Chapter 1, \"The Intimate Life\", by Judith Blackstone
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Chapter one. The relational field a tuning to unified consciousness. It is one and the same self that shines as one's own self as well as the selves of others. Vision and Barack Yeah, the oneness of the spiritual dimension is the underlying reality of all relationships. It can be described as a relational field, a fundamental continuity of self and other in the spaciousness and stillness of our spiritual essence. We are truly in contact, truly intimate with ourselves and with all of life. The idea that people are interconnected in a relational field is an agreement with the contemporary view of the world as an open system in which all parts influence the others. In the field of psychology, the theory of inter subjectivity describes relationships as interactions of differently organized subjective worlds. The relational field described in this book however, is more subtle than the field of interacting subjectivity ease. It is experienced as a fundamental unified dimension of consciousness. The spiritual essence of life is beyond our rigid subjective modification of experience to the extent that we are either consciously or unconsciously manipulating ourselves and our relationship with the world we do not experience are fundamental oneness with other people as we let go of rigid or fixed organizations of the way we experience ourselves and others. We uncover a dimension of unity between ourselves and other life. Spiritual maturity can be seen as the realization of the fundamental unity of the relational field. The various schools of asian spiritual philosophy have different ways of describing ultimate reality or fundamental consciousness, but they point to the same experience of unity for example, Sankara, the revered teacher of hindu non dualism rights. I feel all things inside and out like space. Changeless and the same in all. I am pure, unattached, stainless and immutable. A buddhist text from the christian tradition says within naturally occurring timeless awareness, a single basic space. All things are present in such a way that they are in essence non dual spiritual realization is a process of laying bare this underlying reality. It is a process of dissolving the subjective limitations and distortions of our essential being. However, the Asian spiritual traditions also teach that the complete realization of fundamental consciousness is extremely rare. In fact, it may be that no one is completely realized that the nature of embodied existence is always to some extent limited and subjective, but it is also clear from observing the progression of spiritual realization that we mature in the direction of ultimate reality. Although absolute oneness appears to be virtually unattainable in its entirety, it is not hypothetical, it is a dimension of ourselves that is unmistakable. Once we attuned to it, it is an experiential and observable reality. It is a dimension of consciousness that transcends that releases the constraints of our own subjectivity. This is not a negation of our humanness, the experience of existing as a human being, of being alive to ourselves and the world around us of responding to life with insight, emotion and sensation increases as we realize our subjective organization as we release our subjective organization. As we realize this undistorted unified consciousness, we have a sense of becoming real and of experiencing life as it really is. When two people are both attuned to this dimension, they have a sense of being in genuine contact with each other. The image of a relational field also represents the spatial nature of fundamental consciousness. This dimension of life is experienced as vast. It's been empty space, pervading everything, even physical space itself. When we attune to it, we feel that we are made of empty space and we feel continuous with the empty space that everything else is made up. This is an actual change in the texture of our experience. Instead of feeling solid and separate, we feel permeable and everything around us also appears to be permeable, transparent. People often ask me what sort of experience this is is attunement to fundamental consciousness. A sensation of feeling and awareness. Fundamental consciousness is the essence of our whole being and it is known through our whole being. It is an integration, the integrative ground of awareness, sensation and emotion. Fundamental consciousness is said to be self reflecting because it awakens to itself, it knows itself. This type of knowing is unlike any other. It is not an experience of something in the same way that we haven't experienced of a blue sky or of a feeling of sadness or of a sensation of heat. Fundamental consciousness is the nowhere itself not an object of the newer to experience fundamental consciousness means that the nowhere begins to know itself. When two people are together attuned to the relational field, they feel continuous with each other as the empty space of fundamental consciousness. They experienced that they are living in an unbounded field of unified presence, consciousness and flow. Although the spiritual dimension of life is experienced as motionless space, all of the content of experience is movement, feelings, move, thoughts, move, our physiological systems, all move, even circumstances move. We experience the stillness of fundamental consciousness and the dynamic flow of life at the same time. The more we attuned to and become the stillness, the more the movement of life occurs without obstruction without resistance or distortion. The content of experience is inseparable from the stillness of fundamental consciousness. In the same way that waves are inseparable from the ocean. Everything that we experience in the spiritual dimension appears to be made of the same subtle consciousness that experiences it. Zen buddhism describes the unobstructed movement of life as leaving no trace, it passes through the stillness of our consciousness without our grasping or manipulating it and without disturbing or altering the stillness in any way. For example, if we feel sad and we do not interfere with this feeling at all, it will register vividly in our consciousness and then dissipate. But if we try not to feel sad, we will have to clamp down on the spontaneous movement of experience by constricting our body and energy system and this will actually maintain the experience of sadness within our organism. If we continue to prevent this emotion from moving, the holding pattern will become a chronic rigidity in our being. It will become an ongoing limitation in our ability to feel emotion. Any rigidity in our own being is also a barrier between ourselves and other people. The bound sadness will also color our experience so that life always seems a little sad for this reason. Spiritual realization requires that we accept and experience life just as it is in each moment, To the extent that two people are both attuned to the stillness of fundamental consciousness. The exchange between them moves with fluidity and spontaneity in this clear unified space, it becomes easier to recognize and dissolve the residual barriers of numbness of bound fear, sadness, confusion, and anger that separate us from other people and impede this flow. When the flow of exchange between partners gets stuck, we've become aware of a locus for healing to take place. That will help both people open to their spiritual essence. The unity of self and other is our true nature. Once we have reached this dimension of ourselves, we experience unity. Even with people who have not realized fundamental consciousness, we experience that our own essence is continuous with There's that the spaciousness that pervades our own being also pervades them. Many people fear that they will be lonely if they attune more subtly to life than other people do. But this subtle attunement gives us a felt sense of kinship and connection with all other life. The body of clear space. We cannot truly understand human development or the dimension of spiritual oneness unless we understand how the body is involved in the process of spiritual realization. The body can be experienced as physical matter, as energy as consciousness. Our most subtle and clear experience of the body is that it is made of consciousness. This is the integration of body and mind. It means that we have inward contact with the whole internal space of our body. Although the total unity of body and mind is considered a very advanced and rare attainment. We progress towards this integration as we realize fundamental consciousness. Our experience of spiritual oneness is obstructed by static areas in our body and energy systems. These are literally places within our organism where we are holding still against the flow of experience. Some of these patterns are chronic or in other words, the tissues of the body have rigid, ified in the shape of the holding pattern. For example, if a child cringes every time she hears angry voices of her parents, this unconscious repeated reaction of her body may became become a static contraction in her muscles and fashion. Other patterns are evoked by specific circumstances that remind us of painful events in our past, A child may for example, cringe in response to her parents yelling, but this reaction does not happen often enough to become an ongoing contraction in her body. Instead, the cringe will be temporary, but it may become a well traveled groove that her body follows whenever she hears angry voices or some similar threat throughout the rest of her life. These holding patterns, especially those that are ongoing, impede and distort our contact with ourselves and with other people. They diminish our awareness, emotion and sensation as I will explain more fully in the next chapter. Spiritual realization is not just a return to the pre defended state of infancy, but we do need to let go of our holding patterns in order for the process of human development to continue towards spiritual maturity. When we live in the dimension of fundamental consciousness, we are able to experience these held areas in our body as tensions within the fluidity of our experience or as d sensitivities within the clear space of our consciousness. Some people describe seeing them as patches of darkness within the luminosity of the spiritual dimension. As we become one with a relational field of fundamental consciousness, the physical body becomes less rigid, less held in position. We have a sense of inhabiting the internal space of our body of reclaiming the space that we had constricted in our defensive organizations and we gain depth range and authenticity in our contact with the world around us. Our somatic holding patterns are connected with static beliefs and repetitive behaviors. This can be illustrated by a woman named Sarah who came to work with me because she seemed unable to maintain an intimate relationship. She was extremely lonely and now in her late 40s she had begun to despair that she would never find love. She told me that men always ended relationships with her just when she was beginning to feel really involved