[Images stolen from Integral Institute.]
In my never ending quest to examine and refine ideals for an integral relationship model, I have come to Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships by John Welwood. He makes a clear distinction between absolute love (which we often feel early in the bonding process) and relative love (what we have to contend with in relationship).
At the deepest level of our being -- the divinity within that we share with all beings -- there is no separation between me and you. At any moment it is possible to experience the warmth and openness of a heart connection with any living creature: a lover, a child, a friend, a stranger passing on the street, or even a dog. When we appreciate the beauty of another's being, the heart channel opens and a spark of absolute love passes through us. In this moment of connection we no longer feel so separate or isolated. We delight in sharing the one lovely, tender presence that dwells in the heart of all.
Yet at the same time, on the relative plane, we always remain separate and different. We inhabit separate bodies, with different histories, backgrounds, families, character traits, values, preferences, perspectives, and, in the end, different destinies. We each see and respond to things differently, and approach life in our own unique way.
Yes, we can experience moments of being at one with another. But this can happen only when we connect being-to-being, because at the level of pure being and pure openness, we are one. My openness is not different from your openness, because openness has no solid form and therefore no boundary that separates us, one from the other. Therefore, when we meet in a moment of absolute love, being-to-being, it is like water poured into water.
Relative love, by contrast, is an exchange that occurs on the level of form, person-to-person. Every person, just like every snowflake, every tree, every place, every circumstance in this world, is completely distinct. Each of us has our own unique character and way of unfolding, different from all others. While two persons can know themselves as one in the realm of pure openness, they remain irrevocably two in the realm of form.
One night you connect deeply with another, which leaves you feeling wide open to this person, totally amorous and enamored. But then the next morning, though you may still feel loving, that wide-openness may become clouded by considerations that start to arise: Is it safe to open yourself to this person? Can you accept the ways this person is totally different from you? How deeply is he or she able to understand you? Are you a good match?
Melting into oneness provides moments of blissful union in absolute love. and this is what the great mythic romances thrive on, this pure discovery and meeting that often happens outside ordinary time and space. But the challenges of relative love bring couples back to earth, forcing them to continually face and work with their twoness. This is not a bad thing, however. For without honoring the ways in which they are distinctly different, and exploring how to keep finding each other across these differences, a couple's connection will lose passion and vibrancy, and run the risk of unhealthy emotional fusion or codependency.
One of the things that can seriously damage a relationship is when the couple experiences this early blissful union and expects that to be what the relationship is -- blissful, easy, merged. Rather than face the reality of relative love, some couples become fused -- losing all individuation or differentiation. Rather than Dick-and-Jane, they become DickandJane. It is actually that merging energy -- emotional fusion -- that can leave us feeling alone and unloved because it is not authentic, pure openness.From this description by Welwood, and from what I am reading in the Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch, I want to tentatively propose a hierarchy of relationship development: Fusion, Differentiation, Integral.
Emotional fusion is a pre-personal form of relationship. Differentiation is a personal and individuated form of relationship. Integral (whatever that may be) is the post-personal form of relationship.
Among other things, Integral may be the ability to hold both the absolute and the relative nature of relationship in our hearts and minds at the same time.
Any thoughts on this?
Technorati Tags: Relationship, Integral Relationship, John Welwood, Perfect love Imperfect Relationships, David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage, Integral
6 comments:
I think it's important to distinguish between the form of the relationship and the work one does as part of the relationship.
Kira and I have gotten a lot better at avoiding the drama and the endless processing of "stuff." We've done a lot of work that resembles Big Mind (parts or subpersonalities) and that stuff, along with mindfulness and loving-kindness, reduces the need for and the drama of conflicts. Our process might be bordering on integral even if our relationship isn't there yet.
I think that the "sensitive self" loves to process feelings endlessly, or at least it can seem that way , especially to men. But integral owns mistakes, releases resentments, and argues with compassion. At integral, there isn't the need to endlessly process, create drama, or hold anyone "accountable."
At least that is my experience of it. I'm hoping that being able to solve conflict at an integral level will translate to an integral relationship over time.
How does it work in your life?
Peace,
Bill
In thinking about this, there are a few points at which I get stuck and my clarity (because I'm afraid of the answers) can't see beyond these obstacles.
1: Ok, love; but which definition of love? It's rather like Wilber's discussion of God and religion--suddenly you realize that, based on one's individual development, the capacity/definition/encompassingness of the love one is working with may be different--perhaps vastly so--from one's partner. What if one partner is anointing the other in lotus-nectar but getting only dirty dish water in return (a heartfelt, sincere, working-as-hard-as-one can/best one is capable of dish water love)? An extreme example, but it happens often (even mostly, I almost want to say).
2: Who said "nothing which does not exist in deep sleep is real"? I can only state this crudely, so I'll just say it outright: amorous relationships are cool, certainly, but they are not ultimately our reason for being here, or the essence of our lifework. Surely (we all remember what the Buddha did in his relationship) there comes a time when amorous relationships are not vehicle that can take us further along the road we must all travel, and finally finish alone. Can there be a relationship which calls itself integral which does other than include this truth at the center of its self-definition? I wonder.
But perhaps you do not agree ...?
Kai in NYC
Kai,
You raise some interesting questions. I think the answer to number one, for most people, would be that it will never work in the long run. I don't know if I agree, but I certainly think it would require the more evolved one to have the heart of a bodhisattva.
