Relationship Advice from Experts on Consciousness

Know one of the things that I did when I was doing marital counseling for my clients was if they were dissatisfied with their spouse. Let's say I said, well, what are you fantasized about in relation to a new relationship, right? What fantasies spontaneously enter the theater of your imagination? And they would tell me, you know, in as much detail as was necessary. I would say, well, why is it impossible for you to seek that within the confines of this relationship? You know, it might be, well, she's not like that, or he's not like that, or she would never do that, or he would never act that way. It's like, well, people are pretty damn strange, and there's a lot of mystery in them.

If you're a dancer, you can get a lot of interesting possibility out of people where you thought there was only a stultified actuality. One of the things I noticed as a therapist and as an interviewer, you know, if my clinical session got boring, it was because I wasn't paying enough attention. I was substituting my presumption for the person. So if I had attended more deeply, they would start revealing more of themselves, and then they'd become—like, and this was even true for so-called simpletons. There's no simple people, but I had lots of clients who were—they weren't intellectually gifted, put it that way.

You know, they were people who would have been struggling. You know, often they didn't have a high school education; some of them weren't even literate. But if you got them out of the box that maybe you wanted to put them in, they were just as unbearably interesting as anyone else. There's a Norwegian writer, a fiction writer called Axel Sandu, who wrote in one of his books that that man who does not understand that any woman contains every woman, right? He's an idiot. I mean, the way you approach your spouse is understanding she is every woman in this universe, and that could be someone you don't like or someone you like. All aspects of being a human being are present in that other human being.

The same, of course, goes for me as a man in that same relationship, that I'm the best of men, and I'm the worst of men. One of the reasons that it's a good thing to stick to your relationship, to be faithful to your relationship, is then you allow this multitude of possible persons to be there. The moment you start thinking, oh, I would like rather to go over here or there, or I would like to change things in that way and have another object of my love, then you reduce that person, and you don't see the depth, the richness inside that other person.

I think that's what a strong and good relationship is about. That is what love and openness is about: to allow the other person to be fully rich, fully full. My wife just about died a couple of years ago, and so did I at about that time. Like, it was a narrow pathway, you know? I had a pretty good relationship with her before that, very good, I would say. I've known her since she was like 8 years old, so we've known each other most of our whole lives, you know? She changed quite a bit after she was ill, and really for the better once she started to recover.

I was much more, I would say, grateful to have her around. I mean, not that that wasn't there to begin with; it was already there. I loved my wife, but the demonstrative—like a true demonstration of the possibility of her absence woke me up a bit more. One of the things that's happened is that now when I see her, I can see her at every stage of her life at the same time. It's really something. Also, what's happened is, like, she shed a lot of her self-imposed constraints in the aftermath of her brush with mortality. It lasted like nine months; it was a very torturous experience. So she changed a lot.

It's taken multiple years for the full manifestation of that change, and it still hasn't happened, but it's a wonderful thing to see her. Maybe it's also a reflection of my change in attitude. I think we're afraid of our own entropy and know our own possibility. In doing that, I would say she's become more like a child again, you know? There's insistence in that—in Wordsworth, for example; also biblical insistence, you know, that unless you become as little children, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven. It has something to do with that imaginative plurality that you described, right? Because one of the things that's magical about children is their capacity to magically transform and enchant the world.

They do that because they're going in many directions; they're not narrowed. You know, that makes them in need of discipline and civilization, but there's something wonderful about that. So I'd like you to comment on that, but I'd also like to ask you, you know, what you just said about relationships—that's not something that everybody knows. So I'd like to know how you figured that out.

Hard hard work. How did I figure that out? Yeah, well, and you can say it—not only did you figure it out, but you can articulate it. So, yeah, um, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to it, actually. But I think that it's—I've always had a tendency to be very monogamous. Is that how you say the word in English? Yeah, yeah. And faithful to—but in the modern world, I mean, you—you’re certainly monogamous; you have more than one relationship but one after the other. As a young person, you have several girlfriends, but you're faithful to each of them all the time.

Is that understandable? Absolutely, yeah. And so I—and that was unusual in the circles I was living in in the 70s, that people were sort of all over the place, all of them. I was like, sort of—I had this instinct for monogamy, and I was sort of wondering, why is that so? I realized that it was because it made me discover and explore the richness of the other person instead of just comparing to someone else and wanting to change someone else.

Then, of course, I've been cultivating that emotion and that way of living for quite some decades now, and I think it's very obvious that the moment you start comparing people, yeah, that's a commodification. You see the label: this guy I'm talking to has these opinions and this track record and so on, and you confuse the person for the label. All you see is the labeling, and life becomes very boring. Of course, what I've been doing with food and agriculture, what I've been doing with how our cognition system works, what consciousness is all about—I've been doing a lot of work also with environmental issues and so on.

It's the same basic story all the time: we confuse the label for the real thing; we confuse the terrain for the map; the concept for the real stuff. I think that what we do when we are not sort of faithful in our love relationships is that we do comparisons all the time instead of saying, okay, this is it. I'm not a perfect man in any sense, but all aspects of masculinity and many aspects of femininity are in me, yep. And that's—it’s every person is a universe, right?

Well, this is certainly something that I learned, and this is why I love doing psychotherapy, because the art of psychotherapy is to have that realization making itself manifest constantly during the conversation, right? Because that—and that means the person is on the cusp of optimized transformation.