In America, many of us have been raised to believe that the eternal husband/wife union is the best model for relationships. As many of us know, this structure often doesn't work and can lead to very traumatizing and psychologically unhealthy environments. So we end up replacing true monogamy with varying degrees of serial monogamy.

So I guess what I'm asking is, why have a structure at all? Why not a completely open and consensual relationship? Love whoever and and many as you can. But then I remember that we live in a real world with real obligations and real emotions. Could I really bear it if my spouse loved someone else as much as me? Could you? And even if this was possible, would it be a better alternative?

Sometimes you fall in love with more than one person. Is that really a bad thing?

are you advocating flower power and free love, Timothy?

i'm j/k.... but this is, no doubt, a touchy issue for many, probably because many people, at one time or another, have felt strongly ambivalent about the issue of monogamy.

One the one hand, if you're in a monogamous relationship, then even entertaining the slightest notion of additional relationships would almost certainly be regarded by your partner as a very serious, if not unforgivable, betrayal of his/her trust. However, on the other hand, if one feels or believes that they have enough love for more than one partner, then it can be easy to rationalize having additional relationships, even if it means jeapardizing your first relationship. My advice for any guy in such a situation is, don't let your little head do all the thinking. Your little head only wants sex, and will often times result in you rationalizing certain actions to make them acceptable to your consciousness, but the bottom line often is, it's just about sex. Don't be fooled by the motives of your little head. Consider the consequences and whether your first relationship is really worth something to you.

Well now what do you think relationship is?
Let's approach this from a few angles.

Need and attachment:
I need you, I love you, you are my universe and my soul.
Love stories and songs paint an amusing picture sometimes around the stories of Love. The attachment of humanities heart to a person is easily threatened and brings misery when it is taken away, or the illusion of bliss is shattered.
I say illusion only because if it is not unconditional then any condition that is easily threatened needs to be supported by something and if that something is not real or permanent it will inevitably change or evolve.

If you want to understand Love you have to know what it is. Love born of emotional attachment and need is not the same as unconditional love.
The love you have for your daughter or son is different than your wife or husband because you project difference in need and expectation.
Most relationships are co-dependant and are easily threatened.
Can you love someone unconditionally to support them in anything that will expand them and help them grow into themselves? If it means to evolve beyond fear and beyond need, either in yourself or your love one?

Again we might place different rules in our expectations around this defining concept of love when it comes to a spouse or a sibling or an offspring.

If one has love they can give love. IF one is attached and needs love then they cannot give more than they have which is from need.
IF there is need the universe responds to give you what you need until there is no need but unfortunately the need you see is not the same as what your greater need is, to rise above need.

Relationships are created by mutual needs to complete the need for needs and how you look at life is in relationship to your completeness, Your wholeness.

Would you be able to stand it if your loved spouse left you? If they died you could forgive them but if they walked away from you, especially to form another relationship, would you beable to do the same?

If you cling to this life as being all that there is then there is a good chance you will cling to everything in it. This will cause greater suffering in loss of the attached thing.
If your perspective is more expanded, or liberal then the subjective/objective points in reality may be somewhat different.
My Teacher used to say "I love everyone the same and no one at all."
You hear horror stories of Cult leaders passing amongst their students freely socializing sexually without concern to anyones moral standards. Yet who creates the standards. IF no one is intentionally projecting violence and harm into life can anyone take from another?
Morals are born from ideals that are created in the light of a lesser ideal or a threat to what the majority holds as the greater reality or truth. From a need.

Our system of values is a funny thing. What a child does is out of innocense and would not be punished for reason of inexperience and knowledge of morals. But an adult is not treated the same because he should know the rules.

When two people come together they may be eternal partners or temporary associates in life. Some know they are meant to be eternal mates and others think they are.
Our society has the highest divorce rate in the world so I would say that the knowing of what is to be, when it comes to relationship isn't always guided by a higher intelligence but a grasping for fulfillment, and often different needs clash. These different needs often emerge when the sparkle of the sexual urgency and newness diminishes.

