Monday, May 31, 2004

Some Thoughts On Living Friendship (part one)

By Piankhy Thompson ©2004

Note: these thoughts outlining some essentials of what I am calling Living Friendship started off as--and in some sense still is--a letter to an individual regarding a specific situation. It nevertheless constitutes, I think, a good introduction to the Idea of Living Friendship as an aspect of Integral Science and Healthy Culture in General and so I include it here more or less unmodified"

--Piankhy

Part One

To involve yourself with me in Living Friendship is to involve yourself in the coordination of your own healing with mine and with that of the world.. The Living Friendship into which I am inviting you in nothing like a normal relationship. It is conscious and deliberate as well as spontaneous. It is neither public nor private. If it sometimes involves romance it is a Personal romance, not a public or a private one, a romance not just of sensuality and sentiment, but also of soulfulness, civility and good will. If entering into such a relationship is anything like “falling in love”, it is not falling in love with this or that individual man or woman as such (that is as a primarily gendered being), nor is it like falling in love with someone purely as an Individual irrespective of gender, since merely individualistic romance implies no sense of responsibility to self or other. Rather it is "falling" in love with an Individual Person in the full meaning of those words. It is seeing the Individual Living Person within the phony alienated surviving Individual (which we also see and acknowledge, both within ourselves and in each other) and having Inner Consensus that a gesture between us will help that Living Individual Personhood grow in both of us and in the world at large. It is like saying “Oh! Here is a chance to coordinate my own healing with that of this person and the world we share.”

The kind of romance that fantasizes some happy private life separated from responsible consideration of others and the world we share with them, is not at all Living Friendship but an act of unconscious collusion , of mutual connivance. So does a relationship that is merely formal, public or political, only exist for the sake of others. Living Friendship is therefore neither a traditional nor a modern sort of relationship. As a person in Living Friendship, your primary identity can never be that of my partner nor can mine be that of yours. Primarily we will both always be individual Living Persons with a primary responsibility to seek inner and outer consensus (which is the same as to cultivate Friendship) as family-members, neighbors, citizens of the world, souls, and inwardly as individuals. It is just in our reminding and supporting ourselves and each other as to this primary identity and the worldview it comes from that our relationship of Living Friendship can be said to be most manifest.

For us to be in Living Friendship means that we must foresee that it will never be best to relate as familial/intimates when one or the other does not have inner consensus for this. It might be that we can best remain friends with each other and ourselves by having only neighborly relations for a time. Or only soul/spiritual relations. Or even, should one of us leave the neighborhood for a while, only a civil relation of e-mails and letters. We can be in living friendship at any distance, and going from one form of friendship to another is not to be regarded as either abandonment (should the spatial distance increase) or a promise never to change (should the spatial distance decrease).

So, in a way that is perhaps similar to polyamory, this kind of Living Friendship will likely challenge the need for the sense of private security and of (private) possession that has become habitual in many kinds of relationships. It does challenge this sense of possession and security, and yet Living Friendship is really very different from polyamory or polyfidelity as they are currently espoused and practiced. Besides not being necessarily sexual at all, Living Friendship is a commitment (not only theoretical but energetic) to befriending ourselves and each other as whole Individual Persons ( an in each of the 5 venues of that Individual Personhood). It implies the acknowledgement and acceptance, on the part of all participants, of the implicit relationships/responcibilities inherent in existing at all. This alone makes it, in practice, quite different from other "relationship alternatives".

So, although as Individual Persons in Living Friendship we are engaging in a Life-Dance together that is no more a static thing then any dance is, nevertheless, to commit to Living Friendship is to commit to engaging in some progressively truthful way with me and with yourself . It is a commitment to Healthy Culture based on at least some understanding and experience of it, and to a life-long process of facilitating inner consensus (of your own mind, heart, body, and soul), as well as facilitating outer consensus with me as to what form of relating and at what distance is best for both you and me at any given time; “best” in the sense of what will most help both of us to be whole persons and to coordinate their own healing with that of others and the world (which is our greatest commitment as conscious Persons). I commit to the same thing.

