April 04, 2012 is the 25th anniversary of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s death (parinirvana). I am using this post to pay tribute to his great love for his students and to a heart that sustained and guided his escape from mountainous Tibet in 1959 so that he could bring the Shambhala buddhist teachings to the West.
“The main point is to have a heart! If you don’t have a heart, you have to build one. If you need further reinforcements, take a piece of my heart. You have it. It is yours.” (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche)
In Part Two of this Relationship Series, we discussed “falling in love.”
Today’s post is about love.
My question of March 18, 2012: Is “love” synonymous with “basic goodness?”
David Sable: Yes!
Me: I gather that love comes out of primordial\ultimate basic goodness. But how can we relate to it on the relative plane? The use of the word “love” seems to be so abused at this point [as to render it almost meaningless]. We have “bought into” a lot of the ceremonies that our society has taught us about “love.”
David Sable: When we open the baggage we carry about “love,” this is what we work with on the relative plane [daily life].
Love comes with a lot of baggage, as David Sable points out above. The baggage is made up of, among other things, often unrecognized and unquestionned expectations.
Your most intimate relationship is the one you have with your thoughts. The way you relate to your thoughts determines everything else in your life, and in particular how you relate to other people. If you believe [grasp onto, fixate on] your stressful thoughts, your life is filled with stress. But if you question [examine] your thoughts, you come to love your life and everyone in it. <source: Byron Katie: I Need Your Love — is that true?>… includes an exercise that allows you to discover what your experience of love really is [beyond the baggage] — an experience that doesn’t disappear and doesn’t depend on anything or anyone outside you.
Throughout the book we’ll be inqiring into some painful and universally held thoughts about relationships, and we’ll be finding out if they are really true.
Besides expectations and unquestionned thoughts, some of the baggage involves what I call the composite karma of the two people. I have my karmic package. You have yours. Together they form a composite karmic package that is “ours”. For those who believe, as I do, that one’s astrological natal chart reflects the karmic package with which one came into this lifetime, you can get a composite astrological chart that illustrates what the two people have to work on.
Some think that dealing with the nitty-gritty of the baggage takes away from the “romantic” or potentially romantic quality of a personal relationship.
I don’t agree.
I personally don’t find it romantic or sexy to base a relationship on not knowing, on lack of clarity, on projections and fantasies, and on blocked communication that is the result of fear and cowardice. Indeed, the word “responsibility” means the ability to respond!
In other words, I don’t believe that ignorance is bliss. To me, knowing what is, how things are in each particular situation, and being able to discuss it on a non-ego basis is both romantic and sexy. That’s something we can work with together beyond ego positions and bargaining. Ury and Fisher from Harvard University call it Getting To Yes Without Giving In. When you aren’t coming from the default position of ego, there’s nothing to give into.
Notwithstanding the value of a broken heart as pointed out in the previous post entitled Relationship Series Part Two, I’m neither a martyr nor a masochist. My tenderness and vulnerability have to be based on basic sanity and a mentality of richness (not poverty) altogether, not what I call idiot selflessness.
To me, genuine love is unconditional, as opposed to conditional love that depends on manipulating to get what you want. But this is not to say that there shouldn’t be a “give and take.” Just that it has to be freely given. Again, to repeat what was said above, Ury and Fisher from Harvard University call it Getting To Yes Without Giving In.
When I love someone, the practice is to love him for who he actually is at that moment even if what he says or does angers or upsets me. I fall in love whenever we meet. I follow\feel his in-breathe and his out-breath. And sometimes we can even co-ordinate the whole thing.
We are each others’ eternal one-night stand (source: Richard Burton’s description of Elizabeth Taylor).
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along – Rumi
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