Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  THE DISTURBING NATURE OF INTIMACY

  Our society’s idea seems to be that relationship is supposed to be a refuge from our difficult lives. Our cultural expectation, reflected through the media and in terms of relational norms, is that intimacy is supposed to be warm, supportive, and continually sexually passionate. Perhaps we’ll hit a few bumps at the beginning, but then we’re supposed to sort of coast from there. I just don’t find much evidence that this is accurate. I do think that some couples are very lucky. Just like an individual might win the lottery, some couples win the relationship lottery. They genuinely have very positive, passionate, easy relationships, which continue in this way over decades. But the majority of people I’ve worked with and known socially struggle with intense disturbance and vulnerability, which get brought out into the open by intimate relationship.

  We might consider the difference, though, between what we want and what is to our benefit. Most of us would probably choose a life without pain, never getting sick, being independently wealthy, children who never drove us crazy, and so on. But health is not synonymous with positive experience. Wisdom is not the same as happiness. And freedom is definitely not dependent on feeling good.

  From a Buddhist perspective, a fortunate life is one with “the right amount of suffering,” as long as we are willing and able to work with and learn from our difficult experiencing. The path of waking up appears to require contrast, discovering that it’s impossible to be identified with any one version of reality, any one formula. At the same time, it seems very helpful to learn how to moderate the degree of intensity we engage with. Not enough disturbance is comfortable but is unlikely to bring into awareness what we must work with. Too much disturbance is likely to take us into a dissociative or even retraumatized state, in which it is very hard to stay present. In exactly the same way, a fortunate intimate relationship can be understood as one with “the right amount of suffering.” But for our relationship with our partner to actually be fortunate, we must discipline our relationship to our own difficult experiencing. This means that we must do the counterinstinctual work of bringing awareness, embodiment, and kindness to exactly what we don’t want to feel. We have a choice about how we relate to the disturbance of intimacy. If we want an intimate relationship to only be a source of happiness and comfort and security, I think most of us will end up feeling disappointed—maybe even bitter or victimized. Instead, we might consider relating to our experience of intimacy as one of the most powerful vehicles for personal and spiritual growth that we, in our culture, have access to, as our culture doesn’t really seem to have many options in terms of viable spiritual paths.

  There are many understandings of what a spiritual path involves. One view says that our normal, socially familiar experience is not the whole picture. Most of us feel ourselves to be very small, finite selves in an incomprehensibly vast and infinite universe—and then we die. How can we find meaning, joy, and openheartedness in these circumstances? Most spiritual paths offer a variety of ways to help us see through this appearance of alienation; to experience our actual identity with the mysterious vast nature of reality; to experience ourselves as expressions of the universe, rather than as its observers. Because this is not easy work and it usually progresses through certain stages, it is usually presented as a “path.” Understanding and working with intimacy as a path is one of the best ways to challenge ourselves to grow—or to “wake up,” from a Buddhist point of view.

  Another way of saying this is that intimacy demands authenticity. The closer we are to somebody, the longer we are with somebody, the more difficult it is to pretend that very deep grief, rage, fear, or panic is not being triggered in our relationship, and the harder it becomes to deny how powerfully our partners bring love and meaning to our lives, beyond what we can create for ourselves. In our relationships, we can choose either to acknowledge and go into our disturbances and vulnerabilities or to deny and avoid them. If we choose the latter, it’s generally an unconscious choice on the part of both people. We unconsciously agree to ritualize the relationship in ways that allow us to stay together, while protecting us from too much vulnerability. But if we want to grow—if we want to wake up—it makes sense to me to use the never-resolvable disturbance of intimacy as an opportunity to gradually increase our tolerance for living in the truth of each moment, rather than constantly trying to live in the fantasy of our preferences; to use it as a tool to help free ourselves of our conditioned history, so we can live our lives as adults, rather than reenacting the survival strategies we developed when we were quite young and immature.

  ALL RELATIVE EXPERIENCE IS RELATIONAL

  While relationship with an intimate partner is often at the forefront of what we consider to be our “relationship issues,” I think it may help to step back a bit and look at the context of relationship in general. Relationship is all around us. From a Buddhist perspective, everything we experience—other than pure awareness—is relational. In fact, in Buddhist jargon, we say that pure awareness is an “absolute” experience, while everything else is “relative.” And from what I can tell, all relative experience is relational. Meaning that upon examination, we’re never going to find any experience that has its own independent, essential nature.

