(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)

Weblogs are meant to be personal. Hopefully readers will find something in mine that can help them to create a more fulfilling life. I offer this highly personal account so that it may benefit others.

 Once we begin to question our thoughts, our partners, alive, dead, or divorced, are always our greatest teachers. <source: Byron Katie: I Need Your Love — Is That True?>

I have been trying to write a draft of this webpost on commitment since April 03, 2012. I am finding it especially difficult.

• I am not “the marrying kind”— But I do want emotional intimacy with those significant others who value it as much as I do, and who respect the preciousness of the vulnerability that this creates;

• I do not want to be part of a conventional “cozy couple”— I just want to be capable of loving in a non-ego way; and
  

• I do not want to live with my significant others-of-the-romantic-kind — But I cherish the time we spend together.
  

But that doesn’t mean that the idea of commitment is not important to me. It is. But I begin to realize that I don’t know what commitment really means.

May 14, 2012 …..I’m having supper with Alex (click here) at Remy’s in the Yorkville district of Toronto. I’ve been trying to work out what “authentic commitment” means. Or at least, what it means to me. I raise some of these questions during our discussion over supper.

• Are love and commitment inseparable?
  
• Can you love but not make a commitment?
•  Do we commit to a person?
  
• To a relationship?
  
• To a view about how to live?
  

I tell Alex that I begin to think deeply about the nature of commitment because of a message my life partner leaves for me just before he dies at age 61 in November 2004.

I just called to say I love you. I wish that I would have done more of that. I regret that I wasn’t more romantic. One of the regrets of my life is that I took you for granted. I spent a lot of my life running away from commitment, running away from anything that made me feel tied down. This was because I was frightened. I was afraid of getting it all right! Most people say they are  afraid of getting it all wrong. I was afraid of getting it all right. It was ingrained in me as a child that all family relationships and all family units fail. If I had got it all right I wouldn’t have known what to do with it! I realize that it was a disastrous thing I did by allowing my fears to run — and ruin — my life. I couldn’t break the cycle.

I had a lot of self-esteem issues. I never felt good enough or grand enough. I’m thinking right now of “Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” [1922 novella by novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald], and the song “Putting on the Ritz.” I spent my life putting on appearances, trying to look successful. I was bitter. Even if I had had a diamond as big as the Ritz I would have been unhappy. You were my diamond as big as the Ritz, but nothing made me happy. I really missed the whole point.

I could have given you a multi-faceted joy — like the multi-faceted diamond that you are — if I hadn’t been so uptight and bitter. My life with you should have been an adventure. Just being together should have made me happy. I could have appreciated just sitting down eating a lovely meal with you. But nothing ever felt like it was enough.

Falling in love with you should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

There was nothing more you could have done. There was nothing more you could have given me. This was an unending cycle that I couldn’t seem to break from my childhood.

Put another way, I think my life partner is saying that he chose his habitual patterns over freedom from a negative karmic cycle, over a mature relationship. As a result, this kept his  karmic cycle going.

And the result for me?

I end up putting my own romantic nature on the back burner. That is, until I had a raw, intimate, erotic dream on February 03, 2012 that threw me into an identity crisis. (Please click here to review the dream.) That was one day after, i.e. on February 02, 2012, that I reviewed the message presented above from my life partner. It was as if he were speaking to me through the dream of February 03, 2012 to warn me not to hide from who I am like he hid from who he really was. Not to let habitual patterns obscure who we actually are on the relative plane.

May 20, 2012:  I attend a class on the Sadhana of Mahamudra (click here for more information on the sadhana). We are discussing the idea of  “the three confidences,” one of which is decisiveness. My vajra brother Fred Cohen suggests another word for decisiveness, namely commitment. Not waffling around. BINGO. Finally, things have started to fall into place around what commitment might be.

Being decisive about something. Not waffling around.

Of course, the commitment to oneself is the first and most important one in the sense of being true to who you really are and to your own heart. Sometimes that might mean that you have to end a relationship in the form that it has been. I think we just have to be careful that what we call being true to our heart is not really a cover-up for indulging in negative habitual patterns. Hmmmm. It can all be very subtle.

Ending relationships rather than going on and on with something that is no longer good for you, perhaps because someone is acting from an entirely frivolous state of mind in order to maintain or defend ego. This is where alarm bells go off and say “You’re in emotional danger.” This is where being commited to your own well-being has to be the priority.

Didn’t Kenny Rogers sing  “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, Know when to walk away.” Even if you love someone, you  may just have to walk away.  Or what I call “getting out of the car” — the car symbolizing the journey you have been on together, however that journey has manifested up until now. You now take another route.

On the other hand, even deciding to engage in a relationship altogether might require some decisiveness in\commitment to being willing to work with our own resistance, fixed views, and the fear of emotional intimacy.

In his last message, as presented above, to me before he died , my life partner said “I really missed the whole point.” What is the whole point? Using Fred Cohen’s suggestions presented above, my own view is that we have a choice:

• We can either be decisive about\commited to continuing to maintain our habitual patterns\responses and keep our karmic package (please click here for definition of karmic package) intact. That’s what cowards do.
  

OR

• We can be decisive about\commited to ensuring that heart trumps ego, by freeing ourselves from these habitual patterns\responses in order to have a more evolved, happy and fulfilling life inspired by couragously “stepping up to the plate” of our own lives and manifesting our own basic goodness on the relative plane [please click here for definition].

…. to be continued in Part Two

Preview of Part Two:

To me, there are two main types of commitment:

(1) Conventional committment is based on ego where we are commited to protecting our “investment.”

We use our beauty, our cleverness, our charm to capture someone for a partnership, as if he were an animal. And then when he wants to get out of the cage, we’re furious. That doesn’t sound very caring to me. It’s not self-love. <source: Byron Katie: I Need Your Love — Is That True?>

(2) “Authentic committment” – I’m going to suggest that this involves viewing your lover, or some other significant other, as teacher.

There’s no mistake about the person you’re with; he or she is the perfect teacher for you, whether or not the relationship works out, and once you enter inquiry, you come to see that clearly. There’s never a mistake in the universe. So if your parnter is angry, good. If there are things about him that you consider flaws, good, because these flaws are your own, you’re projecting {in the sense of making judgments or drawing conclusions about the partner as a human being, based on the flaws he\she manifests}, and you can write them down, inquire, and set yourself free. <source: Byron Katie: I Need Your Love — Is That True?>

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