Between Places (Space and Environment, interlude)

I’m worried my relationship to everything is fucked up. I worry that I’m going to hurt and drive away all that’s good in my life, and I worry that I’m actively courting what’s bad. In little moments I find myself recapitulating the ways that others have hurt me, but from the other end—and vice versa—sometimes it’s satisfying, sometimes it’s horrifying, but mostly it’s insulting; isn’t there something better to do than to be driven by unceasing cycles of causation?
So I’ve been trying to understand this in the way that I know how: magically, through analogy and spontaneous insight. Bubbles, concentric circles, possibility space, and so on. The big and nested quality of some of these cycles, or spaces, really concerns me. It’s one thing to find myself having the same pleas and disappointed bids in the day-to-day arena of a single relationship—it’s terrifying to consider that maybe the whole basis of a relationship is in a recapitulation of the kind of choice that plays out over years.
I write that with mind turned toward romance, but I could be talking about my relationship with music; with God; with my body, or the activity of taking care of my body.
Some of these relationships I can run away from—or, I can appear to run away from them. I can run away from this or that lover, but can I run away from Lover? From Body? Reality? Even Buddha, arguing against the reality of this or that God or fixed concept about experience, posits the Dhamma, the attainable unchanging.
That means it doesn’t necessarily help to run toward this or that lover, god, or body, and so on. However, even the Christian God is supposed to be a real ‘ultimate, unoriginated, unchanging reality’ like the Dhamma, and I think the point of the Torah is to go beyond the self-contradictory nature of discursive understanding to see that relationship with an ultimate and fundamental reality is possible for a dualistic, conditioned being. So what about Lover?
I’ve been saying to my partner that we don’t need really need to change ourselves for the sake of our relationship—that sucks! I don’t think he needs to change. But I think she’s worried about the same thing I am. I think we’re both confused about the nature of self and relationship.
I’ve been saying ‘it could be easier to focus on changing what’s between us, the relationship, than it is to try and change ourselves’; wouldn’t changing the relationship, made up of concepts and actions and feelings and questions, change the both of us who are in it? I may as well be saying ‘go up to go down’ when I could as easily say ‘go down to go up’. Okay, which is it? Down or up?
I think it’s possible to realize paradoxical, circular, esoteric instructions like that: first of all, just fucking pick a thing to do—trying to end up going up? Start by going down. Yes, this can dovetail into an infinite and recursive chain of ever-smaller micro-actions, but what’s the point of noticing that? A really profound, embodied truth can be arrived at by seriously paying attention to the presence of paradox in activity: it’s possible to observe the nondual, acausal transformation of things by which changing myself and changing the relationship and not changing myself and not changing the relationship and going up and going down and not, etc., all exist and mutually support each other all at the same time always. And that esoteric realization can make the practical work easier.
It’s also not necessary to have the conscious realization of our paradoxical reality; some people just stick with the practical work and come to understand, without needing to put words to it, that life and its works are deeply fucking weird and nonsensical. Oh well! Even with that paradox, it’s still also true that causal effects exist, which is the importance of practical skill and knowledge.
I think my problem lately is that I have a cursory understanding of paradox afforded by sincere contemplation and attentiveness. What that actually means is that I have no reason anymore not to just face up earnestly to the practical work entailed by my life’s circumstances.
I’ve actually felt this very acutely recently—if I’m feeling some resistance to doing the dishes or sending that email, it’s not necessarily hard to figure out why that’s the case. In fact, if I just start, it becomes apparent very quickly; the activity is a mirror for my internal state. If I really know my internal state by paying attention to the phenomena constituting my experience of mind and body right now, it becomes actually easy to just get up and do the thing, it actually becomes a nearly-natural outgrowth of my internal state.
What’s necessarily hard is resisting knowing my internal state. What do I not want to know about myself and how I feel? And then, going looking for that so that I can get the resistance over with can also be resisting. Hence, get up and do the thing, even if that thing is the action of resisting—and let the activity be what it is, a mirror for my internal state and not the-psychic-piss-and-shit-part-of-the-cycles-I’m-in.
Hey—let me not say that cycles are inherently bad, just as I would say that ‘progressing’ isn’t inherently good.
Relationship, its actions and thoughts and feelings, take place in cycles, because they are of the world of experiencing; question, the break from the world into the liberation of possibility-space, is more concerned with progression. Liberation is to support finding the relationships which support liberation, and relationships are to support finding the liberation to support relationships.^[1]
I’ve been saying to my partner that it might be easier to change our relationship than to worry about changing ourselves. What’s me, and what’s not? Becoming more myself by sloughing off painful cycles is the idea behind ‘not changing myself’. Stopping the self-soothing of identifying with my pain and its fruits must include the pain of letting go of my pain. If I change what I do and don’t do, our relationship changes necessarily—so, let me just begin.

1. It would be helpful, it feels like, to find a single thing which organizes this circular procession. A system, a God, a Way. However, maybe it’s not so circular and recursive; maybe the totality of relationships is God that is also the liberatory Void is God, as is the Magic that enjoins the two, as is the Way that unites the three in life and practice. Maybe I just need to try things and pay attention. I’ll see.↩︎