with them. When we met Sarah had just started going out with someone new and she was afraid that the same pattern would repeat again. When Sarah described her isolation to me, I was surprised. She seemed to me a very warm, lively and trusting woman as she sat across from me. I could feel the movement of love in the space between us, but each time she mentioned, one of the men she had known, the same shift occurred in her. I sensed a hardening deep inside her chest and I could see the constriction in her eyes and brow. There was also a subtle upward displacement of her energy so that her forehead became the dominant location of her presence, conveying a sense of superiority and judgment. This holding pattern stopped the flow of love in our relational field just as it had in her relationships with men. Sarah herself was unaware of the shift that had taken place in her. So she was always confused and surprised when men responded to it with their own defenses and finally, by leaving her. But when I pointed it out to her, she could feel it in her body and she recognized it as a familiar movement in the realization process. There are specific methods for releasing these holding patterns since they are unconscious. The first step is to become conscious of them. The next step is to experience the purpose of the holding pattern to feel what it is protecting against or what it is holding back. Such as tears or anger. This allows us to become aligned with the volitional intention of the movement so that it is not something that is happening to us, but we recognize that we ourselves are moving towards this protective stance. This is not necessarily a postural change. It can take place within the internal space of the body like Sarah's hardening of her chest. Once the protective movement becomes conscious and intentional, we can practice allowing ourselves to move into the pattern and release it. Usually repeated. Practice is required in order for the pattern to release completely. I asked Sarah to shift into the contraction as she pictured one of the men from her past. When she did this, she recognized that she was trying not to love him when she pictured the same man and allowed that contraction to release. She felt longing for him then fear that he would reject her and then grief that the relationship had ended as she allowed herself to feel this pain. She remembered that her father had suddenly become withdrawn from her when she was about five years old. He was often not home in the evenings as he had been before and when he was home, he seemed less affectionate towards her. Sarah also remembered that her mother was very critical of her father. Around this time she could picture her mother scolding her father as if he were a child while he withdrew into stony silence. In order to cope with the heartache of her father's withdrawal, she had shut down her own loving response towards him. At the same time, she had imitated her mother's critical attitude. This imitation of attitude which psychologists call introspection is an unconscious mirroring of appearance or caretakers subjective organization. It is not just an imitation of behavior but of the subjective organization of the whole organism. I then asked Sarah to imagine her father in front of her Sarah was able to observe that she automatically closed her heart as she pictured him as she gradually released this holding pattern. She was able to feel her deep grief at the loss of his love. After this session Sarah practiced keeping her heart open in her relationship with the new man in her life. Although she still went into her familiar holding pattern at times she could recognize the shift as it occurred and let go of it. She also understood that this holding pattern signaled that she was feeling vulnerable because she was feeling love. The shifts in the organization of our body and energy systems are usually so subtle that they go unnoticed When therapists work with couples, it is important that they watch specifically for where the relational field is open or closed between the partners and how this changes as they discuss their relationship. When a therapist works with an individual, these same shifts occur in the relational field between them as the individual describes current difficulties and the important events of the past. This subtle dance of veils is the key to understanding the problematic area of a purpose in his life and helping them open to their spiritual essence, the authentic self. We realized the dimension of spiritual oneness through subtle inward attunement to our own body. It is a paradox of nature that the more inward contact we have with our own form, the more we experience oneness with life wherever we inhabit our own body, we become permeable. We can experience the present moment occurring inside and outside of our body at the same time. This means that the transcendence, the openness of our individual form and the inhabiting of our individual form occur at the same time, our individual wholeness and our oneness with other life developed simultaneously through the realization of fundamental consciousness. As the barriers between ourselves and other people dissolve, we are able to feel more whole and intact within our own being. We experience an internal continuity of spiritual essence that seems to collect and gel within our body As our realization progresses, we can rest in our essence without having to support it in any way. We feel both intact within ourselves and entirely open or transparent, entirely continuous with our environment. At this point it requires no