What in the World is Happening in Relationships?

This little book addresses the whole issue of relationships at present. At this point in history, relationships have become near impossible to effectively manifest. People are having a very difficult time with all forms of intimate relationship -- spousal, parenting, friendship, mentoring, close collegial, and all other forms of vulnerable, invested, committed and significant interpersonal involvements.

It should be noted about this that it represents a point in process. It means that we are at a certain stage in the evolution of the collective consciousness that requires that this be the state of affairs. It is therefore not necessarily indicative of intractable pathology on your part or on that of your partners. It is a process that is affecting everybody, and it is a pivotal teaching process on route to where we need to be.

In the early 90's, we are in the midst of the so-called "Armageddon" process whereby we are being forced to make a choice between continuing the ways of life we have led up to this time or embarking on a heart-centered, integrity-based and cosmically congruent way of life. The imperative from the Universe is contained in the book title, "Love Is Letting Go of Fear", and the clear warning is that selfishness is suicide. It is also clear that if we don't collectively choose on the side of love in all we do, we are looking at the last 20 years of human history.

At this point in our development, the "shit is hitting the fan", and the "last grasp" of the "old order" is in a full and very tight grip of things. And that produces a pattern in which they win all the battles and it looks really bad for us all. However, this is really what could be called the "mousetrap" phenomenon, in which the Universe is saying to those so inclined, "Go ahead. It's right there for the taking. Have at it! (Of course, it's September 29, 1929 -- only two weeks away from the trap-snap, but that shouldn't deter you!)". In the long run, they are going to lose the war.

As a result of this process, however, we are experiencing all the wrong people doing all the wrong things and getting all the right things, while all the right people get all the wrong things happening to them. And that includes in the realm of relationships. However, it needs to be known that this is all part of the preparation process for what we have to do next to pull off a successful outcome of the "Armageddon" scenario.

In fact, we have been in effect carefully designed to be totally incompetent in relationships as a part of the preparation process for this time. It is a kind of "up against the wall" and "You can't do that any more and survive" type of thing. We are living out the legacy of all that has gone before, and we are being forced to hammer out new ways of relating because the old ways are a sure-fire failure on the way to hell.

We are being required to heal ourselves by this process, in that there is no choice but to heal or fall. A lot of changes occur within us as we do this, and we come out the other end of the "tempering" process strong as steel and ready to go. We will have to work out the "make and mend" approach to effective relationships. It is going to take a consistent problem-solving and "flying by the seat of the pants" approach, because the "real thing" has never been around. Indeed, the relationships we have seen and been in could be characterized as a "catalogue of catastrophe".

What we are involved in is the final healing process here, and that involves very, very early relationship issues. We have in effect "peeled the onion" down to its core. We have already taken on the most recently acquired neuroses, such as those acquired in the military in Viet Nam, for instance, and we have moved our way back in our healing process to the point where we have gotten to the foundational events that generated our deepest-seated neuroses.

These usually are established during the intrauterine period and/or in the "symbiotic" period (0 to 9 months) during the "double bubble" relationship with the mother in which there are no boundaries. This means that the fundamental relationships that have to be worked out are two. One is the one with yourself, and the other is the relationship with the "Home Office". Because at this extremely early point in our development, any significant neuroses on the part of the mother are "osmotically assimilated" as "silicon implants". And they are taken as direct messages from the "horse's mouth, the Source itself" about who we are and what we deserve.

Now the mother's neuroses extend back seven generations, according to the Bible. That refers to the fact that in our evolutionary history until 10,000 years ago (about 6 and a half million years), we reared our children in the "commons". That was the central area of the "ambulatory camp ground" that was the "territory" of the hunter-gatherer tribes. Everyone participated in the imprinting, disciplining, teaching and loving of the all the children.

Then we started the agricultural revolution, and we went to the isolated nuclear family model in which the mother had to do almost all the child rearing, with some help from the elders in the farmhouse. The result was that instead of the child getting the collective wisdom of the entire community and the "canceling out" effect of having everyone involved in the imprinting period so that the parents' neuroses and shortfalls were compensated for, they end up being imprinted almost exclusively by the mother and the other members of the isolated family. That, in turn, resulted in neuroses being passed on for seven generations, the period necessary to guarantee cultural stability while simultaneously incorporating the changes that inevitably occur over time.

This effect has been considerably compounded by the "descent into hell" of the "hitting bottom" process of the collective as it becomes inescapably clear that we simply cannot and will not persist in the "selfishness syndrome" if we intend to survive. The net effect of this is that "the failings of the parents have been passed on to the children for seven generations" to the point now where we simply cannot afford to continue in this process any more because things have gotten so bad.

As a result of this process, our experience of the cosmos, starting in the intrauterine and "double bubble" period is that "God must be Al Capone", or that we are some sort of hideous monster, or both. And so our foundational relationship with the cosmos is based on the residuals of seven generations of negativity passed on in the womb and beyond. And furthermore, our basic experience is that we got what we got because we are what we are.

Because at that early a stage of development, there isn't any cognition or mind to operate the mental body so we could go see where the source of our pain and rejection experience really were. We couldn't see or understand the external and internal circumstances that were driving her, nor could we understand all the parameters and processes that produced her in the first place. So all we have at this stage of the game is the experience that there is this THING going on between us and what feels like the whole cosmos.

When we reach for God and get "Godzilla" like this, our automatic egocentric assumption is that we are simply getting our "just deserts". After all, God is never wrong. Furthermore, the experience is totally ubiquitous and continuous, so it is clearly something wrong with us. And we have to get this thing straightened out with the "Home Office" between the womb and the tomb or we are in "shit city" for eternity.

The resultant is a process called the "developmental flatline". What happens is that the developing individual encounters "trouble right here in River City" of a "red alert" -- "battle stations" nature. And the trouble is experienced as being that your soul is suffering serious rejection from the "Home Office". And you gotta do something about that or you're done for, for eternity. This is the formation of what Bradshaw calls the "inner child".

And that "inner child" starts frantically scoping and scanning what it thinks is the "Home Office" to find out what It wants of you. The effort is to turn off all the negative experiences emanating from that quarter. So what then happens is that the "kid" starts garnering data on what it is that "God" (actually "Godzilla") wants. So they end up scoping and scanning their mother and then all other significant rejecting and pain-inducing relationship figures to turn off the rejection, wrong-making, accusations, neglect, punishments, deprivations, humiliations and whatever. The result is that you end up "tailor-making" your personality to match the neuroses of your parents.

What you are attempting to do here is to cure your parents' neuroses. And that is an impossible undertaking. Not even a spouse can cure their partner's neurosis. It requires a truly objective, relevant, committed and competent neutral party and a deeply motivated participant to heal a neurosis -- maybe. There's simply too much vulnerability, too high a set of stakes, too much intimacy, too much multi-level loadedness with regard to projection and transference from the parents onto the intimate other. And no child can EVER heal their parents' neuroses.

So what that means, therefore, you come out of childhood with the feeling that you have given your all to get the thing straightened out with the "Home Office" -- and you have failed. You therefore enter adulthood looking for some way to get this thing handled, lest the "ultimate catastrophe" occur. So what you end up doing is generating the "selective electromagnetic effect" in which you get pulled to and pull to you people who make you feel like the original prototypes did -- "stand-ins" for the "original cast".

And you have a "romantic rush" -- the "Robinson Crusoe reaction" --in response to them. What you experience here is what looks like an opportunity to put a new ending on the old story. The situation is one in which they activate in you those old familiar feelings, and you are instantly galvanized into motivation to change the situation with God. Notice that it is how they make you feel that sets this off. It's not necessarily what they look like, how they behave, what culture they come from, how old they are or any of the usual notions of "parent transference elicitors". It's how they make you feel, which can, of course be greatly amplified by other similarities (or even non-similarities as you then think they AREN"T the same old story all over again).

This is the genesis of the thing known as the "fatal attraction" or the "nemesis" figure. This is an individual who fits all the criteria that make you feel like the "original cast" made you feel, and you are instantly activated into trying to put a new ending on the old story. Now when you encounter the nemesis figure, you have the "romantic rush" -- "There they are! This time it's going to HAPPEN! I just KNOW it! This time it's going to work!". The experience is that you are finally going to "make it with God".

And what's really happening is that you are after God and what you get is your parent(s) all over again. And, of course, you can't cure them any more than you could cure your parent(s). It inevitably results in another disastrous outcome in which you end up feeling worse than before. You also end up with all kinds of sequelae, as they say in the med bus. These are the side effects of the whole process like the deep hurts involved, the re-validation of your feeling that you are unfit for Divine consumption, and a growing despair, rage, fear and resignation. The net effect is that you end up feeling like you're never going to make it because you are the "turd of the Universe".

The process is one of trying to get God through your relationships. This is of course very similar to the thing of looking for God in all the wrong places found in the addiction process. And it has the same kind of fantastically powerful impulsion behind it. Because what drives it is a terrible sense of separation from the cosmos. So that you are here alone on your own rejected by God -- a person without a cosmos experiencing the ultimate ostracism.

Now the "inner child" or "the kid" has no judgement on you about all this. The "kid" is a part of the hard-wired system called the "automatic pilot" whose purpose it is to make it possible for your soul to be here doing its thing. What the "inner kid" experiences in all of this is that for reasons that are not known, your soul has gotten into some deep shit trouble with the "Home Office". It therefore takes the position that it is its sole purpose to rectify that situation if it is at all possible.

For instance, supposing that you are a baby soul who has had very little experience on the Earth plane, which means that your soul is prone to fear and "evil" ("live" spelled backwards) lifestyle patterns. Furthermore, you are in an African-American male's body in Harlem. And you discover by about a year of age that your destiny this time is to be a psychopathic pimp. Now the "kid" does not attack itself for having to be this way this time. It just simply says, "Ooh! Psychopathic pimp, eh? Well that means I have to learn to be ruthless, cunning, and relentless in the pursuit of my personal protection and prerogatives". And they set out to do so. They just take it as a given that they are going to live this kind of a life. They don't pass judgement on themselves at the "inner child" level.

So your inner child does not hate your guts, although it feels like it a lot of the time, as in, "I have met the enemy, and it is me!". It actually isn't. It is the "kid" frantically trying to get this thing with God taken care of before it's too late. This being the case, its priorities override all other considerations because it is your immortal soul that is on the line.

It takes the attitude that this is a bus stop on a long journey. And if they have to screw up your quality of life in this bus depot in order to prevent the bus driver from throwing you out the window as soon as the bus trip resumes, they'll do it. The stakes involved are so high that all other considerations pale by comparison. And that is how the "kid" becomes your so-called "enemy". It will mess up your quality of life if that's what it takes to get "God's" approval. It passes no judgement on that. It just scopes and scans for what "God" wants and it tries to give it to Him.

The "inner child's" experience is that God is this 24 story tall giant stomping around going, "FEE, FI, FO FUM! I KNOW YOU'RE AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE!". So the "kid" is working its buns off trying not to take up too many resources, trying not to draw too much notice to you, trying like hell to get this thing straightened out with the "Home Office". The hope is that when the "Home Office" does discover them, they can pull out this dossier of accomplishments that are fitting Its criteria so as to get a reprieve from their sentence.

Now under those circumstances, with stakes involved, the "kid" is going to be shall we say rather conservative around this issue. Because your immortal soul is on the line here as far as they're concerned. So although like the rest of the automatic pilot, the "kid" is a hard-nosed, bottom line realist who learns from experience and is nobody's fool, on this particular issue, they are not about to cut any corners and they are not about to take any chances here. Because if they stop the process of trying to get the "God Housekeeping Seal of Approval", it is in effect telling God to fuck off. Which is soul suicide.

So we have this little kid in there who is still frantically trying to get this thing straightened out with the "Home Office". And, over time, as the kid goes on and on and on with the process, they have these three "rooms" relating to this goal of getting the "Seal". One of the "rooms" is marked "Progress Towards The Goal". And you go in there and there are these platinum records on the wall commemorating those glorious moments when you scored a coup. People, situations, accomplishments and events that indicate that you have vindicated yourself somewhat with the "Home Office" -- with the folks.

The second room is very much larger. In fact, it's huge. And it's labeled, "Fucked Up Again!". The experience here is that you have done it WRONG again. This covers all the experiences where you were in one way or another attempting to make it with the "Home Office" and it didn't work. You didn't get the indications of validation, appreciation or absolution you were looking for as indications of progress towards the goal.

Finally, the third room is EXTREMELY large -- and because it is in a limited land use area, it has grown up rather than out. And it is now the size of the Empire State Building, so that when you are at the top of the room looking down, the "Progress" room looks like a dot down there. This is the "realist room" that is the storage area for all indications that something is not right here. This room is labeled, "Something's Fishy Here . . .". The experience is that something is mighty suspicious, that this doesn't make any kind of karmic, cosmic or common sense. Now normally, the "kid" would have thrown in the towel long ago on this pursuit of the "Seal" thing because this "Fishy" room is so large. But it is very conservative on this issue. It is garnering absolute proof positive plus before it makes its move and throws the whole thing out as a "bad buy".

So the "kid" is neither your enemy nor some sort of naive, totally blind idiot nor some sort of raving madman or nutty neurotic. It is a highly committed but highly conservative conservator trying to protect your ultimate interests. As a result, it is highly resistive about changing its criteria or its process in case that really was God. But as the third room begins to burst its seams and to teeter from too much tallness, it begins to get mighty suspicious. And a process called "getting it up to the EYEBROWS" with regard to the whole thing starts happening. And when it crosses threshold and the "kid" is totally convinced that was not God, it finally throws in the towel and says, "Forget it! This is ridiculous!".

And one of the things that's happening right now in the relationship realm is that there is a hell of a lot of experience being devoted to this issue of our relationship with what our "kid" thinks is the "Home Office". There is a lot of cosmic energy being directed our way around this issue of putting God's face on the intimate others in our life. This process involves two things.

One is them is called the "nose-rub" process. The message here is, "This'll learn ya!". So you do the same old strategies with the same kind of people of trying to get this thing straightened out with the "Home Office". So you try whatever it took to get your mother to start with and others later to stop hurting you at top notch speed. You are trying to fill that first room.

Now the process that's going on with the "nose-rub" is you try that and you find out what it gets you. In other words, it gets you more of the same old shit -- in spades. So you get your nose rubbed in your own shit every time you try pulling another person like that into your life and every time you try to pull the same old strategies. In fact, you get to deal with whole truckloads of your shit when you do this, in what is called the "garden rake" effect. You try to sneak in the old style stuff and you step on a rake that smacks you in the face -- every time.

The other process that's going on is the thing known as, "We-e-e-e're BA-A-A-ACK!". This a complete reinstatement of the formative process stuff that happened at the very beginning, such as intrauterine. However, now it is modernized, updated, adultified and externalized to produce the same experience you had in the womb and in the first year of life, along with what happened subsequently.

