I am taking a break from my series on living the Law of One in concert with the world of nature this week so that I can write about relationships in this time of rapidly shifting consciousness. Relationships are the fast track for seekers who wish to shift their points of view in ways that accelerate the rate of their spiritual evolution. As fourth density and graduation loom, our relationships are more valuable than ever.
In conversation with friends a few evenings ago, enjoying each others’ company in the glow of lamplight and mutual affection, I was struck by how common was the theme of out-of-focus relationships. The people in this circle of friendship were highly sensitive, engaged and spiritually present. But they were suffering under the burden of relationships gone awry, coming unglued or just not quite matching up.
I felt utterly spoiled by my own mated relationship, which goes from strength to strength. Nature seems to have so fashioned my husband and I that we are able to grow together. We have moments of catalyst, to which we respond quickly with healing discussion. We have never been troubled with difficulties that did not yield immediately to our loving attention.
Perhaps we planned this happy compatibility before our present incarnations began. Or perhaps our coming together a quarter-century ago to serve others rather than to create a nuclear family can take the credit. Whatever the reason, I could see that Mick and I were by far the exception rather than the rule in having a peaceful yet mutually energizing relationship.
In my counseling and personal channeling sessions, this theme of difficulties in relationships is one of the most common topics of discussion as well. Often, one of the partners is awakening at a different rate than the other. He is feeling excited about his new realizations. It is easy for him to feel that his partner, who has either not awakened spiritually at all or is moving more slowly into a new point of view, is holding him back.
The variations on the Relationship Rag are endless. Perhaps he wants to move into a deeper level of intimacy while she wants to preserve her personal space. Perhaps she likes having friends and family around and he wants seclusion and time to read and study. Perhaps he wants marriage and she wants committed friendship.
It can come down to the smallest deal-breaker. I know one couple who disagrees profoundly about how to shop for food. One partner likes to plan menus for the week ahead and execute one extended visit to the grocery each week, armed with a detailed list and coupons. The other likes to stop by the store each day and get that day’s groceries.
Another friend’s hassle is over the laundry. She folds her clean clothes and puts them away. He takes them directly from the basket to wear again. Meanwhile they both put dirty clothing into the same basket. Consequently, some of his clean clothes get washed again and again without being worn. And since they are in the washer and unavailable, he assumes he has no clothes and buys more.
To an outsider, solutions appear obvious and simple. Deep and creative discussion will work for those who are invested in finding compromise and entente. To the couples involved, however, because of established habits or differences in personality type, the solutions remain out of reach. And to that extent, the relationships remain out of focus.
I think that the model for relationships in our culture is itself out of focus. That model suggests that people come together in order for their needs to be met. When the couple feels that their needs are no longer being met, the relationship “should” dissolve.
Yet if we are spiritual beings, as I believe wholeheartedly that we are, a far different model for relationships prevails: a model of coming together in order to practice loving and being loved. In an L/L Research session recorded on July 18, 1993, Q’uo says,
“Each relationship consists of two entities who have so plaited their consciousness together, time and time again, that each is more able with the other’s help to come a little closer to an approximation of some awareness of love. As you attempt to be of service in relationship, allow that seemingly far-away perfection that ideal love seems to be to color your thinking, so that regardless of what you choose to do or say, you have the sense of proportion which allows you to form, as well as possible, responses to each other that contain the openness to love that enables each to be a channel through which infinite love may flow.
“The human heart, to use the instrument’s language, has a very limited amount of love. The energy which created each and which is each entity’s true being has infinite love, for love is the nature of consciousness at that level. More and more may you feel transparent to that infinite love and so open the heart that each may serve shiningly.”
The model of relationships as practice at loving and being loved is one which is greatly expanded, compared to the model of relationships as a mutual meeting of needs. In the model of loving and being loved, a big point of the relationship for both is to have an other-self to serve. It is accepted that this other-self and you have worked together before. Now you are drawn to work together again, getting ever closer, it is hoped, to the balance-point where each is a perfectly clear and honest mirror for the other.
In this mutual mirroring, every effort is made not to judge but to support, not to criticize but to encourage. Putting pride away, each asks, “How may I serve you?” And each listens carefully as the partner in relationship answers that question.
Q’uo says, in a session dated March 29, 1992,
“Questions about relationships are actually questions about how to seek and to pray.”
