The cult of pairs

“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.”

– Adi Da Samraj