The-Touch:-Sample-Chapter-One
Chapter One – Our Relationship with Life
“I can break off from anyone, except that presence within. Anyone can bring gifts. Give me someone who takes away.” ~Rumi
Whether we realize it or not, we live in a spiritual environment where Love is the only essence. We may want to think we have arrived on this earth to make something of our lives, like saving the world or our own souls. That’s not the case. We are here to immerse ourselves in Love, and each aspect of our lives is essential to this immersion. Everything in daily life is sacred, from the food we eat, to mundane tasks like cleaning the house, to the most obvious source of Love—our relationships. All relationships originate from the depth of an unseen spirituality, and each relationship is trying to demonstrate to us our connection—or lack of connection—with the mystical union of Love.
What we must begin to feel—and what we have lost sight of through our upbringing and education—is that we are trying to have a relationship with ourselves through every aspect of our lives. Relationship with ourselves creates a relationship with the sacredness of Love. And when we have a relationship with Love, we are in harmony with the whole of life because everything is in God. This harmonious immersion of ourselves in the essence of all is the mystical adventure this book is about.
Society Against Love
I first began writing when my teaching and counseling work made it obvious to me that people fail to have real relationships. That is, we don’t know how to connect with key elements in our lives, such as work, children, money, and even play, all of which involve a much greater experience than the merely physical. Although we typically relegate these elements to the nonspiritual categories of necessity or luxury, they in fact represent the spiritual qualities of our lives. If we simply adopt the right perspective, everything in our lives is a door to the infinite, a gate opening onto the mystical journey into Love.
Our culture fails to perceive this basic fact of life; indeed ours is a badly wounded culture. This point came home to me in the course of my counseling and teaching when people kept asking me for ways to modify their beliefs and behavior to appear “more acceptable” or “more attractive,” not only psychologically but also in spiritual terms. Their goal was to obtain what they needed to “get through” daily existence and escape the fear of going through life alone or powerless.
As an example, consider how susceptible we are to the allure of security. We look at someone and think, “I want that person. I know he will make my life better” or “She will bring me what I don’t have for myself.” Thus the game begins, a game we all play. We start modifying what we believe in, how we act, what we say, and what we do until we get what we want. Amazingly, we call this a relationship. In reality, though, we have no relationship. Instead, we engage in a series of compromises aimed at keeping tight hold on what we think will make us happy.
As a consequence, we sever our ties with our feelings and lose the Love of our life. Especially in my marital counseling work, I have been amazed again and again to watch two partners act selfishly and immaturely. Often I felt as if I were on a playground with a bunch of overwrought four-year-olds. I lost count of how many time a couple left a counseling session with the situation “resolved,” yet not an hour later the two of them were at it again, calling me on their car phone on the way home in the middle of a bloody battle over who was “right.” After encountering this series of events again and again, I recognized it as a pattern, and I began to look at it from another point of view. I asked myself, “What is it about us that causes such difficulty in relationships?”
Slowly the answer to my question evolved. It begins with understanding what the word relationship means—what relationship really is, where it goes, and what purpose it serves as we travel along our spiritual journeys. Relationship has nothing to do with getting along with other people or being either right or wrong or good or bad. Relationship has nothing to do with “soul mates.” I can’t tell you how many couples I have counseled who once were “soul mates” and now are divorced. Nor am I not about to teach you how to have a better relationship with your mate, find a perfect partner, or raise ideal and well-behaved children to be “proud of.”
Instead, we will be looking at what it is about us that makes our lives possible. By that I mean the way we sometimes think ourselves extremely fortunate or extremely unfortunate, as if things have happened that never should have. What comes to us in life isn’t punishment or reward. Rather, it result from our relationship with ourselves and our willingness to feel Love.
