Neale Talks About... More on the Purpose of Relationships

I've been looking a lot at the nature of relationships lately and I'm coming to some conclusions that I had not reached as firmly in the past as I am experiencing right now. So for the next several weeks I am going to be exploring this topic in a series of entries here.

Before I start this discussion, let's take a look at some of what Conversations with God has to say on this subject…

            You have nothing to learn about relationships. You have only to demonstrate what you already know.
            There is a way to be happy in relationships, and that is to use relationships for their intended purpose, not the purpose you have designed.
            Relationships are constantly challenging; constantly calling you to create, express, and experience higher and higher aspects of yourself, grander and grander visions of yourself, ever more magnificent versions of yourself. Nowhere can you do this more immediately, impactfully, and immaculately than in relationships. In fact, without relationships, you cannot do it at all.
            It is only through your relationship with other people, places, and events that you can even exist (as a knowable quantity, as an identifiable something) in the universe. Remember, absent everything else, you are not. You only are what you are relative to another thing that is not. That is how it is in the world of the relative, as opposed to the world of the absolute—where I reside.
            Once you clearly understand this, once you deeply grasp it, then you intuitively bless each and every experience, all human encounter, and especially personal human relationships, for you see them as constructive, in the highest sense. You see that they can be used, must be used, are being used (whether you want them to be or not) to construct Who You Really Are.
            That construction can be a magnificent creation of your own conscious design, or a strictly happenstance configuration. You can choose to be a person who has resulted simply from what has happened, or from what you’ve chosen to be and do about what has happened. It is in the latter form that creation of Self becomes conscious. It is in the second experience that Self becomes realized.
            Bless, therefore, every relationship, and hold each as special, and formative of Who You Are—and now choose to be.

We are clear from this introduction to the discussion of relationships found in the first Conversations with God book that relationships themselves are vitally important to the human experience. That is why when they fall apart, there is such an extraordinary impact on our lives. On the day that I am writing this I returned to the very first Conversations with God book to find out more about this; to remind myself what information was given to me and brought through me many years ago. Here's what I found...

When human love relationships fail (relationships never truly fail, except in the strictly human sense that they did not produce what you want), they fail because they were entered into for the wrong reason.
            (“Wrong,” of course, is a relative term, meaning something measured against that which is “right” —whatever that is!  It would be more accurate in your language to say “relationships fail—change—most often when they are entered into for reasons not wholly beneficial or conducive to their survival.”)
            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 whom 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.

More about this next week as I add my up-to-date personal comments and observations to this whole exploration. 

With Pure Love,

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

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Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE