Solving problems in relationships requires honesty, integrity and a downright simple understanding of where the answers are not....
1/ Nobody does anything to you more that you do to yourself
2/ Blame doesn't work
3/ If you can't go back you are carrying baggage
4/ Sex is not the answer
5/ you are the same person, in or out of relationship
6/ Love is not attachment, control, possession, need or anything like that.
7/ Laughter is health
8/ Busy - ness kills love.
9/ Everything is possible without changing anything.
The person who is in relationship, fearing loneliness, fearing a repeat of the past is committing a very high form of abuse. They are living in an independence, a bubble of delusion unable to open to truth they apply the laws of relationship and set boundaries like this is what I want and this is what I need. and this is what I don't need. So they are loving with their mind. Mind love is mind games, substituting ideas for investment, substituting their rules for love. In this relationship the hardness of rock can be compared to it. Like a religious seeker, or a devotee, they cannot love, just repeat their priest or guru, and say this is how it is, this is how it shoud be. It's like western people wearing a sari and saying "I am indian" a false representation. there cannot be love in this situation, only imprisonment of the spirit.
We need a home. We need a physical and emotional home. Yes, this is really important. Emptiness is the lack of a home. We fear emptiness, because now our mind is not validated as representing our home (knowledge and righteousness) our emotions are found to be delusional they are no longer validated as being our home. Our money can be stolen or our possessions lost, so if these are our home we become fearful that our lover will steal our safety, living always in worry and problems. Our dreams are no home, they are hopes and ambitions and blind recitation of second hand knowledge is really no home because it takes so little to debunk it. Emptiness exists behind all this. Behind the bricks and mortar that you call home, behind the veil of your spiritual or religious practice there is loneliness and emptiness. Here is the love that is possible.
Homelessness is Godliness. You won't want to accept it because your ego will be fighting for it's own survival. How can I live without the bricks and mortar and the rights and wrongs of my morality? And you are right to argue this. How can you live without the contructions? there is in fact no need to live without them, but the day you validate them as something measurable, something real and significant, then you have forfeit the very reason your own soul incarnated into this life. If there is no love, then all that is really the barrier, there cannot be a God in a heart that cannot love.
We build homes. Titles, trophies, families, wealth, careers, knowledge, we can repeat, store, possess and accumulate so much that if the earth stopped turning we'd still be wealthy. But we cannot build a home to camouflage our emptiness.
Nothing. Empty. A vacuum. A black hole in the universe. A nothingness that is unbarable. The experience of the meditator. the witnessing of the depressed. The hopelessness of the suicide victim. A place condemned by the material surface of the shallow worlds of repition nad conformity, yet, sanctified by those who know love. Santified by all the great teachers, prophets and leaders of depth, emptiness, the place of genius, and brilliance in music, art and mathematics. the empty mind, is the sacred mind, the spirit of the mountain, here, now, empty but for this moment of existence. this is love.
Spirituality applied is the athlete who knows nothing other than this one millisecond of performance. This is the business person who, in a flash knows choices, a child on a swing who goes one swing to far, the love who falls without regard for the cost. This is the magic of love. Emotiness, the highest note sung by a performer.
So rare is this moment in the average life that we have become obsessed with sex. Because in the moment of climax this experience occurs. Months of persuit just for that one moment of climax, manipulation, distortion just for that one moment, when all else goes blank and the world ends. So complex has this become that the average person cannot even invest the effort in partnering for it would bring to much disturbance to their pleasure hunt, and hence they masturbate.
Obsessed with substitution, the average person can fall in love for moments, then, remember how it was forever. They have little preparedness to find the emptiness that guarantees love. If the average person were excited about nothing, inspired by life itself then the trend toward sex and the industry it sporns would be less. But this is not the case. Corporations design jobs for people who want to be safe and conform. So sex becomes their only outlet. In fact it is not sex or relationship at all that causes this obsession. It is that one moment of release, that moment of emptiness that we call loneliness, that moment of orgasm that causes this obsession. Emptiness is a human desire.
So why does the mind conform? Why are we obsessed with second hand knowledge? Why do we try to create relationships that are built on patterns? to understand these questions we must understand a little more about mind science.
It is quite a strange obsession this need to conform. It is not freedom, which most people aspire to. It is not independence which the spirit wants in order to express it's love. So the fact that we drive so hard to repeat what others have told us, in bibles and gita books seems to be driven by something very strong, given that the cost is so high.