In the book "A stranger in a strange land" the main character has no knowledge or understanding of attachment. In part of the story he spends time with several different women and neither of them feel any jealousy because they in their descriptions of their intimacy, describe the sense that he is there totally present giving everything he has to them.
Niether woman feels they get anything less from him. They describe that in their relationship with any normal man they alway hold something back and want something from them and so what they feel is not a completeness in their association or any fulfillment in Love as humans interpret it.
I also experienced this in my Teacher. No one felt left out when they associated with him whether male or female, they all felt as if he was giving everything he had to each of them no matter what the interaction.
IF humanity has this ability and utilized it, what would our definitions and morals be? Would Monagamy be a known term anymore?

hi Joe,

you bring up some interesting points concerning conditional vs. unconditional love. However, I would like to take up the role of devil's advocate in the following:

Unconditional love seems to me to involve a negation of conditions, which oftentimes is due to lack of imagination (or a surplus of romantic or otherwise fanciful thinking) rather than a real lack of conditions. That is, I would claim that anyone's claim of 'unconditional love' is in fact conditional.... it's just a question of determining the conditions (at the very least, all love is conditional on one's state of mind). As an example, take love of one's spouse: this is usually said to be a prime example of 'unconditional love', but is this really so? What if your spouse changed and was no longer the person you used to love, then wouldn't that constitute a 'condition' that would violate the 'unconditional love'? As another example, take love of the 'Self'. Surely, this is an example of 'unconditional love', right? No, I don't believe it is, since I can readily imagine circumstances and conditions that may invalidate this 'unconditional love'. It's all a state of mind, and some states of mind are such as to invalidate any and all forms of 'unconditional love'. Since we, as individuals at least, do not possess utter complete control over our states of mind, it follows that 'unconditional love' is an illusion. Anyone who claims otherwise is probably implicitly professing ignorance of the nature of mind and its states (or else willingly ignoring it's implications). Even the narcissistic love of one's self (or Self, if the case may be) is not unconditional, but is dependent on conditions and expectations, and at the very least, on one's state of mind.

I'm curious what other people think about this, about whether there can be such a thing as unconditional love, and if so, then to be explicit about it and give real examples.

Unconditional Love can only be realized (experienced) and expressed at higher levels of consciousness.
One way to look at "real" Love is the unconditional love that supports all of creation.
This type of love has no reason it will abide in any situation, the love thy neighbor and love thy enemy love. Gods love.
Only emotional attachment creates different types of love through a qualification process, a conditional process determined by the ego or the limited mind. It takes love and chops it up into degrees. I love her this much and him this much and that person that much and that one... well if he fit into my box of form function and quality then I'll consider it later.
Within the higher levels of consciousness immersed in the Bliss of higher vibrational energy you realize it not as an emotional feeling with any quality but a freedom from the limitations of any quality at all.
Unburdened by fear of maintaining anything or expecting anything or needing, "Change" is then irrelevant to the expression or passing on of that Love.
I'm sure you have experienced it Shawn I've read your descriptions of your experiences of being immersed in Consciousness. There is no need in that awareness.
Abraham Maslow categorized the experience as a "Peak Experience" where one is so full of life that there is no need, everything in creation vibrates with the same energy and the experience is of total completion.
It only takes the ability to make this permanent. IF the Ego can let go of the Ideas of recreating qualities and responsabilites in judgments and reason the awareness would not return itself again into habit and form based on conditions.
Human, emotional love is attached love, it depends on and requires conditions and is greatly affected by change. It requires effort to adjust and readjust to the changes, where at the higher levels of awareness it is effortless.
Innocense is key, to unlearn the conditional aspects of personality that demands something from outside of ourselves to complete us, leaves us always wanting something. Personalities may differ in respect to the particular want but it doesn't matter the condition is the same.
Love of the Self is not possesive, it is a love that encompasses all of the One in its many projected forms.
You love all equally and none at all.

