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.