| | While I do try to keep my private life relatively private, as there are my current and former wives involved, and I don't particularly want to bring them into this without their input, I can say some generic things that don't compromise anything related to them:
"Thanks Daniel. I don't know how useful it is to go into personal psychological 'stuff' but I can try. I'm in a happy stable long-term relationship, could be called a marriage in terms of commitment and trust. I've had some great relationships and some terrible ones, often ones with a bit of both, for anything from a couple of weeks to seven years. I've also had a great period of celibacy (3 years) some of which was at a monastery (a year). At this stage my interest in the question is probably more professional, since my lifelong interest is in working with psychology, teaching and communication."
How about your meditation practice? Would you classify yourself as a hardcore or accomplished or aspiring practitioner and, if so, care to be specific? Things can be a lot different in relationship to this questions of relationships depending on how deep, wild, etc. one's practice is and also how used to that sort of stuff one's partner is, and even then, two hardcore practitioners in a relationship tend to have a pretty wild ride unless at least one of them is really on the chill end of thing for a hardcore practitioner.
"I've learned stuff, it works, I'm thinking about it and figuring out how to express it in a way that your average person can benefit from (for some reason people listen to me so it would be nice to say something of value). This question here is the "thinking about it" part. You wrote in your book along the lines of how it's good to keep the absolute and relative separate, perhaps I'm trying however to allow the absolute to inform the relative."
Obviously that only goes so far, but there are reasons at times when practicing to erect those barriers as they help protect both to some degree.
"To me, love is the realization that everything is connected."
Everything is connected and we can call that what we like, love, unity, non-duality, causality, emptiness, luminosity, all sorts of stuff, but the thing is the same.
"I think the way that non-Buddhist practitioners realize this, is the realization of connection only with one person, and their limited group of friends/family. What took me aback initially was the statement by several Zen masters that you cannot attain full enlightenment if you choose to commit to another person in a romantic relationship (e.g. marriage) - never fully explained, but I think because it "takes away" from your commitment to practice."
They are making that up and it is old dogma that has long been overthrown by verifiable reality testing. I got stream entry while married, mastered the jhanas and all sorts of other stuff while married, studied really well when married, wrote MCTB while married, and arahatship while married, and I know plenty of others who have also or at least in committed relationships.
"I don't personally see that marriage and practice conflict, on the contrary my experience is that they can inform and support each other. But, I can't see them as separate things either - compartmentalisation - because nothing is separate from training."
That integrated perspective has its points when things in practice are good: the hard phases can cause substantial relationship disruption as things get reworked and before they stabilize on the other side: in those times how practice and relationships work could depend on what we mean by practice: morality? insight? zazen? tantra? The topic is vast and not straightforward.
"Does this give you any more specificity? It might sound totally surreal since I'm going for brevity - don't want to write a whole book in a message body...
Edit: More specific questions might be, how has your practice affected your marriage?"
My practice and the progress of the stages of insight on both sides probably served at once to make my first marriage very interesting and worked to destroy it. That is all I wish to say on that front. I made a lot of mistakes learned a lot then, and it helped inspire MCTB and the advice therein.
"And why did you get married? Do you think marriage is separate from practice? Is this none of my business? : )"
I got married as I wanted to be married, call it personal, idiosyncratic, empty reality doing its thing, love, or whatever you wish. The forces and factors that really cause things to happen are so vast that any analysis is superficial and complete.
Why did I get married twice? Was it love and romance? Was it pragmatism and the simple desire for company? Was it impersonal biochemistry and genetic conditioning? Was it empty compassion? Was it the universe just doing what it does? Any simplistic explanation is woefully lacking and feels like it is missing something on some front, and even the convergence or synthesis of those seems really off the mark. I might give you a different answer every hour or even minute were I just responding to the impressions of the moment as they came to me.
I generally look at marriage as a part of practice in the grand sense but in terms of formal practice keep them quite separate most of the time, and I think that is a more workable solution for us than some of the possible alternatives. People change, their interests and relationships to practice and those realms change, and to stick to more fundamental relationship things as the basis of one's relationship is more reliable than the vagaries of practice, which, at the hardcore end of things, can get quite unstable and wild, and so from that point of view, to have them as somewhat compartmentalized things that relate somehow but have their own place can help one keep both functioning, not that there aren't always interactions in both directions.
I learn a lot about myself from being married and it also helps show me things about my practice, and it is true that practice informs everything I do, including being married. However, just as I try not to bring my work home too much (trauma, misery, gore, disease and the like don't make for great dinner time conversation), just so with some of the more odd and complex areas of my practice, which are such a moving target that it is better to just let the things pass through rather than making them into something more. Partners of hard-core practitioners can find the descriptions of the experiences that hard-core practitioners sometimes have to be confusing, upsetting, threatening, and all sorts of other things that don't help anything at all. If you cruise through the DhO you will find many examples of how hardcore practitioners have had difficulties and how they dealt with it, but the basic theme is perennial. How to deal with that in ways that are beneficial is an ongoing conversation.
I think that for people doing what most people do, relatively integrated, gentle, somewhat psychological, non-hyper-intense, non-hardcore, non-ultratechnical practice, that this integration you speak of is easier and more informative. In the realm of the really out-there, the dramatic and intense, the super-deep, the bizarre, there is a lot to be said for having that as its own thing and letting something more processed, compartmentalized and conventional be present on the relationship front whenever possible, as, having tried the reverse and found it detrimental rather than helpful very single time without exception, this seems a superior and more stable solution, and also kinder and more skillful in some way. I am happily married at this time and this second marriage, having had substantially more compartmentalization at least around the big stuff than the first one, is a whole lot better for it, so it seems to me.
Have you read MCTB?
Helpful?
Daniel |