getting the wholing truth

“All a person wants is Wholeness, but all he does is fear and resist it”

-Ken Wilber Up From Eden

What are we looking for in our couple relationships? If we are searching for something, what is that we have lost? What do we want or really desire?

Aristophanes’ fable in Plato’s Symposium suggests that the human was originally a dual figure with a double gender; two backs, two chests, four hands and legs and two faces looking in opposite directions. This being was so powerful that Zeus divided it in two. Since then we spend our lives looking for our lost other halves.

There is something akin to this in our upbringing, where we begin as a unit of mother and child-a unit which has to divide. We lose this wholeness and every partner we couple with is in some way-perhaps in an unconscious way-compared to this primordial unit where all of our needs were “satisfied” (of course all of our needs are never satisfied, hence to be human is to be bound up in dissatisfaction). We long for and search for this unification.

And so, we walk the Earth, searching for a lost paradise, hoping that our couple partners will provide this for us.

But the whole truth might be more complex than that.

The experience of being thrown out of paradise, of the longing residing in that blissful state of needs-being-met might just be the most crucial event in our human devolvement and most powerful next step in our maturation, if harnessed well.

In his book, Up From Eden Ken Wilber assiduously points out-even in the books title-that in order to actualise our deepest potentials we essentially need to be cast out of Eden. The Fall is God’s greatest gift to humanity.

However, we resist this actualisation.

Why? Perhaps because we fear, we fear not our darkness but, as Marianne Williamson says, our light: “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you” (Williamson, A Return to Love).

And so, we can descend into a hubris of scepticism, doubt and superficial cynicism, staying close to an egoic self that defends against further falling, literally our “pride goeth before a fall”.

When I was around 2 years into my mindfulness training, and totally besotted with my root teacher Rob Nairn (and still am) I began to experience a feeling-sensation that I had never experienced before. I felt as if everything that I had known and believed and identified with was leaving me; I was falling, as if I’d suddenly lost my grip going down a staircase.

I found myself constantly falling, a falling without an end. After months of this I decided to take this to my academic supervisor who I decided would be the one who would be able to stop this now dreadful experience. I asked her what this was. “not sure” she said “but I’ve experienced it, it’s dreadful” (not helpful, so I asked more, what would Rob Nairn call it? I asked) “I don’t know what Rob would call it” she said “but I know what he would say” (great, I thought, I’m going to get an answer) “he would say: excellent!”

This turned out to be the best kind of advice I could have been given.

The Fall is good news, not bad.

The unity we were at the start-mother and child-that primal couple could well be an undifferentiated template pointing us towards something more real, the differentiated wholeness we only find after meeting The Fall, in the existential clarity of our life: The Great Loss.

We meet this truth in our couple relationships, where our needs feel at times so deeply met it feels like love-and it is, for this is the closest thing to heaven that we have felt for decades, since that time before heaven abandoned us. And then it fades.

Because it’s not real.

It’s a substitute.

What we want is something to return, the Wholeness, but what we need is quite different. If this endless quest, this eternal wanting is going to stop, then we need to stop-and look within.

The Whole Truth is a wholing truth, we find our wholeness not in our partners, but inside; what we really need we find within.

Realising this, we can perform a huge act of kindness; we can release ourselves and our couple partners from a terrible bind that we’ve been part of and put each other in, saying “I set you free from the expectation of making me whole, I set myself free from the same to you”

Now we can get real love, undistorted from the unachievable demands of an impossible wanting. This is the second stage of love: love liberated.

This is then an “inside job”, finding your own Whole Truth: meeting your other half, your Self.

And this is getting real love.