15 Oct The Mistake of Relationship as a Way to Self-Completion – October 16 2020
“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
If I think I need a relationship in order to be complete, I am seeing myself as incomplete. The world sees me as I see myself and responds to me as I expect it to respond. If I see myself as incomplete, the world will offer me an incomplete experience of life.
Seeing myself as incomplete, the people I draw to myself will be people who are drawn to an incomplete person. They will see me as someone who needs to be completed, and will present themselves as the one who can do it, in exchange for me being the same for them–their means of completion.
It’s easy to see how this will play out. Everything will be hunky-dory for a while until both of us begin to notice we’re no longer feeling fulfilled by the other (because no matter how good it might have felt in the beginning, it always wears off). The we’ll either start demanding more from each other, or torturing our partner for withholding what we need; or we might begin looking elsewhere for the true love of our life, because obviously I made a mistake thinking it was this one.
Completion, wholeness, is available only within–in our relationship to our true Self. We find this relationship by sitting in meditation and transcending our surface experience of life. Twice each day we drop into this place of the Truth of our Being, and we begin to know ourselves as the fulfillment within–perfect, whole, and complete; and as we live more and more from this place of wholeness, the universe will begin to see us more and more as this wholeness, and bring to us someone else who is fulfilled, who is whole. Someone who is an ideal reflection of the fulfillment that we are.
When two fulfilled people come together there is an opportunity for something beyond an experience of taking turns with our neediness. There is an opportunity for love.
Today I will approach every relationship in my life asking what can I give, rather than what can I get, knowing that by giving, I am defining myself as fulfillment, and the universe will begin to see me that way, too.