This is the text of a talk I recently gave at the Center for Nondualism.  Any comments?

 

The Dangers of Special Relationships

 

March 1, 2009

 

Center for Nondualism, Fort Walton Beach Florida

 

Good morning, how many have enjoyed the pleasure of having that one special person in their life that makes them complete.  Or as Rene Zellwegger, in Jerry Macguire said to someone special on the elevator, "You complete me."

 

You know the one.  Hallmark makes a lot of money selling cards so we can profess how we wouldn't be who we are without them.  How they fill in the parts where we aren't quite complete.  How they are the butter on our toast and the jelly in our PB&J sandwich.

 

All of this is well and good and sounds sweet but it has an underlying danger to it. First, it makes us entertain the thought that we can be incomplete.  To do so, we have to forget who we really are.  We have to realize that by thinking we are incomplete we have actually endorsed the notion of separation from God.

 

Secondly, we have now become involved in a relationship where someone can withhold something from us if they want to and we could very easily end up in a situation where we could be blackmailed or we could even act like an addict having his favorite recre-cuetical withheld and being willing to do anything to get what we want.

 

In a special relationship, two people come together to benefit one at the cost of another.  One person needs something, anything, that the other person has and the other person provides it.  In my work I run into folks who are in what only can be described as very addictive special relationships.  That's because the other person provides something for them that they don't think they have and need to get from someone else.  This is a very dangerous place to be and I see it all the time.  If I am addicted to your presence because I erroneously believe your presence makes me whole, then if you decide to withdraw your presence from me for some reason, the relationship isn't working, etc., then you, the person who is withdrawing that which I am addicted to becomes my enemy.

 

This wonderful person who made someone complete and was the missing parts of someone's life now becomes the enemy in that person's life and can be subject to all kinds of verbal and physical abuse in order to force them stay.

 

You, being the provider, who believes that I need whatever it is that I believe I am missing because I have obviously forgotten who I am, now become resentful.  Your path is obviously going in another direction or drifting slightly but you can't follow it because you and your ego have been wrapped up in the error of believing that we can be anything other than perfect.  Not only that, but you believe that this inferior and lacking person in front of you can't survive without what you have to offer.

 

So romantic, so Hallmark, so special.

 

What about adjustments in relationships or changing yourself to better suit someone else?

 

Adjustment:  "To make correspondent or conformable."
"To adapt or conform oneself (as to new conditions)."
"To achieve mental and behavioral balance between one's own needs and the demands of others."

 

So, quite simply, one thing is adjusted in order to correspond or conform itself to another thing, so that now they fit.

 

With this fuller understanding of adjustment  and applying that to the arena of interpersonal relationships. How are we doing that? How does the concept of adjustment  apply to human relationships? This shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Adjustment, as we saw, involves relationship between two things, which surely can include two people. Adjustment as applied to human relationships was even part of the dictionary definition of it (the last definition I listed above).

 

It does not take much thought to realize the significance we ascribe to adjustment in interpersonal relationships. In our eyes, relationships need lots of adjustment in order to work. The fit between two people is never naturally perfect. There is always some lack of fit. So to make the fit better we make adjustments. I adjust myself to fit your needs. But I also try to get you to adjust to fit mine. And of course the same thing is going on from your end. This is a massive part of the whole dance of relationship. By me adjusting to your needs and you adjusting to mine, we will hopefully meet in the middle and carry on a successful relationship. We learn the art of compromise, we learn to give and take, and the relationship works.

 

Relationships clearly depend on adjustments or so we mistakenly believe.  The implication is that this is not the case at all. We do not need to adjust to each other in order to get along! In fact, according to this sentence, we are not adjusting to each other.  They are being adjusted to the ego's idea of what the relationship ought to be. The ego is not adjusting the two people to conform to each other; it is adjusting the relationship to conform to itself. The relationship is being adjusted not to their needs but to its. The ego is the only one getting its needs met here.

 

The people in the relationship need to work through their areas of contention and decide on a common goal.  The goal should be adjusted not the people working towards it.

