2010-03-11T13:58:54Z Namaste Staff Writer Copyright 2010, Namaste Staff Writer SPHPBLOG
“How so?” I asked.

Susie was pensive. “I’m realizing that I’ve been acting out my mom and dad’s script far more than I realized. Around Rick, I’m not who I really am. I’m who they expected me to be.”

“You feel your parents have been the playwright for your life.”

Susie nodded.

I slipped into a mischievous frame of mind. “So, are you ready for a change? You could act out your employer's script next. Or you could get a therapist and act out his or her script, or a script from your minister.”

Susie chuckled. She had accepted that she didn’t need anyone to tell her how to live. When she simply listened to herself, she already knew.

“It’s time for me to author my own story,” she said.

If we follow someone else’s script for our life, who we are can’t blossom—and this is the death knell of love.

To the degree we try to live up to the expectations of others, we don’t feel it’s we who are living our life. Instead, we feel fragmented. This is because we are only partly “here.”

Instead of all the parts of us being integrated, important elements are left out. These are the parts of ourselves we weren’t encouraged to explore when we were growing up.

The result is we are lost in the middle of what’s supposed to be our autobiography.

This is how people wake up twenty, thirty years after they marry and find they are so disconnected, there’s no longer a reason to be together. Neither have been authentic because, all along, they haven't been authoring their own life.

When this happens, we discover we are essentially living with a stranger. We know the person’s habits, likes and dislikes, but there’s no heart-to-heart connection. We thought we were building a future together and now it appears to be in ruins.

Unless we are connected to ourselves, a growing disconnect from the other is inevitable.

When I say we must connect with ourselves in order to connect with another, I don’t mean we carry on a relationship with ourselves in our head as if we were two people. I mean that we discover the person we are behind the conversations we carry on in our head.

Our essence isn’t part of the conversations we have with ourselves. It’s the deeper us who is observing all of this self-talk—the divine Presence from which our essence arises.

To be connected with ourselves isn’t thinking about ourselves in a certain way. It’s stopping all the thought about ourselves and simply being our most authentic self in a quite spontaneous, unthought-out manner. There’s a complete lack of the kind of self-presentation associated with ego, as we are swept up in the flow of divine Presence.

Fulfillment in any relationship lies in authoring an exciting life of our own.

We want to live out a life that originates in our core. We want to be a unique expression of the divine in us. Only when we are excited about living our life of divine Presence can our relationships flourish.
]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100311-075953 2010-03-11T00:00:00Z 2010-03-11T00:00:00Z
So, if it's her dream, then surely she can change the dream, alter the characters and circumstances, right? Can't she just "imagine away" the ones she doesn't like?

In a dream, all the characters are a creation of our own mind. They don't exist in their own right. Indeed, the whole of reality is a projection of our mind whenever we are in a dream state.

But when Alice tries to imagine things differently and thereby alter her dream, she finds she can't.

So it's not a dream that's she's having, after all.

And neither are you, the reader of this column, a part of a dream I am having—nor I a character you have imagined in a dream you are having.

There is one single consciousness that is the source of all the experiences you and I are having, but you and I are not that source. We didn't create the universe and its cast of players.

You and I participate in that consciousness that's the source of everything, but we are not ourselves the source of consciousness and all that has been birthed by it.

We have no being other than the source—no being other than the oneness from which everything has sprung. But this is very different from saying that we ourselves are the source, are the oneness.

We are expressions, manifestations, of the divine. As such, we share in the divine nature. But we are not that which gives rise to everything.

The new Alice in Wonderland wants us to "get" that we are real, and that our experiences both individually and collectively are real. Not real in the sense of solid, as people once used to imagine the material world. But real in that our individuality isn't just the imagination, the dream, of a single mind.

You are not a projection of my mind, any more than I am a projection of your mind. Neither of us is dreaming the other.

We will always be manifestations of the One. Yet we will also always retain our separateness within the oneness.

Which means that the choices we make have real repercussions, real consequences, for how we shape both our present and all present moments that will flow out of this moment now.

We are co-creating ourselves with and within the divine. We are determining what we will be, how our essence will unfold in existence.