The answer to number two, for me, is that we must change our definition of relationship. In the West we tend to think of Tantra as the meditational form of relationship, but I disagree. I see Tantra as an absolutist stage technology. I believe that we can experience very high states of consciousness through pure presence with our partners, both sexually and not. We can transcend ego in very profound ways simply by being purely present -- which may be what the Dzogchen tradition is getting at.
Certainly there are deeper reasons for our existence than relationship, BUT I think that relationship is a profound tool for achieving those deeper purposes. And even a profound tool for purifying ourselves for those deeper purposes. Nothing reveals our shadows as clearly as deep relationship with another. We can never achieve our deeper purposes if our shadows are getting in the way.
Here is the revised model of relationship that has developed in conversation over at Zaadz:
David Schnarch talks about the fusion stage as identity created through a reflected sense of self. We are undifferentiated and unable to define ourselves separate from our emotional ties to the other. We see ourselves as we are reflected in our meaningful relationships.
The next stage may then be identity created through the opposition of self to other (and the successful attempt would reflect emotional separation - the end of fusion), which Schnarch mentions as one way that people try to break the fusion pattern. Too often however, we are unable to break the fusion, which results in bickering to establish boundaries or leaving to escape the fusion (which doesn't really end it).
Then we might discover identity as a result of maintaining self while in relationship with others (we no longer define ourselves through emotion, but rather, through a more aware ego sense). We have access to a core self that does not fluctuate based on the conditions around us, yet is capable of maintaining strong emotional connections to others.
I think the first truly second tier or integral stage would be differentiation with the ability to take on the other's role and experience their point of view. True empathy, to me, feels like the bginning of an integral awareness. When we can take the role of another, the separation between self and other begins to break down – we begin to see all the ways are alike, and with empathy begins pure compassion.
Finally, we might know and experience that we are all one at some absolute level, yet still maintain our separate self-sense. This would be the ability to hold Welwood's absolute love and relative (fully differentiated) love in our interior space simultaneously. With this stage we are fully integrated in our relationships, and able to experience true compassion and empathy based on an experiential awareness on oneness.
In all likelihood, there are intermediary stages, as well, especially at the top end.
I think many people mistake fusion for the touch of the absolute or nondual. Another variation on mistaking a pre-personal state/stage for a post-personal state/stage.
What makes it all the more confusing is that a fused couple might actually have access to absolute love as Welwood defines it as a state experience, while still existing in a pre-personal stage of relationship. It's easy to see how a couple could confuse the two.
Comments? Disagreements? Revisions?
Peace,
Bill
I'm feeling very scattered right now, but I want to jot down a few thoughts:
In the first place, while I recognize that there's much in the process and phenomenon that's comprehensible and accessible to reason, I think we're REALLY missing the point if we don't finally believe and accept that love and relationship contain an element of mystery. We can and ought to play with our "unified field theories of love and relationship" but still accept that there are manifestations and qualities of these experiences that will always elude definition or easily applied universal rules.
True empathy is a lovely thing--very cool--but countless partners, mostly women, have been practicing it and authentic role-taking adeptly for many millenia without ever approaching anything we might want to call an Integral relationship.
Fusion isn't an inevitable step in a relationship ("limerance," though, is, I think, and might be more skillfully substituted for the idea of fusion.) I've been passionately in love three times in my life and never once "fused." I'm willing to admit I'm a wierd exemplar, but if I'm an exception there must be many more. I agree that we all begin in an unskillful space, however; perhaps that unskillfulness manifests differently for different folks, though.
To wrap it up, I'd suggest that what truly characterizes an Integral relationship is, not the respective development of various lines in the partners, but a shared committment to the evolutionary process as the relationship's raison d'etre (and only secondarily the line-development to make that a feasible proposition).
My two cents.
Kai in NYC
Bill,
As always, I appreciate your perspective. I hope you don't mind me mentioning it here, but I long to have these types of discussions in a forum atmosphere, outside the limiting confines of these comment boxes. To that end, I invite you to chime in now and again to the Integral Visioning Forum.
It's lonely over there, and yet it seems uniquely suited to be a potential community for independent (from Integral Institute) integral thinkers.
In any event, I will continue to chime in on your blog.
--Bob
One thing that I think is missing from this discussion is what, exactly, makes a 'relationship' different from any other kind of relationship; what makes that kind of relationship different from, say, parent relationships or friend relationships. This is a lower-left quadrant question and of course, each worldview has its answer -- Blue sees a marriage as a divine model, rite of passage, obligation, Orange views it as a structure rooted in biology to produce children and aims to get the high-status spouse, Green sees it as an institution for maximizing intimacy and connection. What is the second-tier view?
Aside from including all these perspectives, I think an integral theory of relationships should include the observation that a romantic relationship is really not very different from other types of relationships -- a couple is the smallest possible community. So really, an integral relationship theory should be part of a larger integral treatment of interpersonal relationships generally.
But there are things that make romantic love unique among relationships. Combining love, empathy and a high degree of intimacy with sex is a potent generator of peak experiences which provide some small glimpse of the divine -- it might be humanity's most popular method of getting that glimpse. In the day-to-day sense though, romantic relationships have the same phenomena as any other relationships; for example, we commonly say that two arguing friends sound like an old married couple. Perhaps the most important difference and potential for conflict is that we frequently expect our partners to be a kind of spiritual twin, more so than other relationships. Clearly, each partner is deeply affected by the other's karma and the ups and downs of each individual's path. I haven't thought about this enough to be able to decide if that tendency is a holdover from a more naive worldview, or if that is a genuine part of an integral worldview.
Anyway, those are a few thoughts.
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