what we do not know that we do not know. The interface between the known and the unknown is where we have the greatest opportunity to gain new perspective and make unrestricted actions. At the edge, traditional systems break down, thus creating real necessity for new possibilities to be discovered. To get to the edge we exchange security for adventure. Suddenly, there is a rich source of riskiness and aliveness, both of which are foods that nurture extraordinary human relationship. Nonlinear nutrition is not available in the marshmallow zone.
The view at the edge is exhilarating, inspiring, enlightening, and also a bit confusing or scary. You can tell that you are at an edge because you will have two simultaneous perspectives: the familiar view of what used to be considered normal, and an additional view completely at odds with the traditional view. Holding both views long enough to realize that you have two views is the beginning of Edgework. Sustaining two views demands the same kind of practice it takes to learn tight-rope walking. While practicing, you will find that it is far easier to fall into one view or the other than it is to balance on the razor’s edge experiencing both realities together.
The double perspective produces a crack in your certainty that causes your familiar perspective to lose its omnipotence. Given the Box’s voracious commitment to defending its views as irreproachable and almost holy, having a way to change solid to liquid verges on the miraculous. The original vice-grip thinking about what is possible or what is important dissolves, revealing a freedom and a groundlessness that feel both refreshing and threatening. As your old world disintegrates, there may arise some fear, but the fear is exciting because you are reaping the reward of what could be years of hard work integrating this new double perspective. Suddenly, you take action in ways that surprise the old you. For instance, you may find yourself able to disagree with the general consensus at meetings and to voice your own opinions in a calm and convincing manner; you may easefully gather a team of people and resources together and start a project that you have long been wanting to start; you may clean out the attic or garage of extraneous objects; or you may arrange to meet with someone you admire, but were too self-conscious to connect with. These are actions that you may have instinctively felt to be possible, but for which you previously had no access. The chaos of the edge’s two perspectives opens the access.
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