If you think about it, the idea that you, and everyone else in my world—indeed, the universe itself—are just a projection of my mind, a dream I am having, is the height of narcissism.

It's ego gone mad.

There is a vast difference between saying that "I" am the source of everything, and everything that exists is a dream I'm having, and recognizing that I am part of the all and therefore one with everyone and everything.

So Alice, realizing that all is truly real, returns from the rabbit hole to chart her life in her unique manner, in a direction she chooses, which is different from what everyone else had imagined she would pursue.

Thank God for our oneness. And thank God for our individuality within that oneness.

The one and the many—the one in the many—the many in the one.

Truly ourselves, and yet totally connected.

The full realization of this is where this evolving creation is headed, whereby—as St. Paul expressed it—the divine is becoming "all, in all."
]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100309-135918 2010-03-09T00:00:00Z 2010-03-09T00:00:00Z
The problem is that much of this is often contrary to our true nature. It doesn't line up with what we really feel, really desire, really have the capability of being.

In the new Alice in Wonderland, which I cannot praise highly enough—and which apparently the box office agrees with, as it opened as the highest rating 3D movie in history this weekend, beating out Avatar's opening weekend—Alice finds within herself the courage to buck what her family and society in general expects of her. She will determine her course in life, not someone else.

Alice in Wonderland in this revolutionary retelling of the story invites us to become conscious of who we are at our core.

There's a unique "spirit" in each of us. By "spirit," I don't mean something otherworldly. I'm talking about our essence, our fundamental consciousness. It's this that becomes occluded as the unconsciousness of society is layered on us as we grow up.

So developing a new consciousness in which we star in our story isn't so much a matter of generating something new, as it of "undoing."

The question is asked again and again in what has come to be called Underland, "Is this the real Alice?"

Alice has become different from the authentic little girl she once was. She's been conditioned by the society in which she's grown up, and consequently has lost much of the wonder of life. So the task is to uncover who she really is, and actually always was but has lost sight of, and thereby restore her sense of life as Wonderland.

Now it so happens there's another "children's" story that explores this theme in depth, the story of The Little Prince, whose meaning I unpack in the Namaste audiobook Lessons in Loving—A Journey into the Heart. I hope Disney, who hold the rights to the film version of this book, will consider doing it in a modern 3D form and perhaps find a way to incorporate some of the deep spiritual insights it contains, as I show in the audiobook.

Alice emerges a powerful woman who can chart her own destiny. Throwing off her conditioning and entering into her original consciousness, the kind of life she chooses for herself is fundamentally different from the life she had been unconsciously programmed to expect.
]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100308-145921 2010-03-08T00:00:00Z 2010-03-08T00:00:00Z
And wonderful it is. Not just the 3D and incredible graphics, but the consciousness the movie exudes.

A tip: sit fairly close to the screen if you go to an IMAX, perhaps only four, five, or six rows back. I was actually two rows from the screen in a packed theater, and it was fine. While I never sit close in a regular movie, the experience of IMAX 3D is different. You want to be immersed.

This is a love story. But not about love of the man Alice is expected to marry now she is 19. Rather, love of who she intrinsically is, which she begins to really “get” as a result of her journey down a rabbit hole.

Not that she hasn’t long sensed who she is. But now she truly “knows” from her deepest being who she is and what she wants.

This is a modern, feminist version of Alice in Wonderland, replete with the whole cast of bizarre and wonderful characters from the original story.

Brilliantly told, the story moves away from the idea prevalent at the time the original Alice in Wonderland was written, which was that women need to find their destiny in a man. Instead, it invites them to discover their destiny in consciousness.

When I say “discover” their destiny, I don’t want to imply there’s a destiny mapped out for each of us and we only have to find it. Far from it.

The "straight and narrow" to which Jesus referred as the gateway to eternal life—which isn't so much a future thing, but living fully in the present moment now, to the point we are unaware of the passage of time—isn't some predetermined pathway God gives us externally and asks us to follow.

Just the opposite. To walk the straight and narrow is to be true to our divine essence, as creatures in the image and likeness of the divine—something we have a hard time doing, so programmed are we to follow the expectations of family, friends, and society in general.

