Marriage, Society and Consciousness

The Three Senses of Marriage
By Philippe Gastonne



I do not regard any externally imposed religious idea of marriage for the intimacy, trust and honesty of a shared willingness that is what such constructs may have originally intended to honour. The true meaning of anything is never contained or defined it its concept, symbol or image.
However the meanings that are accepted and lived out as real or true of us become the currency whereby we structure our self, our society and our model of the world and our place in it.
The Spirit is inherently and forever free from or beyond a manipulative intent, but the idea of an autonomy of mind - disconnected from Spirit (direct intimacy of living) IS the idea of manipulating meanings to coerce outcomes. Thus meanings themselves become meaningless - for they can mean whatever anyone want or asserts them to mean in any shifting context, rather than integral to the wholeness of being in which and as which all that is true communicates itself without distortion AS one's total consciousness. This substitution and adulteration of a true currency of thought operates a reversal in local consciousness whereby a sense of disconnection and separation masks and defends itself against wholeness. However, the breaking through of a true intimacy of being between those who otherwise identified themselves as separate is a transcendent experience of a greater unity - and this can and often does serve as a foundation for social structure that is not merely the shifting alliance and transactional bargains of sacrifice for personal gain, by which two or more make an identity of relative joining over and against a perceived hostile world. All versions of such extended 'ego' operate likewise as a sacrifice via which a personal advantage or gain is believed to be had. And which then persists as a pattern of inheritance if not re-evaluated.
The alloy of the integrative and segregative movements makes a confusion of self conflicted identities. The coercive mind operates to try to make a unity of what does not and can not join or belong together - and is a futility upon which to sacrifice one's life until, the identification within the segregative movement falls away to allow a re-awakening of an integrative perspective.
Until such clarity emerges, everything is tending to serve conflicting purpose and within the mentality of deceit and coercion implicit in masking such conflict, will every kind of manipulative attempt to engineer society or personal outcomes - disregarding the whole or the truth of the other and oneself, persist.
My view is that the fear-mind of manipulative intent cannot know of or see what anything truly is, but can only perceive the forms that seem to equate with meanings. There is nothing transcendent or truly human being extended or shared or received in that kind of mental sleep. The giving away of our power begins with the accepting of definitions, beliefs and meanings that are NOT true of us and which therefore undermine and conflict or divide our true presence of participation in every moment of our living, by the substitution of an image of our selves, that 'thinks' and uses its thinking to assert and defend its 'self'.
"Let the dead bury the dead" is the corollary to attending the living. For to become engaged with what cannot know or see or value you, is an unholy marriage that consummates itself in conflict and loss. Union is not achieved by sacrifice or war.
The ideal or idol of marriage may fall to state or corporately provided 'identities', but the capacity to uncover a truly joined purpose with another and embody it is not threatened. Indeed as the idols by which our world seemed to stand, fall, are we called to discern the truly living from an awakened humility. For what is society but the sharing of, and embodiment of, idea?

The Three Senses of Marriage

By Philippe Gastonne