Radiant Joy Brilliant Love

by Clinton Callahan

  Learning something new, which you are doing as you work with this book, automatically makes you look bad to your peers because you look strangely different from how you looked before. You also look bad to yourself because now that you know what you know now, you can see that you did not know it before. There is no way to avoid looking bad if you are on the learning team.

  You get to choose between the “looking good team” and the “learning team.” As a member of the looking good team you might be looking good, but as Ken Windes – my first trainer and a student of Dr. Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis – used to say, “Looking good, going nowhere.” The way you join the learning team is to keep studying, keep practicing, going to talks, seminars, workshops and trainings, doing your own personal experimenting, and implementing new behaviors. In this particular case the way you join the learning team is to keep reading.

  If while reading you begin to experience a painfully clear perspective of yourself and what your relationship-life has been about, let that experience go on and on for a long time, as long as it can go. Not as guilt. Not as self-flagellation. Merely as clear self-recognition about what you have actually been up to. It takes time for your self-image to adjust to the new view. It takes time to hit bottom satisfactorily so that wisdom, humbleness and compassion can ripen out of the pain of disillusionment.

  You may find that you have some resistance to seeing clearly what you have been up to. By seeing the new clarity and at the same time having resistance to seeing the new clarity you are actually holding two things in the same place at the same time. Two things cannot normally occupy the same space at the same time. Holding two things in the same place at the same time is called “cathexis.” Cathecting (allowing cathexis) produces a valuable kind of stress energy, similar to isometric exercises. Conscious cathexis builds your matrix. Cathecting certain energies and exposing yourself to certain experiences and influences produces evolutionary change, which is not necessarily a pretty sight.

  Try to avoid explanatory, justificatory, diversionary or anesthetizing tactics to avoid the discomfort of realizing what you have been up to in your relationship-life. The discomfort is the birth pain of new consciousness within you.

  8. Avoiding Naïveté

  There are real pitfalls to eating hamburgers, driving to work, or taking a bath. There are also real pitfalls along this journey toward radiant joy and brilliant Love. Don’t be naïve. Stay alert to the “dangers” of expansive learning, especially in learning what you did not know that you did not know about. For example, you might be shocked when you first recognize the level and intensity of delusion generally circulated in our culture. Or, you might find that you are changing faster than your present circle of friends and notice that they have little interest in talking about what you now most want to talk about. You might suddenly start remembering surprising little incidents that occurred in your childhood – events that reflect badly on the fantasy image you’ve had of your parents or relatives. You might unexpectedly discover a deep inner inspiration for working in a career that is very different from the career path you are presently following. The dangers along the journey toward radiant joy and brilliant Love are that some parts of your life might change.

  It is naïve to assume that many changes can all happen at once for you, because the matrix for holding greater understanding can only be built at a certain rate. You avoid naïveté in this process when you practice patience, allowing yourself to persist even when changes are not happening as fast as you think they should. Changes unwrap layer by layer. Old wounds are healed one feeling at a time. Expired invalid decisions are re-cognized and re-made one decision at a time. As we discussed in number 5 above, these things take time.

  During the unfolding process, as we move toward radiant joy and brilliant Love, I have observed that imbalances can occur. Pay attention. Watch out that your naïveté doesn’t get you trapped in them. For example, the habit for some women to hate men runs deep in the female heart. There are so many reasons to hate men. Thousands of years of man-hating can vibrate in your nerves, nerves that you inherited directly from the body of a woman who also had reasons to hate men. When you start getting your clarity back, your voice back, and your center back, it is wise to be vigilant that your newfound power is not used by your unconscious commitment to despise and destroy men. You would be surprised how many spiritually developed women languish in a self-made righteous hell of unconscious man-hating. And we wonder why more men are not attracted to personal development!

  For men, we are so deeply terrified of our innate nothingness that stepping into self-reflective opportunities is not exactly our cup of tea. Either we act out being a sensitive, nice boy still hiding behind our mama’s apron or we have shut our feelings down altogether, preferring the adrenaline highs provided by money, power and impersonal sex. Give us a better cell phone or a BMW with GPS and we are satisfied as deeply as we are willing to be satisfied, especially when there are still wars so easy to cook up.

  9. Apprenticing to a Guide

  Consider not trying to make this journey alone. The guidance of someone who has gone before you and can provide you with timely feedback and coaching is highly recommended. A guide may even be necessary for success.

  How do you find such a guide? Stay open and pay attention. Keep talking with people about what you are doing. It is said that, “When the student is ready the teacher appears.” It is also said that, “When the teacher is ready the students appear.” Both of these axioms can be extremely misleading, rich with opportunities for betrayal and self-delusion for the unwary. (Even for the wary! So be very wary!)

