To love life, and in particular, to love other human beings, is one of the central ideals of every spiritual tradition. It is also one of life's greatest challenges. Love requires us to be real. Its source is the essence of our being that is somehow hidden or enfolded within us. Our desire and our efforts to love uncover the mysterious wound of separation from our authentic self. For this reason, our relationships can help us realize the spiritual essence of ourselves.

For many people, the word spiritual suggests an intangible, inaccessible and perhaps improbable realm of existence. As spirituality is understood in this book, however, it is our true and basic nature, beneath the fantasies, artifices and constraints that distort our usual experience. It is our most subtle, and most clear attunement to ourselves and the world around us.

Although it cannot be detected by the ordinary range of our senses, the subtle essence of our being does become tangible as we attune to it. It becomes an actual experience, a quality of being that is felt in our whole body, and that can then be discerned in all of life. As we realize this essence of ourselves, our senses themselves become more subtle, revealing a radiance, fluidity and spaciousness that suffuses the material world. The most radical transformation that occurs with this subtle attunement is that instead of experiencing ourselves as separate from our environment, we find that our own being is continuous with everything around us. This book describes how the realization of this unified, spiritual dimension of life transforms all of our relationships. It focuses especially on relationships with an intimate partner.

The understanding that I present in this book is most closely aligned with the Hindu system of Advaita (nondual) Vedanta and the Tibetan Buddhist schools of Mahamudra and Dzog-chen. But it is also informed by the accumulated knowledge of Western psychology, by old and new methods of body/mind healing and by my own experience of spiritual practice. I am not concerned with arguing for a particular philosophy, for I do not believe we can know for certain which explanation of ultimate reality is most true. I do know that the experience of spiritual oneness is the innate potential of our human organism, and that it involves a transformation of every aspect of ourselves, including our physical body and our psychological maturity.

Spiritual realization is not a matter of constructing something new; it is always a clearing away, or a letting go of the holding patterns and beliefs that obscure our true nature. If oneness is our true nature, it is also the natural potential, the underlying reality, of our relationships with other people. This book looks at how relationships can help both partners in a relationship release their barriers to spiritual oneness. This is presented as a dual process of resolving our resistances to contact with our partner and attuning directly to the subtle dimension of spiritual unity.

The spiritual essence of life is our most subtle, fundamental dimension of consciousness. The Hindu literature describes fundamental consciousness as all-pervasive. It is experienced as vast space, pervading our own form and everything else that we experience, even physical space itself. It is therefore the basis of unity within our own being, our internal wholeness. And it is the basis of the unity of our own being with everything around us. It is an unbroken dimension, a dimension of wholeness and stillness that, when we attune to it, is co-existent with the movement of life. Spiritual realization is not just a matter of uplifting our mood, or changing our behaviors and beliefs. It means that we enter into, and experience ourselves as, the spiritual dimension of existence.

Although the traditional teachings do not speak of it in this way, fundamental consciousness is the basis of contact: our deepest contact with ourselves, with other people, and with all of nature. The ability to love goes beyond having an emotional response to or understanding of another person. It requires the ability for contact. Every aspect of ourselves is capable of contact, including our touch, gaze, voice, emotions, and awareness. Human beings crave this contact instinctively, for everything that it reaches becomes awake, alive. When we enter the spiritual path, we are learning to love. We are developing this ability for contact.

Although our fundamental dimension of consciousness is referred to in spiritual teachings, it is just beginning to gain recognition in the psychological field. Up until recently, it was thought, in the more adventurous schools of psychology, physics and medicine, that energy was the basic stratum of life. Energy is easier to perceive and to feel than consciousness. It is a less subtle level of ourselves than consciousness, and requires a less subtle attunement in order to experience it. Therefore, the application of fundamental consciousness to psychological and physical healing represents the cutting edge of the human growth movement.

There is also a growing recognition in contemporary psychology of the mutuality, or interconnectedness, of existence. The psychoanalytic theorist Robert D. Stolorow describes human interaction as an "intersubjective field" of mutual influence. Interestingly, in his book, Nonduality, the Buddhist philosopher David Loy refers to the unified, spiritual dimension as a "pre-subjective ground", because it exists beyond, or deeper than, our subjective distortion of reality. In this book, I describe how the intersubjective field can gradually transform into "pre-subjective" field of spiritual oneness. I also show how this shift brings compassion and insight to relationships, and helps both partners disentangle themselves from the defenses and projections that obstruct the flow of exchange between them.

Human development can be seen as a gradual realization of the relational field. In this process, we develop inward contact and the capacity for contact with other people at the same time. It begins in infancy, as the rudimentary distinction between self-awareness and awareness of our mother (or primary caretaker), and culminates in the simultaneous self-knowledge and oneness with others that defines spiritual maturity. This book looks at the difficulties that thwart this developmental process and how they can lead to the boundary problems of merging (loss of self-contact) and distancing from others. It also shows how the realization of fundamental consciousness resolves these difficulties, so that our development towards spiritual oneness can proceed.

One of the main barriers to contact in intimate relationships is the fear that we will become submerged in another person. Attunement to fundamental consciousness can alleviate this fear because it is the basis of contact with ourselves as well as with other people. Fundamental consciousness pervades both our internal being and our environment as a unified whole. When we live in this dimension, we have a felt sense of both our internal experience and our oneness with the life around us, at the same time. We can therefore experience oneness with another person while remaining attuned to our own internal being. