“No one can make it through this without being pointedly disloyal to the self. And all of the loyalty is gathered up and it’s all turned toward what you most deeply know in your heart.”
– John de Ruiter, Pointedly Disloyal to the Self within Experience
“The only true love affair is the one with yourself. I am married to me, and that’s what I project onto everyone. I love you with all my heart; you don’t even have to participate, so there’s no motive in “I love you.” Isn’t that fine? I can love you completely, and you have nothing to do with it. There’s nothing you can do to keep me from the intimacy that I experience with you.
The voice within is what I’m married to. All marriage is a metaphor for that marriage. When I make a commitment, it’s to my own truth, and there’s no higher or lower. “Will you have this man to be your husband?” “I will. And I may change my mind.” That’s as good as it gets. I’m married only to God—reality. That’s where my commitment is. It can’t be to a particular person. And my husband wouldn’t want it any other way.
I also notice that I possess nothing. Stephen slips the wedding ring onto my finger and whispers, “Try to keep it for one month.” It’s his little joke. He’s had the experience of giving me a gift, an expensive one, that was gone the next day, because someone admired it and I knew it was theirs. He realizes that what the ring symbolizes is mine forever and that the ring itself can never belong to me, that I simply wear it until it’s gone. Two years ago, I gave it to a dear, unmarried man whom we both love, but he gave it right back. So here it is, still on my left ring finger, five years later: an unexpected miracle, in Stephen’s view. How can I possess anything? Things come to me only when I need them and only for as long as I need them, and the way I know I need them is that I have them.
There’s a lot to be said for monogamy. It’s the ultimate symbol for One, because it keeps your mind focused on one primary person. You just have to undo everything around him, every story about him that rises up in your mind. Monogamy is a sacred thing, because the mind can be very still in that position. One person will give you the experience that a million people could give you. There’s only one mind. Your partner will bring up every concept ever known to humanity, in every combination, so that you can come to know yourself. If you can just learn to love the one you’re with, you have met self-love.”
“I believe that in the past at one time or another I have compared the usual marriage to the relationship of Siamese twins. I have called it the “cult of pairs.” Instead of being a free relationship between awakened beings, the usual marriage is a dependency relationship between unawakened beings neurotically dependent on one another’s survival. The subject and the object are dependently linked.
The subject-object condition in general is a state of mutual bondage. Both the object and subject are bound and bind one another and, curiously enough, they depend on their state of bondage for their existence.
We try to work out our freedom in the domain of relations yet what we do never becomes freedom, because we never transcend the self-contraction and object bondage. The more we seek to achieve a sense of release in the plane of relationships, the more we bind ourselves. Our relationships are like traps that bind more tightly the more the quarry strives to escape.
The subject-object orientation of conditional existence is like such a trap. It is conceived as a form of bondage from the beginning, but the more you try to liberate yourself in the context of this body, the more bound you become, until you understand the binding principle of the subject-object condition, which pervades both the subject and the object and which—when understood, permits perfect transcendence and Freedom.”
“Meditation practice is a structure that we place around this conscious relationship, around who we are. We’re dipping into that relationship and allowing an awareness that doesn’t judge, and this is what liberates us.
Who you are as a person is a vessel — a form that we use to find out who we are in a way that’s not mentally graspable.
It’s as if to say, “Make of thyself a prayer.”
– James Wood, Meditation is What I Am
Svaha 