So what that does then is to set up a situation in which from over here and from over here and from over here and from over here and from everywhere you're getting stuff coming at you that reinstate the same experience you had at the very beginning, and it creates the same feelings. Now what that does of course is to really panic the
"kid". "Oh shit, it's getting WORSE!!!". That convinces the "kid" that they really have to "overtime" this thing because it's getting out of hand. "I'm getting more and more negative responses here. More and more negative experiences! Oh Lord! I'm losing ground!". The "Fucked Up Again" room is getting a LOT of input.

This process is not, however, about improving the fine points of the pursuit of the "Seal" process. It is instead to force you to re-evaluate the pursuit. It provides you with experience as to what is REALLY going down. When the "kid" "flatlined" early on in the developmental process, the evolving "automatic pilot" split into two parts. One part went on to become the systems by which the soul can exist on the physical plane, by which we handle the requirements of life, by which the soul's experience can be expanded. This became the "ego" or the "self system". It too has the "three room" process for everything it does. The other part became the "inner child" humping at the pump trying frantically to get the "God Housekeeping Seal".

The difference between the two is that the "automatic pilot" or "ego" or "self system" is a total realist as to what it is that it's seeing. So when it looks at anything, it has the effect of being a combat-seasoned, Nam vet top sergeant "sentry eyes" scoping and scanning everything for all of its reality meanings. Now the "nose-rub" and "We're back" processes are affecting the "top sergeant" big time. And s/he's getting to the point where they're looking at the whole thing and going, "Something's REALLY fishy here! What the hell is going on!? This is coming at me from everywhere and I just plain don't deserve this! Where is the IRS coming from? And my spouse? And my boss? And my next door neighbor?" And on and on it goes.

And the top sergeant is sending truckload after truckload of "fish" to the "kid" saying, "God dammit kid! Will ya get it straight! This is what's going on!". And that's the whole point of both the "nose-rub" and the "We're back" processes. It is designed to put the "kid" and the "top sergeant" and you in the same space of consciousness as you were when it all came down in the first place -- in the womb or in the first year of life.

The purpose is to get the "kid" to drop the notion that there is something wrong with you that you have to take care of in order to have the "Home Office" stop rejecting you. And that is the process that is going on at the present time for us all. It is a "healing crisis" that makes you feel as bad as you did in the first place, not to "prove" to the "kid" that you are never going to get away from your pain, but rather to prove to the "kid" that there was never a problem with your beingness in the first place. The problem was your parents', not yours.

The Universe is seizing upon everything it can to carry out this undertaking. And one of the prime things it does to do that of course is all forms of relationship. And so all relationships at this point are a total nightmare. They have to be. It's part of the healing crisis. We cannot have our inner "kid" going around trying to please an unpleasable parent in the head any more. That simply will not cut it, period. It's suicidal.

So we are being given all kinds of processes and messages and experiences and events to make that quite clear. And as one of the many ways in which this is being brought home to us, our relationships suck at this point. That's just the way it is. Celibacy is becoming one of the commonest sexual paths, as people are becoming so spooked about the whole thing that they are backing off from the entire erotic arena.

There is also a culture-wide process going on at present that could be characterized as the "mass divorce". People who thought they were in a life-long committed relationship are finding that after tons and tons of effort, they simply cannot continue with their partner any more. And so with great regret, conflict and upheaval, they end up deciding to terminate the relationship while feeling like the turd of the Universe for precipitating all this trouble and potential harm.

So what we have here is the coming to a head of a rather intense situation. The tendency is to start filling up the "Fucked Up Again" room in reaction to all this. But the reality is that it is intended to fill up the "Something's Fishy" room. And in order to get that, you have to go up against the wall in your old patterns. For instance, the mass divorce thing is actually reflecting the end of your "teaching relationships" in preparation for the "real thing".

But as it turns out, this "fishy room" thing is only one of the parameters involved in the production of the seeming impasse relationships are coming to. There are a large number of other processes and parameters that affecting how relationships go at the present time. Now we will go on to some of the other ones.

The next thing that is happening in producing so much trouble on the relationship front is the phenomenon that has euphemistically called "dysfunctionality". That process is associated with the whole addictive experience. And the addictive process is what you could characterize as the sine qua non of trying to put a new ending on the old story with the wrong people, over and over again.

What dysfunctionality and addiction are about is "desperately seeking Susan". That is, trying frantically to find a connection with the "Home Office", looking for God in all the wrong faces. Consequently, what we have at the present time according to the most sophisticated estimates is a situation in which something like 95% of the population is immersed in one aspect or another of dysfunctionality.

Now part of that is this "God Housekeeping Seal" thing. But part of it is just plain sheer desperate loneliness, a terrible sense of separation and isolation. There probably has never been in history such a strong sense of "The buck stops here, and it's me, myself and I, and I stop at my skin and you start right outside me. And that is two separate worlds."

There has been less what could be characterized as sacred contact and consciousness in this era in the world than at any time ever. And for that reason, dysfunctionality is absolutely rampant. Now this is an interesting manifestation. Because in the course of evolutionary development, the level of soul sophistication of the collective has systematically increased.

So that, for instance, if you look at what was going on in Europe or in Asia in the middle ages, you see awfully, awfully primitive behavior. That was a function of the fact that at that point, they were just leaving behind the baby soul level of collective soul development and just entering the young soul level, the power chakra. If you think it's bad now, you ought to have been here then. "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" demonstrated beautifully how crude and stupid people and events were then.

So although at the present time we are in the midst of the worst sense of separation we have ever had, we are simultaneously at the highest level of collective consciousness we have ever attained. What was happening back then was that while all hell was going on, it served as an impetus to look to the cosmos and the larger purpose of so much suffering. As a result, there was a much larger sense of connection and of being taken care of on the cosmic level. It was a very God-conscious time. Of course it was in baby soul fashion -- very dependent, immature, primitive and ferociously assaultive of other God-connections. Witness the crusades, the inquisition and the horrors of the orient.

The point of all this is that although we were much more primitive and cruel back then, we were not dysfunctional like we are now. At this point, we are on the verge of crossing over into the mature soul range, the heart chakra, in our collective consciousness. Nevertheless, we are not all that much better off because it is being accompanied by the Armageddon process and this massive manifestation of dysfunctionality. There is a dreadful sense of separation and isolation and rejection by the "Home Office".

And it is worldwide in its operation. For instance, one individual was in India and sent out their laundry. The person receiving the clothes was intensely obsequious and pleasant because as a baby soul and as a dysfunctional, they will do anything to avoid rejection. When the laundry came back, it was all nicely wrapped but it hadn't been cleaned. And that is the way it is everywhere. Nothing works and everything's screwed up because of the effects of dysfunctionality.

And that includes of course our intimate behavior because that is where we are the most vulnerable, the most loaded in our emotional baggage, and the most involved in the thing that comes closest to the original formative situation that set up this whole thing in the first place -- the relationship with the family of origin. We end up projecting our parents onto our intimates, going into a dysfunctional frenzy trying to get this thing straightened out with the "Home Office", and ending up of course shooting ourselves in the foot right and left. And shooting up the environment pretty good too, while we're at it.

Dysfunctionality is rampant at this point and it is a process of everybody feeling so completely separated, isolated and completely alone on their own that they are looking desperately for some sort of connection with the sacred, with the cosmos, with the "Home Office", with the collective, with something, with SOMEBODY.

Now the other side of the coin of this thing is of course that when you have that as the motivation, what lurks just below the surface is a tremendous outburst of what could be characterized as devotion. In other words, those people who are into the addiction process ARE desperately seeking Susan, desperately seeking contact with the "Home Office".

And just below the surface of all the dysfunctionality in the world is a radical revolution of our relationship to everything as we sacredize the secular and we go to the heart chakra as we come out of the dysfunctional pursuit of the "Home Office' and we open to the real thing. So this massive dysfunctionality is one of the processes designed to bring down the old order and to bring up the relationship with the "Home Office" that is the foundation of the emergence of the heart-opening process of the collective.

The third thing that is rampant in our whole process here is the phenomenon known as the "puer" and the "puella", "Peter Pan" and "Peter Panella" -- the eternal boys and girls. These are people who have never grown up because they were subjected to a program of keeping them around the old homestead to avoid losing them to the world. And so they end up chronically immature. They want to be taken care of, they don't want to have to do anything they don't feel like doing, and they remain eternal children.

They never want to be grown up adult, responsible, contributing, accountable people. They want to do their own thing, to go with the flow. The whole "New Age" is tied up in this in what could be described as the "thrills and chills and pills and frills" approach. They want no responsibility, no accountability, no restrictions, no requirements, and no demands. Dancing in the light, sweeping all that is "heavy" under the rug, and having a thrill a minute.

They are also high flying idealists, like Icarus, the guy who put on wax wings and flew so close to the sun that he plunged into the ocean. They become very ethereal and very spiritual and very abstract and very very attached to their spiritual experiences. They want to have union manifestations, cosmic connections, and nirvanic charges, with no regard for the world around them.

Now the larger cosmic purpose of the emergence of the puers and puellas is that they are slaves to the positive mind. But as is true in all problems, there is a gift in the garbage. In this case, it is the potential mastery of the positive mind. This would result in their being able to generate great abundance and creativity, along with modeling spontaneity, flexibility and win-win living. But they have to grow up first.

The puer/puella thing is well nigh universal as a phenomenon at this time. And when a puer and a puella start to "play house", the realities of intimacy, bringing home the bacon, and dealing with the responsibilities of life, they develop a whole set of attitudes and issues and relational processes that basically boil down to two kids having a hell of a fight about who's not going to be taking care of whom.

The film "Hook" presented this process very well. The plot is that the protagonist of the film is a stock broker in New York. But he is the man who was Peter Pan as a boy. And he has a couple kids of his own. And the family visits England where he grew up, which Hook takes advantage of and kidnaps his kids. So he has to go back and rescue them. He does, and in the process he remembers who he really is. But the film ends with his throwing his career out the window and portraying a senile old man who "lost his marbles" in Never-Never Land prancing off to return to stay there permanently. It should have had him bring his son to work as he shows the boy how Peter Pan turns the business world into a heart-centered system. The fact that it didn't end this way is very indicative of where we are at right now.

Now the fact of the matter is that when puers and puellas reach middle age, they go into a mid-life crisis. They realize they have done little with their life and that they are so immature and powerless they are not likely to. There then develops a pattern of their either getting it together, hitting skid row or deathing out. It is of considerable interest that the yuppies are now having to pawn their Rolexes and to sell their BMWs to make ends meet. They are being forced to face the issue of growing up or getting out.

And indeed, that is the whole point of the Armageddon process. It is not about "Jesus is coming and boy is he pissed and you asked for it assholes and you're going to pay for it!". It is a bayonet in the belly to the effect of "Grow up or Get out!". It is a requirement to either go to the heart-centered, integrity-based functioning of the mature soul or terminate the human experiment. The collective consciousness now has to commit to the process of taking care of business.

What it amounts to is that we have been in the school of hard knocks with evil as the headmaster for six and a half million years. Now evil is learning from our mistakes, pratfalling our way through life, paying the karma and the consequences as we go. We have been like a bunch of kids in school -- breaking the nibs on the pens, dipping the braids in the inkwell, dealing with the bully and the cliques in the schoolyard, handling homework, etc.

We've been going through the business of learning how to be ensouled vehicles in space-time. And we have reached the top of the third chakra on the collective consciousness level, and we are now running in place like a jogger at the signal. We've been doing that for about 8000 years, and now the grace period has run out. We have to start becoming accountable and responsible in an equal exchange of energy in congruence with the first law of the Universe.

Now what puers and dysfunctionals and younger souls do is to try to maintain a one way street in which they get and never or rarely give. Children are like sponges and they are in an unequal exchange of energy relationship with the cosmos. The exchange is that as a function of all the cosmic and committed community energy coming in during the formative process, they are then expected to turn around and share all they have become with the Universe as a function of the integration of their soul and genetic gifts with the gifts from the cosmos. They contribute back in the form of new creativity, new generativity and new evolutions as they carry out their responsibilities as mature adults in the community and the cosmos.

Similarly, on the soul level, we have now reached the end of the growing up process, and the requirement now is for the collective to contribute back to the cosmos in a co-creative relationship. We have not been attacked up to this time for making first class asses of ourselves in the process of learning the ropes of coping in the physical universe. We were supposed to do that. But if we persist in being selfish for very much longer, perhaps a year or two max is all we have left, we will not make it much past the turn of the century.

In the fall of 1991, there appeared an article in the San Francisco Chronicle reporting a multi-disciplinary, multi-national scientific study of the ecology. It concluded that if we don't get a major international effort going on the ecology by mid-1995, we will breathe our last in the year 2040. Period. No reprieve. Since it appeared, I have heard or seen nothing more of it. It's amazing how much denial there is at this time.

This is part of the whole process of getting us to the point where we are forced to manifest what we are capable of manifesting -- or get out. We are in a seven year period of transition to whether we make it or not that started on November 11, 1991. All that's happening now is to get us to put our money where our mouth is. Selfishness is suicide, corruption kills -- don't even think about it.

Now of course the masses are in the "buckshot butt" process at present. They have their feet on the ground, their heads in the roots, and their butts standing straight up gathering buckshot. When it gets too painful to tolerate any more, their heads will pop out and they will start screaming "Well what DO we do!?". Until then though, talking to them is like trying to present reality to an alcoholic on their way to hitting bottom -- you might as well piss in the wind.

When the bottom is hit, those who have a better idea will be called on to put out their awarenesses and resources. It is already starting up with some people. Interestingly, it is the realm of police work and business where this is happening. Those who carry the weight of society on their backs are the loudest defenders of the old order -- and the first to go with the new realities. They go with what works.

So what is happening here is a coming to a head of the whole Armageddon process. And in the realm of relationships, it is taking primarily the forms of homophobia and the war between the genders. And of course they are related. Homophobia reflects the collective's panic at the disintegration of the paranoid patriarchal patterns of relations between the genders and of the management of intimacy. It is the fear of the loss of the entire system upon which everything rests -- namely the sexploitation of women.

The war between the genders reflects this process and its foundations in 8000 years of oppression in which both genders lost big time. It takes the form of "tripod-rage" and "Goodbar reactions". "Tripod-rage" refers to the irresistible urge to kick anything with three legs. It has to do with the collective cumulative experience of the entire female race. They are involved in a gigantic intolerance response to any of the paranoid patriarchal manifestations. If they see authoritarianism, irresponsibility, exploitation, sexual coercion, corruption, incompetence, weakness or any of the male failure patterns of the past, they respond with intense anger. This is an up with which they will no longer put.