  Human beings tend to succeed better when they work together on an evolutionary journey, because support for evolution is contextual; that is, encouragement and support for evolution come from your culture, the people you bring around you. Trying to wing it on your own cannot usually generate enough momentum to escape the gravitational pull toward “normal,” especially within a culture that does not promote personal development and transformation. Feedback and coaching from a skilled guide clarifies and ignites your innate rocket fuel and simultaneously establishes a new cultural context for you to work from. But finding a qualified guide in these days of computer learning may not be so easy. In any case, keep trying. You may discover that outrageous coincidences favor people who make courageous efforts to explore radiant joy and brilliant Love.

  Do not be afraid to apprentice yourself to a lover of love. At the same time, do not be naïve about giving authority to just any so-called guide. There are many self-proclaimed teachers who use their power and the name of love to slide themselves into your purse, your psychology or your panties for their own personal benefit. Pay attention and trust your intuition more than their words. Take your time and observe anyone else working with that guide. If other apprentices seem to be empowered, clear, gentle, open, and able to communicate with you, you may have just found yourself an authentic guide.

  10. Being Lovable

  The biggest stumbling block in relationship is often the unwavering notion that we are unlovable. We can be easily convinced that we are unlovable during incidental childhood events, especially in a modern industrialized culture where childraising has been relegated to the category of chores below that of washing clothes and putting dishes away. After once concluding that we are not loved we may continue to prove ourselves right by selectively editing our perceptions so we only see confirming evidence. Even a tiny scrap of circumstantial evidence suffices to support our commitment to self-hatred. From then on, we live our life in self-fulfilling prophecy, shadowy loneliness, stale resentment and poorly disguised despair.

  If this scenario applies to you, perhaps you are reasoning that, since you are obviously not lovable now, you were never lovable. The problem is, you have already been loved. If you look, you could find the memory of a moment in your life in which you were loved – otherwise you would not know what being loved is all about and being loved would no
t matter to you! You have already been loved by a friend, a teacher, a neighbor, a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, a colleague, a brother or sister, and, God forbid, in moments – and although you may find this hardest of all to accept – even by your own parents. You know that this is true.

  If you have ever been loved in your life, even for a moment, then you are already lovable. It is too late to think, even for a moment, no less for the rest of your life, that you are unlovable.

  But, you may have a persistent feeling that you want to be loved more. This is great. I want to be loved more too. (I also want to win the lottery.) In the meantime, while we wait around for our fantasies to maybe come true, we can learn more about loving and being the source of love so that wherever we go love happens. Then we can ourselves discover the true abundance of radiant joy and brilliant Love, for real, right here and right now, wherever we are.

  So. Good. Now that we are done with that little thing and you can trust yourself to be lovable right now forever, we can get on with the rest of the book.

  These ten basics of expansive learning will start us roving in a propitious direction. As consciousness explorer and educator Joseph Chilton Pearce says, “Perhaps the scope of this work sounds a bit broad for a single volume, and I can hear complaints that this book attempts too much. But I argue that all too often we attempt too little. Better an impossible task of splendid proportion than a sure but piddling one of no consequence. We learn from failures as well as successes.” And as my teacher Lee Lozowick says, “If it is not impossible, why bother doing it?”

  PART II

  The Ordinary

  CHAPTER 2

  Ordinary Relationship/ Ordinary Love

  Human relationship skills at the beginning of the twenty-first century may be regarded by future generations as still being in the Dark Ages.

  If you have the desire to create relationship differently, this book can help you tremendously. But you cannot jump to a new level when standing on thin air. You have to stand on something solid to leap from. The platform we will build to stand on here is that of clarity about your present relationship skills. How can you figure out ways to create extraordinary relationship without first knowing, in exacting detail, how you create relationship the way it shows up for you now. This chapter will explore the qualities and technologies for creating ordinary human relationship.

  MAP OF THREE KINDS OF RELATIONSHIP

  We begin with a “thought-map,” an energetic diagram representing ways that we might be thinking about possible kinds of relationship.

  With a map like this you do not have many options. If you want to create relationship and all you know about is ordinary human relationship, then you have very little chance of creating anything other than ordinary human relationship.

  SECTION 2-A

  Ordinary Relationship / Ordinary Love

  Each of us is doing the best that we can. There is nothing wrong or bad or stupid about being involved in ordinary human relationship. If the best that we can do is eventually proven to be lacking in some way, that is not necessarily our fault. It is perhaps the fault of our education.

  The quality of our relationships is related to the quality of our soft skills education, our so-called relationship intelligence. Relationship intelligence is built out of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, communication skills, listening skills, problem solving skills, our imagination, our relationship to fear and other feelings, the level of our emotional healing, our ability to engage actionless presence with another person, and other skills of this nature. Think about this: Where did we learn how to create relationship?

