“We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business;
we are each other's magnitude and bond.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize
The Working Parts
Your intellect controls your deductive mind, while your heart controls your imagination. Each contributes to the other, but intellect works to resolve differences while the heart creates unity. Understanding differences and appreciating wholeness sound similar but they are of different qualities.
The lives of most of my counseling clients center on relationships, but they split into two kinds of relationships. One group is working to establish
and control differences, while the other is working to establish unity. Actually, one doesn’t make unity, one creates congruence.
Congruence is compatibility, while unity is built on a common, shared thing. A foot and a shoe that fits are congruent. They are not united, but they can work together even though they’ll work through different mechanisms. The foot and shoe need to share a project for their different natures to work together. If all you do is pad around the house, then the collaboration is minor. If you walk across the continent, then you’ll have a much deeper relationship.
I believe having a shared goal to be an unrecognized and necessary part of a co-creative relationship. It’s not enough to resolve differences and work in a united relationship. There must also be a shared purpose.
This equation of co-creativity need not be anything grand and metaphysical. But it always has the same three-part structure. It can be quite prosaic. Something as small as helping someone by giving them directions, or something as large as two people married for life.
Building Relationship
I have three counseling relationships that demonstrate this dynamic at three different levels. In one, the client is struggling with differences. In the second, the couple is struggling with both their differences and their need to find a sense of unity. In the third, the struggles are in business relationships outside the romantic partnership, and the sense of unity already exists, but is not fully recognized as something that needs to be given primary importance.
My first client feels endangered by aggressive people and responds by threatening violence. This is a problem of excessive sensitivity and feeling the necessity to respond with equal intensity. Sometimes he cows the aggressor, but other times the situation escalates. His limited ability to communicate allows these situations to spiral out of anyone’s control.
This client needs better control at many levels, but the problem is between himself and someone with whom he’s unfamiliar. Part of the solution to his problems will be intellectual, part will be emotional, and part will reside in building a compatible reality between himself and the world.
I suggest many steps he can take, and each one is a step in the right direction. But ultimately, I tell him to reframe the whole situation as one in which someone is coming to him in a state of need. Instead of telling his aggressor that he’s going to punch them in the face, he should ask them what he can do to help them.
The second client is in conflict with his wife. Each wants to share and connect, and they pursue this goal through anger and recrimination. Both are intellectual and their arguments are cogent; neither one understands the other. They have no sense of unity, and they cannot even see that such a place exists except in their separate and incompatible realities.
Anyone who thinks you can fight you way to resolution is lost in a demonic struggle, and demons never lose. This is an old and mythic theme. Demons never lose because you are them, and they only leave when you release them. To my argumentative clients I say, “You don’t fight your way to unity, you start there. If you don’t work outward from a place of shared concern, then you will never arrive at it.” For this couple, having a higher shared purpose is not even on the menu.
The third client has always been outwardly successful in athletics, school, and work. The inner work has not been as clear or mindful. This client has old issues with his parents, notably with his father, but the couple has not projected their issues on each other. If their early childhood problems were with their mothers, then they probably would have. You might say that they’re lucky, but luck has little to do with it.
This couple has an intellectual connection. They are open and communicative. Sometimes there is friction or frustration, but they have a sense of sharing. They have established a sense of unity. My client’s struggle is not with his partner, at least it is not at this point. His struggle is for a sense of purpose. He is looking for meaning in all of his success.
At a later point in this client’s relationship, shared meaning will become important. At the moment, it’s assumed but not explored. It lies still in the future, and the risk is that this personal struggle may be projected on their partner. It would be better if this couple brought the spiritual need for meaning into their relationship, but this is not something that one can simply resolve to do.
Materialism Encourages Reductive Thinking
We’re encouraged to focus on what’s material. Reductive and intellectual thinking easily drifts into being materialistic because materialism lends itself to naming and valuation, things that are less likely when thinking in emotional, creative, or associative terms.
Once we start thinking materialistically, it’s hard to see what we’re missing. You must keep another track open. You must have a reservoir of self-faith in your feelings and intuitions, something that most of us lack. This is why it’s hard to move one’s conversation to meaning and purpose. These things are not easily stated, argued, or deduced.
Intellectually successful people have one sort of difficulty expressing their sense of purpose, as do emotionally dysregulated people whose feelings are too strong or destabilizing. People who have prevailed through adversity are often better equipped to find value and meaning in their lives. The cloud of adversity has a silver lining.
I think humans are evolutionarily deficient in spirituality. Not everyone entirely, but everyone to varying extents. We celebrate the occasionally successful marriage and saintly person when all our marriages should be successful and saintliness should be a person’s natural state.
Congruence, Unity, and Purpose
There are many other configurations of these three elements: congruence, unity, and purpose. Most of my clients’ problems have more to do with not recognizing what they need, and less to do with being unable to achieve the needs they recognize. Most people who come to counseling are ready to work on an issue, but it’s often their lack of awareness of other essential issues that is preventing their progress.
In some cases, this is a rational situation that can be intellectually described. I don’t mean the issues are technical, the issues could be quite emotional, but they can be named, identified, and dealt with intentionally. In these cases, talk therapy makes progress. If there is another frame of mind that can be seen, remembered, and re-experienced, then it’s usually possible to talk one’s way into it.