As the movie shows so clearly, the discovery of our "destiny" lies in the unfolding of our being. We figure out what we want and make our own path.

As Thomas Merton put it: “Looking for God is like seeking a path in a field of snow; if there is no path and you are looking for one, walk across the field and there is your path.”

I hear so many people talk about what’s “meant to be” or “wasn’t meant to be.” How about, as this movie emphasizes, talking instead about what we mean things to be?

The basis of any healthy love relationship with another is that we are true to ourselves, follow our own path, and don’t bend ourselves out of shape to fit someone else’s plans for us.

This Alice in Wonderland is a truly enlightening movie. If you don’t have an IMAX nearby, or even 3D, it’s still well worth seeing. More on this movie the next couple of days.

]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100307-150632 2010-03-07T00:00:00Z 2010-03-07T00:00:00Z
We all want to feel loved. It really would be awful to go through life feeling nobody at all cared about us.

Wouldn't you tend to find yourself asking, "Why me?”

All these couples, these families, these friends around us have love in their lives, why not us?

I think a person could feel very sorry for themselves.

Dr. Schnarch went on to observe, "The only thing worse is the terror of understanding and accepting the answer to the question we ask, when we sense that are loved...'Why me?'"

I think this observation is right on the mark. It's an awful feeling to believe we are unloved. We ask ourselves, as I have many times in the past, "Why me?"

But it is even more frightening, terrifying in fact, to truly be loved with an intense love that doesn't flinch, doesn't let up, doesn't hold anything back. One's feeling is, truly, "Why me?"

The reason we ask "Why me?" at such a moment is because to be really, really loved challenges our sense of validity. It calls into question whether we are worthy, deserving, lovable.

It takes great strength to allow oneself be loved intensely. To let someone in, really let someone in, we've got to be able to validate ourselves.

We've got to know we are a great person, not as an ego thing—not telling ourselves we're great, but simply quietly knowing it in the depths of our being.

I had a struggle with this in the past, haven’t you? For a long time, because I didn't feel very lovable, I behaved in some unlovable ways to prove to myself and everybody else that I was unlovable. I lived out how I felt about myself.

Gradually, I discovered that my deepest being is a very lovely, beautiful being. Though part of me still didn't fully believe it.

I had one foot in, one foot out, of a total acceptance and embrace of myself until more recently.

Now, I have really come to know myself as a wonderful human being. It’s no longer something I have to remind myself of. It just is, at the level of "a felt-perception," a term Namaste author Michael Brown uses that has come to mean so much to me.

Consciousness isn’t a concept, it’s a life-changing reality. When we are then loved by people, or a special person, we no longer flinch. We no longer ask, “Why me?”

How about sharing your experience of coming into this consciousness of yourself as wholly lovable in the forums and book discussion on this site?

]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100306-164420 2010-03-06T00:00:00Z 2010-03-06T00:00:00Z
From what I see, the majority of relationships are far from heavenly. In fact, many are sheer hell. (Believe me, I had my fair share of hell in the past, which I personally created!)

Yet surprisingly, even though they are often hell, relationships are actually our best path to heaven!

Notice, I didn’t say an “easy” path. I said “best.”

You see, a lot of us can function reasonably in everyday life, as long as we either aren’t too isolated or aren’t pushed up too close to another person or group of people.

In our relative isolation, as we keep ourselves to ourselves, we can even look quite “spiritual,” quite aware, quite conscious.

It’s when we are really in the thick of things with others that we find out just how conscious we actually are.

Many of us have a hunch that we’re not all that well developed in terms of higher consciousness, so we avoid situations that will plunge us into the nightmare a relationship can be when two people aren’t differentiated.

We avoid the hell of relationships.

However, in avoiding hell, we simultaneously avoid the heavenly bliss of true connection with another or others.

What does it take for relationships, whether at home or on the job, to become heavenly?

Two and a half thousand years ago, Confucius observed, "Heaven means to be one with God."

For the purposes of our relationships, it doesn't matter whether we conceive of God as the mystery of being itself, or whether God for us is the best in humanity—and perhaps the two are the same. Here, I’m talking about the experience of Presence.