 

If you have two things that already perfectly fit each other and you then adjust one or the other, what happens? Obviously, you throw them out of alignment. For example, our garage door has a device that keeps it from closing if there is something in the way, to protect children from being crushed. On either side of the garage is an electronic eye and a beam of light shines between these two eyes. When that beam is broken, by, say, a child lying on the cement, the garage door will not close. What also breaks the beam, though, is when the two electronic eyes are not pointing perfectly at each other. So, when you bump one of them with a rake or shovel (as I've done more times than I care to admit), they fall out of alignment and the garage will not close. They are already aligned; only when I accidentally adjust one of them do they fall out of alignment.

 

We are like the electronic eyes. In our true nature, we are all naturally aligned. We point at each other perfectly, creating a direct beam of connection. Thus, any adjustment, in one person or the other, rather than bringing the two of us into alignment, takes us out of alignment. We no longer fit. Now further adjustments become necessary. The adjustments, then, get in the way of the direct relationship that results from the innate fit between two people.

 

Of course, this alignment exists on the level of who we really are, and that is the level on which we are meant to relate. The holiness in me is meant to recognize and love the holiness in you, and vice versa. As soon as I think that I am my body and personality, and that you are yours, we will need to make endless futile adjustments in "who we are" in order to attempt a fit. To truly fit, we need to uncover the pre-existing alignment, not further obscure it by adding new adjustments to the original ones which threw us out of alignment.

 

Once upon a time there were two people who fit together perfectly. They were made for each other. The natural state of their relationship was perfect harmony and bliss. Their only desire was to meet, to unite, and for this they were perfectly suited.

 

But then this man showed up at the front door uninvited. He said, "I am a mediator, a trained psychologist, and you need me. You have a terrible rift between you. Only expert help can fix it. You (the man in the relationship) need to learn how to adjust yourself to her needs. You also need to stand up for yours. You must learn to clearly communicate those needs and how she can adjust herself to meet them. You (the woman) need also to adjust yourself so that you can fulfill his needs. But you can't lose yours in the process. You need to learn how to artfully tell him how he can satisfy your needs, entice him into doing so, and reward him afterwards. Let me put you in two separate rooms. You can communicate through me. Hopefully, through this process, both partners will adjust themselves until they can meet in the middle and finally achieve a truly constructive, healthy relationship."

 

The two are reluctant but allow the mediator to go ahead. He places them in their separate rooms and begins shuttling back and forth between them. They get into the spirit of things and start suggesting adjustments, but in his wisdom he knows better and so he makes his proposed adjustments, not theirs. Not surprisingly, since they started out a perfect fit, each adjustment brings them further out of alignment, not closer together. Finally, they are left with a mountain of adjustments standing in between them, and the mediator there as well, who has no plans of going away. It seems they are in such fundamental discord that they need his services permanently. Their original, perfect harmony has been forgotten. Needless to say, they do not live happily ever after.

 

And this doesn't have to be in strictly romantic relationships, either.  We are in relationships all the time.  We are in relationships with everything we see, touch, and experience every day.  The special relationships we form with those items in our version of reality are the ones we need to be wary of.

 

When the car you love breaks down and won't take you to work how much do you love it?  When the TV goes out and you can't watch your favorite show, how much do you like your TV?

 

When I speak of relationships, in general, I mean any situation in our life that involves more than simply one person, ourselves. Like I said, the phrase refers not just to romantic relationships, but to our relationships with our parents, children, and siblings, relationships between bosses and employees, teachers and pupils (regardless of the subject matter), or between us and anyone we interact with, from doctors to policemen to someone we meet on the street-anyone with whom we are thrown together by the circumstances of our lives. They include not only relationships with people for whom we have a particular love or liking, but also ones with people we especially dislike, judge, or even hate.

 

So how do, we get from this special relationship to a holy relationship?

 

Most of the time it resides as a potential or a presence just beneath the surface, but able to be contacted. There are thus two relationships going on at once: the usual surface relationship, which is dominated by the ego, and the holy relationship, which only surfaces occasionally in moments of genuine forgiveness, love, and joining.

 

This dual-relationship is really there in all relationships. All of them have the surface relationship that is dominated by the ego, and an underlying relationship of true, holy joining. For, as I said, God created us all perfectly united. What the Course calls a holy relationship is simply a case where that underlying relationship has been allowed to come closer to the surface, where it has become a consciously shared goal and, as a result, an active presence in the situation.

