FROM ADDICTIVE TO ENLIGHTENED RELATIONSHIPS

 

Can we change an addictive relationship into a true one?

Yes. Being present and intensifying your presence by taking your

attention ever more deeply into the Now: Whether you are living

alone or with a partner, this remains the key. For love to flourish, the

light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no

longer get taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake

them for who you are. To know yourself as the Being underneath the

thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy

underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. To

disidentify from the pain-body is to bring presence into the pain and

thus transmute it. To disidentify from thinking is to be the silent

watcher of your thoughts and behavior, especially the repetitive

patterns of your mind and the roles played by the ego.

If you stop investing it with “selfness,” the mind loses its compulsive

quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist

what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the

moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are

free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.

First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner.

The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete

acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge

or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego.

All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no

victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is

also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into somebody

else’s unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You

will then either separate — in love — or move ever more deeply into

the Now together — into Being. Can it be that simple? Yes, it is that

simple.

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within

you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not

dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness

of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality

as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can

then feel the same life deep within every other human and every

other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This

is the realization of oneness. This is love.

What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all the forms of life.

What is love? To feel the presence of that One Life deep within

yourself and within all creatures. To be it. Therefore, all love is the

love of God.

Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It

does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is

not the love of God but the “love” of ego. However, the intensity with

which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects

your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others,

and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you

are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you

with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person

sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the

degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.

Even in an otherwise addictive relationship, there may be moments

when something more real shines through, something beyond your

mutual addictive needs. These are moments when both your and your

partner’s mind briefly subside and the pain-body is temporarily in a

dormant state. This may sometimes happen during physical intimacy,

or when you are both witnessing the miracle of childbirth, or in the

presence of death, or when one of you is seriously ill — anything that

renders the mind powerless. When this happens, your Being, which is

usually buried underneath the mind, becomes revealed, and it is this

that makes true communication possible.

True communication is communion — the realization of oneness,

which is love. Usually, this is quickly lost again, unless you are able to

stay present enough to keep out the mind and its old patterns. As

soon as the mind and mind identification return, you are no longer

yourself but a mental image of yourself, and you start playing games

and roles again to get your ego needs met. You are a human mind

again, pretending to be a human being, interacting with another

mind, playing a drama called “love.”

Although brief glimpses are possible, love cannot flourish unless you

are permanently free of mind identification and your presence is

intense enough to have dissolved the pain-body — or you can at least

remain present as the watcher. The pain-body cannot then take you

over and so become destructive of love.