  Let me offer some obvious examples. You can’t have high without low; there’s no essential highness. The concept of “high” is only defined by the concept of “low,” and vice versa. You can’t have hot without cold, or light without dark, or left without right. In fact, we can’t articulate any experience without contrasting it with something that it’s not. This relative nature of all experience is somewhat of an alien idea in our culture. For at least the past two thousand years, the pervasive assumption of our culture has been that we have an independent, continuing, essential nature; that the objects of our experience have their own nature, independent of ours. But when we examine our experience beyond appearances, we find that everything is mutually cocreative. By this, I mean that everything depends on an incredibly complex number of conditions for its own appearance. To have conscious experience, we need sense organs. We also need material reality, whatever that might be, and we need to have our awareness. No one of those qualities can give rise to our experience all by itself. It’s like steam or water or ice. None of these manifestations of H2O exists independently of temperature. Or like building an arch: it’s the tension—or the relationship—between the bricks that keeps the arch together.

  In the same way, our experience seems to be defined by both what it is and what it’s not. There seems to be a certain foreground/background quality to experience. As humans, we tend to focus on what’s in the foreground, on what’s moving. It’s probably an evolutionary hardwiring that we have. But what’s in the foreground is actually defined by what’s in the background. Perhaps you are familiar with the vase-faces optical illusion (see Figure 6.1). Depending on how you look at the drawing, you might see two figures looking at each other or a vase in between. Our experience flips back and forth from one to the other; we can’t hold both the vase and the faces at the same time. Why? Because what is in the foreground is actually defined by what is in the background. That’s the way our brains work.

  FIGURE 6.1VASE-FACES OPTICAL ILLUSION

  In a similar way, our sense of self is defined by not self. If we lived in a reality without gender, we would not experience ourselves as male or female. We think of ourselves as uniquely human by how we are different from other life forms. Every appearance is a cooperation among an incredibly complex number of factors. To appreciate this, however, we need to really examine our experience. If we stop at appearances, it’s going to seem that everything has its own independent nature. You and I are separate bodies, driving separate cars, doing separate things with our days. We each have thoughts and feelings the other can’t ever really know. So, to understand that all experience is relative, we must hold both the appearance and the analysis simultaneously. We don’t choose sides. We don’t say, “Everyth
ing’s just one big mess together,” and we don’t say, “Everything is totally independent.” Instead, we acknowledge that everything appears to have its own independent nature and, upon examination, turns out not to have its own objective existence.

  Recall the example of the rainbow I mentioned earlier in the book. It certainly looks like there’s a rainbow in the sky, and it wouldn’t make sense to deny this experience. But upon investigation, there is actually no independently existing rainbow there. It’s a completely relational experience. Upon investigation, all of our experience, including the “experiencing self,” is found to be completely relational in its nature. Just as it doesn’t make sense to look for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow that doesn’t have an objective existence, it may not make sense to look for a “true self” with its own independent reality.

  NOT TWO, NOT ONE

  How might we relate to the assertion that our world is perhaps not a collection of independently existing “things”? That it may instead be an incredibly complex reality, in which anything that “is” is defined by, and simultaneous with, all that “is not”? One approach, which we discussed in chapter 3, is to increase our capacity to hold apparently contradictory ideas, thoughts, and feelings simultaneously, with no fantasy of resolution. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” And Michael J. Gelb, author of How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci, named “sfumato”—or the capacity to hold contradictions and uncertainty—as one of Da Vinci’s “seven principles.”

  We can also consider the idea that all of our experiencing is inherently without essential division; there is nothing we experience that is not an expression of our experiencing. This idea seems obvious, but most of us actually feel that we are somehow separate or disconnected from life, from others, and even from aspects of ourselves. From a Buddhist view, this sense of basic disconnection is illusory, maintained out of awareness, moment by moment, with great effort and creativity. One view of how we might generate this feeling of essential division was discussed in detail in chapter 3. But because of our unexamined feeling of separateness and even disconnection, we understandably think that we will experience “wholeness” when we can improve our feelings of connection. But just like “high” and “low,” our experiences of “separate” and “connected” have no independent existence; they are heads and tails of the same coin. We can’t be connected unless we’re separate to begin with. We can’t separate unless we’re first connected. Perhaps we will have a better sense of our already- and always-existing wholeness as we learn to include feeling both separate and connected, at all times, as equally valid and necessary. It turns out that all apparent opposites are expressions of how our conceptual minds work, rather than accurate descriptions of a fragmented reality. Holding both opposites at the same time turns out to be a better approximation of the nondivided nature of our experiencing than trying to resolve which of these energies we should take sides with.

  In the field of quantum physics, Niels Bohr proposed the principle of complementarity: Because reality is so complex, so basically unknowable, the best approximations of reality must allow contradictory descriptions and understandings. We can understand light as both a wave and a particle. I like my job; I feel drained by my job. I want life to be fair; I know that life isn’t fair. I want to feel more alive; I want to keep the security of what’s familiar. If I can tolerate the sense that there’s no formula to count on, not even the formula of pretending that I have conflicting feelings that must be resolved, then I may find that it’s possible to call on the full range of my experience as I engage with this incredibly complex life. Even more subtly, if I hold my contradictory experiences as equally valid, my “sense of self” is left in some open space in the middle of these positions. This may be a useful understanding of the Buddhist idea of “middle way”—not “half of this and half of that,” but rather an open creative awareness that holds contradictory versions of reality, without a need to be identified with any of them. A Buddhist summary of this view is “not two, not one,” meaning that it’s not entirely accurate to say that everything is separate, but it’s also not entirely accurate to say that we’re all one. This is simple to say, but it requires a lot of work to gradually develop the capacity to hold this complex state of mind in an ongoing way.

