Today’s post is brought to you by Conversations With Staff Members In Cafes. I’m excruciatingly aware that, of late, my newsletters have been rant-esque and it is a reflection of spending too long in a place I shouldn’t spend so long in. But I’m also aware that it’s entirely up to me which mirror I choose to look in for that reflection, so I turned to the people around me to get their hot topic issues.
‘Is there anything you’ve been thinking about lately? A concept? An idea? Something that has been rattling around in your head incessantly?’
The 5-minute conversation that followed covered relationships, dating, religious belief, culture, and happiness. The points that stayed most with me after our chat were to do with two things: relationship, and the ever-present human desire for more.
Relationship isn’t exclusively the domain of two people. When I refer to relationship I am talking about how one relates to everything in their life, and the world around them in its entirety. I have a relationship with work, with family, with romantic relationships, with nature, with sleep, so on and so forth. How I relate to these things internally determines how I perceive them when they appear externally.
Relationship always exists internally first. I have an image in my mind which comes up, and then that image is compared to reality, and a judgement is passed on whether or not the reality matches up with the image. If my relationship to the image is one of attachment or aversion, my judgement of reality will always be harsh, either finding it so good that I never want it to end or finding it so terrible that I want it to be over immediately. But if my relationship to this image is open and flexible, then reality won’t be so harshly judged.
I am in a relationship with my image of you, not with you yourself. You yourself are different every moment, a constantly changing, moving, evolving process of emergence and being. But in my mind, you are the Coffee Maker who acts and dresses like this, behaves like this, and exists like this. Were I to see you in another environment or reality, my image would be shattered momentarily, only to be replaced almost instantly by a new image - one that incorporates the Coffee Maker with the new reality version of you. But it’s still not you.
And, when I am looking for a romantic relationship, I have an image in my mind. When I am looking for a romantic partner, I am not looking at the person who is before me, rather I am comparing my image of a romantic relationship with their image of a romantic relationship, checking to see if they match. But I’m not seeing the person, instead I’m comparing them to this image, and a psychological checklist is operating subconsciously. All of this rather than a process of being with this new, constantly evolving human. And it’s this constant evolution which determines whether or not a relationship can exist peacefully.
If I take my image and your image, put them together and they match perfectly today, then I say ‘how wonderful!. I propose to you, and we get married. But next week the images change, and suddenly we have a huge problem. The image is static, the reality is dynamic, and I have fallen for the static - a classic human error. Just because I love something today is no guarantee that I will love something tomorrow, because I myself, and the thing itself, are both subject to endless change.
When people leave a relationship, they invariably spend a bit of time on their own ‘finding themselves’ again. To my mind this is typically a deconditioning of all the stuff they took on from their previous relationship, an act of erasing the overlaid image that had covered their own image. But too often the erasing stops at the personal image, when the erasing needs to continue until no image is left.
All my relationships in life are conditioning me, and influencing my expectations of what I desire from a relationship. If I don’t go through and deconstruct all of them, I am destined to repeat the same pattern of falling in love with an image, only to realise that the image and the reality are not the same, and to inevitably become a heartbroken mess when I can’t accept the reality.
So, I turn toward the images and determine to rid myself of them completely, but I have no idea how to go about such a process so I go looking for some system to help me do this. Typically, these systems come under the banners of religion or spirituality, so I learn from these systems. Or perhaps I already subscribe to one of these systems, so when it comes time to clear the images I throw myself back into the system full scale.
But the system is also constructed of images, whether or not I see it. I push my images aside and I subscribe to the images that are put forward in this particular system. I pray, meditate, fast, perform specific rites and rituals, and slowly but surely my images disappear, only to be replaced by the images proposed by the system I am following. When I have these images in place, my reality conflicts with them - because I am still existing in relationship to images, rather than reality - and I start to fall into the trap of more.
‘I would like to be more religious’. This is the comment that I have been sitting with for a while before writing this, and this is why the concept and importance of ‘more’ has come from, because it touches a spot that has been very prominent in my own mind.
When I am unable to accept reality, or don’t feel that I am happy enough, I start to feel that I’m not religious enough, or spiritual enough, or devoted enough, or close enough to God. So I need to pray more, meditate more, fast more, perform more rites and rituals. But this desire for more is still in relationship with an image. I have an image of a saintly person being completely at peace, but my experience of reality is that I am not completely at peace, so I have conflict. Conflict breeds more conflict, so I do all of the above more, and build more internal pressure which creates more conflict, and so on.
At what point is one ‘religious enough’? If I live permanently in a fasted state, pray 20 times a day, and my entire experience is a constant ritual, but I am constantly conflicted internally, is that religious enough? Conversely, if I eat and live how I want in a total chaotic flux, but feel no sense of internal conflict, is that religious enough?
I’ve found nothing that puts this better than the Tao Te Qing. The following is a translation from there:
In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone
The more and more I do, the more and more I realise the overwhelming need to do less. No system will ever be perfect for me, unless it is a system that I have created and am constantly updating from moment to moment, based on all the information that I receive throughout my life. Otherwise it will be a stale reproduction of things I have heard, seen, thought, and felt in the past. Life is not lived in the past, but in the present. Sure, we are aware of the past and the future as concepts, but it’s our experience of the present which determines whether or not we live within a state of internal conflict.
Life itself is a constant process of death and rebirth. We tend to celebrate the birth aspect of it, but too often turn away from the death aspect. And only through the aspect of death can we make space for rebirth. If I celebrate the birth of a new image, I should equally celebrate the death of an old image. When I am able to maintain this razor’s edge of attention, I am present and able to see the images rise and fall from moment to moment.
And this feels to be religious enough, spiritual enough, to be in a good enough relationship with reality itself. No identities, and no identifications colouring my experience of the moment as it unfolds, just the unfolding itself, with a curiosity present that asks ‘how will this change?’.
As far as I can tell, this is the only way that I am able to find a relationship with reality where I can say that I am happy enough. When all comparison has ended, when all judgements and expectations have been surrendered, when everything is enough in and of itself, when I am not needed to do anything, at any level, then everything is good enough.
And there is peace.