[quote author=Joesus link=board=5;threadid=2797;start=0#msg14200 date=1064686219]
Unconditional Love can only be realized (experienced) and expressed at higher levels of consciousness.

[/quote]

I totally agree with you, Joe. An interesting question, perhaps, is whether this Unconditional Love that people have experienced is of the same type and intensity (most definitely not of the same intensity), and whether it's expressed at all higher levels of consciousness, and also whether one can shed it, like a snake sheds its skin, and experience things totally beyond it (beyond Unconditional Love).

[quote author=Joesus link=board=5;threadid=2797;start=0#msg14200 date=1064686219]
It only takes the ability to make this permanent.

[/quote]

that is a general problem for me, is how to make certain experiences permanent instead of transient or episodic. It's relatively easy to write about super-conscious experiences, in retrospect, when one is in a cool, rational (and probably rather ordinary) frame of mind, with the memories and wisdom of one's past experiences. But the key question is how to revive those experiences, and how to make them more permanent and lasting. Otherwise, even blissful memories are prone to fading and distortion,....

Just a very quick response. I only had time to read about half of the thread so forgive me if I'm treading over old ground.

I would agree with Shawn that unconditional love is a fiction when it comes to real relationships. His arguments seem sound. At the same time, I would agree with Joe that unconditional love is also an ideal that ought to be sought after, even if, as Shawn has cogently argued, it is something forever beyond the grasp. The more you are able to express love without external constraint, the less you are able to regret those times when circumstances do not correspond to intentions.

To me love seems to be a function of the individual ego. As long as the ego exists, love will necessarily remain conditional. Since I am not yet willing to concede that the ego is dispensible, I cannot endorse the idea of unconditional love. Certainly we can minimize the role of ego in relationships, but can it ever be dissolved? And if so, what is the advantage?

Can anybody refer me to a good layman's level work on the biology of the ego? Any comments on transpersonal psychology?

only a 'thinker' can perceive. thus, if the 'ego' is perceiving, then the 'thinker' is ego.

so, 'Ego' is just a way of thinking, like any other way, but with an overwhelming tendency to preserve and build on itself? As any particular structure of thought is bound to reach an end, and all ends are incomplete truth at best, 'ego' thinking necessarily prevents the 'thinker' from remaining open to truth who's potential it does not embody? Thus, to remove 'ego' is to reject the tendency to settle into particular thoughts, which is to remain open to truth in any form?

this 'bridge' sounds suspicious. sounds more like a short-circuit

[quote]The intellect questions, the heart knows, put them together, and one can consciously understand all that they experience.[/quote]
The Ego questions, the intellect translates, The heart is the connection to the absolute.

The heart is forever connected to its source, The intellect can translate the source within the terms of its manifest structure, no matter what the structure.

Cosmic ego is awareness and is a servant of consciousness.

Waking state Ego is a belief structure or foundation, that is created from separation it is illusion. It suspects and questions only from its foundation of separation, its strucure.

There is nothing but the absolute, any understanding of it in terms is only relative to a particular structure. No structure is reality, only projection of reality.
Consciousness or God is movement of the absolute. It is forever active and born of the stillness is always coming from the stillness of the Absolute or seated in the absolute. IT can be experienced as Still or active, once all reference to quality is removed. Energy is pure potential and moved it is still energy.

Conscious understanding is a misnomer, but it fits into a realm of perspectives.
Consciousness is consciousness, it simply is. Any understanding is a "reduction" as someone said, of the infinite into relative terms, but it has to exist within the structure of the manifest reality. It is connected to its natural laws, as it is a part of creation.

Need to connect structure to the infinite eventually ceases when one rise above structure. Until then all interpretations are just interpretations.

"Just be" to the Ego means leave everything relative as it is, because that,(interpretation) is all there is.
To the enlightened, being, is not a thing or a doing. It is not relative to anything. It is in relative terms only, being the absolute.

