wisewords
Intimate Relationships and the Spiritual Path
by Marianne Williamson T he common
wisdom goes like this: that the myth
of “some enchanted evening,” when all is awash with the thrill of connection and the aliveness of new romance, is actually a delusion… a hormon- ally manufactured lie. That soon enough, real- ity will set in and lovers will awaken from their mutual projections, dis- cover the psychological work involved in two people trying to reach across the chasm of real-life separateness, and come to terms at last with the mundane sorrows of hu- man existence and intimate love. In this case, the common wisdom
is a lie. From a spiri-
tual perspective, the scenario above is upside down. From a spiritual perspective, the original high of a romantic connection is thrilling because it is true. It is in fact the opposite of delusion. For in a quick mo- ment, a gift from the gods, we are likely to suspend our judg- ment of the other, not because we are temporarily insane, but because we are temporarily sane. We
are having what you might call a mini- enlightenment experience. Enlighten- ment is not unreal; enlightenment—or pure love—is all that is real. Enlighten- ment is when we see not as through a
glass darkly, but truly face-to-face. What is unreal is what comes after the initial high, when the personal- ity self reasserts itself and the wounds and triggers of our human ego form a veil across the face of love. The ini- tial romantic high is not something to outgrow, so much as something to earn admittance back into—this time not as an unearned gift of Cupid’s arrows, but as a consequence of the real work of the psychological and spiritual journey. The romantic relationship is a spiritual assignment, presenting an opportunity for lovers and would-be lovers to burn through our own issues and forgive the other theirs, so together we can gain re-entrance to the joyful realms of our initial contact that turn out to have been real love after all.
Our problem is that most of us rarely
have a psychic container strong enough to stand the amount of light that pours into us when we have truly seen, if even for a moment, the deep beauty of another. The problem we have is not that in our roman- tic fervor we fall into a delusion of one- ness; the problem is that we then fall into the delusion of separateness. And those are the romantic mysteries: the almost blinding light when we truly see each other, the desperate darkness of the ego’s blindness, and the sacred work of choos- ing the light of mutual innocence when the darkness of anger and guilt descend.
Marianne Williamson is an inter- nationally noted speaker, author of 10 books, Unity Church minister and a teacher and student of A Course in Mir- acles. Her most recent workshops focus on the topic of Enchanted Love: Building the Inner Temple of the Sacred and the Romantic.
In our society, the women who break down barriers are those who ignore limits.
~Arnold Schwarzenegger
44 Broward County, Florida
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