  THE FUNDAMENTAL EXPERIENCE OF RELATIONSHIP IS THE EXPERIENCE OF FUNDAMENTAL DISTURBANCE

  Perhaps for all of us, the most fundamental location of this never resolvable, cocreated experience of relationship will be that of “self” and “other.” This experience is inherently disturbing. There is some type of gap, or transition, between self and other that we can never cover over or bridge. We can never make our experience only about our self without some other intruding. I can try to create a world of control, tranquility, and order, but other people—or the weather or my own health problems—will mess things up. We can never make our experience only about others without our self intruding. I can try to be selflessly generous and to practice surrender and acceptance, but I will not be able to get rid of selfish thoughts or upsetting emotions. We cannot even draw a clear, straight line dividing self and other. When does the air we breathe change from atmosphere to part of our body? When does our language transition from being what we are given by others to become our own creative expression? At what point does our partner’s behavior become our interpretation of his or her behavior?

  It’s very upsetting to not be able to create and count on a continuing, stable, reliable formula about who I am and how I should relate to my life and to others. Out of this upset—this accurate intuition that we will never have any solid ground to stand on—most of us unconsciously try to create and maintain our own formulas of certainty. Of course, because this fantasy of certainty is a defense against the reality of basic uncertainty, our efforts end up generating a subtle, but powerful, atmosphere of chronic anxiety. This chronic anxiety, in turn, fuels a continuing project of seeking resolution, which itself results in more anxiety. So it goes, in what can operate as a self-perpetuating cycle of unnecessary suffering and confusion.

  The most obvious and unconscious strategy for not acknowledging the never-resolvable tension between self and other is to emphasize one or the other side of our experience, while erasing or ignoring the other side. From one perspective, we can focus on self and subtly invalidate other, which gives rise to an experience that life is basically about separateness. From another perspective, we can focus on other and subtly invalidate self, which gives rise to an experience that life is basically about connection. While either strategy may give us some degree of conscious relief, it never actually works, because it’s not based on what’s actually true. But this response to the inherent disturbance of relationship is so pervasive that almost all of us appear to enter adulthood consciously identified with either a style of separateness or of connectedness, while unconsciously disowning the opposite energy.

  SEPARATENESS AND CONNECTION IN RELATIONSHIP

  I find that the qualities of separateness and connection provide a rich, useful framework for working with intimacy and relationship. Almost all cultures have some way of talking about these two apparently contradictory energies. Many relate the truth of separation to masculine energy and the truth of connection to feminine energy. We might also call them yang and yin or becoming and being. Whatever words we use, we’re talking about the tension or dance between these energies. While they appear to be contradictory, we also sense that they are inseparable in some way, that both are expressions of the basic nature of reality. Upon investigation, we find no independently existing quality of “connection” nor of “separation.” It’s easy to generate confusion when we believe that we can have one without the other. To be clear, we are not talking about “male” and “female” here. All life forms must have both the qualities of separateness and of connection. Any life form must have a
shell or skin or membrane, must compete for resources, and must defend itself. And any life form is completely interconnected with its physical and biological environment. But in most human cultures, women seem to express connecting energy more obviously, whereas men seem to express separation energy more obviously.

  The energy of separation includes a capacity to rest in one’s existential aloneness, to have boundaries, to assert needs, to allow other people to have their own lives, to not feel inaccurately involved with others, to resist influence from the environment, and to maintain a familiar structure over time. A simple summary of this separate quality is “integrity.” This quality reflects a certain sense of consistency and containment. We are willing to be ourselves and let others be themselves, while at the same time sticking up for ourselves. But of course, there are neurotic aspects to the separate style, as well. These may include a disconnection from others, a lack of empathy, the repression of feelings we don’t want to feel, insensitivity, and a sense of isolation and deadness. At the extreme end, we could say that the expression of neurotic masculine energy is that of the perpetrator. Someone in that position is so dissociated from their experience of connection that they’re able to treat others as if there’s no commonality: “I don’t need you, so it doesn’t really matter how I treat you.”

  The energy of connection, on the other hand, includes the awareness that we’re all interdependent. It’s characterized by the qualities of empathy, accommodation, support, a willingness to welcome influence from our environment, and continual change. There’s a willingness to let others’ needs come first and to find our meaning and satisfaction in relationship. Anybody who’s been a parent knows that it’s important to be able, at any moment, to put our child’s needs ahead of our own. This sense of connection and immediacy can be talked about as the experience of “aliveness.” We feel the freshness of relating to “other.”