Intimate Relationships as Transformative Path
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If we are to cultivate a new spirit of engagement in our intimate relationships, I suggest that we need to recognize and welcome the powerful opportunity that intimate relationships provide— to awaken to our true nature. If relationships are to flourish, they need to reflect and promote who we really are, beyond any limited image of ourselves concocted by family, society, or our own minds. They need to be based on the whole of who we are, rather than on any single form, function, or feeling. This presents a tremendous challenge, for it means undertaking a journey in search of our deepest nature. Our connection with someone we love can in fact be one of the best vehicles for that journey. When we approach it in this way, intimacy becomes a path— an unfolding process of personal and spiritual development.
If form and feeling, duty and romance, have been thesis and antithesis in the historical dialectic of marriage, the new synthesis we can now begin to contemplate is: marriage as a conscious relationship, which joins together heaven and earth. Since men and women have only rarely looked at each other eye to eye, as equals, as whole human beings, apart from roles, stereotypes, and inherited prescriptions of all kinds, conscious relationship between the sexes is a radical new departure.
The Greek myth of Eros and Psyche suggests what the journey of conscious relationship may entail. Eros becomes Psyche's lover by night on the condition that she must never attempt to see his face. Things go smoothly between them for a while. But, never having seen her lover, Psyche begins to wonder who he really is. When she lights a lamp to see his face, he flies away, and she must undergo a series of trials to find him again. When she finally overcomes these trials, she is united with him again, only this time in a much fuller way, and their love can proceed in the light of day.
This myth points to the age-old tension between consciousness (Psyche) and erotic love (Eros). Traditional Western marriages have been like love in the dark. Yet now that relationships no longer function smoothly in the old unconscious grooves, they require a new kind of awareness. Like Psyche, we are presently undergoing the trials that every advance in consciousness entails.
THE NATURE OF PATH
Path is a term that points to the great challenge of our existence: the need to awaken, each in our own way, to the greater possibilities that life presents, and to become fully human. The nature of a path is to take us on this journey.
Becoming fully human involves working with the totality of what we are—both our conditioned nature (earth) and our unconditioned nature (heaven). On the one hand, we have developed a number of habitual personality patterns that cloud our awareness, distort our feelings, and restrict our capacity to open to life and to love. We originally fashioned our personality patterns to shield us from pain, but now they have become a dead weight keeping us from living as fully as we could. Still, underneath all our conditioned behavior, the basic nature of the human heart is an unconditioned awake presence, a caring, inquisitive intelligence, an openness to reality. Each of us has these two forces at work inside us: an embryonic wisdom that wants to blossom from the depths of our being, and the imprisoning weight of our karmic patterns. From birth to death, these two forces are always at work, and our lives hang in the balance. Since human nature always contains these two sides, our journey involves working with both.