Now that has a profound impact on their child rearing of male offspring. If he is to be trained to be successful in the patriarchy, she has to train him to be an asshole. And if she creates a non-patriarchal male, he is a failure and she has no respect for him. And either way, the son experiences her extreme cumulative archetypal rage at him for being what he is. Simultaneously, as she rears her daughters it has been impossible not to pass on the seven generations of parental failure and pain in the form of training the daughter to have an enormous amount of "tripod-rage". And of course, the patriarchy validates it every day. So she ends up with built-in rage at men, and her brothers get their sisters hating their guts at the emotional body level as well as getting it from their mothers.

This all results in the males ending up with "Goodbar-rage". The title comes from a film called, "Looking for Mr. Goodbar". It's about a lovely woman who works as a special education teacher by day, while she prowls the bars at night looking for the cruelest dude in town. The film ends with a strobe-light presentation of him disemboweling her. "Silence of the Lambs" is about the most extreme form of "Goodbar-rage" -- the serial killer.

The serial killer is not a new phenomenon, but it is extremely high frequency at this point in our history. For instance, the central reformatory for the state of Oregon had one serial murderer from 1890 to 1900, while it had 60 from 1970 to 1980. These are adolescent serial killers. Most don't start till later. This is the ultimate extreme of "Goodbar-rage".

"Goodbar-rage" refers to the fact that he was reared by a woman who had a significant amount of "tripod-rage". And she was in the double bind of having to rear a paranoid patriarch or a loser. She becomes totally frustrated. On top of which, she is so devastated by the paranoid patriarchy and by the "fatal attraction" figure she married that she has nowhere to turn for masculine support but her son. So she forms an emotionally and/or erotically incestuous relationship with him, often accompanied by colluding with him against his father. The result is a derailment of his destiny, as he is "miswired" to functionally fail in a lot of significant ways.

Now the generative process (providing for the next generation) in the female is traditionally the bearing and rearing of the children. In the male, it is the building and nurturing of the world that the children will enter. That's why males get so totally and passionately invested in their work. And when he has been effectively devastated in his ability to do this, he is profoundly enraged at she who caused that. And he may either pedestalize his mother because of her "spousing" of him and hiding her undermining efforts or he may be furious at her because she was out front about it. But in either case, he will be pervasively rageful towards women, and especially towards his intimate woman. This is "Goodbar-rage".

So what we have is "tripod-rage" and "Goodbar-rage" interacting with each other and creating a nearly impenetrable wall between the genders. This wall is so insurmountable that it has generated a very interesting phenomenon, to which we turn now.

Throughout history, at any given point, approximately 1% of the population at all soul age levels will by destiny choice take the experience of being homosexual. They learn from the process of forming profound, deep and loving intimate spousal relationships with members of their own gender. But when the entire system begins to disintegrate, what happens is that the relations between the genders become so totally untenable that the rate of homosexuality increases to 10%.

Now the last time that things got that bad was the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And it is now again at 10%. Furthermore, both the Catholic and the Episcopal churches have admitted that the rate of homosexuality in their priests has reached 40%. That is a rate of pathology that is indicative of a death throes process.

Now what the other 9% of the population are doing is not homophilia, it is not loving the same gender. It is hetero-phobia and hetero-fury. It is fear of and rage at the other gender. And so the other 90% of the "gay" population is anything but gay. They are very unhappy people. Which makes it extremely difficult for the 1% of the population who are the real thing, because their own people are so full of pathology that they betray them constantly and they portray to the rest of the world a totally distorted image of who they are and what their life is about.

This whole thing greatly compounds the enormity of the gap between the two genders at this point. It also hugely confuses the picture by generating all sorts of mis-impressions regarding those individuals, women in particular due to the economics of their situation and due to the way the patriarchy has pathologized the males, who are forming same-gender households of two or more adults, along with children in many cases.

And to complicate the picture still further, a new phenomenon kicked in in fall of 1988. This is the "Lysistrata response" in women. This refers to a 3000-year-old Greek play in which two city-states had been at war for 30 years, World War I trench warfare style. Finally, the women from both cities got together and agreed that there would be no more "nookie" until this war ended. So much for THAT war!

What has happened is that as a universal, archetypic response, women the world over have arrived at the point where "This is an up with which I will no longer put!", with regard to the paranoid patriarchy and all its works, symbols and manifestations. They will not tolerate any paranoid patriarchy bullshit from anyone anywhere, male or female, intimate or stranger, interpersonal or cultural. They have taken the approach of refusing to in any way validate, participate or support any further paranoid patriarchal processes.

The "Lysistrata" response then is a total war on the patriarchy -- a war of withdrawal, of withhold, of non-support, of invalidation, of refusal to cooperate, of refusal to submit, of refusal to be a part of, of refusal to validate in any way any aspect of the paranoid patriarchal system. It is a manifestation of "Kali", the goddess of destruction who is called in when normal means of regeneration have failed. Right behind Kali is "Brahma", the god of creation. Kali clears the path and the new forms come in right behind her. The appearance of Kali is of extreme importance because it indicates that half the human race will not tolerate the destructiveness of the paranoid patriarchy any more.

Individual women are encountering this at their own pace, they are responding to it in their own way, and there is quite a range of reactions to it. There also is quite a range of responses from the males. They range from passionate support of the "Lysistrata" reaction to massive reactionariness to the whole thing and all it portends.

Now human consciousness is a bell-shaped curve, with the most people at the top of the young soul or third (power) chakra range. That means that half the human race is operating at a level that is in the third chakra or even more primitive in their manifestation. But then half is already able to operate in the mature soul (heart chakra) range or higher. However, a goodly number who have a mature soul level of development have been so devastated, demoralized and/or deranged by their experiential history that they manifest at a lower range of functioning.

For instance, George Bush is in the heart chakra range of soul development, but in his ego functioning, he is operating at the young soul range in the largely negative manifestation. This is due to his having been enculturated intensively in the elitist east coast paranoid patriarchal culture. And Saddam Hussein is also in the mature soul range, but he was raised in an insane household in a baby soul culture, with the result that he is incredibly dangerous -- a dictator with mature soul resources with which to work.

All in all, about 60% of the human race is in a situation where they cannot and will not allow us to move to the heart chakra level of functioning as a collective. And for that reason, about 60% of the human race is going to leave body during the next several years. That, in conjunction with the calamities and crises of the elimination of the paranoid patriarchal culture will lead to an extremely upheavalous time in the next few years. The purpose is NOT to eliminate us or to drive us back to caves and clubs. It is to elevate the collective consciousness manifestation to the heart chakra level.

Now one of the key components of this whole transformation is the empowerment of women and the return of the feminine values as the balance to the masculine, so that we have a cosmically congruent process running the world. "Terminator I and II" demonstrated this symbolically very clearly. In "Terminator I", the heroine starts out as a powerless and impoverished puella waitress. By "Terminator II" (seven years later), she has become a "Rambette", raging and carrying on like any good macho paranoid patriarch with all kinds of military involvement. Then she comes to a point where she has to make a decision, and she breaks down and bursts into tears as she emerges as a "wild woman" -- her internal manifestation of the goddess. Those films were unconsciously channeled input as to what is going down and what needs to happen.

We are being required by the Universe to become integrated and integritous, and to move from fear to love in all we do -- or perish from the face of the Earth. And the process will be led by women, due to the 70% death rate among men because of paranoid patriarchy poisoning. And these will not be Margaret Thatcher type women; they will be women of consciousness who welcome conscious men and elevated masculine manifestation as the essential other half of the story.

And this whole process is going to RADICALLY transform the relations between the genders -- and the manifestations of relationship. It will have to be a "whole cloth" process of construction of new forms of functioning in intimacy and in all other forms of relationship in the light of the drastically changed circumstances of our world that are developing now. And the working models of these new forms of relationship are going to have to be generated by the "upper echelons" of the soul development range, working with each other to demonstrate what the "real thing" looks like.

These individuals are in the midst of a process of "assortative re-mating" at the present time. Their "teaching relationships" are terminating and they are beginning to find the true spouse figures with whom they will carry out their destiny and simultaneously work out and demonstrate how real relationships function and what effects they have on the ecology, including the next generation formation. These individuals are also discovering their "cadre", their "siblings of destiny" who will fill the friend, colleague and resource pool functions for their and your work in this life and in these times.

This "upper echelon" makes up about 8% of the human race at present -- about 250,000,000 old souls who together make up the "Ford has a better idea" group. One subgroup of them is composed of the normal coterie of departing souls who teach from the sidelines out of the reach of the non-comprehending masses. They leave legacies behind that the younger souls can pick up on when they are ready in the form of written works, creative works, good works, inspirational examples, etc.

Then there are the "shock troopers", who are upper old souls who come into a younger soul environment to learn where the world is at from the vantage point of the underside of the belly of the dragon, but with the eyes of a wise old soul. They end up in the midst of the fray at total risk, protected by the "Donald Duck light" in the corner of the womb and the room (the "Home Office" in the closet, so to speak). Their job is to prepare themselves to lead the way by recapitulating their transmigration in miniature form while doing a reconnaissance mission on the world so they know how to integrate their soul skills with their situational requirements when the time comes. There are about 65, 000, 000 of these, about 1.25% of the world population.

The majority of the offspring of the "shock troopers" are the "visionaries". Shock troopers typically don't "pass it on", and that leaves the "visionary" able to stay in touch with their essence, their higher self, the cosmos and the "Home Office" to a much greater degree than has happened in the past. They therefore have much more consciousness than the average bear, and they do things like two-and-a-half-year-olds having deep metaphysical insights. They are the way-pavers of tomorrow in two ways. First, they are like the architects who get the "plans" from the "Home Office" and who share them with the "shock troopers", who are wise in the ways of the world and who can operate therefore as the "contractors" who pull all the resources together and supervise the operation that is carried out by the "construction crew" (the rest of the human race) in the building of the world of tomorrow by the people, not for the people. The other way they pave the way is in their personal manifestation of how to be as exemplary and inspirational examples.

Another group involved in the "Ford has a better idea" collective is the so-called "walk-ins". This is where the soul reaches the end of its rope and decides to leave, but there develops a prolonged discussion on the astral plane at night deciding what soul is going to take over the body. They then come in as the other one leaves. It takes about a year to get on their feet and operational. This has happened as a trickle throughout history, but now it is developing into a torrent. And furthermore, almost all of the replacement souls are old souls coming to assist in this transformation, ready for work after just a year of preparation.

Finally, there are the "crawl-ins". These are beings from other transmigrational paths such as whales, dolphins, angels and extraterrestials who chose to be born in as humans so they could bring their collective consciousness to bear on the human condition from the perspective and life history of a human when the proper moment arrives. They combine the capacities of the "shock troopers" with the archetypes and collective wisdom of their species or consciousness path.

Now taken together, these all add up to about 8% of the world's population. First of all, that's much more old souls than have been here before. And secondly, it has been found that it takes 11% to set off a "Ford has a better idea" reaction in the collective in monkeys, rats and even bacteria when the whole species is threatened with extinction if they don't change their ways forthwith. That is called the "hundredth monkey effect". What happens is that when 11% of the population "gets it" under these dire conditions, the other 89% suddenly "get it" too, and the whole collective moves up a notch in consciousness and manifestation. So all we have to do is trip off 3% more of the population and we've got it. And that is all but impossible to prevent happening, short of total annihilation of the human race or the Earth. So we are about to do a sudden leap in consciousness here.

All of these groups are of course in effect having to pioneer how relationships will look in the future. They will have to hand build their relationships from the ground up with their inner resources and their experiential history and each others capabilities. Now we have never seen a real relationship, and we have never been in one, so these individuals have to "whole cloth it". That is, they have to work it out with each other with no guidelines, models or experience. They have to in effect "fake it to make it" as they "punt their way along". They have to show others how to make a real relationship work. And they have to do it by working it out themselves as they go along. The old models don't work, so they have to work them out with each other and then share them with the rest of the collective, primarily by means of inspirational example.

So the situation at present is one of the collective "hitting bottom", with things looking really, really bad. On top of which, everybody is having one hell of a time with all of their relationships, but particularly with the male-female intimate relationships. It is however what could be characterized as a necessary evil to heal us of what ails us and to precipitate what needs to evolve out of our situation. It is not a prediction of what is coming. It is a termination of what has been and a preparation for what is really coming.

RELATIONSHIPS AS OUR LAUNCH PAD

The two primary questions that keep coming up in regard to relationships are: 1) "Why do I keep choosing the wrong one and staying with them?" and 2) "Why is it that things get so damned weird every time I get into a relationship?". These will be the focus of the discussion for this part of this little essay.

The answer to the question of why we choose the wrong one has already been discussed earlier to some extent. However, it needs to be examined in more detail and in a broader (non-Armageddon) context at this point. The fact is that when we enter body, we are forced to leave the "cosmic connection" in order to experience the intensity and profound growth-generation that happens in the space-time dimension. However, that creates a tremendous sense of separation, isolation, insulation and alienation that is extremely frustrating and despair-inducing.

Consequently, we are forever looking for a substitute stand-in or a "spoke connection" from the "rim of the bicycle wheel" where we are to the "hub", the "Home Office". So in effect, we seek to bring God back to us and to bring us back to God in all of our intimate relationships, but especially in the spousal and parent-child relationships. So we become fanatically determined to make our intimate relationships work out, come hell or high water -- and they usually both do come in the process.

It is in this context that the devastation of rejection by the parents takes its toll. We are already experiencing the anguish of separation from God, and then He (She, It or They) tells us that we are persona non grata as far as They are concerned. And we become utterly overwhelmed with the implications and ramifications of that. That starts us on the long road of "fatal attraction" -- "nemesis figure" relationships.

On top of this whole process, there are the biologic foundations of the formation of personality. The parent-child relationship is, after all, the generative matrix out of which we become who we are. It is also the physical survival system, the lifeline, as well as being the life-sustainer for the emotional body -- the love-line. And if trouble develops there, our very physical and emotional existence is on the line instantly. And for this reason, the early formative experiences have a profound effect on the whole of who we become. And it consequently sets the parameters of who we will find attractive and sustaining -- based on the most outstanding positive and negative qualities of the formative influence people.

Now the combination of these two massive forces involved in intimate-selection is all but overwhelmingly pre-determining of our choices. And unless you have been fortunate enough through much dating and other wisdom-inducing experiences such as therapy, you are almost always going to choose the wrong people for the wrong reasons, producing the wrong outcomes. There are several reasons why such choices will be doomed from the very beginning.

One is that nobody is God. And any attempt to make connection with God through another human being is going to result in disaster. First of all, they can't possibly live up to your hopes in this regard. Secondly, their inability to do so is going to profoundly hurt you, as you take it as evidence that you have "failed" again in God's eyes. And finally, they are going to be desperately demoralized by your outrage and other reactions to their functioning, thinking that you are rejecting them, not their failure to be God. And the whole thing is sure to spiral into devastating developments.