 

Something inside you is terrified of uncovering the primordial unity the two of you have shared since before time. And so that something shows up as your guide, to expertly shepherd you into a pseudo-joining, a joining based on carefully worked-out bargains, based on each being a slave to the other's needs (which the Course says are not even real needs). This pseudo-joining does not reveal the pre-existing union God gave you; it obscures it. It is not even a sincere attempt at finding that true joining, but a deliberate attempt to bury it. It is a studied [calculated, premeditated] interference. Each adjustment makes the implicit statement, "As we are, we do not fit." Each adjustment makes one partner a slave to the needs of the other, and no true joining is possible between slave and master. Thus, after all the adjusting and counter-adjusting, the very thought that you share this pre-existing, perfect relationship seems at best irrelevant, at worst patently false.

 

The Course talks about true joining and false joining.  True being the holy relationship and false being the special relationship.

 

One example of this kind of false joining is the typical scenario of two people joining in a business venture. I think if we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit that as a general rule, we enter into such ventures in order to serve our own ego goals: to make money for ourselves, acquire material possessions, give ourselves the means to live a life of luxury, gain prestige, etc. Our business partners, in our eyes, are simply useful means to accomplish these personal goals. We may deny this and claim that the our partner's success is equally important to us. We may have the best of conscious intentions, and really be striving to see our business ventures as truly collaborative enterprises. But given our heavy investment in the ego, I think that in most cases the bottom line is still "What's in it for me?" This is made evident by the fact that we are very quick to jettison our business partners when they don't hold up their end of the bargain. Our primary motivation is to accomplish our separate, personal ego goals, not to truly join with the other person.

 

Another example of false joining is one I mentioned above, a kind of "joining" that is near and dear to all of our hearts: the romantic love relationship. At least if our popular music, literature, TV shows, and movies are any indicators, the romantic love relationship is easily the most sought after prize on earth. In our eyes, finding that special someone to join "body and soul" in wedded (or at least cohabitating) bliss is the deepest, truest kind of joining imaginable.

 

But again, I think we have to admit that as a general rule, we enter into such relationships to serve our own ego goals. We see our romantic partners as the perfect fulfillment of our personal ego fantasies, and "love" them as long as their bodies satisfy us sexually, say the right things to us, and do the things we want them to do. Our romantic relationships are thus pretty much the same as our business relationships: However much we may say that we care about our partner's welfare, the bottom line is what's in it for us. And just as with our business partners, the tenuous, illusory nature of romantic "love" is revealed by just how quick we are to dump our romantic partners when they no longer satisfy. Once they stop fulfilling our ego fantasies, we no longer want anything to do with them, and may even come to hate them. (Our penchant for bitter divorces is certainly a testament to this.) As with our business ventures, our primary motivation here is to accomplish our separate, personal ego goals, not to truly join with the other person.

 

By definition, what is it that the Course in Miracles calls a holy relationship?

 

A relationship in which two or more people have truly joined in a common goal, at least for an instant. In this instant the Holy Spirit enters the relationship and heals it at a deep, unconscious level. This deep-level healing then slowly works its way to the surface, overturning the ego patterns that still may dominate much of the conscious interaction. As the holy relationship matures, the people involved will experience an increasing sense of oneness, which will prove to them more effectively than anything else that they are not separate egos. And they will exercise their joint special function of together giving healing to the world.

 

The holy relationship is a foretaste of Heaven. Heaven, the Course tells us, is the awareness of absolute oneness. In a holy relationship, two people experience and manifest that oneness here, in the dream.

 

The holy relationship described in the Text is specifically Helen and Bill's. That holy relationship therefore fits the pattern of their relationship-starting out as a special relationship filled with major issues, and then coming to one pivotal moment in which the two join in a common goal, which allows holiness to enter the relationship.

 

Like how Helen and Bill joined, true joining is a joining that affirms the inherent unity of minds by recognizing our common interests. "Common interests," as I'm using the term here, does not refer to the idea of being interested in the same things (like sharing a hobby or similar political views), but to the idea of mutual benefit: Because our minds are one, we gain or lose together. In the Course's view, this recognition of common interests is the most crucial turning point in our entire spiritual journey, the key insight that tilts our minds away from the ego and toward God. If one person recognizes common interests with another (which can be done even if the other person doesn't consciously see common interests himself), then that one person becomes a teacher of God. And if two people see common interests with each other and join in a unified goal, then they enter into what the Course calls a holy relationship, a relationship which "represents the reversal of the unholy [special] relationship" (T-17.V.2:4). For while the special relationship is a false joining of egos in the service of separate ego goals, the holy relationship is a true joining of minds in the service of a truly common goal (or "common purpose," which in the Course means the same thing), a goal established by the Holy Spirit.

