When my husband Chris and I were on the road for seven years, we experienced life as a wild mixture of light and dark, ecstatic and tragic. We welcomed it all and kept saying thank you, even as we traveled through the realms of life and death.
As we journeyed together, we found that thinking of ourselves only as separate individuals limited our horizons. We increasingly wanted to find ways of seeing ourselves as conscious and awakening humans within the fabric of nature.
Seeing reality from our distinctive vantage points, we provided each other and the world with unique creative gifts that could only flow from us. We saw this as the I component of our relationship. We learned, however, that we couldn’t focus merely on ourselves because we were part of a bigger whole, one we often had insufficient information to understand.
We each carried a strong sense of I to our relationship, allowing us to move into what Martin Buber calls an I-Thou relationship. An I-Thou relationship does not mean simply being in the company of another. It requires a willingness to melt into a state of union with the other. Chris and I called this the You layer of our partnership.
Knowing that we were born into a complex field of energies, known and unknown–our parents and siblings, the culture of our times, the weather, synchronicities, and, undoubtedly, interconnections that reach back to the Big Bang, we wanted to be a part of that bigger story. We understood that to live fully, we needed to surrender to something beyond ourselves that needed us and our participation. Chris and I called this the We and realized that we were not directing our lives from the perspective of our egos and preferences but that Spirit and forces beyond our awareness moved us.
The further Chris and I engaged in our spiritual journey, the more we experienced the One, the complete state of surrender into something without boundaries where egos dissolved. The One was not a state we could grasp with our linear minds. It could be experienced only in an ecstatic or mystical state and could not be maintained in its absolute form in our embodied condition.
With regular practice, Chris and I found it possible to be aware of the existence of the One even while walking on the earthplane. In that way, we brought a sense of the divine to everyday reality, thus changing the ordinary into the extraordinary.
We are multidimensional beings, and we bring the many facets of ourselves to our relationships. Conscious nurturing and sharing of the I, You, We, and One can bring untold richness to ourselves and everyone we meet. Everyone we meet.