I think this little sentence is crucial to seeing how to bring relationships into focus. When you look at yourself as a spiritual seeker and at your life as a sacred maze which will teach you how to love and be loved, your concerns in relationship are not about your personal needs but rather about what the other-self shows you in the mirror of interaction, and what you can do in response to the images you see in the mirror. And your goal in interacting with your other-self is not to gain control or to be in the right but to be honestly yourself, a clear, lucid and accurate mirror for that other-self.
In this model, you do not try to deny what you are seeing in the mirror the other-self shows you. Quite to the opposite, you strive to understand what you are seeing. This takes humility and patience.
It is natural to want to resist seeing into that mirror when what it – the other-self – shows you is an image you would prefer not to see. Yet the benefits gained from taking the mirror at its word are priceless. Hatonn says, in a session recorded on May 6, 1979,
“When you can look at the pain of a misunderstanding and continue to be yourself in the face of it, then you become as a mirror reflecting that which may help your loved one. Speeches, arguments and inharmonious silences can never be of the help that you can be if you remain yourself.”
In this spiritualized model of relationships, you reject the model of “me against the other.” You relinquish the art of scoring points. Rather, you see the two of you as a team, working together to learn the lessons of love. Q’uo says, in a session dated July 18, 1993,
“It is in the illusion of differences, and the working with situations in which the spiritual principles are tested, that the lessons of love which you have incarnated to learn are brought forward and laid before each in patterns which engage the mind and heart and launch one, as it were, upon that road which you may call the spiritual path.”
This particular session has such a richness to it, that if this article resonates to you, you can read it on our channeling library. In it, Q’uo talks about relationships in terms of the branches of a vine. I suspect that they took this image from my memory of Jesus’ parable of the true vine in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, “I am the vine; ye are the branches.”
Q’uo suggests that we are all one. The root of the vine, which is the Logos, grows up to branch out into the many branches of all of us. They say,
“Each has expressed thoughts this day concerning the mystery of the call to relationship: why this branch of the vine? Why not another? Yet the path of each is a long one, and in its time, if we may use that term, the entities with whom each has relationships have been in relationship, perhaps, many times. Each time, each incarnational opportunity, the two, the seeker and its relation, have worked in the tips of the vine, as it were.
“And as each lifetime’s choices deepen each entity, the two entities in relationship move about, being in different relations to each other, yet still working upon the harmonics, the euphony, which more and more might be found to exist between the two seemingly separate entities. And each time the relationship deepens, each time the two selves involved are able to move farther down the vine whose identity is the common root, [both self and other-self come] a little bit closer to that unity which exists in the very heart of the root of this vine of being or consciousness.”
And again,
“’How could this depth be?’ the seeker asks. ‘Why am I so vulnerable, so easy to wound, so easily happy, so desperately sad because of this one being?’ Yet that one being and you may have worked many, many incarnational times in order that this depth of pain, of joy, this level of choosing love may be reached.”
From the Confederation’s point of view, the difficulties of relationship are not burdens but gifts.
In the same session, Q’uo says,
“If you as a seeker can be aware of the goal of relationships, which is to aid each other in learning the lessons of love, then each as seeker may have the beginnings of an idea as to how to proceed. For if each is seeking the truth of relationship, the truth lies in commonality. If a branch speaks to another branch of the same vine and says, ‘You have poor leaves; your fruit is unacceptable; that twig is out of the question,’ you speak not only to that other twig but also to your very own twig self.
“Grasp, if you will, the thought that each relationship is basically with the self. Each entity with which you are in relationship is basically a mirror reflecting to you your face, your nature, your issues, your lessons. That which you admire and encourage, you are encouraging in yourself. That which you judge and question in another, you are questioning in yourself.”
In the end, then, the issues of a relationship are not about who is more advanced spiritually, who is right about how closely to live, or how socially, or how to shop for groceries or how to handle the laundry. They are about seeking the One together.
One theme comes up again and again in the Confederation readings on relationships and that is the value of entering the sacred silence. On December 19, 1999, Q’uo suggests,
“We might suggest that you bid come the angel of gladness. For there is much inner noise which almost drowns out a yearning for clarity and balance. It is not in noise or contention but in quietness that each may find the peace to accept the limits of self and the limits of other-self.”
I open my arms and embrace your spirit. May we invoke that angel of gladness as we pursue our relationships, and in quietness find our relationships becoming ever more in focus. May we come to see each other as the inestimable gifts that we are. And may we learn, more and more, how to love and to be loved.