Before I get into your Summer/Heart/Love post of today, can anyone explain while LiveJournal doesn't seem to let me search my (or your) journal? Am I missing something crucial, or is LJ?

H'okay, so... Conversations With God has a lot to say on love and relationships... I am going to present just a bite size chunk, and maybe more will follow. Yes, the post below is bite size. CWG spans volumes and volumes of books, srsly.

Fundamental in the CWG perspective is the idea that relationship, in the most basic sense, is sacred because it allows us to be Who We Are in relationship to Who We Are Not.

So put yourself in God's shoes for a minute... you're everywhere, everything... there's nothing that is that you are not... complete oneness, complete wholeness. There is nothing outside you. So you can't see yourself. Get it? In CWG God says that All That Is can only "know its utter magnificence conceptually, not experientially. Yet the experience of itself is that for which it longed."

So God creates duality so that we can actually orient ourselves in space/time and therefore have some experiences other than super-satori... in our human experience we have reference points: here, there, up, down, tall, short, black, white, smart, dumb, male, female, bunny, kitty, good, evil. Seen from a high enough perspective, these are all illusions. But they enable us to do a very important thing: create who we are, in relation to who we are not. There's no other way to do this except through relationships. How would you know that you're a big queer unless there were straight people to relate to? CWG is fond of saying that in the absence of that which you are not, that which you are, is not.

Of course creation is exactly what God is up to... which is why relationships are sacred: the enable us to do the God-work of creating our varoius experiences of everything. Hmm, experiences of Everything... sounds suspiciously synonymous with All That Is = God.. what was that up there about All That Is longing to experience itself...

If the purpose of relationship in general, or relativity, is to create who we are... then human relationships constitute a subset of that general truth. A special subset, because they provide some of the richest and most complex and finely textured opportunities to create ourselves. And so in CWG God says, "The purpose of relationship is to decide what part of yourself you'd like to see "show up," not what part of another you can capture and hold."

When was the last time you viewed a relationship in your life as an opportunity to show the world who you really are? I'll be honest, most of the time in my past I've simply been looking at what I can get out of it. Eventually I started to learn to pay attention to what I could give to it... but even this misses the real point of relationship if I'm focusing on trading what I can give for what I can get.

The interesting thing is that even if we don't think about our relationships in terms of who we're creating ourselves as, we are still creating ourselves in them... so the choice isn't whether or not to create ourselves, it's whether to do so consciously or unconsciously. If I enter into relationship only looking at what I can get out of them, then I'm creating myself as the type of person who relates that way... and I'll find myself living a life that reflects that, with only certain types of friends, etc. If I enter into relationships only looking at what I can give to them, because I believe that I am only lovable if I'm giving others what they want, then I create myself as that type of person.

The point of conscious creation, of course, is that we actually have a choice, and if we don't like how we're creating ourselves and our lives, we can make different choices.

What do your current relationships say about Who You Are showing up as in your life right now?