The second reason that these "nemesis" choices fail is that the "chosen one" is very similar to the most rejecting parent(s), with the same generic neuroses, and they are therefore extremely unlikely to change or to be able to rise to the occasion of meeting your "God Housekeeping Seal of Approval" quest. Indeed, they are very likely to react even more strongly than the parents did to your desperate attempts to get blood from the stone because of the peer adult nature of the relationship, which allows for more latitude of response than the parent-child.

A third reason for the failure of these "fatal attraction" choices is that the parenting process involves the parent(s)' seeking to work out their "most rejecting parent" things on the child. That, in turn, means that the parent will project their most rejecting parent onto the child, which has the ironic effect of generating many of that (grandparental) figure's characteristics in the child, to which the parent reacts with revulsion. And that, in turn, means that anyone who makes you feel like the rejecting parent did is going to have that same revulsion reaction to who you are.

Now add to that the fact that there is typically a "crisscross" process going on in which the "nemesis figure" is also "romantic rush" "fatal attraction" reacting to you at the same time. And so you dash into the relationship with all these incredible excited hopes and vulnerabilities. Then you immediately run into the fact that your characteristics on both sides are of exactly the wrong nature.

But because of the tremendous high stakes involved in the attempt to make re-connection with God and to "put a new ending on the old story" with your parent(s) so as to heal the deep wound created by the rejection, there is a plunge into denial of the whole thing. There is a terrible panic associated with the possibility of rejection and abandonment once again by the "ultimate authority". And as a result, you hang onto the relationship attempt as if your life and soul depended on it, because in your experience, they do.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that we took the original rejection experiences as "God's gospel truth" about us, so we react to the "nemesis figure's" rejection reactions as goads to do everything we can to fix up, correct or change whatever it is we are or aren't or do or don't do that makes this evaluation happen, thinking it is another manifestation of what led "God" to reject us in the first place. So we hang in there like a pit bull while our partner pounds all over us, hates our guts and drives us nuts. We just won 't let go because the stakes are too high.

And just to put the capper on the whole thing, there are the particular neuroses we bring to the relationship. For instance, many of us have been programmed by our parenting experience to believe that we deserve nothing but punishment and suffering, and so we function accordingly. Or you are on a life-long vengeance-vendetta, and you systematically proceed to torture your parent-stand-in. Or you had to back off from vulnerability years ago, and you are incapable of any form of availability in a relationship. These really add spice to the stew that you have gotten yourself into with your "fatal attraction" relationship.

The net effect of all this is to create another "failure" in your quest for the "Golden Orb", and you end up with spiritual alienation, cosmic isolation, emotional abandonment, personal rejection, and another "proof" that you and/or other people are no damned good. And this gets added to the long-suppressed childhood feelings of total survival-anxiety generated by abandonment-threats by the lifeline and love-line parent. The result of all this is a massive desperation and paranoia-panic about how the significant other is reacting to you.

And then other people get into the act as they try to comprehend and/or intervene in the situation. Unfortunately, they too are typically caught up in all of this sort of thing, and they have their own neuroses as well. This usually results in various complicating inputs that function as things like, "Let's you and him fight" or "Why don't you . . .? -- "Yes, but . . ." or "Now I've got you (him, her), you son-of-a-bitch!". What usually happens is that you get explanations thrown at you that are more like accusations, because in general, people are totally oblivious to the processes that are involved in all of this.

Then you get things like the "rescue ring", where one or both tries to rescue the parent to make it all better for them so that you can then have a "coup" for the "Progress" room. But then it gets caught up in the "victim-persecutor-rescuer" process, which then interacts with all the other parameters in the situation. Pretty soon, you have a three-ring circus of pain and calamity on your hands. Then you add in the kids, the relatives, the neighbors, the schools, the divorce courts, and all the rest of it, and you get some idea of how relationships can play havoc with every aspect of your life and beingness.

In addition to all the other problems inherent in the relationship process since the agricultural revolution, we also have the situation of the urban industrial culture to contend with. In this arrangement, the couple are supposed to provide everything in the way of emotional needs for each other and for the children with no help from any friends in a culture in which kids and family come last in the order of priorities. The way things are set up is such that you have to be a self-serving person first, a citizen second, a spouse a long third down the line, and a parent last in importance.

In the meantime, we are continuously presented with the "Leave it to Beaver" image of what the nuclear family is supposed to be like. This only results in guilt over our failure to manifest the manifestly impossible dream Thanksgiving dinner scenario every day. In addition, these cultural myths further our expectations that the spouse that we have selected is going to be there for us in all the significant ways that are not being handled because of the way things are. The reality is that it is biologically impossible to try to carry all this off with one other human being.

Yet at the same time, relationships are the inescapable cornerstone of our functioning because they poke at our sore spots continuously. Every relationship reminds us that we operate as if we are walking around in a portable Plexiglas phone booth that cuts us off from all forms of connection, including with the "Home Office". And people are, after all, highly evolved chunks of cosmic consciousness and the closest thing on Earth we have to being able to make a connection that would bring us closer to the Source.

What it comes down to is that the fuel and the driver for the connectiveness need that we have with other people is basically spiritual. And because of that and because of the isolated nuclear family's situation, we try to put all our eggs in the basket of our intimate in the hopes that they can connect us with God and meet all our needs. And with being trapped in the five senses with the experience that we leave off at our skin, being rejected in childhood, feeling we somehow deserve that, and having the tendency to feel that "I'm not OK -- and neither are you!", we are in a fine kettle of fish indeed.

It is for all these reasons that the relationship domain has become the primary focus of the thrust to consciousness elevation. It is making it crystal clear that we cannot stay as we are. Everything has to go, yet without losing all we have accumulated in wisdom and resources. And our relationships are driving us into making those changes by their very intensity and pervasiveness and inescapability.

THE FUNCTIONS OF RELATIONSHIPS

Given that all that has been said thus far is true, why do we bother to continue the whole show? Especially in regards to attempting to form functional relationships? The answer is that they DO serve very real needs and purposes above and beyond putting a continuous "garden rake" in our face. But in order for these functions to happen, we have to be more or less free of the kinds of "booby traps" and "booby prizes" that so permeate relationships as they have been.

Relationships need to be based upon solid self-respect, self-appreciation, self-commitment and destiny-passion. It also requires ethical integrity, compassion, concern, and contribution. Finally, there has to be a firm foundation of a sense of non-neurotic connection to the Universe and a commitment to cosmic congruence in all you intend. You need to be seeking to manifest your Higher Self and the Divine Design in all you do.

If this is where you are seriously seeking to come from, relationships can provide a genuine source of sharing with the Source because of the "chips off the old Hologram" that we all are. When both parties are respectfully aware of who they are and who the other person is, both as a chunk of the "Home Office" and as an individual, and if each is deeply appreciative of their vehicle and its limitations as a soul- and cosmos-expanding device via experience-generation and challenge-presenting, and if both are devoted to bringing about the highest possible outcome of all they do, relationships can become a form of spiritual path.

Secondly, in addition to providing a key form of Divine connection, relationships can be the basis for fundamental biologic support in our lives. We are, after all, troop animals, not a lone tiger type of organism. We divide labor so that all of our needs can be met under the umbrella of cultural cross-contribution. We also rely upon each other for emotional support, for expanding awareness through communication, and for providing stimulation and inspiration for further development.

The third set of basic needs has to do with the "double bubble" -- "figure eight" thing that goes on between pairs of people. In a truly loving relationship, there exits from one individual's fourth (heart) chakra an emanation that goes to the other person's second (bonding, Eros, generativity, creativity) chakra. Once it enters there, it goes up to the other person's fourth chakra and out to the first individual's second chakra, completing the "figure eight" or "infinity" relationship of cosmic energy exchange. When this happens, there is an experience and a reality of a functional cosmic connection as well as a deeply bonding mutual commitment process. This has the effect of breaking open the "portable Plexiglas phone booth" so that we can operate here much like we can out there in the cosmos.

Still another function that cross-gender relationships provide is the ability to relate directly to that part of your soul that was not given the "greased skids" that a body provides. When we come in, our body automatically provides the means of expressing the components of the soul that are congruent with the gender of the body. But he have to rely upon the other gender to provide us with the acting out of the rest of our soul, so to speak.

When we are in the "Oedipal/Elektra" period, one of the things we do is to study the parent of the other gender microscopically to see how that part of your soul can manifest itself. We build what is called the "anima" (the inner female) in men and the "animus" (the inner male) in women. Unfortunately, that can all too often result in an emotional-commotional anima in the male, reflecting his mother's distorted neurotic functioning, and he will engage in explosiveness, "black stomp" behavior, and the like. Similarly, the woman's animus can become a judgmental, "I'm always right and you're always wrong!" type of pattern.

But when things are going right, he can complement and bring out her masculine energy and capabilities, and she can bring out and bring forth his feminine qualities in a mutually enhancing and expansive manner. They become an equal exchange of energy between peers who are different and enriching to each other and to the environment. And of course, this can be passed on to the children.

Now because of the fact that entities differ in the amount of "yang" (masculine-like) and the amount of "yin" (feminine-like) qualities, and because of the need to be able to have the experience of same gender spousal relationships as an available option, this same type of process can occur between members of the same gender by making a good match between the partners so the same effects occur.

Still another function relationships provide for us is the "house-cleaning" process. Because of the intimacy, vulnerability and intensity of the relationship, it has the effect of pointing out our neurotic patterns and of pushing our big red buttons so we can see what we need to clear out in order to carry out our destiny. It allows us to have the opportunity to make it possible to contribute what we came here to contribute.

Finally, relationships have the effect of putting us in our fourth (heart) chakra. This chakra is an intake point for the life force of the Universe, what we call "love energy". It is not passionate or possessive. It is unconditionally caring and enhancing. It generates compassion, commitment, contribution and co-creation. Successful intimacy results in and draws upon our coming from the heart chakra. And this is another reason why relationships are serving as our "launch pad" into the future of the human race. We simply must move to this chakra as our base of operations or we will not make it as a species.

MYTHS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

We are now going to examine some of the myths of our culture regarding what relationships are all about. These are the "stories" we tell ourselves about what things mean, what things are for, what to expect from things, how things got this way, etc. We have already discussed the "Leave It To Beaver" thing. These are some of the others that have led to the stew we are in regarding relationships.

The first of these is that there isn't enough love to go around. The reality is that love is what the Universe is made of, but in a paranoid patriarchy, the foundational assumption is that there is a real shortage of fundamental life support resources and that one therefore has to fight for one's life to have the basics for oneself. In addition, the saturation of our family life with the patterns described above also leads to the direct experience that love is a very rarified commodity indeed.

The general experience is that due to the overloaded situation the adults are in, they just don't have enough "juices" to go around to meet all the needs of the situation. For instance, if one of the children receives some committed energy from one of the parents, the others are apt to experience that it is at their expense in regards to the love supply. On top of which, all of the experiences of isolation, separation and abandonment, the projections, the "desperately seeking Susan" dynamics and the "God Housekeeping Seal" pursuits, and the neurotic interlocks that abound in the isolated nuclear family profoundly reinforce the notion that there just isn't enough love to sustain us all.

A third major myth is that "It's somebody's fault!". Any time anything goes wrong in a relationship or even around a relationship, the experience is that some one is to blame for all of this. There are two variations on this theme. One of them is, "It's all my fault. I did it AGAIN! What did I do now? Here's another fine mess I've gotten us into!". The other possibility is that "It's all your (their) fault! If it weren't for you (them) . . .! NOW what have you gone and done?! All right, who's responsible for this!?". The pattern here is that when something goes wrong, the judge and jury comes out, and it's a hanging judge and a hangman's jury -- applied to the self or to the other. They're out for blood.

This arises from the paranoid patriarchy's mania for control of everything. The assumption is that hands on control is an absolute must, lest all hell break loose. And a corollary is that anything that happens is the resultant of human agency. Hence, SOMEONE is to blame if something goes awry. It is, of course, a massively inflated and egocentric assumption, but that is the nature of the paranoid patriarchy, by definition.

And the havoc that this can wreak in a relationship is truly cosmic in its proportions. It is perhaps one of the most foundational forces that decimate relationships. It is the "blame-frame", and it completely obviates the possibility of compassion, co-creation, and concern. It drives people to the survival level and the power-tripping control-or-be-controlled orientation that totally destroys the heart basis of relationship. It generates mutual and/or self-paranoia instead.

A fourth major myth is that "the grass is greener over yonder". Other people have it better. Maybe I can get my "Golden Orb" with him/her. And "This isn't cutting it!". It generates intolerance and high irritation with shortfalls, neurotic patterns, and the frustrations of life. And of course, affairs, perennial searches, functional neglect and abandonment, and all other manner of disastrous results occur as a function of this myth that there is a "nirvana" to be had on Earth, so to speak -- ant it's over there, not here!

Finally, we have the notion that somewhere there is a "golden orb" wandering around somewhere, our personal direct link to God. And the myth is that by going with that individual, you are going to have all of your needs met, you are going to heal the rift between you and God, and life is going to be Heaven on Earth. And of course, we have already covered in some detail the effects of this myth.

Taken together, these myths of our culture (and many others that are less directly related to the family) have the effect of making it all but impossible to build a successful relationship. Especially as they interact with the circumstances of the isolated nuclear family and the "hub-seeking" quest we are all on as a result of being embodied in space-time.

And one of the effects that these myths have is to create the "What happened to our relationship?" reaction. You have the "romantic rush" and you plunge in with great anticipation, and then it all fizzles out. The sexuality becomes routine, the "battling Bickersons" show up, mutual jackhammering starts in, the "grass is greener" patterns start showing up, and you wonder where the wonder went.

PROBLEMATIC PARAMETERS

There are several aspects of the cultural context that bear heavily on the nature of relationships. These factors have the effect of turning relationships into problems instead of resources. Together, they add a great deal of difficulty to the process of forming and maintaining successful intimacy.

The foundational source of most of these difficulties is the paranoid patriarchal system under which we have been living for about 8000 years. And the basic parameter here is the intensely destructive gender roles that have been imposed across the board. What has happened is that males and females have been separated and trained into highly specialized and mutually incomprehensible patterns of functioning.

The male is expected to be basically a problem-solving impersonal machine who is feeling-avoidant and relationship-incompetent. He is paid for being a walking cerebrum and a pair of hands, period. Sometimes he is even expected to just LOOK like a certain image. He is not paid to be a human being with feelings and with relationship capabilities and a family and commitments and needs that compete with the work world.

In the meantime, the female is basically put in responsibility almost single-handedly for the entire emotional/ecological system. What that means is that nearly everything about the process of being human and rearing children lands on her shoulders. And since this is a basic biological impossibility to pull off, her failures then become the target of much attack. The male is neither capable of handling the requirements of the situation nor is he emotionally and often even physically present.