It comes down to recognition: can you see or imagine what it is you’re looking for? This may involve reconsidering history or trauma. It may involve guilt or anger. It will involve more than a dry, didactic analysis. Emotion will emerge, and the emotion is critical, authentic, and cathartic.
The two questions essential to progress with words are, can you see it, and can you face it? You might think these were straightforward, and that whatever needs to be seen or faced can be talked into clarity, but you would be wrong. These two aspects of one’s experience can be nearly impossible to talk into existence if a person is not willing.
Finding Congruence
Here is the limit of talking and analysis. If what needs to be confronted is too painful, or you lack the courage or self-faith to confront it, then “it” will neither have a name or face. You cannot see what you cannot imagine, and you will not imagine what you will not face. This sounds psychopathic and I think it is. Yet it describes us all. All of us have limits to what we can or will face. For those of us whose lives are limited by what we cannot face, these issues stop our development.
We make distinctions in order to have choices. Distinctions enable discernment, and without discernment, there is no skill. Buddhists say duality is an illusion, and this leads novices to say dual thinking is an error. But duality is the foundation of discernment. Holistic thinking is not non-dual, it’s more than dual, it’s multi-level.
Just as the ego is something you cannot do without—it defines your presented identity—duality is an essential part of all thinking. Without duality, you cannot see yourself in any dimension: time, space, identity, heritage, or emotion. Without contrast, there are no differences, and without differences, there is no map.
Unity
Duality is the foundation of conscious thought. It will take you to the threshold of unity if you refine it. You cannot reach unity without it, but it will not take you across the boundary. You do not deduce what you have in common. Unity is more than resolving differences, it is an alliance of action.
Consider your world to be a puzzle of dualities. There are three, four, and five-way decisions, and some of these are truly balanced. Unifying ideas stand out as peaks in a forest of differences. You do not deduce that you are compatible with another person; you feel it. The greater problem is determining whether the other person feels it.
I don’t know if there is a foolproof method for testing unity between people, but certainly the emergence of dissention shows it to be lacking. One of my ex-wives once told our son that arguments between couples were natural. That may be true, but it also shows a fundamental and usually fatal flaw. The only goal for any couple that fights is to stop fighting, and not just on one issue, but on every issue.
Unity is more than not disagreeing. If you’re uncertain whether unity exists, or exists deeply, then I suggest testing it. I don’t mean one should challenge or threaten; I mean one should engage novelty and see if unity naturally emerges.
Remember, unity does not come from resolving disagreement, it develops from emotional congruence. If I had tested for unity in this way, instead of trusting that it would develop, then I would have seen the flaws in my previous marriage partners. Instead, I adopted the toxic illusion that love will find a way. The only way to which love leads you is the way to the maturity that you’re lacking.
Purpose
Inner purpose is not material, it’s spiritual. You find it in people and in life. You can find purpose at the height of joy, accomplishment, ecstasy, and connection, but you can also find it in the depths of sorrow, illness, heartbreak, failure, and death. It seems unfortunate that the latter are more generally available than the former. Given that is the case, make the most of them!
I found a measure of purpose through mountaineering and, ironically, through physics, but they were of entirely different sorts. In mountaineering, I engaged in suffering, danger, death, injury, and achievement. I didn’t see these as life lessons; they were just part of the experience. However, since then, I have never again been traumatized by illness or death. I have had heartbreak and sorrow, but I have not been traumatized by them.
Physics offered a different kind or purpose, the anti-purpose. After working in the field for 50 years, I feel it’s pointless. I look for meaning and purpose in what I’ve done, the people I worked with, and the histories of people who came before me and I see none. It’s interesting, fascinating, puzzling, but there is no humanity in it. Physics, which I continue to study, is a lesson in where you won’t find meaning. I suspect you’ll find much the same in all academic pursuits.
Rounding out my lessons in death and pointlessness, I credit heartbreak as a third essential lesson in dis-incarnation. My two ex-wives have been lessons in relationships that had no heart. I think I may now see the whole of it, since I see similar elements in both former partners.
Both partners did not find an existential purpose in our relationships. This was apparent at the point we separated, but it has become more significant as I’ve watched these people develop in the decades since.
I remain at a loss in understanding how or if this can be developed in an adult who does not have it. I suspect that like the ability to attach, the ability to find purpose in partnership is something that must develop in childhood. This is something I expect to focus on with my clients, as I expect many people’s relationships will ultimately turn on whether their partnerships nourish a mutual sense of purpose.
Mountains, the Cosmos, and Relationships
In summary, a co-creative relationship must have all three elements: congruence, unity, and purpose. My experience as a mountaineer deceived me in thinking that congruence breeds unity, as sharing a common goal was all it took to reach the summit. Once that goal was achieved, we had little in common.
My experience in physics deceived me into thinking that unity breeds purpose. Many academics seem to build social lives around their fields of interest, believing that this creates a meaningful bond. I don’t see that happening, neither for me nor for any of the lives I’ve studied.
Now I am confronting the critical, last step: what breeds purpose, and how can people find a shared purpose? I will make this issue clear to my clients and, as is usually the case, I expect they will teach me the answer.
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