Yet let me hasten to add, lest the rigid and unfriendly aspects of marriage vows and other formal contracts be conjured up , the commitment I speak of is a Personal Commitment within the Personal World Order that it invokes but that is yet to be established in the world. As such it is not coerced or coercive in anyway but is engendered in Mutuality and manifests itself and is nurtured in the friendly rituals of the Life-Dance. For example: each transition in a Living Friendship; lets say from familial friendship to intimate/individual friendship, or perhaps from intimate/individual to neighborly, or if one or both leave the neighborhood, from that to Civil, is celebrated/mourned with its own ritual of Thanks and Welcome, which is meant to renew the Friendship in its new form. The Details of the rituals are arrived at by mutual consensus of those involved and informed by their joint understanding of Integral science and Healthy Culture.

More generally, the most important difference between Living Friendship and things like Polyamory is that Living Friendship is an expression of Healthy Culture in general and as such involves the Healthy Cosmology of Integral Science, The Healthy Identity Politics of Individual Personhood, and the working out of these in the various related ritual/experiments that are aspects of the Life-Dance. Without the informing context of these aspects of Healthy Culture, Living Friendship is not possible, and attempts at it will inevitably lead to some variation of the alienation that is both the cause and effect of the present culture of Apartness.

The whole Idea of the Living Friendship in Particular and the Life-Dance in general revolves around Mutuality, which is the togetherness of inner and outer Consensus. Yet the facilitating such consensus and Mutuality can be difficult. Inwardly it implies the intention not to “disinvite” or leave out any part of our own wholeness, whether our Mind, Hearts, Bodies, or Intuitions from the facilitation process, since without such inner consensus--or at least the good faith attempt at it--any outer consensus between persons is meaningless and will be undermined by the parts of ourselves we have left out.. So we must try, like a good facilitator/Host, to invite, welcome, and consult them all as aspects of our individual wholeness equally. This is not possible when we are unconsciously numbing part of ourselves, whether with food or drugs or entertainment or anything else. This is not to say that such numbing addictions are not and will not be manifest but it is to say that good faith in our friendship will take the form of supporting and challenging each other in recovering the Living Personhood that makes such crutches less and less necessary.

As I’ve already said, Living Friendship need not be sexual of course, but if it becomes so, that sexuality will manifest as nothing more or less than the Intimate and Individual expression of that same Living Friendship which can and does express itself in other ways as well.

My sense is that such an intimate expression of Living friendship would manifest in experiments in some modified form of Tantric sexuality. I think Tantra is relatively close to the form that Living Friendship takes when it is expressed sexually since it involves using sexuality and intimacy as a means for inner and outer healing, of both inner and outer coming-together. My experience is that in Tantra; heart, body, and soul, are each explicitly invited to full participation in the sex act (I don’t know that the Mind, which expresses the Goodwill, The Inner Adult, the Civil dimension of Life, is equally invited with these other three into the Tantric Embrace and I regard this as a fundamental problem with it. This is why I say that healthy intimacy will be some Modified form of Tantric sexuality, assuming that after such modification, it will even make sense to call it "Tantra" at all.)

But by whatever name, such healthy sexual culture means taking up sexuality as a conscious and intentional practice that will sooner or later challenge a great deal of that which is vain, fearful, repressed and phony in ourselves and in our relationship to sexuality, intimacy, and things in general. This means commitment to a kind of journey, which is likely to be rough at times. Such a practice of Healthy Sexuality is something that can be done alone as well as with another so it is not that I am asking that you always practice this form of inner and outer sexual friendship with me—I would even be all right with you engaging in a truly healing form of sexuality with some one else as long as this change was conscious, consensual, and marked by an appropriately healing ritual—I just would like to know that you were indeed committed to some form of sexual healing and to coordinating this kind of healing other kinds of healing.

posted by: piankhy | 00:51 | comments (1)