 

This leads to a big question: What constitutes a truly common goal? What makes the common goal of the holy relationship different from the ego goals that masquerade as "common goals" in the special relationship? In a nutshell, the Course says that a common goal is anything that can be truly shared. I read a discussion of how the joining of two people in a common purpose invites God into their relationship.  It said that it does not matter what their purpose is, but they must share it wholly to succeed. So now the question becomes: What kind of purpose or goal is wholly shareable?

 

Based on my understanding of the Course, I would say that in order for a goal to be wholly shareable, there are two properties it must have. First, it must be an idea. The goal of acquiring material things cannot be truly shared, because material things themselves cannot be truly shared; even if we jointly own something, in truth we "divide its ownership" (T-5.I.1:10). A goal rooted in an idea, however, is a completely different story, because as the Course tells us many times, ideas can be truly shared:

 

If you share an idea...you do not lessen it. All of it is still yours although all of it has been given away. (T-5.I.1:11-12)

 

Second, and more specifically, it must be an idea that reflects the goal of universal salvation. That is, the goal must involve the realization of a saving idea, the facilitation of someone's internal healing or awakening. It must be focused on the healing of one or both participants in the relationship, or the healing of someone outside of the relationship-healing that, wherever it is specifically focused, will ultimately include everyone and benefit the entire world.

 

Thus, we cannot truly join in the "common goal" of hateful ideas like white supremacy, getting revenge, or forcibly establishing our religion as the one true faith, because these ideas are obviously ideas of separation, not ideas that reflect the goal of universal salvation. We cannot truly join in any ego idea, because the ego is the very antithesis of salvation-in fact, the ego is the very thing we are saved from. This means that we certainly cannot join in the goal of acquiring specialness-the goal of the special relationship-because specialness by definition is an attempt to "save" the special one at everyone else's expense. Only an idea that leads to the salvation of all can serve as the common goal of a holy relationship.

 

For example, a patient comes to a therapist. The two of them don't, however, form a holy relationship immediately, because they don't have a common goal.  At the beginning, the patient's goal and the therapist's are at variance.  The patient's goal is to keep his self-concept exactly as it is, but without the suffering that it entails, while the therapist's goal is to change the patient in some way that he believes is real. Therefore, in order to have a holy relationship, the two will have to give up their original goals and find a way of reconciling these differences. They will have to find a common goal at which they can meet.

 

The Course appears to teach that we go through a period of preparation, getting ready for holy relationships and that when we are ready, we will meet those holy relationship partners inevitably. So we don't really have to do anything about finding the right partner, we just have to get ourselves ready. There are many articles that clearly present the fact that pupils begin to seek their teacher when the teacher is ready to learn. The same principles that apply to this particular form of holy relationship apply to all holy relationships: We will inevitably meet the right partners for our holy relationship as soon as we are ready to learn from the holy relationship. Prior to that time we probably would not even recognize them if we met them!

 

Should we be looking for our holy relationship partner? Well, the Manual says that when the teacher is ready the pupils start looking for him, so apparently looking is part of the process. I think that "looking" is not the kind of looking we usually think of, however. We make it a specialness thing; we are looking for that special one. I think we should be looking continually for holy relationship partners; with everyone we meet! If every relationship is destined to become holy, we should look on everyone as a potential partner for a holy relationship. A holy relationship may last a few seconds or a lifetime; so everyone we meet is a candidate.

 

In Chapter 3 of the Teacher's Manual, we read:

 

There is no one from whom a teacher of God cannot learn, so there is no one whom he cannot teach. However, from a practical point of view he cannot meet everyone nor can everyone find him. Therefore, the plan includes very specific contacts to be made for each teacher of God. There are no accidents in salvation. Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship. They are ready for each other (M-3.1:4-8).

 

In this world, within time, we can't meet everyone, so "very specific contacts" are set up for each of us. There is a plan. There are certain ones with whom we can develop holy relationships; and there are no accidents. The key line, which I think can reassure us if we are worrying about how we will meet the right partner for a holy relationship, is this: "Those who are to meet will meet." There is no need to worry about it; it's a done deal.

 

Thank you for letting me have this special time with you this morning

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