True unconditional Love is not a quality built or derived from any structure but is the underlying principal of all relative structures. It is the infinite as it supports every idea in form or the fromless from the awareness of consciousness recognising itself.

Emotional love is the attempt to unify the relative into one. To unite that which is experienced as separate or fragmented as parts into a whole.
Sadness created by the impression of division creates desire to unite what it perceivss as separate, which enlivens the emotional drive or desire to combine or come together. Sexual Union is the closest thing to Unification that the waking state mind can experience in its attempts to unite fragmentation of the self in its many perceptions of itself.
In desperation to achieve this, ego becomes attached to the things it feels complete itself into wholeness, but it is illusion only for it believes itself separate and it never is or was.

Sexual attachments are the most distorted because it is the one thing that belief has created which actually comes close to real Union of Spirit and the manifest reality.

Who indeed? God is never separate or far from its creation.

Here are some questions for you Joe, or anyone.


What is meaning? What is the meaning of meaning? Why should I believe in absolutes?

[quote]What is meaning?[/quote]

Meaning is association with perception. Outside of the pure isness of the absolute and pure consciousness the intellect arranges it ideas by the intent of creative desire derived from consciousness

[quote] What is the meaning of meaning?[/quote]
There is nothing other than consciousness. It by its nature contains everything within itself, all possible dimensional realities, everything that can be known or will be known. Manifestation is brought forth by desire. It is drawn from the absolute oneness, a vast infinte field of energy that supports the thought or desire for as long as the thought is maintained. Each thought in order for it to be, has structure that surrounds the idea. It is a glue that holds it together, this is called natural law. It is an understanding that is cognized at the level of the Laws of creation. Returned to its source there is no understanding only isness. But God/Consciousness is forever active, that is its nature, its bliss, to create.

[quote] Why should I believe in absolutes? [/quote]
Belief is from the surface level of the mind, the 10% level that scientists recognize as the functioning level.
Below the thinking level of beliefs are deeper awarenesses of reality that are not subject to beliefs, only variations of the One and the experiences of that.
Pure perception of manifest reality. A completely different paradigm than that of the ego which is in belief separate from the essence of all things.
Why should you believe anything, what should you not believe in? These shoulds and shouldn'ts are the boxes that are built and then torn down and rebuilt as each new idea comes into form at the surface level of the mind.

Occasionally the mind slips deeper into reality and busts most of the paradigms, but out of habit the ego forms new structure around the habit of containing the infinite into form and rebuilds the box a little differently.

Those answers don't really help me to understand. You said you always meet ppl where they are, but I'm having difficulty relating to this. I just don't get what you're talking about.

If ego is so bad, why does it exist? How does it exist? Physical limitations are illusional? How? How did things get a state of so much illusion anyway? ...? ??

[quote]If ego is so bad, why does it exist?[/quote]
Why not?
The ego is not a bad thing per se, not in the sense that it is bad, or evil, Just not useful when it creates a barrier of fear between you and your totality, when you want more than the limitations of fear and pain hovering in your reality.
If you are content with the world as it is, to live your life and die like everyone else as truth. Or if you are content with compromise, self sacrifice, competition, greed, corruption. If you think it is normal to have your heart broken when the things you love most are taken from you or fear that they could be taken from you only to have your heart broken. To grasp onto the need for things or people in life to complete you because you are incomplete on your own. When God is some unknown uncaring someone or something that one puts their faith in to save them from themselves or the world that seems so annoying.
Actually it is not a bad thing because it is created by misperceptions. Yours and you are not bad, so nothing that you create can be bad, right?
If you got the wrong directions from someone in your trip across country it would take you away from your destination for a while, but eventually when you found out that you weren't getting to where you wanted to go you would change your direction, either by asking for new directions, or if you are a man ??? and can't ask for directions you would criss cross the country enough times until you ran into your destination.
The Ego is alot like bad directions. Or If you get caught up in the scenery you can miss the exit you were looking for and end up driving down miles of unnecessary road.