To make matters worse, the household is expected to be a "hymn to him" process in which he is minimally demanded of emotionally and his word and whims are law. He is also the "enforcer", as in "Just wait till your father gets home!". He IS expected to bring home the bacon and to handle physical maintenance and protection, but anything in the realm of emotions, relationship and child rearing is beyond his call of duty and his ken and his capability.

For the male child, therefore, that means that he has to piece together what it means to be a man from the little snatches he gets of this distant and mysterious figure who won't tell him anything about what is going on inside and who works at a job which is highly complicated, technical and situationally set up in such a way that a child can't comprehend what's going on when his father engages in his work. So he has no one to look up to as a model and he has to fall back on mother's attitude and shaping in terms of creating his masculine manifestation.

He also learns that the real action is in the realm outside the home in a technical society that requires complete emotional suppression. In addition, he learns the "buck stops here" ultimate accountability, responsibility and authority role in which every time anything goes wrong, everybody turns to the male in the situation and he has no one to turn to. It's his job to come up with the resources and the solution to the problem. The result is a problem-solving machine.

In the meantime, the female child is inundated with training experiences in how to handle ecologies, emotions, far-reaching responsibilities, and relationships. Not infrequently, she becomes the mother's sole source of intimate love, perhaps even going into erotic involvement. In addition, she's usually pressed into service to assist in the overwhelming overload of responsibilities of her mother early on, and she very frequently is even forced to reverse roles and to be her mother's mother from a very early age. Yet at the same time, she is supposed to be nonthreateningly incompetent in many areas of personal power expression and competent world handling, so that "Big Daddy" can "take care of her". She quickly learns to hide her candle under a basket and to handle the "home front".

Now the mother in the isolated nuclear family is the lifeline for the child of either gender, especially during the first four years when the child is putting God on her face in the "in loco Deity" response resulting from the "commons" evolutionary history. But she is also the "polarity parent" (the other gender) who establishes the boy's gender identity, his personal worth as a male, and the "stand-in" for the "Home Office". She is in effect everything to him, especially in the light of the absence of the father. She thus becomes a "Statue of Liberty" figure for him -- she can crush him in an instant.

Very frequently, he also becomes her spouse-substitute and even her father-substitute due to the severe limitations of the male gender role and its effects. He in effect becomes the man in her life because she has never been fulfilled and she has been in effect neglected or abandoned by the masculine all her life. But of course, he can't deliver the goods, and she then projects all her betrayal-rage on him. He then can do no right for his unpleasable mother. She also seeks to prevent his developing his personal power, both because she doesn't want to lose him, and because she is afraid of his abuse of his power. He is thus expected to be her man while at the same time not manifesting his masculinity. He ends up utterly enraged and perplexed by women.

For the female child, the situation is one of severe deprivation of validation and gracefulness training from her father. He doesn't intervene in the profound "double bubble" dependency relationship between her and her mother, who is using her as an associate or role-reversed parent. Between his non-involvement and his non-intervention, she ends up believing she is undeserving of his attention, and she ends up depressed, self-denigrating and longing for love from a male.

This situation is horrendously confounded if in addition, he becomes sexually involved with her on the emotional or even the physical level (the latter now being reported at 60% and perhaps as high as 90%). In such a situation, all of the above reactions are extremely exacerbated because of our evolutionary history in which the female was the determiner of who became sexually involved with her. This results in her being biologically programmed to believe that she is the one responsible for this situation.

As a result of all this, she often wants to avoid full feminine maturity, and she wants to be protected and taken care of in the little girl experience she never had. She rejects her sexuality and power in order to remain an eternal girl. The eating disorders revolve around this desire not to become a mature female. And because of her profound frustrations, suppressed rage and powerlessness programming, they are also prone to helplessness feelings, seething "tripod-rage" and cancer.

Yet at the same time, she feels totally responsible and accountable for the entire emotional and physical ecology, and she therefore feels that it is all her fault when things go wrong there. This also results in her believing that all the negative things that happen to her are her "just deserts" for not having handled things in such a way as to avoid the negative outcomes for which she feels responsible.

Simultaneously, between her mother's programming and her father's betrayals, she ends up full of "tripod-rage" in which "he can do no right". But then again, she finds herself "romancing the stone" of her father-stand-ins while simultaneously subconsciously hating them. And if she gets a really relevant male, she can't relate to him because she doesn't deserve it, and besides he can do no right.

The male comes out of his experience fascinated by, terrified of, dependent upon and extremely vulnerable to women. He also puts his worst foot forward with them as a result of his "You can do no right!" experiential history with his mother. He ends up full of male shame for all his betrayals and incompetences and failures, while at the same time he is full of fury for his mother's effective destiny-destruction. And he falls into the pattern of not-thereness, exploitation and authoritation abusiveness in a hate-mate relationship pattern. The only emotions he can express are artificially inflated sexuality and rage.

The net effect of all this is that when a male and a female get together to form an intimate relationship, all of these dynamics come into play and all hell breaks loose and interacts with all the other processes going on in relationships today. And the situation is even more complex when same gender pairings occur, inasmuch as all the societal rejection comes into play, along with all the extremely confusing complications arising from the gender role dynamics having to be played out in a multi-layered kaleidoscope of profoundly painful playouts.

One of the commonest forms this takes is the "demonic dynamic". This is a situation where within seconds, the two individuals are in a blind, perhaps even homicidal rage over some passing trivial issue. It is the resultant of all the damage, pain, rage and neurotic interlocks that are the outcome of all the parameters involved. It is a mutual jackhammering process that can get physically dangerous very quickly. It reflects all the horror and pain they have both gone through all their lives in intimate relationships, starting with the most rejecting parent phenomenon.

SOME COMMON PAINFUL PATTERNS

There result from all these parameters a large number of difficulties in intimacy that pattern out into frequently encountered play-outs. We will explore some of these in this section.

First of all, there is the co-dependent pattern in which one individual plays the part of the problematic person and the other does the dance macabre around trying to minimize the damage to everyone and everything. This is, of course, the resultant of having grown up in a dysfunctional family, and they are just passing it on.

Then there is the puer and the puella playing house thing in which neither of them is mature enough to want to be responsible for anything so nothing gets handled and everything devolves down to "parallel play" -- "ships passing in the night" patterns while the children are left to fend for themselves.

Then there is the parent-rescuing pattern in which the individuals involved either take one of the roles or they alternate back and forth trying to make it all better for an impossible-to-please parent who is in a continuous shit pot full of self-produced trouble.

Then there is the authoritarian household in which everything revolves around the massively dominating and decimating destructiveness of the authoritarian. Incidentally, this can result in the "barrelhouse mom"-"Henry Henpecko" pattern as well. In both forms, everyone loses.

Next there is the addictive -- loving too much and clinging dependency pattern in which the individual is desperately terrified of losing the lover. The individual ends up an identityless approval-suck and abandonment-paranoid. It often also leads into a paranoid posessiveness pattern, with its associated recriminations and restrictions.

Another common pattern is the individual who has had so much wrong-making experience that they feel deviant, deficient and disgusting, and they wonder what is normal as they fake it to make it -- unsuccessfully, as the partner recoils in revulsion.

Then there is the powerless reactor-victim pattern in which the individual feels guilty if they assert themselves, ashamed if they have needs, and over-responsibly self-blaming around not being able to take action to make things better. Their partner of course tends to feed into this intensely with their enraged disappointment reactions.

Still another all too common pattern is where one or both partners have a very sharp division between sexuality and love in their dynamics, such that they can't have both at the same time with the same person. This results in untold sexual difficulties and love losses.

Another very common pattern is what has been called "trangling". This is where the family dynamics revolve around alliances with and against each other. It automatically results in some one having to simultaneously reject and be rejected by someone else, and all trust goes out the window.

Then there is the "toothpaste rage" phenomenon. This is where one of the partners tells the other about a small thing that is very irritating to them but it is in an automatic pilot routine pattern like where to squeeze the toothpaste tube. The requesting partner then feels that they are being ignored and that the offending partner doesn't really care about their feelings.

Above and beyond these generalized difficulties in relationships are the gender-specific "betrayal" patterns. There are quite a few for each. Starting with the "male-failure" patterns, it looks like this:

First of all, there is hiding from their feelings. They haven't the foggiest notion as to what to do with them and they aren't supposed to have them anyway.

Then there is the mother-rescue phenomenon where he tries to make it all better for her and her stand-ins, often to ridiculous extremes and at great cost to himself and his loved ones.

Then there is sexual unavailability out of self-protectiveness or conversely hyper-sexuality and indiscriminate sexual acting out. Both hypo- and hyper sexuality arise from sexual invasions from his mother.

Next, there is the pronounced tendency for them to be a "sealed unit" who is self-entombing to avoid any further devastation at the hands of their intimates.

Another common pattern is the "macho monster" for whom absolute control is the foundation of their entire existence, come what may.

Then there is the opposite -- the "wimp capitulator" who learned early on that there is no use fighting because it only makes matters far, far worse.

The "compulsive competitor" can't stand to be behind anyone on anything anywhere. He HAS to be number one, and he goes berserk if he thinks some one is getting ahead of him.

Next there is the "reality-denier" and the truth-twister who lives in his own world for his own purposes.

A favorite is the "walking cerebrum" who is all left hemisphere logic, rationality and concretism.

We can't forget the "jock", whose whole life centers around athletics and physical activity. One major variation on this theme is the hunter/fisher. Another is the gun-freak.

"Silent Sam" is the "Yup-Nope" artist who is super-taciturn. Getting him to talk is all but impossible.

Then there is the "infantile tyrannosaurus" who is a raging bull four year old who never grew up -- and who is willing to use his size, strength and steamrollering to get what he wants, come what may.

A more serious dynamic is the "raging rapist" who is infuriated with women and for whom all contacts with them are power encounters and revenge assaults. One of the worst variations on this theme is the child-assaulter and incestor.

The "isolated island" is very common. He is the "lone stranger" riding off into the sunset who can't let anyone in or even near him emotionally.

Of course, there is the puer -- the "never grow up" and "never leave Never-Never Land" type -- including the Icarus high-flying idealist.

Another very common variety is the "noble struggler" who is forever at odds with the system and for whom things never work out. It is the resultant of having success equated with matricide/Deicide.

The "judge and jury" never stops evaluating -- negatively, and passing "sentences" -- and they are always right and others are always wrong -- morally.

Then there is the "workaholic-withholder" who can't handle intimacy or vulnerability in any way, and who channels all his libido into his projects, including his hobbies.

At the other extreme is the "care-coercer" who gets himself into situations where he is unable to handle things -- and he hooks others into helping.

Some are drowning in despair in a kind of "Eeyor" nihilism belief system that feels that we are all coming to a bad ending.

The "combatant" is looking for a fight anywhere and is ready for war at the drop of a hat.

Of course, there is the "nerd-weirdo" who can't fit in anywhere and who is such a "Johnnie One-Note" that he can't deal with life, and no one but other equally super-specialized misfits can understand him.

"The critic" has a dissecting analysis and elucidation of what's wrong with everything in sight.

"Frankie Freak-Out" panics constantly about the implications of everything that happens.

Then there is the "gentle" man who is actually more female than male because of having been made into his mother's confidante and mother.

At the other extreme is the "authoritarian asshole" who runs every environment and situation like a military commander.

Of course, there is the "rage-aholic" who throws a violent fit every ten minutes, it would seem.

"Walter the walking wailing wall" is constantly bemoaning and expressing how things are about to descend upon him -- to his death.

The "sneering cynic" assumes that nothing is going to work and that everything is going to hell in a breadbasket.

"Joe Beer-gut" sits around watching TV or its equivalent 24 hours a day. He is a mindless lump.

Then there is the "power-maniac" whose only concern in life is to dominate everything and everyone they encounter.

Closely related is the "corruption-king" who regards life as a cunning con game that they intend to win with their particular shell game.

A more serious variety is the "systematic sadist" whose prime process in life is the extracting a pound of flesh for every ounce of misery he has experienced -- with great gusto.

Then there is the "child molester" who is so afraid of adult intimacy that they never grew up sexually.

Finally, there is the "professional prick" who needs "Mission Control Houston" to know whom and when to hit.

These are, of course, only a few of the common patterns into which males have been programmed by their experiences. But they give the general idea of how relationships would be difficult with them.

Now let's look at a similar series for the "female failure" patterns, the ways in which women have been distorted by their life histories to become "unfit for human consumption".

Perhaps one of the most pervasive is abandonment-paranoia, the experience that they are about to be left at any time, arising out of an underlying sense that that is all they can expect, based on their childhood experience. It leads to intense possessiveness and jealousy and a continuous demand for reassurance.

The opposite pattern arises from early neglect or rejection that leads to a self-sufficient island unto herself that can't let love in in any form.

Still a third variation on this theme is umbilical attachment to their mother, which was, of course, carefully husbanded by the mother. She can't connect anywhere else as a result.

Of course, there is the ever-present "tripod-rage", but in some, it is almost all they are composed of, and no man can ever do any right.

Closely related is the "animus-amazon" who is "a better man than any man I know". She is either so yang-saturated or so hell-bent on power that she is a runaway Mack truck.

Which is different from the "ball-buster", who is out to dominate and even destroy every male they encounter in the equivalent to the "raging rapist" mentality.

Another extremely common pattern is the "power-paranoid" who is terrified of the responsibilities and reverberations of owning her personal power. This is a sure-fire cancer-producer.

Then there is the "super-boob" who becomes everyone's teat and who serves herself up on a platter. This is another cancer-producer. It also turns any relationship into a "babe at the breast" or a "left out in the cold" while she services others.

The "macho-Mom" operates out of the attitude that "Mama knows best" about everything, and they proceed to "mother" everyone.

Closely related is the "Wizard of Ought", who is absolutely fanatic about making things be the way they "ought" to be.

A very frequent manifestation is the "Papa-pleaser" who is still trying to "romance the stone" in the hope that "God" will finally come through for them -- and who dreads the prospect of ever alienating Him.

Perhaps the dead opposite is the "air-head" or "bubble-brain" who is hell-bent on proving that she is no threat to any male ego. Underneath, though, she is essentially a variation on the theme of the "Papa-pleaser".

The "belle of the ball" never grew out of adolescence, and she sees herself as the center of everyone's admiring attention for her good looks.

Then there is the "manipulative bitch" who is a masterful maneuverer and event-orchestrator -- and who never ceases doing so, often with vengeance as her motivation.

Next is "Marian the librarian" with the prune mouth and the prudish attitude who imposes her values and lifestyle on everyone with a vengeance.

The "sentimental romantic" hangs on to the idealized pollyannish attitudes of childhood, and she is endlessly gullible and caught up in studied naivete. She literally believes or hopes that things go the way they do in romantic novels and the like.

"Organic Annie" is a fanatic about health, the ecology and just about every other aspect of one's lifestyle.

The "flake" is vaguely disoriented, dysfunctional and discombobulating by being weird and off-the-wall about everything.