To the degree we are in touch with the universal Presence of which our own essence is a part, we experience heaven. To the degree we are out of touch with this Presence at our center, we find life hell.

The “hell” or the “heaven” of a relationship don’t reside in the other person. They reside in ourselves.

Whatever we experience within ourselves, this is what we bring to all our relationships. To the degree that we allow ourselves to really connect, what's in us will come out. Which is what so many of us are afraid of, causing us to avoid getting too close to anyone.

]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100305-120218 2010-03-05T00:00:00Z 2010-03-05T00:00:00Z
When we love, all of life becomes a fascinating and wondrous adventure that absorbs us every moment.

If we learn to love well, sharing our whole being without reservation, without any holding back, putting our entire self forward in the relationship, we find ourselves experiencing what Diane Ackerman once wrote:

When you consider something like death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.

Of course, many of us no doubt disagree with the idea that at death we may “go out like a candle flame.” But that’s not the point I’m interested in right now, not the topic I want to raise to our consciousness.

The reality is that this experience in which we have an opportunity to love now ends.

In these brief moments that are framed by death, we are challenged to love well—and this means going beyond the person we have so far known ourselves to be, which is in most cases an extremely limited person when it comes to our ability to love at a profound depth.

Why is it so difficult to love deeply, fully, unreservedly?

Why do we so often choose to hold back, often distance ourselves, or even go a step further and pick quarrels that guarantee we won’t have to be close?

The reason has to do with ourselves, not the other person. (Yes, I know that’s hard to swallow, especially if the other seems really difficult. But keep reading in the days ahead.)

It's hard to admit this sometimes, but the fact is that we attract into our life people who are at the same level of development in terms of consciousness as we are ourselves.

Let me hasten to add that it may not look this way on the surface of things. But I have found this to be the case over and over again in my own life. It’s something internationally-recognized relationships expert Dr. David Schnarch has also pointed out (www.passionatemarriage.com).

So we hold back from loving others to the degree we hold back from being in love with ourselves.

When I say “in love with ourselves,” I’m not talking about narcissism. A narcissist is the sort of person who is so evidently "in love with themselves" as an image, but who doesn't really love themselves at all. They have an inauthentic grandiose view of themselves. (I suspect many of us have been able to relate to such at some point in our lives! I certainly have.)

What I’m speaking of when I talk about being in love with ourselves is a genuine valuing and appreciation of ourselves.

And I don’t mean “valuing” ourselves as a mental concept. I mean that we feel truly comfortable with who we are—that we really enjoy being who we are, bask in who we are, are radiant in who we are.

That’s a touch challenge for humans. We’ll begin to see why tomorrow.

]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100304-114246 2010-03-04T00:00:00Z 2010-03-04T00:00:00Z
Relationships are intended to bring us to a point that feels like the end of the world.

At that point, if we allow our relationships to do what they are designed to do, we will go through a transformation.

What kind of transformation am I referring to? I believe it's the thing all of us, in our heart, are searching for.

World renowned therapist Dr David Schnarch, whose work you can find at www.passionatemarriage.com, says that life is something we won't let go of, but which we refuse to accept anyway.

He’s suggesting that we live a kind of half-life instead of a heavenly life.

Much of the time, we put up with each other instead of being fascinated with each other, tolerate each other instead of enjoying each other.

Why do we do this?

We do this because we are terrified of really, truly, fully risking ourselves in love.

The British author and theologian Sebastian Moore says that we are “inveterate two-timers.” He explains that we commit to people, projects, situations, but we make sure there is an escape clause.

We make a decision, but we leave a part of ourselves out of it, just in case.

We don't want our choices to actually require us to follow through with our whole heart.

In terms of the various relationships in our life, we're “in” them, but we're not really in them. So much of the time we've got one foot in, the other foot out.

So we live a life in which our caring, loving, romance, and passion are truncated. Which isn’t at all a fulfilling way to live.

Yesterday I quoted a line from T.S. Eliot. Today, let me set it in a bit more of its context:

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Relationships of every kind call us into a mysterious depth of communion that has to do with what our essence, our true being, is intended for. This is something very different from what most of us experience in relationships.

