Also I was usually not able to, or willing to, explain clearly what I was being emotional about. Telling the whole story of my ‘upset’ would take away the mystery that secured my power, and often the man would put down my emotional reaction as inappropriate and irrational, thus adding fuel to the fire. So I wouldn’t talk about the actual issue and consequently didn’t bother to find out for myself what exactly were my emotions and what were the reasons that triggered them. I can now understand and acknowledge how I had used my psychic and emotional power in all my relationships to win the ‘battle’, if only temporarily, and to take revenge for hurts, disappointments and frustrations.
Since I had already agreed to discard battling as the solution, it was obvious that I had to give up the fight first. If I want peace I can’t wait for the other to start to lay down his arms. This does not work. I have to give up battling because the battle itself is the problem. The solution is not to try and change somebody else, but to look into the very cause of my own unhappiness. Once this condition was understood and agreed upon, we could both cease battling, sit down and talk about any situation that caused disagreement.
Now I would not only ask myself, ‘how do I feel?’ but also question the very necessity of having this feeling. Understanding that emotion itself was a major component of my (female) identity, and of my ‘self’, allowed me to explore what lies behind any upcoming emotion – what thought, what belief, what investment, what instinct. By examining the validity of the underlying cause I was then able to eliminate the subsequent emotions, one by one, including the greatest and holiest of them all: Love itself.
Now I just find the most sensible way of being happy and harmless which, of course, includes considering everyone who is part of the particular situation. For me, this also involves cleaning myself up so I can be free of misery and malice – not contributing to the chaos people usually create for each other. Everybody seems to live everybody else’s life, perpetuating the cycle of misery by consolation, sympathy, empathy and compassion – thus helping people to stay helpless. I can supply practical help if someone asks me to, but I am not responsible for anybody else’s happiness and neither is anybody else responsible for my happiness. It makes life much less complicated if I stop trying to find the solution for ‘S.E.P.’, ‘Someone Else’s Problem’ and focus my intent and effort on becoming happy and harmless.
I remember my last disagreement with Peter nine months ago. I had just come back from overseas and, although I still had rented a house to live in, I decided to live with him. I had shifted my belongings into his flat, but one evening I got the wind up! Scared of the new adventure ahead of me I felt the ‘poor victim’ of being trapped in a place where I suddenly didn’t want to be. What I wanted was the solace of Peter’s love, which should bridge the expected difficult times, and his reassurance that everything would be all right. I used all my old manipulation skills to convince Peter to see the situation my way and offer me comfort and sympathy.
But he simply responded, ‘Look, I know you are an independent woman and perfectly capable of looking after yourself. If you don’t want to be here this evening, you could go. The car is downstairs, you still pay rent for the other place – you are free to go there any time!’ This simple stating of the facts switched on my intelligence again. Well, this was obviously the case. It meant I had a choice in the situation; I was responsible for myself, instead of being a victim of the circumstances. I could change the situation without his help. Out of this clarity I realised that I chose to be with him because I wanted to be! It brought me straight back into the actual situation, and all need for comfort, compromise, manipulating and changing the other simply disappeared into thin air.
And what a relief it was, that I had no power over Peter, no way to make him do what I wanted! I could not bend him in any direction because he wasn’t afraid to be on his own. Thus, my tools in the power battle had failed and could finally be thrown out of the window. Also, I discovered that I wasn’t afraid to be on my own either. So in our relationship we do not need to win the battle of ‘dependency’, we can focus on each of us being here – where we can meet freely and enjoy each other’s company whenever we want to.
My traditional response to the feeling of being trapped had been that the man should give me his love and reassurance. But the way to the intimacy that I had already experienced and wanted to have with Peter all the time, was that I had to question, examine and eliminate the notorious bunch of feelings called love. Peter’s description of our adventure into freedom and intimacy is certainly not just a male point of view. Did he love me enough or not, or did I love him enough or not, was not the question – I discovered that love was not the solution but the problem itself!