The "socialite" is a social ladder-climber of the first magnitude, and she is a prestige- and status-addict of the first magnitude.

"Picky, picky, picky" has a perfectionistic standard on virtually everything, and she imposes it with a ferocious intensity.

The "power-fiend" is grimly determined to take by force what she was denied when she was a child.

The "sharp harpy" is bitterly nihilistic and negatively passive while she gossips in a sullenly nasty and blame-throwing manner.

The "vengeance-vendetta" has decided that life is simply about "getting even" -- as a result of a forced "apprenticeship-training" program as a child.

The "professional victim" exaggerates the feminine receptivity and reactivity pattern into a life-permeating role of being overwhelmed and victimized by the environment -- often in the hopes of rescue.

The "barrelhouse mom" is a rolling boulder who crushes everyone in her path with her violent, loud and totally domineering functioning.

In the meantime, the "touchy tyrant" is a hysterical enfante terrible who never got past the tantrum-throwing early development period in her emotional development. She is "her majesty, the infant".

The seductive-destructive operates as a "femme fatale" who entices everyone into her "Venus fly trap" parlor as a function of severely devastating hostile sexploitation as a child.

The "wrong-maker" finds fault with everything and everyone and nothing ever pleases her -- just like her unpleasable parent.

"Chicken Little" is forever "crying wolf" and freaking out over potential catastrophes. She lives in chronic fear of calamity.

"Daddy's Little Girl" never got past the Elektra stage, and she is totally hooked on him for life. She looks for his likeness everywhere.

The "mindless robot" was so exploited, devastated and oppressed as a child that she never got out of the "slave" role. She just goes along with whatever is and tries to get the job done, but there is nobody home inside.

The "ghostly presence" is hardly here due to having had her cognitive functioning thoroughly scrambled as an infant, followed by horrifyingly unreal and horrific experiences -- to the point where she spends most of her time "out there somewhere".

Then there is the "hospital-hopping hypochondriac" whose body is always malfunctioning but never correctable and often not detectable.

"Little Miss Spirit" is completely lost in space in a chronic "cosmic connection" -- at the expense of any groundedness, pragmatics or responsibility.

Finally, there is the "cop out controller", the "centipede with their wooden leg stuck in a hole" so that everyone and everything has to revolve around her disability.

These also only tap into a small fragment of the seemingly endless ways that women can get into trouble in relationship and out as a function of the damage done early on.

Now what happens in this whole relationship business is that these patterns interlock to create various kinds of havoc with each other, within ourselves, and with the resulting ecological/familial system. For instance, take the phenomenon of the "sadomasochistic minuet". Here you have a "professional prick" or a "barrelhouse mom" getting together with a "vengeance vendetta" or a "sneaky sadist".

Here the "asshole" is the "heavy" and the other one is the "hero(ine)".

But on closer examination, you find out that the "asshole" got that way when at about a year of age the parents tried to ignore their existence until they hit the "terrible two" and they then were enrolled as the "family hit man" who was guided by "Mission Control Houston". The "asshole's" only human contact and source of "strokes" is his/her "behavioral prison" behavior. They hate themselves for who they are and what they do, and they feel utterly worthless as a human being at the deep subconscious level.

Meanwhile, the "masochist" turns out to be the "masked sadist". They are the one who is programming all the mayhem by guiding the "asshole" where to hit. The trouble is that they are usually not aware of what they are doing and they are also very subtle and subterranean in how they do it. They were systematically sadized as a child until the family in effect backed off and gave them the choice of joining them as an "apprentice" or being terminated by the torture. All of this was done on the subconscious and subterranean level of course.

The trouble is, nobody sees or knows the true nature of the situation -- including the "masked sadist" themselves. What they see is that they are right and righteous in a wrong and wrongful world that causes them all sorts of pain and that cries out for "just deserts" for their "moral cretin" behaviors. They become masters of impression-mismanagement, manipulation and the orchestration of events behind the scenes, three steps removed and mediated by others and by the passage of time, so they come out smelling like a rose as all hell breaks loose around them.

Now what happens to the kids in such a household is that they trust what they see. They see a victimized saintly person and a professional monster. And so they hate the monster and they love and trust the victim, and they entrust their deepest secrets with the victim -- with disastrous outcomes, of course. The result is that they end up completely confused as to what and who is real, and they have the experience that intimacy is totally untrustworthy. And they bring that into their intimate relationship and the whole thing passes on.

Perhaps, given all these pitfalls, the marvel isn't the fact that relationships don't work very well, but rather that they ever do work at all. The paranoid patriarchy interacting with the younger soul ages of the past have made it almost impossible for successful relationships to occur. It is a profound commentary on the resiliency and inner resources of the human race that we have ever gotten this far, really.

THE "COSMIC PARTNER"

One of the more confusing and discombobulating phenomena in the relationship sphere is what has been called the "cosmic partner". This is a person who enters one of the spouse's life with a bang -- they are extremely compelling and overwhelming. It is like a hundred-thousand-volt electromagnet enters your life. If you get within reaching distance, you are literally magnetically drawn to them and you can't keep your hands off of them. You HAVE to spend every possible moment with them in a "magnificent obsession" situation.

What is happening here is that you are simply not getting a lesson from your life experiences. In fact, you are resisting it like crazy, and you are utterly refusing to deal with the issue. This is usually occurring on the unconscious level, of course. The other parameter in the situation is that the lesson is of crucial importance -- either life and death, ecological devastation and/or spiritual suicide is in the making. You are hanging on to it for all you're worth because in your "inner child", the experience is that your soul survival depends on it. But the fact of the matter is that your destiny-manifestation depends on your terminating it NOW.

So the Universe grabs an available person who will by their nature teach you about that lesson/issue with everything they are and do, and then They drop that person in your path all charged with cosmic energy to rivet your undivided attention to the issue, with no chance of escape. The erotic energy is the magnetic pull and the magnifier of the issue so there is no mistaking or escaping the import of the lesson.

Now the person involved is going to be a member of your "cadre". These are a large number (somewhere in the vicinity of 300 or so) of individuals with whom you have had many past life experiences who are in body and who will be a part of your "destiny team" for this life. You know them very well at the soul level, though you may never have seen them before in this life. Or if you knew them before, all of a sudden, they take on a TOTALLY different meaning to you. In any case, because of all the previous shared experiences and the profound connection between the souls, there is an instant trust and recognition response, coupled with a massively magnetic sexual draw that you literally can't get away from or avoid acting on.

Now this is a very different thing from an affair. Affairs often result from encountering someone who doesn't do the spouse's favorite alienating patterns. So there is a "feeding frenzy" of indulgence, liberation or expression for a while. But then the rest of the person shows up and the mismatch becomes evident. At this point, the affair terminates (if it hasn't been closed off by other means by this time). The affair is a kind of "have your cake and eat it too" type of thing. It is often combined with a "fatal attraction" -- "nemesis figure" type of person. In any case, they reflect an issue in the spousal relationship that needs attention, and they rarely last. Or if they do, it represents a neurotic pattern on the involved individual's part.

The "cosmic partner" is also not the next spouse. Sometimes we encounter the person with whom we should form a spousal relationship while we are still in the ongoing spousal relationship. When this happens, the current spousal relationship has gone on the rocks or its function, such as being a teaching relationship, has completed. But out of fear, consideration for the spouse and/or the children or other issues, you haven't terminated the relationship yet. When you encounter the next spouse, it is usually a slow starter type of thing where you know the person for quite a while before the "V-8" reaction sets in (you hit yourself up side the head and say, "I could have had a V-8!", like in the old commercial).

The "cosmic partner" is usually someone with whom you would never consider having an affair with or moving on to as the next spouse. In fact, they frequently turn out to be someone rather strange or bizarre to have such an intense relationship with. The classic example of this was "Harold and Maude". He was 20, she was 80. He taught her that she was wonderful as the "wild woman" she was, and she taught him that he was worthy despite his mother's neglect. And it is designed to work that way -- mutual teaching.

Now once the basic lesson is learned, the erotic magnet disappears, and you settle into the "warm, fuzzy slipper" cadre relationship with them as a good buddy for life. Incidentally, as you might have guessed, cosmic partners come in both cross-gender and same gender forms. After the lesson has been learned, you have somebody who appreciates and understands you, and with whom you have had a lot of shared experience. It's a great resource. And, of course, the spouse benefits from the growth and change in you, and there often develops a warm relationship between the spouse and the partner. However, once in a great while, the "cosmic partner" turns out to also be the next spouse. And when they do, the departing spouse again ends up appreciating the situation for all the benefits it bestows. But this is quite rare as an outcome.

Generally speaking, it's not advisable to act on the sexual thing when you are in a cosmic partner relationship. It is unnecessary, irrelevant and potentially very costly all the way around. After all, the erotic energy is only being used to keep you totally immersed in the lesson to be learned. The real point of the relationship is the lesson that is being resisted, and you should devote all your energies trying to ascertain what it is you are to learn, so as to be able to be freed of the erotic enslavement and of the difficulties involved in the problematic pattern being fingered by the "cosmic partner".

Another aspect of the "cosmic partner" situation is the "unrequited" relationship. This is where one partner is fully reactive and the other is totally not. Unfortunately, the large majority of "cosmic partner" relationships end up being of this nature. Here the situation is one in which one partner is unaware of the lesson being taught to them, and they are so resistive that they don't even respond to the partner. Or, conversely, one of the partners needs someone who fits their lesson needs but the other partner doesn't have a lesson that requires this severe an intervention. The requirement here is for the unrequiting partner to be respectful of the involved partner's lesson and to assist them in "getting it".

What the "cosmic partner" is is a "cosmic boot in the butt" sent by the "Home Office" to "get your shit together before it's too late". It is highly upheavalous, potentially dangerous in its impacts, and extremely overwhelming in its effects. It is not something anyone wants to have happen. It is a "necessary experience", so to speak. It is "for your own good". It is usually not a fun process to go through. But if it works, it works wonders for all involved. Unfortunately, all too frequently, it doesn't work, and the Universe has to get even more severe and intense in its interventions.

There are, of course, several types of "cosmic partner", each of which is designed to teach a particular kind of lesson. For instance, there is the "mirror", who is like a version of yourself that you fall in love with to heal self-hatred. Then there is the "mentor", who is there to teach you what they know in the area you need teaching in. Next there is the "complementary", who fills in what you are missing and vice versa. The "parent/child" is a re-parenting process so you can heal and get on with your destiny. The "feedback device" can provide you objective inputs about yourself that no one else can around the issue area. The "spiritual releaser" triggers your relationship with the cosmos and the "Home Office". The "carrot-motivator" gets you off your butt and moving towards your destiny. The "roto-rooter" burrows out your deepest wounds to free you up. And the "Medusa-mirror" holds up a relentless reflection of your destructive propensities so you can finally relinquish them.

As might be expected, given the circumstances, the "cosmic partner" phenomenon is becoming quite common nowadays. It has been a regular slow trickle type of thing throughout history, but now it is more like a dam burst in its frequency. The reason being, of course, that we simply HAVE to get on with the evolution of the collective consciousness or perish from the face of the Earth, perhaps taking the Earth with us.

THE "DATING GAME"

"Dating" is a characteristically western practice that is designed to compensate for the absence of imprinting on the whole range of human manifestation via the "commons" and of the "imprinting" provided for by the living in of the extended family. Its purpose is to expose us to the whole range of possibilities out there and to simultaneously terminate our "fatal attraction" attempts to put a new ending on the old story with stand-ins for the original cast.

The parent/child relationship is unique and it is the strongest you'll ever have, particularly in the isolated nuclear family situation. The connection is called bonding, and it refers to an extreme rush of affection, vulnerability, connection, desire to please, need to be with and profound felt importance. It provides the basis of the spousal turn on reaction. If the critical stimuli aren't there for activating the "imprinted" reaction, we cannot spouse with the individual. The trouble is that when there is only one or two individuals to whom we developed imprinting, we end up with the "fatal attraction" -- "nemesis figure" outcome.

Now what the dating process does is to put us in intimate circumstances with people so as to provide the necessary experiences for a bonding to occur. Or, conversely, for us to find out that the bonding reaction doesn't occur. Or for us to learn what it is we would never in a thousand years allow into our intimate life. Or for us to "get it up to the eyebrows" with our "fatal attraction" figures so we don't have to spouse with them to learn that we aren't going to be able to put a new ending on that old story.

And it usually takes a whole lot of repetition of experiences before we get that lesson, due to its intensely high stakes and the earliness of its onset. We require a huge amount of experiences of the real effects of the "nemesis" figure on us before we have had enough of the most rejecting parent's bullshit in our lives. It also simultaneously teaches us that we don't and didn't deserve that kind of treatment, and that we are required by the cosmos to drop the pattern and to get on with our destiny. And the dating process helps us enormously in this undertaking by not requiring the disaster of a spousing to get the lesson. Or at least it has that potential.

When this process is successful, we end up with the "ten second turn on" phenomenon. Because the original parent/child experiences are imprintings, the attraction to the most rejecting parent type person never goes away. But when you have "eyebrowed" on it and your "inner kid" no longer believes that you are "persona non grata" with the "Home Office" as represented by the "fatal attraction" figure, you end up with a kind of esthetic appreciation reaction. It's like you are intensely attracted to a sculpture and you admire it for a bit -- and then you move on. In the case of the "nemesis figure" attraction, it comes out the "ten second turn on". It is like you're in the grocery store pushing your cart and THERE S/HE IS! And you go, "Oh boy!" -- (ten seconds of implication readout) "Oh Boy! -- No way!".

Of course, ideally the dating process also leads to your encountering the real thing, the spouse figure. This figure has all the crucial POSITIVE qualities of the imprinting figure(s), along with "just a pinch" of the negative qualities that make up our "fatal attraction" stimuli. Not enough to be bothersome, but enough to activate the full bonding reaction. Usually, this relationship develops more slowly, as you come together in a smooth fit that feels better and better as it dawns on us who this is for us.

THE RELATIONSHIP PROCESS

Relationships have a typical "life history" of their own. We will examine that briefly here. At the very beginning of the relationship, the issue is that of relevance. That is, after it is established that this is not a person that is totally unrelated to your needs and intentions and that they aren't going to hurt you.

Having decided that you are going to look further into the possibility of having some sort of relationship with the individual, you start seeking out experiences and information that confirm or disconfirm that they share many important qualities and values with you. As they pass this "inclusion" criterion, you explore deeper and deeper until you either level out at a given depth of involvement or you decide to go the whole nine yards. The question is, of course, "Do I include you in my life and do you include me in yours?".