But for those who are willing to commit to the journey, relationships are able to take us deeper into what life is all about than most humans can begin to imagine.

]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100303-113428 2010-03-03T00:00:00Z 2010-03-03T00:00:00Z
So, given that every relationship will die, do we really want to live in "dead" relationships even while we are still alive?

We can pass the precious moments of each day at a distance, protecting ourselves, risking only minimally. Or we can invest ourselves totally, unaware of anything but the sheer joy, the absolute rapture that is available to us right now in this moment if we but rise to the challenge of learning to love well.

It’s difficult at first to love well because we are accustomed to coming from a place that’s reactive. Closeness threatens us, and when threatened, we react.

But the part of us that gets into quarrels, or that backs away to an emotionally safe distance, isn’t our true being.

Let me share with you an insight into the nature of our humanity from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German poet and writer who lived from 1749 until 1832:

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make a life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a person humanized or dehumanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

We all have a spiritual center that’s capable of behaving toward others in a manner that brings out their best.

Yet so much of the time, we speak and act in ways that are dehumanizing, ways in which we were treated while growing up that have become a “false self” in each of us.

Our real self is like the wonderful person Goethe realized he had the ability to be, the person who can make another joyous, inspire them, uplift them, bring out the best in them. Isn’t this what all relationships, of every kind, should do?

The great challenge of relationships is to allow them to introduce us to our spiritual center, our true self. This is so beautiful, so desirable, so lovely that it can cause the spirits of others to soar.

But first, we have to thoroughly bump up against the fact that the person we have been much of our life isn’t capable of this. We have to "come to the end of ourselves," as it were, with full awareness that our identity as we have known ourselves really isn't us at all. Only then do we open up to being our true self.

It's coming to the end of ourselves as we have known ourselves that changes everything for The Little Prince, in the famous story by that name, who has fallen out with the love of his life and, disgusted with her behavior, taken off to visit other planets.

So, we must come to the end of ourselves.

But as the poet T.S. Eliot saw, "In my end is my beginning."

To let go of our well-protected false identity, our egoic self, and relax into our true being at our center is where learning to love well begins.


]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100302-143623 2010-03-02T00:00:00Z 2010-03-02T00:00:00Z
The end may come as a result of physical death. In the case of romantic relationships, it may come earlier through separation or divorce.

For me, the fact that my relationships will end has become the motivation for learning to do the single most difficult thing life ever asks of us: to learn to love well.

Given that life is framed by birth and death, the question I ask myself is: Do I really want to spend the short time I get to share with the people in my life in anything other than an atmosphere that brings out the best in each of us?

I have come to see that if we allow our relationships to transform us, they will teach us what it means to really love well.

It’s not mental concepts that are going to transform us into people who can really love, but life itself—if we’re open to what each moment is trying to show us.

What relationships will do, if we allow them to do their work, is present us with so many challenges that we come to see that, in our current frame of mind, with the way we presently understand ourselves, we are ill equipped to deal with what a partner, a child, a parent presents us with.

When we really see how utterly devoid of true fulfillment our present way of relating is, we have a choice:

• We can spend our life spatting with each other
• We can pull back to an emotionally safe distance, dwelling in a sort of no man’s land
• We can allow our predicament to drive us to discover strengths we don't know we have.

To love well requires the strength, the resilience, the fortitude—yes, and the integrity—to open ourselves up and allow another to have an impact on us.

This is a very difficult thing to do at first because it threatens our sense of identity.

But what we think of as our “identity” isn’t really our identity. It’s just a learned way of behaving that’s often not who we really are at all. Once we recognize this, we have no reason to be threatened.

Now we can let the other have an impact on us. And what this will do is bring out our true being.

When we feel resistance to what another person is showing us about ourselves, and to the growth a situation invites, it’s crucial to differentiate between these voices of our old identity, and the voice of our true identity deep within.

Once we know the difference, we can choose to listen to our true being, where we will discover the strengths we have but are unaware of—strengths that will empower us to love well.
]]> http://x.namastepublishing.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry100301-120320 2010-03-01T00:00:00Z 2010-03-01T00:00:00Z