QUESTION NO. 4: How do we steal energy from each other and how do we evolve our love?Our next class will be examining the role of energy in relationships. Do you ever feel like your energy is being taken by someone or something? Do you every feel depressed because you cannot access the energy all around you? Do you ever feel mysteriously energized by some small thing that happens? Are there some individuals who generally give you energy when you talk to them and others who generally take your energy?
The recommended text for this class is Toru Sato’s The Ever-Transcending Spirit: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Consciousness and Development. You can order the book from Amazon HERE, or read online or download for free the book HERE. Additionally, in you want something quicker to read, Sato has recently written a short article, “The Gradual Blooming Process of Consciousness” available HERE making some of the same points he makes in the book.
Here are some quotes from the beginning of the book.
Here he raises the basic question of what the energy of love is:
“The Mohawk native North American tribe has a proverb that translates, ‘Life is both giving and receiving.’ In human interaction, we often say that we need to give and take. Sometimes we give and receive visible things from each other such as food, money, gifts etc., but sometimes we cannot physically ‘see’ what we are giving and receiving. For instance, if I say I will do our laundry if you clean our dishes, most of us would interpret this as giving and receiving. What is it that are giving and receiving (or taking)?
“In many ways it is something we seem to gain when we receive attention and something that we seem to lose when we are forced to pay attention to someone. When we receive attention from others, we feel energized and happy. When we are forced to pay attention to someone, we feel de-energized and often uncomfortable. Thus, perhaps the closest word to this thing we are giving and taking in the English language may be ENERGY.”
What is fascinating about Sato's theory is that he begins with the observation that energy level is actually relative to your perspective! Depending on their perspectives, the same individual can be energizing to one person, and draining to another. Hence the solution to energy is not to hord but to change your state of mind, from scarcity-perception to seeing abundance around you. As Sato puts it,
“The quality of our life is really just a reflection of the quality of our internal state of mind. Our internal state of mind is a reflection of where we are in our maturation process. Where most of us are in our maturation process is a reflection of where we are in the process of evolution.” – Toru Sato
NOTES FROM OUR LAST CLASS ON THE SUSTAINABILITY OF LOVE
Our conversation now has three questions in play:
(1) How can love make you a better person?
(2) Is passion compatible with happiness?
(3) Is it possible to keep falling in love with someone forever?
Our last discussion centered on the ideas of the influential relational psychotherapist Stephen Mitchell who argues that romantic intimacy often fails because we ourselves degrade it, in a self-defeating process he terms “protective degradation”. Romantic love has a special intensity for us because it unifies our two deepest primal longings: the longing for home, trust, acceptance, nurturance (LOVE) and our longing for transcendence, risk, the unknown, surrender (DESIRE). This special fusion of love and desire that makes romance so powerful and meaningful to us also makes it especially dangerous and difficult to control. In long-term relationships, the individuals involved often come to feel that the uncontrollability and unpredictability of desire makes romantic intimacy an unsafe glue for commitment. And so we try to protect ourself (from the painful possibility of our beloved’s failure of desire for us, or of our own failure of desire for our beloved) by subtly degrading the life of that romance and desire so that we will not be vulnerable to its contingencies. We neutralize the force of the fusion of love and desire by separating them – reserving love for long-term relationships and desire for fantasy and flirtation, and “segregating permanence from adventure.” But in so doing, we destroy the very thing that we are so afraid to lose, the unity of home and transcendence.
The key to sustaining romance in this perspective is also the key to living mindfully. We need to be able to desire without clinging, without attachment. We need to master our mind so that we will not undermine the life of our own life in the process of trying to achieve an impossible sense of security. Stephen Mitchell sees this as the truth behind the tragic romantic love story. In his book that we looked, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance through Time, Mitchell sums up his message with a metaphor from another searching romantic modernist, Friedrich Nietzsche:
“In his theory of tragedy, Nietzsche captures the delicate balance in the genuinely tragic, between the creation of forms and the dissolving of forms. Our individual lives, Nietzsche suggests, are transitory and in some sense illusory, ephemeral shapes that emerge from the energy that is the universe and that, in short order, are reabsorbed into the oneness. The enriching tragic in life can be missed in two ways. We can attribute to ourselves and our productions an illusory impermanence, like a deluded builder of sandcastles who believes his creation is eternal. Or, alternatively, we can be defeated by our transience, unable to build, paralyzed as we wait for the tide to come in. Nietzsche envisions the tragic man or woman, living life to the fullest, as one who builds sandcastles passionately, all the time aware of the coming tide. The ephemeral, illusory nature of all form does not detract from the surrender to the passion of the work; it enhances and enriches it.”