effort at all to live within our own body. Spiritual realization is therefore synonymous with personal maturity. As we inhabit the internal space of our body, we awaken the inherent capacities of our being. For example, we develop our capacity for love, understanding and physical pleasure as well as the most subtle and accurate functioning of all of our senses. In hindu non dual DaVita philosophy, fundamental consciousness is described as the one unified consciousness of the universe, a single self that is experienced as the primary self of all beings. This is similar to the jewish mystical conception, which says that we are all sparks of a single flame. We are all embodiments of a single light, a single source of wisdom and love. In hindu philosophy, one of the names of fundamental consciousness is self, as I have said, this refers to the single self of all creation, but this term is not just a concept, It is also a qualitative description of our essence. We can enter the dimension of fundamental consciousness through attunement to the quality of self within the internal space of our body. Although it is difficult to describe this quality. I have found that when I ask people to attune to the quality of self, most people have no difficulty doing it. You can test this out quickly for yourself if you wish by taking a moment to feel that you inhabit the internal space of your arms. Now attuned to the quality of yourself inside your arms. Although this is not a quality that we usually notice because it is the ground of life and not the content, it has always been there as part of the feeling of being alive. Some people object to the word self in this context because it can be easily confused with the construct itself, the subjective organization of oneness that conceals the reality of spiritual oneness. They suggest that I use the word being, but interestingly attunement to being does not bring us into as subtle a dimension of ourselves as attunement to self. A tuning to the quality of self evokes the spiritual dimension within the internal space of the body and the dissolution of the barriers between internal and external experience and a tuning to the quality of self within just one part of the body. Our arms, for example, brings us into the spiritual dimension within our entire body. Attunement to the quality of self is an exercise or practice. The realization of our spiritual essence is a relaxed state. In fact, it is our most relaxed natural state, not an action of any sort, but this exercise and all of the exercises presented in this book functions like a stretch for our consciousness which eventually enables us to settle into this most subtle dimension of ourselves without any effort as I mentioned above. The quality of self is not the same as are many ideas about ourselves that make up what we might call our false identity. Our false identity contains static images of ourselves, for example, an image of authority or an image of cheerfulness that we have assumed to cope with the challenges of our particular life circumstances. They are part of our defensive holding pattern, subjective organizations that stop the flow of experience and obstruct our contact with our essence. Over time these images hardened within the tissues of the body, forming rigid persona that we can easily mistake for our true being. The false rigid patterns of ourselves can be difficult to recognize. They are often hard to give up because they are usually effective Once other people are convinced by our persona, our interactions with them constantly reinforce our false character structure. Then we feel locked into relationships that seem to require us to always be that cartoon of authority or that smiling happy face. The authenticity of the self that occurs with spiritual realization is not just a shift in the way we experience ourselves. It can also be observed by other people as a transformation of the way we look and sound, even the quality of our touch. Although I have witnessed this transformation many times, it still seems to me as mysterious and amazing and aspect of nature as birth or death. For example, a man named Leo has been coming to work with me for about five months. I do not know much about him, although he is always warm and cordial. He does not talk about himself but likes to get right to the meditation exercises. He comes in, sits down and closes his eyes and I lead him through the realization process. Then he opens his eyes and sometimes asks me a question about the work or reports on some new experience that he had that session. Then he gets up and leaves over the months. I have watched him deepen as if he were gradually materializing within his body. Then two weeks ago when he opened his eyes there, he was looking out at me. It was an unmistakable shift from the polite veiled expression that he always wore to the unmasked vital presence of a real person. I could see him and though I still did not know many details about his life, I knew him because our essence pervades our whole bodies to become attuned to. It means that we become alive throughout the whole internal depth of ourselves. In his novel Foot jim dodge has a character say if you just stand still and feel for a moment, you would know how everything yearns to be wild to live in the subtle spiritual ground of ourselves is to arrive at our own wild existence. We all have a natural ability to recognize authenticity, just as we can tell balance from imbalance or harmony from dissonance. We are designed to detect the ring of truth. This capacity becomes increasingly acute as we realize