  Many of us have never participated in a human relationship class or training. We acquired most of our relationship intelligence by the time we were four or five years old, before going to school, by directly imitating our parents. Where did our parents acquire their relationship intelligence? From imitating their parents. Where did our parents’ parents acquire their relationship intelligence? From their parents, and so on. We are probably using a level of relationship intelligence that has been passed on from generation to generation for thousands of years. Newer, more effective, relationship intelligence soft skills do exist, but we probably lack them because neither our parents nor our teachers could demonstrate them.

  This is actually great news! It means you have a real chance to improve your relationship intelligence. The new soft skills are learned when you take personal responsibility for going step-by-step beyond the limits of standard education, just as you are doing right now by studying this book. Let’s examine what we presently use for relationship intelligence.

  This chapter explores the first and most common kind of love, called “ordinary human love.” Ordinary human relationship is built around ordinary human love.

  Because ordinary human love is so widespread and so widely accepted, it may at first be difficult to understand what is being said here. Later in the book, after comparing ordinary human love with extraordinary human love or Archetypal Love, what is said here about ordinary human love may make better sense.

  In any field, our first efforts at unfolding the available knowledge are often sloppy and ineffective. Nonetheless, where we begin can be deeply respected simply because it is the place where we begin. Without the first step there is no next step. In the field of love, where we begin is with ordinary human love.

  MAP OF THREE KINDS OF LOVE

  1. Ordinary Human Love, self-referenced, neurotic, “I need you” love, dependent on certain expected circumstances and experiences.

  2.

  3.

  Ordinary human love originates within a consumer perspective – that of wanting to be loved. We focus on obtaining love and long to have our unmet childhood needs finally fulfilled. When someone appears to fulfill our needs and we say to them, “I love you,” what we actually mean is, “I need you to keep fulfilling my needs. I want to own you, to have you, to possess you and to control you so that you keep taking care of me.” We conclude that this is love.

  Our intention in ordinary human relationship is to arrange it so that the other person takes care of us. If they stop automatically fulfilling our needs, we wonder if they still love us. After all, if they are not fulfilling our needs, why are we in relationship with them?

  To continue getting our needs met we may complain (“You always leave the breakfast dishes in the sink for me to wash.”); manipulate (“The kids feel really neglected when you won’t play with them.”); barter (“If you come with me to visit my mother I will come with you to your business party.”); threaten (“Come to dinner right now or I will feed it to the dog!”); cajole (“C’mon, a big strong man like you should be able to tell our neighbor to stop letting his dog shit in our yard.”); play victim (“Did you ever wonder if I have enough clean underwear in my drawer to wear this week?”), and so on. Such interactions are so normal we may already be wondering, “What else is there?”

  Ordinary human love is based on seeing the evidence of love, such as flowers, chocolates, birthday cards, and having our expectations met. Ordinary human love is also based on having the experience of love, some kind of warm fuzzy feeling in our tummy. If we do not see the evidence that we expect to see, or if we do not feel that warm fuzzy feeling we think of as being in love, then we conclude that the other person does not love us anymore. This makes ordinary human love extremely conditional and unstable. It goes up, down and around like a roller coaster ride. We can never trust that such love is truly there or that love will truly stay. This instability forms the erratic basis of ordinary human relationship.

  If we regard the other person as the source of love for us, then it is up to the other person to make us happy. If we are not happy, then it must be our partner’s fault. If our unhappiness is our partner’s fault, then we have proof that we are not with the right person. Day in and day out we live with neurotic insecurity.

  Infatuation

  Our training about relationship is to look for Mr. or M
rs. Right. If we convince ourselves that we have found such a person, we fall into a sensation known as infatuation. Infatuation is the illusion that the person we are with matches our fantasy image of someone who will perfectly fulfill our needs even if we do not deserve it.

  Infatuation temporarily enlarges our world because it sidesteps the natural territoriality of our defense strategy. For a short time we feel like we are in (or, if we are lucky, back in) our father’s protective arms or nursing at our mother’s nurturing breasts. We might let our partner physically touch us in ways that are definitely taboo for us when our defenses snap back into their usual place. Or we might let our partner look more closely into our private matters – our personal diary, our kinkiness, our past experiences of being wounded – and then, without knowing exactly why, we may close back up again.

  The experience of infatuation lasts only as long as we keep a heavy fog bank over our natural defendedness using the fantasy that we have found an endless source of love for ourselves. As soon as we collect enough evidence about the other person’s behavior and character to prove they don’t love us, the fog burns away. We come out of denial, and our self-generated fantasy image of our partner dies badly. So does our infatuation. We may conclude that “love has ended” and the shock of this disillusionment may unhinge our world. We may feel betrayed (again). Being betrayed gives us justification for unleashing our usual vengeance. Thus occupied we don’t see that chasing an illusion distracts us from making use of treasures that lie within easy reach.