Investigating Relationship

When you're investigating any relationship, you are really investigating yourself. Everyone that you are in a relationship with is a projection of you, a reflection of you, and in some ways a creation by you. Now we don't say that to be flippant and avoid discussing any sense of another person’s contribution to the experience, we say that because as you continue to dive deeply into this notion of who you are, it becomes very clear that others are who you think they are, and you learn about you in relationship, not about anyone else.
 
All that you really have as information about another person is your own thoughts and feelings that are occurring in the moment attempting to describe the nature of that relationship. All that is available to investigate is who you perceive yourself to be in that moment, and everything about the other person is pure speculation. This speculation is often not very accurate or useful. It tends to be based on historical information rather than present experience. It is totally subjective, biased and full of expectations and assumptions.
 
Usually your initial sense of someone is related to the role they seem to play in your life, and your ideas about people who play that role. This is totally normal. You have an idea about what a landlord is like, so you see your landlord through the schema you have which describes “landlord.”  Your mother is supposed to be whatever you have developed as an idea of “mother” and so on. This is true for even the most intimate relationships. You evaluate how well they play the role you have ascribed to them and lose touch with a bigger view of them—hence you lose touch with the bigger sense of yourself. Everyone plays a million roles throughout their lifetime, but are seen by others with just a few of these roles defined. Assumptions and expectations are a product of the way you evaluate how someone else is playing a role in your life. “You are supposed to do this, be like this” are the most common assumptions we are speaking of. Assuming anything about another is unsatisfying for everyone. As both people engage in this, it is impossible to make anyone the cause of it. If you feel like someone is assuming things about you, you might just notice if you have evaluated them according to a role you believe they are supposed to be playing in your life.
 
Of course, no one is supposed to be anything. There are no absolutes about what a relationship should look like, how a person should function, communicate, operate, what actions they should take. These are things that are overlaid upon the present moment experience as idea structures because structure makes you comfortable. Many of you are uncomfortable in the wholeness of a moment and just experiencing the moment. There is an absolutely new display of phenomenon in every second, but it can seem much more comforting to expect something that your mind his conjured up and made into a story about what is real. This is this is the way that you get stuck in your life. You think it's so much more comfortable if everything just meets your expectations--your expectations are reliable and they don't change. Yet just the opposite is the result. You can experience great discomfort because those expectations can't be met, and the fixation on your expectations ultimately limits the opportunity for spaciousness and true liberated experience of reality. This can be very subtle. Subtle or not so subtle, expectations can get you felling stuck in some way.
 
There is a way out of this stuck place. It is actually quite easy. In the process of relating to someone who in that moment you are perceiving as a separate individual outside of yourself, you are projecting an image of a person and interacting with your projection. What you perceive as the space between you and the other person, the space you believe separates you, is actually the space that connects you and the other person. This is of course just a shift in your perspective. The shift in your perspective is what compels you to feel separate, but it can also allow you to feel connected. Separation and connection are just two sides of the coin—the coin being the idea of relationship. Because relationship is the primary aspect of duality, there always seems to be two things relating, however, it is all conjured up by you in the moment. This is not a bad thing—this is the delight of the play of all life. In fact, we would suggest that the reason you live in duality is to enjoy the experience of relating. 
 
Just get the sense that whatever space you think is separating you from anyone else is actually a space that is joining you. Imagine looking through a microscope and suddenly you see that there are all sorts of things in motion and all sorts of space and unless you have some kind of scientifically trained eye you can't really tell what is space and what is some thing. It's just a whole lot of different happenings in some seeming order and some seeming chaos and the divisions between things are constantly in flux. From the deepest level of investigation, you and everyone else are just organisms in a much bigger, more profound, both completely organized and totally chaotic expression. It's important to be able to tune into that notion from time to time because it helps you then to understand anything that happens in the course of a relationship is just part of the One Life expressing.
 
The difficulty in relationships, generally speaking, is that different kinds of emotions and thoughts get triggered in the midst of communicating. You can get invested in the absolute reality of the experience of your thoughts and feelings and believe those thoughts and feelings are caused by the other person. Of course, another person cannot cause anything in you. You react to your own ideas generated about someone—their actions are evaluated by you to have some greater meaning or importance—and you react to your ideas. It becomes easy to ascribe the responsibility of your reactions to someone else, giving the other person the power to “make you” happy or “make you” sad. The moment you believe that in any way, you have lost your perspective and are no longer in the delight of the duality. The delight of the duality needs both sides to have power, to be absolutely equal in any arbitrary sense of cause and effect. One side cannot have the power to cause another side to be a certain way. So there you are stuck in the separation—the space between you and the other—without the capacity to see the connection.
 
Trust that all relationships are really more about self-discovery than anything else. You are not really discovering something about another person, you are discovering something about One Life, about the totality and your own self, completely in the moment you investigate, because you can't really discover anything other than that. It is always the big picture, the pure view, and your awareness of that knowing that is revealed over and over again in relationship. One Life awareness is present even if it seems to be in the background momentarily. In every interaction in every relationship that you have, allow that knowing to become more visible as you become more transparent or spacious, as you let go of holding onto your view in favor of having what we can call the primordially pure view—One Life, no separation, all light.
 
Choosing to live your everyday life mindfully, and that means putting attention on the everyday circumstances, the everyday communications, and the everyday exchanges, having some kind of mental, emotional, or spiritual flexibility, there's an ongoing awareness of the big picture the pure view and that allows for real freedom.
 
Your experience of discomfort in relationship comes from the small story, the small picture, the narrow view.  Have a flexible assemblage point where you can sense the way that you are assembling your reality as being one way in this moment, and another way in another moment, not fixed, not stuck.  You can never be absolutely certain that things are this way and only this way. You must be willing to recognize that things can seem important and significant in this moment exactly as is and the next moment really could be completely different. That is respect for the impermanence of the moment, but it's also a flexibility in understanding that you're putting your reality together on the fly in every moment and it's not something that is absolute, fixed, or static.
 
Upon investigating a relationship, remember you are investigating yourself. Always remember what you learn about you, and keep the biggest view possible. There you will find that love underwrites everything. Love is a noun and a verb, a thing and all the space between things that connects them. Be as loved as you are, and, of course, just be.