Excerpt from Amy Edelstein’s book Love, Marriage & Evolution: Chapter 1

The way I see it is this: The context for your life is the context for your relationship. There aren’t two separate contexts. There aren’t two separate sets of rules. There aren’t two separate goals or two separate sets of ideals. This can be as unsettling as it is meaningful. It sounds simple. It sounds straightforward. It sounds logical. It sounds easy to do. So why is it so paradoxically grounding and unnerving?

There really is no limit to the life challenges or the life successes that this perspective can help us with and carry us through.

Because it takes our whole life and throws it into a structure as vast as the unfolding process of the universe. It is unifying. We’re not used to experiencing such an all-inclusive unity. We’re used to living our relationships in a much smaller context, where we manage all kinds of lesser expectations, and debate and negotiate over so many daily issues. We still will have those issues to negotiate. But when we’ve cast our mold in that which can’t be contained, and we share that with our partners, there’s infinite room and space to find all kinds of creative solutions and pathways together.

There really is no limit to the life challenges or the life successes that this perspective can help us with and carry us through. When we’re giddy with joy, we want to maintain the right relationship to our relationship. When we’re challenged by loss or fear, we want to maintain the right relationship to our partners. We want a steadiness and intimacy that is resilient and that easily flows and fluctuates as the circumstances in our lives change.

Our expectations come out of the context we frame our lives within. How vast that  context is determines what we expect from our relationships. We looked at process, and at how our existence occurs in an immense unfolding of matter, energy, life, and consciousness. Mystical realization points us to the discovery of an endless depth of Self, of presence, of Being. Many people have had glimpses of infinitude, Spirit, of a sense of God or the timeless nature of the universe. These glimpses may have been prompted by spiritual practice or may have come unbidden when we were young, racing breathlessly across a sun-soaked field.

Even if we can’t locate the catalyst in time, we can allow ourselves to assume that this knowing is present within. When we allow ourselves to realize anew that our nature is not separate from the dimension of Self that we can’t touch but that we know as surely as we know ourselves to be alive,we discover a very different orientation to others. We discover an essential liberation from lack, from the bondage that comes from insatiable desire and longing, from perceiving another as a servant for our needs.

When I am rooted in a knowledge of wholeness and my spouse is too, our coming together is characterized by Love meeting Love, Self meeting Self, wholeness meeting wholeness. And our mutual expectation is to merge together as two inherently full beings— no clinging, no lack. No reason not to be close. No fear of abandonment.

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This is an excerpt from Amy Edelstein’s new book Love, Marriage & Evolution. If you like what you read here please download the entire book, and share this content with friends and family.