The answer again lay 180 degrees in the opposite direction to what I had come to know up to now. I had expected or assumed someone was to love my ‘grotty self’, when even I could not stand those parts of me! A person who ‘loves me’ is supposed to accept all those ‘quirks of my personality’, which no intelligent human being would be able to put up with without blind nature’s intoxication known as ‘being in love’. And for years I had tried the same with the men I had ‘loved’, without success or happiness, let alone lasting intimacy. Intimacy can only happen when there is no emotion, no feeling or projection in the way between us. So, one of the first things that we discovered to be in the way of actual intimacy were the feelings of love – that sweet syrup that was usually poured over the spiky, malicious, miserable ‘self’, which I was most of the time!
I decided there and then to face the challenge, to abandon the love-dream and go for the actual experience – meeting another human being as intimately as possible instead of looking up to him and waiting for him to be the ‘hero of my dreams’.
That very evening the situation changed. My pining stopped. The fog in the head cleared. My expectations disappeared. I could again stand on my own feet and equally enjoy the time when I was by myself. I had recovered my autonomy – my autonomy in the sense that I am the only one in my life who is responsible for my happiness.
Detecting and debunking the romantic dream placed the first big dent into the wobbling monster of love. Now it was much easier to look at what it was in my ‘self’ that cried out for this love. It has been quite scary at times, to rid myself of the very identity I had as a woman. What would be left of me when I didn’t feel love? How could I relate both to Peter and other people, if not with emotion or intuition? What would I have to offer in friendships or conversations, if not sympathy and consolation? My whole edifice of ‘who’ I was, who I believed myself to be, began to crumble in a heap as I questioned and demolished the attributes of love and emotion. Now naked of all those characteristics and beliefs as well as their resultant emotions and behaviour, which have kept man and woman apart for millennia, I am experiencing for the first time in my life actual intimacy with a man. Now there are no dreams, no expectations, no emotions or any other restrictions that could cloud the thrill of meeting another human being. Now instead of random moments of ‘sweet love’ I am able to give Peter my full attention and clean attentiveness each time we communicate, and so does he.
Even after dismissing love as a concept or an option of relating, I still had to be watchful of my ‘love-attacks’, as I called them. They would come through the backdoor, seduce me with a rose-colored mood and appear so nice and cosy – such a temptation to surrender back into loving Peter instead of meeting him directly. However, I had understood and experienced often enough that any feeling for the other, howsoever sweet and soothing, would only make him a projected imaginary figure on my own screen of emotions, which can so easily change at the slightest whim. It had nothing to do with the actual person or situation.
Examining it closer I discovered that this need for an anchor derives from the female instinct for protection. Only when I feel ‘connected’ to a person can I keep up the illusion that I can rely on this person for ‘bad times’. However, whenever I managed not to fall into the trap of love – what a delight then to discover the actual person, thrilling, alive, meeting for the first time and not knowing what either of us is going to say or do next!
There is no separation caused by us being in different camps, where the man never understands the woman and vice versa. When Peter talks about an issue, an experience or how he perceives a situation I know exactly what he is talking about, and so does he when I tell my story.
The actual permanent intimacy we enjoy now is vastly superior to any temporary good feelings of love, which we both had experienced before.
When I tried to tell Peter about my experiences and insights his simple response gave me quite a shock. ‘But all this is just inside your mind, it is simply your own interpretation, it may appear to be real, but it is not actual.’ Yes, that was true. I could easily see that I was inside the ‘mind’, roaming about in the different chambers of my assembled beliefs-systems, trying to find the one that was ‘right’ and ‘true’ – while in fact, I was just having a little grander and unusually complex perception of this huge labyrinth of thoughts and feelings! I could see more of my ideas or concepts and other people’s ideas, but they were simply ideas. None of them had any relevance to the actuality of the physical world!
I heard myself saying to Richard that ‘We’ve got all the time in the world’ and when I contemplated on the sentence that had just slipped out, time suddenly stood still.
I stopped in mid-sentence and the ensuing silence caught the attention of my two companions.
It was all over, in an instant!
There was no fear, no experience of death, no physical phenomena or changes, just the realization that I have always been here in this eternal moment in time, in this luminous magical world, more naked than I was born and utterly safe.
The stillness in my head was palpable (and has remained so ever since). Richard asked me a few test-questions to confirm what just had happened. We exchanged a few notes of how it is to live in this actual world and we found that our experiences matched.