The bottom line here is whether you are relevant to me and whether I am relevant to you. Now that brings up things like abandonment-anxiety, rejection-paranoia and worth issues on the one hand, and negative evaluations, judgements and repulsion reactions on the other. There is as a result of this a whole lot of scoping and scanning for relevance indicators, and you notice all the things that have bearing on this issue. And the question is whether they have relevance to you, whether you have relevance to them, and being as concerned with the relevance flow both ways in a welfare-concerned manner. You need to have a mutually enriching system. The issue is "What's in it for we?", not "What's in it for me?", when a healthy relationship is in the making here. The question becomes "Can we form a mutually relevant co-equal relationship in which we also make a contribution to the world as a pair and as individuals?".

At that point, the issue that started out the whole process, trust, comes back into the picture at a whole different level. Because at this point, you are becoming vulnerable and concerned with both security from harm and count-on-ability of commitment. So these then become the primary focus of your "toe-testing" and "trial ballooning". The question concerns whether this person is going to hurt you and whether they are going to be long term there for and with you. After all, the history of the human race and of our particular lifetimes have not given us much grounds for trust.

This process usually goes on for a long time, deepening in its level of testing as your vulnerability and interdependence deepens. In many cases, it goes on for years or the whole duration of the relationship. For most people, this issue has led to disaster over and over, so they are what could be characterized as kind of permanently "gun-shy" about this. And of course, things like the "Tripod-Good-bar", dysfunctionality and puer/puella processes interact with this to keep the issue alive for a long time.

Finally, and overlapping with the other two issues comes the question of bonding and intimacy, along with affection and commitment. The issue here is whether there is a reciprocity of commitment and concern for welfare, with regard to "testing" processes. In other words, has there been a genuine bonding here? This is a big issue for many people nowadays. They are desperately afraid of not being loved or of being abandoned or rejected again. But as the relationship deepens, the affection issue simply has to be dealt with. So "Do you like me?" and "Do I like you?" continues on as a never-ending question, as well as "I like/love you" as a never-ending story.

When this stage is reached, the shit starts to hit the fan. Because at this point, you are fully committed, vulnerable and interdependent. And you are in a state of consciousness that is like no other, save the original parent/child bond. And therein lies the rub. Because, as they say, "Love brings up all that is unlike itself".

It's like you've got this basement full of garbage -- black, dusty, sooty, cobwebs, rat turds, mold, cockroaches and the whole works. This is of course the negative fall-out from your experiential history. And the partner comes along and puts a fire hose through the transom into the basement and they turn on the flow of crystal clear water (love input). But what you see as you stand at the top of the stairs is all this GUNK coming up at you from your own subconscious. And so you react to the love by becoming a total asshole, fool and idiot. And of course, the same thing is happening to them, and the tendency is for all hell to break loose.

In other words, love energy has the effect of flushing out and raising up other emotional energies that are not compatible with it. And at the same time, love relationships re-activate the deep wounds of the earliest love relationship. And out of both these processes, all kinds of pain and negative emotions surface. It is here that things like the "demonic dynamic" and the "toothpaste rage" start showing up. But at the same time, your basement is filling with crystalline pure love for the first time in your life, IF you can look at it.

Now all these processes go on simultaneously, and the onset of the patterns and issues involved in each stage vary from relationship to relationship. Sometimes the "love brings up" process commences almost immediately. Other times, they may not show up till towards the end of the "opening phase" of the relationship, which usually runs during the first two years.

After this opening phase comes the "realism" phase. It usually runs from about the third to the tenth year of the relationship. What happens here is that the darker sides of the individuals start to show up as daily realities. During this period, doubts come up based on incidents, patterns and interlocks that have been repeatedly experienced. Boredom also arises due to the domination of life by the daily routines that don't let us do our most unique and extraordinary capabilities much. And then there is the, "I've heard that story a thousand times. Must you bring it up again?".

The so-called "seven year itch" (actually, it's a four-year itch) shows up too, and the wandering eye and the interesting daydreams start to appear. There develops a lot of what could be called the "grass is greener" reaction during this time. Our "have our cake and eat it too" fantasies begin to come up, as we forget how much the partner provides and we focus on the irritations, restrictions, responsibilities and deprivations. Affairs are the most likely to happen during this period. This phenomenon brings up a poster of four cows each eating through the fence in the pasture next door as if they were getting something special. This is the period when the most divorces occur, especially among younger souls, who can't get past the selfishness pattern to learn and expand from this process.

Unfortunately, as a part of the Armageddon process, the mass psychology looks more like the "War of the Roses" in its manifestation. This is a film about a yuppie couple who get into actual physical warfare within the house over which they are fighting in their divorce settlement. Needless to say, it has a tragic ending. And it is not far from the truth, as domestic violence is on the extreme increase, especially towards women, as the men react to the death of the patriarchy and their own crippling. Those who engage in such reactions just don't have the inner resources to respond to what the relationship conundrum is -- a challenge to be mastered.

Now in the situation where there is a truly viable relationship happening between souls developed enough to respond to the challenge, what happens is that eventually you confront the issues involved. It becomes an opportunity for "house-cleaning" and air-clearing so that your suppressed resentments and theirs can be handled and contained in a constructive way. And that includes healing long-standing wounds from childhood and their neurotic aftermaths as a possibility. If handled correctly, it deepens the relationship and expands the individuals. Older souls in particular are capable of using challenges like this to expand and deepen, and they serve to provide exemplary examples to the world in this regard.

From the eleventh to the twenty-fifth year, the term "comfortable" seems to cover the experience. You have weathered the storms and you have shared much. There is a well-worked out division of labor and set of routines of life that meet both partner's needs rather well. The only real danger of this period is the tendency to lose your identity as an individual and to start becoming "that couple that looks just like each other".

From the twenty-sixth to the thirty-fifth year, the "life passages issues" start coming up. Questions about how much life is there left arise, and physical infirmities and limitations start appearing. The partners have to compensate more and more for their own and their partner's failing capacities during this time. And of course, the questions around death and the afterlife, along with spiritual concerns show up big time around here. Thoughts about the aftermath of one's own and the partner's death on the significant others also come up. In the more unfortunate cases, financial stress and poverty and/or severe illnesses become an issue. But this period is also one of great wisdom and mentoring/sharing with others, or it can be. And the partners are enormously helpful just by being there and by having shared so much.

Finally, we reach the post thirty-fifth year period. At this point, widowing may well have occurred, raising the issues of aloneness after all these years. Also coming up is the impact of retirement and the imminence of death. Transcendence issues become very large at this point, if only to vehemently re-affirm that there is no such thing. If the partner is still present, much time is spent reminiscing and sharing current challenges of living and dying. In some more vigorous individuals, there may be active involvement in the family and/or the community.

One of the more interesting aspects of the future is that these aging timetable events may have to be totally re-written, given the advances that are being made on reversing the effects of aging. Some predictions indicate that we will be able to extend both the life span and the vigorousness of life for many years by the end of the century or shortly thereafter. But in any case, this is what has been discovered about the longer-range process of relationships thus far.

TYPES OF LOVE

There is a fairly wide variety of love relationships and love sources. The following is a brief introduction to some of them. These are the basis of love exchange relationships. As you have surely noticed, there is quite a range of ways to express and manifest love. This arises both from life history experiences and inherent qualities. We will focus on the latter here.

The type of love usually thought of in relation to relationships is, of course, passionate love or Eros. Eros is the God of Love, and it emanates from the second (sexual) chakra. However, there is much more to it that that. It is the basis of bonding, of passion, of commitment and of joy. But in a relationship, it is not enough to have just Eros. It is too primitive and it tends to mellow out with familiarity. It is very helpful to have Eros available in a relationship, because it keeps the "juices" going. But life does not exist on the basis of this type of love alone.

The second kind of love emanates from the fourth (heart) chakra, and it is a kind of unconditional, neutral-minded, accepting and validating love called "agape". It asks nothing of its recipient and indeed, it can emanate with no relationship being implied at all. It is universal love, the love of wisdom, compassion and comprehension. It understands and appreciates everything and everyone. It is utterly forgiving and non-judgmental. It is almost like parental love. Relationships that have this kind of love are quiet and accepting.

"Companionate" love is that involving shared experiences, resources and reactions. It is a love that derives its joy from being in the presence of the loved other and in being able to "debrief" and "prebrief" events and experiences as well. It also derives great pleasure from the knowledge of shared space and bed.

"Pragmatic" love is the sort of thing that derives from the division of labor and the enablement of experiences and resources that could not be done alone. Those sharing their love pragmatically express and measure their love in terms of contributions and efforts on behalf of the relationship and the partner.

"Ludens" love is that which derives from playing with the partner. It is a recreational, exuberant, childlike kind of love that is very much like that of childhood playmates. Ludens lovers thoroughly enjoy shared enjoyments and activities that are made more fun by the company of the partner.

"Generative" love derives its satisfactions and expresses itself through the process of building tomorrow's world, whether that be through parenting, through contributions to the community, through leaving legacies, or through any combination of such activities. Partners sharing this type of love feel that their whole relationship exists for the generative function.

"Expansive" love expresses itself through the process of precipitating or facilitating growth of the partner and the self. It is often expressed as a "meeting of the minds" and as "relevance", but its real nature is the love of the enlargement of consciousness, whether that be in the realm of ideas, in the realm of experience or in the realm of feelings. Expansion is the expression and goal of this love.

"Creative/expressive" love is that which manifests itself through the formation of new forms, ideas, resources, experiences, systems, or whatever. Partners who share or express their love in this manner will derive enormous joy from the process of creativity and from the stimulation of creativity in the pattern.

"Destiny/agreement" love comes from the fact that the entities involved decided before they came into body that they were going to share their lives together in this manner for some larger purpose or set of purposes, including the sheer joy of being with each other. It derives its satisfaction from the fact that they are indeed doing what they set out to do together.

"Cosmic connection" love is shared spiritual love, the activating, accessing, facilitating or precipitating of union experiences and of contacts with the cosmos. Not infrequently, this is referred to as a shared love of God. Such relationships involve either much shared meditation and prayer or, if only one partner is motivated in this manner, prayer for or on behalf of the partner.

Finally, there is the "soul mate". Actually, there are several kinds of such connections. One is the "essence twin", who is very much like the partner at the soul level, but who has much to share with the partner in the way of unique experiences. Another is the "lover monad" with whom the partner has had many past lifetime connections in virtually every kind of experience, so the present relationship is one based on a kind of "warm, fuzzy slipper" feeling. Still another is the "task companion" with whom the partner came to work on creating or generating an intended outcome or set of outcomes for this life.

Now this wide a variety of ways of expressing and foundationing one's love with a partner makes for both a great richness of the love experience and a great potential for difficulties, mismatches and misunderstandings. Partners can either complement, conflict or not comprehend what is going on with the other's manifestations of love. Particularly with the almost sole focus on Eros, much unnecessary pain has been generated by the non-recognition of the many types of love there are, of which these are only a few. Relationships are like a palette of different amounts and kinds and manners of manifestation of many different types of love.

MAKING IT WORK

The foundation of a successful relationship is what could be called an "H-Frame" pattern. This where both individuals are capable and operational in standing in the world on their own making their own contribution. Then they form a joint commitment between people of equal power, equal relevance, equal worth and equal contribution. They have a terrific relationship of respect and appreciation with each other, and they expand that relationship through the "cross bar of the H" of the second, third, fourth and fifth chakras. It is a mutual enrichment "cup runneth over" effect. There is an equal exchange of energy between equal individuals who get it together with each other.

Now what we have had in the best at best is what could be characterized as an "A-Frame" relationship of mutual dependency between two individuals who feel incomplete and incapable of functioning without support. And they are both putting God's face on the other as they try to get the "Golden Orb" from the other so as to put a new ending on the old story. Now when one of these pulls away, the other one falls on their face.

Then there is the "nirvana" of the puer or the puella -- the "lean to". One person is standing there as the "tower of power" and major contributor, while the other one is in the relationship to "be taken care of". This is, of course, a continuation of the parent/child relationship, with all of its one-way street inequities. This, like the "A-Frame" is not a relationship.

An extensive study that did a traceback for four hundred years of families found that successful relationships are founded on four components. The first of these is "orderliness", which could be characterized as "doing things right" so that they work. It is a strong emphasis on pragmatic love. Secondly, there is "connectedness" or bonding. There is a real investment in and vulnerability to the partner.

Thirdly, there is "commitment", a genuine concern for the welfare of the partner, the relationship, the family and their shared resources. And finally, there was "contribution", the manifestation of something more than was there before as a function of being in the relationship. They gave something to the partner, the relationship, the family and the world. These are the characteristics of an "H-Frame" relationship.

Further characteristics of the "H-Frame" relationship are the "four A's". The first of these is "Acceptance". It is based on "agape" love, and it receives the partner just as they are, with no requirements that they change or be something other than they are. If the partner improves or expands, it is greatly enjoyed, but it is not required.

Secondly, there is "Appreciation". This is another aspect of "agape" love, and it reflects an attitude of gratitude for the partner's being who they are and for what they bring to the relationship. It is also an appreciation of who they are themselves and of life.

"Admiration" refers to the individual's really respecting and looking up to the special qualities and capabilities of the partner. It is a reaction of inspiration by these characteristics in the partner and a desire to have them in themselves. It is not a naive or ersatz reaction. It is a genuine attitude of acknowledgement of the value of the other person.

And "Affection" refers to the individual's having a real loving and cherishing response to the partner, and a deep desire to express and share that loving. The form of expression can be as varied as the type of loving affection it represents, but it always reflects a real love reaction to the partner.

Now another component that comes in here in the "H-Frame" relationship is what could be called "individuation" or "maturity". This refers to the degree of self-love, self-empowerment, self-development, self-respect, self-commitment, resources to bring to the world and the relationship, and satisfaction with being alone. It has to do with comfort with yourself, enjoyment of your own company, appreciation of your own value, being aware of yourself and your shortfalls, being able to receive and utilize feedback, ability to derive value from and to accept rewards for your contributions to the world. And of course, being in a position of being able to contribute and of doing so.

One aspect of this is your response to your own and your partner's reactions as you and they go through the relationship development process. For instance, in the trust-testing phase, there is a pronounced tendency to over-react to what have in the past been betrayal situation indicators. Or in the healing process, people will get into some pretty strong emotional commotional reactions such as "Reggie the raging room-wrecker" episodes. Or the "love brings up all that is unlike itself" thing goes off, and all kinds of drastic reactions start occurring. What the individuated or mature individual does with these is to context them in terms of what is going on for the partner, for them and for the relationship, and to see them in terms of what they are -- namely "false alarm freak-outs" and "toilet-flushes" of junk from the past that had to be suppressed before and now can be cleared out.

Or a "demonic dynamic" interlock happens and you both "go up the skimmer handle" in 30 seconds to psychotic rage proportions. What then happens is that one or both of you realize what is going on and you leave the situation to cut off the activating stimuli, with a clear message that that is what you are doing and that you will be back to finish out the issue and to debrief what happened. You study what set you off, you look at what you did, you notice what you were feeling and thinking and saying, you note what the other person did in response and so on. And then when you return to sanity and have debriefed yourself, you go to the other person and share what happened and they do the same with you. And the relationship deepens and each person heals and grows as a result of the process.