fundamental consciousness. It is a navigational tool for guiding us towards the realization of our authentic spiritual being. We also have a natural craving for authenticity, although we may not know what we are missing if we become too cut off from our real self two ensnared in our own false persona, we become depressed and life seems meaningless. This lack of meaning has been one of the major themes of the past century for philosophers, artists, and psychologists. When we direct our focus inward, however, we discover that we are not hollow men that the poet T. S Eliot described, but full of the natural power, love and intelligence, of our true nature, disentanglement and spontaneity as we recognize ourselves as the stillness of spiritual oneness. All of our experience flows freely through us. Each moment of life registers with its full impact. In this way we become disentangled from the flow of life as we become more immersed in life. This is our most natural relaxed condition. It is important that we do not try to hold our focus on either the stillness or the movement to live in the dimension of spiritual oneness means that we do not hold onto any aspect of experience. It is particularly challenging to allow life to flow in our intimate relationships for it means that we cannot secure the source of our pleasure, the more we love someone, the more we may fear the changes that the dynamic flow of life might bring. But when partners can allow the true progression of change and growth in a relationship, they support each other in becoming real in this way they come to know themselves and each other with genuine intimacy. One of the most important concepts of asian religion is that all forms in creation are finite and temporal, coming together out of the favorable conditions of the moment and dissolving when those conditions no longer exist. To live with awareness of one's own mortality brings life into the immediate, vivid present to understand that one's relationship with another person is also mortal, brings the same sense of presence actuality and value to each encounter. It teaches us to hold the relationship gently as a finite shape in life's ceaseless flow of circumstances living out its true momentum in space and time. Some people are afraid that to let go of their grip on themselves means that they will act on every destructive or lewd impulse that occurs in them. But fundamental consciousness is our dimension of wholeness. Although we do register all of our impulses in this dimension, our actions emerged from our whole being, including our mental clarity and compassion. This awakening of spontaneity can be one of the most challenging aspects of spiritual realization. It may remind us of painful situations in our childhood when our hearts and minds were open and available. While the adults with whom we interacted were far more guarded to allow ourselves to become truly responsive and authentic again, in a world that does not always return or honor. Those qualities requires courage. We can base this courage on compassion for the confusion and suffering that is shared in various degrees by all human beings. It is also important to know that our true self, our spiritual essence cannot be altered in any way. We can trust the absolute durability of our true nature. A tibetan buddhist teacher once told me that our true nature is harder than Iraq in the hindu literature, It is said to be un created unborn, and then buddhism describes it as I have never moved from the beginning since fundamental consciousness is unchanged by the content of experience. It cannot be damaged, although we can certainly feel emotional pain. Our experience of essence is unchanged by it, although we may feel that we have been severely damaged by circumstances in our past. Once we reach the essence of ourselves, we know that we are essentially whole and well, none of our innate functions are creativity or our capacity to love or think or experience sexual pleasure to name. Just a few can be diminished by another person. We can only constrict our own attunement to these indestructible aspects of our being. The ability to relax and allow ourselves to be as we are in each moment. Also means that we can allow other people to be just as they are. One of the major challenges of intimate relationships is accepting the otherness of another person. Many people protect themselves against the otherness of other people because they fear that it will impinge on their own identity, that it will invade and curtail their own connection with themselves. But in the all pervasive space of fundamental consciousness, there is plenty of room for one's own being and the being of another person as we begin to live in this dimension, our inward attunement is no longer challenged by the otherness of another person. In the unchanging relational field of emptiness and presence. We can experience the movement of another person's experience at the same time as we experience the movement of our own experience. We can then observe with interest and curiosity how the exchange between ourselves and another person unfolds. This means that we are able to truly get to know that person and to interact with them. We don't have to make the relationship happen. We don't have to make it work in any particular way for we see that the actual exchange between ourselves and another person unfolds to reduce its true form. This has been Chapter one. The relational field. A tuning to unified consciousness of the intimate life awakening to the spiritual essence in yourself and others by Judith Blackstone.