The nature of creation is that it always ends up back where it started from.
Lets say God extends an idea outward and it returns as God. IT was God when it left but the further it got into the depths of the idea the further it got from its source as God, but as it returns it again returns to its Self.
An analogy only.

I think the monogomy issue is really not only a question of what a person feels instinctively individually, but it is also a question that must sort of delve into the differences of the genders.

a male has the ability to produce a large amount of offspring, while a female can only reproduce a limited number of times in her lifetime. Men also have a different progression of arousal then do women (in general here!).

So, I think, (not an expert or anything), that men might be a little more apt to having an internal desire to be with many more women, than a woman might want to be with men.
When it comes to sex, both sexes have a desire for sexual satisfaction, but men are more mechanical and instat, for lack of better words, than are women. Woman, again in general (not placing every single person in the same category), I think have more of an internal desire to be special and wanted. I think that would make sense considering the possibility of a man being able to make children much more often, and women needing to rear those childre with one man. Evolutionary changes in our insticts are changed by societal needs to survive. So when women needed the men to be the hunters, they needed a special relationship.

Um, I forgot where I was going. Anyway, Timothy, I see what you are saying, and I think you pose a valid question. It really boils down to societal needs (the reason monogomy is the norm).

I also think it is also natural for people to be tempted, but whether a person is willing to avoid that temptation (which offers its own natural rewards in a retationship), and become involved in a monogomous relationship or decide to be free falling is a question to each individual.

Now there becomes a bigger issue when children become involved. Having a child of my own, and perhaps because I am of the female persuasion, I see a great reason for being involved in a monogomous relationship.

Is there ever an answer? Hmmm. ???

[quote author=devrinator link=board=5;threadid=2797;start=0#msg14733 date=1066404415]
it is also a question that must sort of delve into the differences of the genders.
[/quote]

"Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" is all about this, though it's more within the context of male-female expectations within an intimate relationship and of how the sexes use different gender-based (verbal and body) languages to communicate.


[quote author=devrinator link=board=5;threadid=2797;start=0#msg14733 date=1066404415]
a male has the ability to produce a large amount of offspring, while a female can only reproduce a limited number of times in her lifetime. [/quote]

I've heard about this some time ago, but recently came across this idea again in Ramachandran's "Phantoms of the Brain", where (if I recall correctly) he refers to it as "Evolutionary Psychology". It's an interesting idea, but such ideas are post-hoc rationalizations that can't really be tested scientifically. It's sort of like the Freudian ideas concerning psychological defense mechanisms..... they make sense and everything, but they really can't be tested scientifically. But who knows? Maybe I'm just in a state of denial.

About Timothy's original question concerning monogamy vs. polygamy or having multiple sexual partners, I think the answer comes down to two principal things: 1) do you want to have multiple sexual partners, understanding that doing so will very likely compromise the emotional intimacy of one or all of your relationships?, and 2) are your partners 'ok' with the idea of you having multiple sexual partners? If the answer to 2) is 'yes', then you still have to take into consideration question 1). If the answer to 2) is 'no', then you have a little problem, since the only way you can have multiple sexual partners is to go behind your partner's back, and this will involve deceit, and as such, is just a bomb waiting to explode in your face.

If you desire a long-term emotionally and sexually intimate relationship, then monogamy is the way to go. Few women (at least in the U.S., it seems) would be willing to be part of a long-term emotionally and sexually intimate relationship that involved multiple partners, in part, because it would detract from the depth of the emotional intimacy that could be achieved (since you'd be spreading yourself out too thin, so to speak).

On the other hand, if you don't really care about long-term emotional intimacy, and simply want sexual excitement with a lot of different partners, then, of course, there's nothing really wrong with that, but it should be understood that you're sacrificing long-term emotional intimacy to achieve sexual nirvana (or rather, sexual enjoyment with many different people at the same time).