The "H-Frame" relationship is a bonded connection between two independent individuals who are interdependent. You have an individual with whom there is profound relevance, deep trust and intense affection with whom to engage in the evolution of both destinies. Now of course problems arise, but they are continuously worked out as life constantly challenges and expands us. The neuroses are not the basis of the relationship, they are sort of intermixed with it, and they are regularly worked on to be worked out.

The overall approach to the successful manifestation of relationship is what could be called the "make and mend" orientation. The effort is to solve problems, rather than to create them. The partners reach into their inner resources and they work from a "What's in it for we?" approach, in which the intention is to create a "win-win" outcome from the whole process over the long haul.

For instance, when you have a "toilet flush" or "Reggie" reaction, you "up your periscope" while your "kid" is emotionally commotioning to see what is going on and what set it off. You don't blame or attack your partner. You try to learn from it. Similarly, the partner is aware that you are doing that, and they don't come at you with guns drawn either, because they know that the upheaval is reflective of a change process that is causing all kinds of implication-freak outs in your "inner kid". And they work with you to facilitate your getting it together.

And then on the other hand, there is the "caring enough to give the very worst" phenomenon, where your partner is engaging in self- and other-destructive behavior patterns and you give them the kind of direct feedback, interventions and support necessary for them to be facilitated in coming out of the pattern as quickly as possible. And this can sometimes by quite dramatic, as in the "splatting" phenomenon. That refers to the Russian version of the "Frog and the Princess" fable in which she "splats" the frog against the wall as a spell-breaker.

A spousal commitment is in some ways like a business investment. You evaluate the potential partner's past record, their capacity for, rate of and processes of change, and the like, and you then decide to unconditionally accept them as they are, in a kind of "I can live with that -- and enjoy it" conclusion. Then you "kiss the frog" or "splat the frog" only when it is the integritous and caring thing to do and there is a decent response and return. And you don't "pour sand down a rat hole" in a hopeless investment situation. Nor do you harass and restrain them in an attempt to get blood from a stone.

You make a commitment to prospering the both of you, with faith, trust, determination and competent performance. In the process, you strongly project the image of what your joint success looks like and your trust in the Universe, while at the same time you "tie your camel", you cover your end of the bargain. You don't try to rescue a loser or look to be rescued or care-taken. You don't try to "make someone over" so they can "realize their potential", and you don't trade on promises of potential performance. No projects or problem cases are accepted. And you don't use the situation as an opportunity to get back at a stand-in for the original cast. You set out on a joint venture to make a universal win out of it, and you follow through on your responsibilities in the situation. And they do the same.

Now once a commitment has been made, it is necessary to set up a constructive container for the relationship. You keep your parent(s) out of the situation, carefully avoiding projecting them onto your partner. You need to remind yourself that they are doing the best they can with what they've got, just like you are. You utilize compassion, commitment, suspension of judgements, and careful use of confrontation and other interventions to contain it all, the whole of both of you, and of the relationship between you. And that "container" is the "make and mend" approach to the whole process.

The truth of the matter is that you have to speak the truth at all times. The truth will always out anyway -- the Universe sees to that. However, you have to be careful HOW you tell the truth in an intimate relationship. Some TEMPORARY withholds sometimes are required as you sort out what is happening with your attraction to that other person or as you wait for the dust to settle on that threat to your job, for instance. And you have to be sensitive to the other person's sensibilities as you speak of what is true for you. And then there is the "readiness" factor in children as they want to know what "that handle" is for, and the like. But in general, speaking the truth is the only way to fly in an "H-Frame" relationship.

In such a relationship, there is a minimum of denial, suppression, avoidance of conflict or pain, and there is a maximum of willingness to accept accountability and responsibility for your shit. The partner's negativities and shortfalls are seen as a process, not as their problem. Its purpose is seen as generating depth of understanding and growth or healing for both of you. It's not taken personally, either -- and you don't assume they are just doing to hurt you or out of their "moral cretinism", nor do you assume you are just getting your "just deserts" or that you are getting deserved failure feedback.

"Containers" in relationships both exclude and include in a set of self- and other-respecting boundaries of self-love and commitment to the welfare of the partner and the relationship. In other words, you exclude demands, behaviors and situations that are unreasonable or destructive, and you include things that are unpleasant from the other individual that are leading somewhere. There is a minimum of fear-based restrictions on commitment or over-reactions to situations, and there is a firm determination to overcome them when they do occur.

There is a great emphasis on seeking clarity, compassion and constructiveness, based on a foundation of integrity and commitment. The effort is to not misplace "splats" and "kisses", to not escalate the "toilet flush", and to avoid terminal misunderstandings. Having a "constructive container" relationship allows each partner to access their power, playfulness and positivity without being threatening or threatened.

There is the need in this process for "container space". This refers to both the right to "let it all hang out" and the place and time to do so, such as your own special place or time of day or process to use to handle things on your own when needed. You can't run an intimate relationship on the basis of having to restrain yourself and to only present and manifest a restricted range of yourself. And you also can't be expected to be "relating" continuously. People need alone time as much as they need shared time.

There is also the necessity for "special" times and places which you share together, often away from home. It is essential to have joyous bonding experiences (away from the routines and responsibilities of daily living) in large numbers to the degree that it is pragmatically possible. Going out to restaurants, going on walks, taking mini-vacations, sharing activities, and the like with each other and without the kids is real important. Family activities need to be planned and executed in the same way, with the emphasis on making sure everyone's needs and desires are met to the degree possible. Here the emphasis needs to be on the children's experiences for the most part. But alone times for yourselves and for relating/sharing have to be built into these family outings to the degree possible. For instance, it is not feasible when the children are very young, save when they are asleep and you can share in the other room.

As much as possible, the shared activities are ones that both can enjoy. For instance, though one partner may not much need or enjoy the outdoors and the other virtually lives off of these "refuelings", the other partner can go along for the company and the shared experience because it is not something they can't stand. But if one likes gambling in Las Vegas and fishing and the other can't abide by either, these activities should be done as alone time for the one partner, while the other does things that are repellent to their partner but which sustain them.

You also have to be willing to open yourself to the "meltdown process" that comes with moving through your stuff and healing as the "love brings up" phenomenon happens. And that includes being willing and able to listen objectively with at least a part of yourself as your partner provides feedback, reactions, insights and interventions to what's happening with you. You have to be willing to listen to the fact that there's more to things than meets your eye, ear and guts.

You need to systematically work at not letting yourself project your parent(s)' face on the partner. You also have to be willing to take the risks involved in "violating" the "injunctions" of long ago as you move away from trying to get the "God Housekeeping Seal" by doing what the neurotic part of your parents wanted you to do for the rest of your life. And you have to be willing to undergo the "roller coaster rides" that accompany that the change process and the vulnerable intimacy process involve.

There can be no imperious expectations or laid back dependency. And you have to come to a fundamental acceptance of yourself and the potential of aloneness with yourself if you manifest fully who you really are. You have to be willing to take the chance of losing the relationship in order to manifest your identity and destiny. "If you can't handle this, that's your loss" in the context of an ecologically sensitive and committed orientation is the attitude that is needed here. You can't be restraining your true self to satisfy a dependency or an addiction to the partner, nor can you impose yourself arbitrarily as your "prerogative".

Similarly, you must be willing to allow your partner to be themselves and to honor the real being within them. You need to assist them in bringing out who they really are and to help them heal the wounds that occurred when they had to try to get the "Seal". You have to be able to seek to compassionately comprehend and facilitate their self-release process. And you also have to be able to draw boundary lines, saying in a loving and committed manner, "This is an up with which I will no longer put!" to unreasonable experiences. This is a caring partnership devoted to being all you can be individually and as a pair.

Forceful sexual passion is very erotic to women, but forced sexuality is very destructive and revolting to women. Assertive sexual interest is very arousing to men, but sexual rejection or "forced feeding" demands are very repelling to men. The sexual arena is very idiosyncratic due to its multiple determinants and unique experiential history effects. It is extremely vulnerable and sensitive to undermining or fusion with negative emotions on the one hand, and it is also frequently tied into addictive or abusive experiences on the other. It is an area that has to be VERY lovingly approached and worked on, as most of us are severe "walking wounded" in this area.

Another thing that happens is that each partner will find themselves growing so much as a result of all this that they are going to have to contend with the reactions of those outside the relationship to who you are and who you are becoming. This is going to lead both to rejection experiences as others are threatened by your developing selfhood and to people turning on to you as you exhibit your increasingly manifesting destiny and identity. The former have to be handled with tact and tactical maneuvers, as most people are not aware of their true feelings on such matters. The latter have to be handled with grace, responsibility and supportive understanding, without becoming caught up in feeling responsible for their feelings in a parent-rescue pattern. And you are going to have to be able to appreciate the success feedback that such episodes and situations are for your partner as well. Abandonment-paranoia has no place in a truly loving relationship.

The "make and mend" orientation and approach involves a "needs-assessment" and problem-solving process as its foundation. When difficulties arise, they are taken as challenges and needs, rather than as assaults and failures. You then set out to "make lemonade" out of the lemon, rather than "making curds" out of the spilt milk by crying into it. Even deciding not to do anything is a solution if all honest efforts have resulted in that being the best thing for the present. But it is done with the intention of sharing that that is what you have decided to do and why you have come to that decision, with an openness to negotiation then or later as the partner grapples with the issue.

It also involves a "Your welfare and our welfare and their welfare (e.g., the kids) is as important to me as is mine" orientation and value commitment. It is a "win-win" intention in which the effort is to see to it that your needs are met and that those of everyone else involved (including the environment) are also met. It is not a "What's in it for me?" orientation, and it is not a co-dependent serving yourself up on a platter "What's in it for you?" orientation. Only by being in a co-creative relationship with the partner and the cosmos can a relationship truly succeed.

And when there has to be a caring confrontation, it is done in its own time with an attitude and an approach of compassionate commitment to their process and situation and experiential history and needs. Your presentation of the "ultimatum" is in terms of a strong preference, not an addition. In other words, you say something like, "I really would feel much better if you could not do that (or try doing this)", rather than "I will leave if you don't cut that out!". The effort is to assist the other person in making required changes for their success and that of the relationship, taking into account all that the pattern means to the person as well as what its impact on you and the ecology is. Again, some sort of "lemonade" is the intended outcome, not compliance to an imperial imperative.

Even the ultimate caring confrontation -- the request for a divorce -- can be done in a way that is loving and expanding. The first rule of that game is honesty. You tell your partner where it's at in a sensitive but no holds barred manner. You also share your pain and your appreciation for all they have been and done for you, along with your concerns for their welfare and that of those affected. In other words, you do it in a caring, compassionate, committed, constructive and competent manner.

Now it is not possible to leave a relationship without hurting someone, including yourself. By the very nature of the situation, it is inevitable. But the hurt that comes can be constructive pain or it can be a destructive neurotic game. The process is up to you and your partner in terms of how you come at it. Speaking from the truth and basically being willing to accept the consequences, knowing what they will likely be is the only way to fly.

Successfully negotiating this painful process requires that you be compassionately and comprehendingly calculating, so that you know in advance what their likely responses are going to be and what the needs of the situation are. You need to be prepared at all levels. And that includes hiring a ferocious lawyer if your partner is likely to become irrational in their reaction. After all, staying in a relationship that you are basically not in any more is a very destructive game to play, and it is worse to do that than it is to honestly own up to the situation and to try to make the best lemonade you can from it.

One of the prime resources in life and certainly in relationships is a well-developed sense of humor. Hilarity, outrageousness, impishness and robust laughter are the lubricants of life and the truth of the matter. We are God's play, we are told. When I first heard that, I was utterly infuriated -- "If this is His idea of a joke, who needs Him!?". I have since learned that all the bases are covered down here and the "cosmic jokes" are way up the hierarchy of causal forces in the way that they are arranged and constantly rearranged. Apparently, God has a totally outrageous sense of humor, and we would be wise to emulate Him/Her. Humor is also an excellent container for wisdom and feedback -- we laugh and learn. But most importantly, humor is the elixir of the gods. It is a direct route to the joy of the cosmos, and it is unbelievably effective as a tool in living and loving.

Of course, we are not talking about the compulsive practical joker, the merciless punster, the passive-aggressive disguiser, the lugubrious pseudo-humorist, the unrelenting jokester, the cynical commentator, the subtly sadistic hurter, or the one who says, "Well I was only kidding!". Humor is part of the "divine forgiveness" -- an ability to see the Truth for what it is -- a cosmic lesson presented in a way to expand us and if possible share with us the hilarity and joy that is the true nature of the Universe, when you can get past the density of the time-space dimension for a bit.

A good way of looking at your spousal relationship is that of "your best friend -- plus". The "H-Frame" relationship is between equals with an equal exchange of energy, and that includes relevance, trust, love, respect, wisdom and power, among many other things. A friend shares our joys and sorrows, our values and priorities, and our frailties and shortfalls. They also love to be expanded by us and to expand us and to help us expand. A friend shares life's adventure and they are a connection to the cosmos for us, as we are for them. And when you add the depth of sharing and vulnerability that goes with the spousal and sexual and parenting-sharing relationship, you have as much as the world can offer in the way of a resource.

And that extends to the realm of destiny. Remember that an "H-Frame" relationship is between two independent and interdependent freestanding and contributing human beings. That means that they have their own identity and destiny and you have yours. AND you have a shared destiny together that neither can do on your own, as well as being able to facilitate and resource each other's destinies beyond what you could do alone. It is a joint journey in all ways.

The key process in this whole undertaking is to come from the heart. That is the seat of the "Big C's" -- Compassion, Commitment, Connection, Caring, Comprehension, Co-Creation, Concern, Competence, Confidence, Commonweal, etc. It is the place from which "agape love" comes and it is the foundation of the "What's in it for we -- and for Thee" orientation that is the foundation of successful relationship. The heart is as big as the cosmos and it can contain the whole of your partner's humanity and destiny -- and vice versa.

By doing this, you are able to own your own power and to be your own self-doing your own destiny. You can do so because you are already watching out for the other guy and being impeccably integritous. Your life then becomes a gift to God and to all S/He or They or It has created -- including your partner. Coming from your personal power is your guarantee that you will always be in a win-win situation -- and so will all who are affected by you.

So the trick in the whole process is cosmic consciousness, to the extent that you can muster it. It really does require that your perspective take into account that life is more than nuts and bolts, hurts and perks. Being aware that you and your partner are ensouled beings who are seeking to make the best of the remarkably rich learning experiences provided by space-time undertakings, and that you and they are doing the best you can with what you've got at any moment is the key to the whole thing.

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