We conform in order to gain intimacy. Intimacy is associated with security. A person who is insecure will seek intimacy through the process of conformity. This means that the individual is seaching for security through intimacy, and to do this they must label things as safe and unsafe. So, if they are labeled as a bhudist for example it might be safe. They could also label others as safe and unsafe by diagnosing them as depressed or liars. That is how we try to make sense of the world, by giving it a label. then there is security and in security there is intimacy of sorts. It is an open letter demanding conformity to a precedent of principles. Basically a request to ask the lover to lie or die.
Patterns are build out of conformity to a dogma, laws or principles. Patterns overcome fear, so the insecure person will demand patterns. They gain access to security by overcoming their fears by creating patterns for themselves and particularly others to follow. So, these patterns are helpful but they too cost. To live by patterns is to deny internal freedom, to deny love, it is a mind game in which disorder in relationship is guaranteed.
What builds patterns in relationships? Comparison is the first thing. That means that one person might compare themselves and their lover to someone else and demand that they meet that expectation. Like even comparison to how their ex husband or wife was not. We can build expectations out of the opposites can't we. We can build ideals and models of who we are looking to be with based on who we don't want to be with. Automatically by doing this we inject the mind into love and then there cannot be love. Can you see this?
Disorder in relationship is poison to it. Understanding can turn chaos to order. So knowledge is the enemy of order. Knowledge is disorder. Fools know everything. That person who knows how it can be, should be or could be done is the fool because this person mistakes knowledge for love. Knowledge blocks love. what you know about somebody only eliminates your insecurity, blocks your fears. Your knowledge is based on your information. That information you can say is wise or unwise but it comes from the mind, whether you call it intuition or not, it comes out and through the mind. So, disorder in the mind, is the result of knowledge, and knowledge comes mostly from experience. Experience is emotional incompleteness until it is love.
Experiences that are anything but love are delusional. So you might say, "I fell out of love with someone" and then want to fall in love with someone else, but you are actually lying to yourself. You became fearful, insecure and therefore you needed some knowledge in order to justify running away from that insecurity and you called them good or bad. But they are not the cause. You are the cause, your insecurity and need for patterns is the cause, because you are unable to face real love.
If you even leave a relationship it is unlikely that it would succeed if you went back because you will now have partial knowledge. You will not have understanding, or if you do, it will be blame and incomplete. Mostly we analyse things in order to know them and justify our judgements of them. To go back to a relationship you must not know anything. To go back, which is the best path, you must really just fall in love and have amnesia. What past? What other lovers? Who would care about such things? Only a person who is afraid of being hurt or afraid of falling down in love.
That is the key you see. Falling down in love is the necessity of it. You must be disappointed in order to really be into the sacredness of love. That void is falling down over and over. It only hurts your ego. Really love cannot hurt, or be hurt, only your ego can be hurt, and isn't that the mind, getting less and less control so that intimacy can appear. I don't mean conformity or safety I mean truth.
One lady who came to me for advice was obsessed with lies. She lied to her mother, her father, her ex husband and her lover. She lied to her son and her friends. She wanted patterns that were predicatable in her life so she lied in order to giove people the impression she was a conformist, a patterned individual so that she could have security. Her fear was that if she were honest she would be intimate with people. That intimacy would be real and take the form of love, both acceptance and rejection of herself. She wanted only pleasure in love so she lied. Everybody knew she lied. she thought that they didn't know. It was real because did get rejected but not for being herself, she got rejected because she lied to everyone.
Those people who want patterns - to conform must surround themselves with fools also. They are looking for more knowledge, actually confirmation of the same wounded knowledge that they possess. They look for flattery, and because of that, there can be no innocence in their life.
An innocent mind, has amnesia. It forgets the past. Not because it is avoiding it ot running away from it but because it has found only love in the past and therefore it sees only one white wall, one clear sheet of paper which it calls the past. The whole past merges into that one clean sheet of paper. It was all love. So tomorrow is not based on escaping from yesterday, to running away to find tomorrow. There is nothing to run from and nothing to fear from the past. They can fall in love when they choose with that person from the past because they are actually new.
Many times we run from the past. But actually those experiences are the fodder for deeper love. We run with knowledge and lack of understanding. We say "I will never do that again" but of course this is foolish. From that day, we can only say "if my mind accepts this pattern and that conformity I will open to love" in other words we live for the respt of our lives in delisuion, in mind.
