Message from God: book 1/122
Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them.
The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part of yourself you’d like to see “show up,” not what part of another you can capture and hold.
There can be only one purpose for relationships, and for all of life: to be and to decide Who You Really Are.
It is very romantic to say that you were “nothing” until that special other came along, but it is not true. Worse, it puts an incredible pressure on the other to be all sorts of things he or she is not.
Not wanting to “let you down,” they try very hard to be and do these things until they cannot anymore. They can no longer complete your picture of them. They can no longer fill the roles to which they have been assigned. Resentment builds. Anger follows.
Finally, in order to save themselves (and the relationship), these special others begin to reclaim their real selves, acting more in accordance with Who They Really Are. It is about this time that you say they’ve “really changed.”
It is very romantic to say that now that your special other has entered your life, you feel complete. Yet the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with who you might share your completeness.
Here is the paradox of all human relationships: You have no need for a particular other in order for you to experience, fully, Who You Are, and without another, you are nothing.
This is both the mystery and the wonder, the frustration and the joy of the human experience. It requires deep understanding and total willingness to live within this paradox in a way which makes sense. I observe that very few people do.
Most of you enter your relationship-forming years ripe with anticipation, full of sexual energy, a wide open heart, and a joyful, if eager, soul.
Somewhere between 40 and 60 (and for most it is sooner rather than later) you’ve given up on your grandest dream, set aside your highest hope, and settled for your lowest expectation, or nothing at all.
The problem is so basic, so simple, and yet so tragically misunderstood: your grandest dream, your highest idea, and your fondest hope has had to do with your beloved other rather than your beloved Self. The test of your relationships has had to do with how well the other lived up to your ideas, and how well you saw yourself living up to his or hers. Yet the only true test has to do with how well you live up to yours.
Relationships are sacred because they provide life’s grandest opportunity, indeed, it’s only opportunity, to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of Self. Relationships fail when you see them as life’s grandest opportunity to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of another.
Let each person in relationship worry about Self, what Self is being, doing, and having; what Self is wanting, asking, giving; what Self is seeking, creating, experiencing, and all relationships would magnificently serve their purpose, and their participants.
Let each person in relationship worry not about the other, but only, only, only about Self.
This seems a strange teaching, for you have been told that in the highest form of relationship, one worries only about the other. Yet I tell you this: your focus upon the other, your obsession with the other, is what causes relationships to fail.
What is the other being? What is the other doing? What is the other having? What is the other saying? Wanting? Demanding? What is the other thinking? Expecting? Planning?
The Master understands that it doesn’t matter what the other is doing, having saying, wanting, demanding. It doesn’t matter wha the other is thinking, expecting, planning. It only matters what you are being in relationship to that.
The most loving person is the person who is Self-centered.
Many people make the mistake of seeing love of Self through the love for another. Of course, they don’t realize they are doing this. It is not a conscious effort. It’s what’s going on in the mind. Deep in the mind. In what you call the subconscious. They think: “If I can just love others, they will love me. Then I will be lovable, and I can love me.
The reverse of this is that so many people hate themselves because they feel there is not another who loves them. This is a sickness, it’s when people are truly, “lovesick” because the truth is, other people do love them, but it doesn’t matter. No matter how many people profess their love for them, it is not enough.
First, they don’t believe you. They think you are trying to manipulate them, trying to get something. (How could you love them for who they truly are? No, there must be some mistake. You must want something! Now what do you want?
They sit around trying to figure out how anyone could actually love them. So they don’t believe you, and embark on a campaign to make you prove it. You have to prove that you love them. To do this, they may ask you to start altering your behavior.
Second, if they finally come to a place where they can believe you love them, they begin at once to worry about how long they can keep your love. So, in order to hold onto your love, they start altering their behavior.
Thus, two people literally lose themselves in a relationship. They get into the relationship hoping to find themselves, and they lose themselves instead.
This losing of the Self in a relationship is what causes most of the bitterness in such couplings.
Two people join together in a partnership hoping that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, only to find that it’s less. They feel less than when they were single. Less capable, less able, less exciting, less attractive, less joyful, less content.
This is because they are less. They’ve given up most of who they are in order to be, and to stay, in their relationship.
Relationships were never meant to be this way. Yet, this is how they are experienced by more people than you could ever know. People have lost touch with (if they ever were in touch with) the purpose of relationships.
When you lose sight of each other as sacred souls on a sacred journey, then you cannot see the purpose, the reason, behind all relationships.
Remembering Who You Are 