The Way Of True Marriage
What’s It All About?
A Jazz master was approached by a younger man who wanted to play in the master's band. Without more, the master handed the younger man a sheet of music notations saying "Here are the chords I wrote for a number I composed. Call it The Territory. I will begin to play it and you listen until you hear me suddenly make a change and begin something entirely new. Completely fresh. Into God knows where. Call this the The Adventure. Or, call it living.
And while you listen to what I am doing you respond in the adventure with ideas of your own and I will hear your response and respond to it as your response to my response has sparked in me to play and we continue this way back and forth as long as we please in another dimension to go places where nobody has ever gone before and where nobody will ever go again creating a time for the music we play that responds moment to moment to what is being played by each of us…that way we absorb truth.
Something I have for a long time found strange concerns the way humans relate to one another in practice. We seem to agree for the most part we are a part of the “living” world as opposed to the nonliving things of the world. But when we talk about ourselves intellectually we speak and think as we do of nonliving objects. So, our scientists, the intellectuals, responsible we think, for leading us from our present condition, about which we loudly complain, to a more appealing one readily work on us and our parts as nonliving “things”. For example, they think: having a light bulb makes a better world for us. Does it? Or did it make a larger bank account for Mister Edison and a more secure future for all inventors to follow him? To really answer that question we must address what in us makes us “living” beings. Is it mainly that we are aware of our existence? We do not think non-human animals or plants are so aware yet they are considered “living”. So, what is “life”? We do not know, if honest. We toss the word around, like we do the word “love”, in complete ignorance of that of which we speak. How about that?
How important is “life” to you? How important “love”? Why then do you not act like they are and spend at least as much time studying the meaning of those terms as you do planning your budget or your career or obtaining property or a mate or your children’s education? How aware are you as you go about your activities day-to-day that you are not a non-living object for you have “life”?
If these words upset you all the more reason to give them attention. Be honest. What is life? What is love? What are peace and contentment and freedom? What are the characteristics of that which lives? Can life be measured? Compared? Of course not. That is why science is powerless to study them and should admit that.
Best science can do is to say a living human can eat and drink and breathe and respond to stimuli and a nonliving one cannot. What is religion? Really, what is it? To be truly religious, what does it mean? Is it at all important to the scientist? The lawyer? The corporate executive? The politician? What is meant by a call of the heart? Do lawyers, scientists, and executives feel often they even have one and it calls?
Can we label life? We label objects. Here is how you speak of yourself and your fellow man and woman-she is a Catholic, he is a Jew, they are Spanish, I am American, he is a criminal, she is crazy, those are unemployed, those are elderly, etc. he is my client, she is my wife, he is my boyfriend this is my son, he has special needs and on and on and on. Abstract labels for objects. Since I was a child I have wondered why people deal with me as an object and pretend to know me. I am sorry, but something terribly important to me goes missing and it hurts like Hell!
So, let us consider seriously enough to find the answer to a simple question: what is the nature of my relationship to every other human being I meet outside of the labeling game? If I call you my wife. What do I really mean? Do I mean: poof! you are an object I can own you? If I mention love, what do I mean? What’s it all about?
Love means to be unattached. You have been taught to mistrust and fear unattachment and to search madly to attach, attach, attach. You know the first cure for the pain of divorce suggested by all the remaining husbands and wives is another wedding. But to be unattached means to be indivisible and that is where you will find love.
Attachment to another is a mental concept only, not real, and cannot be made real. Thought and time have no such power. I am what I am. Funny, but maybe, in the final step, one learns it takes two or more to make a fella or gal feel lonely and then find that to be alone is to be all one. A body can have no more companions than that!
Another side of that common experience of being lonely in a crowd is to understand it is a lack of love that leads the unloved to marriage, not love. One of the major religions that marries many people has taught for centuries love is not possessive. Marriage is based in possession and is a vain attempt to make the living into but a nonliving set of abstractions. How can such a practice be associated with love? Some never learn. The central question to be asked and answered in life is: Can it be possible to find out what love is by spending one’s life possessing others?
Getting real, ask, who is it that claims to have and be had by another? Who do I think I am when I say “I do”?
A moment came in my own life when I wanted more to know whether I would behave badly if I ceased to claim to have a wife or a child or a friend of my own than I feared the answer. Up to that moment all my training had been that unless an authority orders me to behave in an admirable fashion I will shun all responsibility to others. That is pure bullshit. Truth is the opposite.
Certainly the evidence is abundant that we are very unreliable in any possessive relationship. We let each other down too often to count. Wisdom suggests you are born as the person you want to grow up to be.
The conditioned mind of a human caught as a prisoner in time knows nothing of love or life or death or God or kindness or generosity or compassion or passion or religion or discipline or loyalty or insight or creativity or anything else that transcends time. Minds make plans using memories from the past to craft an imagined future in the attempt to control human destiny and the results are pathetic. It only amounts to repetition of yesterday’s failures unto a dusty death of fools. (to follow a line by Mr. Shakespeare)
Thinking can be useful as a tool for tying one’s shoes or inventing a light bulb and the like. But it is to be assigned to the mechanical applications and to be kept under constant surveillance from the eye of a watchman who slumbers not. Once set loose, the conditioned mind never ceases plotting and too soon it gets around to the sinister ways to take prisoners and breed abstractions so as to rule in a corrupt world of tyranny. By the time it has taken power it has become convinced that the reality of its very existence is a mentally invented image, an abstraction, attached by a label to a mortal body who obviously intends on taking Heaven by force.