That is why sex is so important to the delusioned mind. It has so much knowledge that the only place it can find solace is in the emptiness of release in sex. This mind is incapable of love except in that moment of orgasm. So it becomes obseesed with it. If that same mind were set free, without the patterns and insecurities it would find the same passion and fire in life itself and sex would become less if not totally unimportant.
The knowing mind lacks understanding. It lives completely out of the past. Nothing is new. It will say "that reminds me of what used to happen to me" and then there is automatic disorder. Disorder of the greatest level. Because nothing is new, evethying is compared to knowledge. The past. This also goes for the pleasures of life. Because this knowing mind compares the present to the past, it wants to repeat what bought pleasure before. It will say "if I could have this part of that person and that part of this person I would be happy" It lives in conformity to knowledge of the past.
But all wanting kills love. So that person who has knowledge, cannot love because they don't want this, and they do want that. Then there is ambition, desire to be something, someone, become something or someone, the whole mechanism is driven by comparison to who they are, who you are and what they want. Beware of this in your life and the those who approach you with their wanting love. They are disordered and will therefore have disordered relationships.
So why is love so difficult to sustain?
Love is difficult to sustain because we are self obsessed. We are obsessed with pleasure and how we are. We want to have,be and do so much that from that moment in life there can be no love, only ambtion. This is the fear of emptiness. Because in emptiness all our wanting finds no traction. There is no ambition possible in emptiness, and therefore love. It is empty, therefore everything we do makes no difference, everything we mimick makes no difference, repeating patterns makes no difference, self isolation (staying out of relationship) makes no difference. They just increase the minds sense of conformity and security. But this is as close as it gets.
We think that the more we strive, the more we conform, the more we develop patterns the more secure our life will be and therefore the more love we will have. This is the great mistake because love does not thrive in security, ego does. Love thrives in insecurity and disspappointment, where loneliness is real and embraced and where everything we ask for is refused us. That is where love is. That requires understanding, not knowledge. There is no complete knowledge, but there is complete understanding. Complete understanding means love. Understanding something, or some situation is to see how there is or was love in it. Then that understanding creates an open heart and those problems that can block our life to not deaden the spirit.
You can see these half people. They walk like everyone else, they talk like everyone else but they are not able to think like everyone else. They are not love. They and knowledge, and therefore only living out of experiences which are incomplete. These people say "I am happy" but anyone who says they are happy are not happy. They are in their mind having an upper. They compare, and therefore they are blind.
Love is not mind, memory, ambition, desire, expectation, conformity, exlusiveness, righteousness, pattern, ownership, security, fear, jealousy, demand or anything of these emotional states of self obsession. These are states that trying to create patterns and therefore intimacy out of security. They are built on running away from insecurity. Therefore this person cannot love. Love requires insecurity.
Kind, loving and tender people cannot be self important and therefore they must be able to love without a home. They must be fully open to the emptiness that is love, the vulnerability that is love without trying to put up their patterns and knowledge and say "if this and this then I can love" no, this is mind and there can be no love in this life.
It does not matter where the ambition comes from. Spiritually ambitious, business ambitious, health ambitious, family ambitious - these are all blockages in relationship. They may have their place outside but in love they are the toxin. They breed disorder, and that disorder breads the emotional suffereing and pain. That means that ambition and wanting keep people on the surface of love. Superficial lovers are those who cannot understand life as love, but instead, know all about what they want, what they don't want and what they deserve.
This is the periphery of love. Feelings, wantings, identification, knowledge, attachments, desire, trivia, conformity all come from self importance. Even an individual who has great loving powers will not know themselves if they are always wanting to be other than who they really are. Empty and lonely.
There are always problems. This is life. The question is whether you can understand that problem as yuour mind blocking love or whether you get more knowledge from that problem and therefore increase the blockage to love. You can choose. The important thing is that if you carry a problem from one day to the next, you will need pride and ambiton to deal with the lack of spirit in your life. Then sex obsession will drive the fire rather than the love of life. Remember, those who desire to be humble can never be humble.
As soon as we want, we kill love. Try to become empty, it is possible. If there is anything from your history, yesterday, last year or last 20 years that you have overcome with knowledge, maybe it is time to unlearn what ever you learned and fall back, into understanding, by finding where there was love, and where it was you who were blind. Love is everywhere. And your duty is to find it. That is how you solve problems daily.