Purpose of Relationship

Is there a way to be happy in relationships? Must they be constantly challenging?

You have nothing to learn about relationships. You have only to demonstrate what you already know. There is a way to be happy in relationships, and that is to use relationships for their intended purpose, not the purpose you have designed.

Relationships are constantly challenging, constantly calling you to create, express, and experience higher and higher aspects of yourself, grander and grander, visions of yourself, ever more, magnificent versions of yourself. Nowhere can you do this more immediately, impactfully, and immaculately than in relationships. In fact, without relationships, you cannot do it at all.

It is only through your relationship with other people, places, and events that you can even exist (as a knowable quantity, as an identifiable something) in the universe. Remember, absent everything else, you are not. You only are what you are relative to another thing that is not. That is how it is in the world of the relative as opposed to the world of the absolute.

Once you clearly understand this, once you deeply grasp it, then you intuitively bless each and every experience, all human encounter, and especially personal human relationships, for you see them as constructive, in the highest sense. You see that they can be used, must be used, are being used (whether you want them to be or not) to construct Who You Really Are.

That construction can be a magnificent creation of your own conscious design, or a strictly happenstance configuration. You can choose to be a person who has resulted simply from what has happened, or from what you’ve chosen to be and do about what has happened. It is in the latter form that creation of Self becomes conscious. It is in the second experience that Self becomes realized.

Bless therefore, every relationship, and hold each as special and formative of Who You Are – and who you now choose to be.

When human love relationships fail (relationships never truly fail, except in the strictly human sense that they did not produce what you want, they fail because they were entered into for the wrong reason.

“Wrong,” of course, is a relative term, meaning something measured against that which is “right” – whatever that is! It would be more accurate in your language to say “relationships fail – change – most often when they are entered into for reasons not wholly beneficial or conducive to their survival.

Most people inter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather that what they can put into them.

The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part of yourself you’ll like to see “show up” not what part of another you can capture and hold.

There can be only one purpose for relationships – and for all of life; to be and to decide Who You Really Are.

It is very romantic to say that you were “nothing” until that special other came along, but it is not true. Worse, it puts an incredible pressure on the other to be all sorts of things he or she is not.

Not wanting to “let you down,” they try very hard to be and do these things until they cannot anymore. They can no longer complete your picture of them. They can no longer fill the roles to which they have been assigned. Resentment builds. Anger follows.

Finally, in order to save themselves (and the relationships), these special others begin to reclaim their real selves, acting more in accordance with Who They Really Are. It is about this time that you say they’ve “really changed.”

It is very romantic to say that now that your special other has entered your life, you feel complete. Yet the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you, but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.

Here is the paradox of all human relationships. You have no need for a particular other in order for you to experience, fully, Who You Are, and . . . without the other, you are nothing.

This is both the mystery and the wonder, the frustration and the joy of the human experience. It requires deep understanding and total willingness to live within this paradox in a way which makes sense.

Most people enter the relationship-forming years ripe with anticipation, full of sexual energy, a wide open heart, and a joyful, if eager, soul.

Somewhere between 40 and 60 (and for most it is sooner rather than later) they give up on their grandest dream, set aside their highest hope, and settle for their lowest expectation – or nothing at all.

The problem is so basic, so simple, and yet so tragically misunderstood; your grandest dream, your highest idea, and your fondest hope has had to do with your beloved other rather than your beloved Self. The rest of your relationships has had to do with how well the other lived up to your ideas, and how well you saw yourself living up to his or hers. Yet the only true test has to do with how well you live up to yours.

Relationships are sacred because they provide life’s grandest opportunity – indeed, its only opportunity – to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of Self. Relationships fail when you see them as life’s grandest opportunity to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of another.

Let each person in relationship worry about Self – what Self is being, doing, and having; what Self is wanting, asking, giving, what Self is seeking, creating, experiencing, and all relationships would magnificently serve their purpose – and their participants!

Let each person in relationship worry not about the other, but only, only, only about Self.

This seems a strange teaching, for you have been told that in the highest form of relationship, one worries only about the other. Yet, the secret is this; your focus upon the other – your obsession with the other – is what causes relationships to fail.

What is the other being? What is the other doing? What is the other having? What is the other saying? Wanting? Demanding? What is the other thinking? Expecting? Planning?

The Master understands that it doesn’t matter what the other is being, doing, having, saying, wanting, demanding. It doesn’t matter what the other is thinking, expecting, planning. It only matters what you are being in relationship to that.

The most loving person is the person who is Self Centered.

If you look at it carefully. If you cannot love your Self, you cannot love another. Many people make the mistake of seeking love of Self through love for another. Of course, they don’t realize they are doing this. It is not a conscious effort. It’s what’s going on in the mind. Deep in the mind. In what you call the subconscious.

They think, “If I can just love others, they will love me. Then I will be lovable, and I can love me.”

They reverse of this is that so many people hate themselves because they feel there is not another who loves them. This is a sickness – it’s when people are truly “lovesick” because the truth is, other people do love them, but it doesn’t matter. No matter how many people profess their love for them. It is not enough.

First, they don’t believe you. They think you are trying to manipulate them – trying to get something. (How could you love them for who they truly are? No. there must be some mistake. You must want something! Now what do you want?)

They sit around trying to figure out how anyone could actually love them. So they don’t believe you, and embark on a campaign to make you prove it. You have to prove that you love them. To do this, they may ask you to start altering your behavior.

Second, If they finally come to a place where they can believe you love them, they begin at once to worry about how long they can keep your love. So, in order to hold onto your love, they start altering their behavior.

Thus, two people literally lose themselves in a relationship. They get into the relationship hoping to find themselves, and they lose themselves instead.

This losing of the Self in a relationship is what causes most of the bitterness in such couplings.

Two people join together in a partnership hoping that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, only to find that it’s less. They feel less than when they were single. Less capable, less able, less exciting, less attractive, less joyful, less content.

This is because they are less. They’ve given up most of who they are in order to be - and to stay – in their relationship.

Relationships were never meant to be this way. Yet, this is how they are experienced by more people than you could ever know.

Why? It is because people have lost touch with (if they ever were in touch with) the purpose of relationships.

When you lose sight of each other as sacred souls on a sacred journey, then you cannot see the purpose, the reason, behind all relationships.

The soul has come to the body, and the body to life, for the purpose of evolution. You are evolving, you are becoming. And you are using your relationship with everything to decide what you are becoming.

This is the job you came here to do. This is the joy of creating Self. Of knowing Self. Of becoming, consciously, what you wish to be. It is what is meant by being Self Conscious

You have brought your Self to the relative world so that you might have the tools with which to know and experience Who You Really Are. Who You Are is who you create yourself to be in relationship to all the rest of it.

Your personal relationships are the most important elements in this process. Your personal relationships are therefore holy ground. ‘they have virtually nothing to do with the other, yet, because they involve another, they have everything to do with the other.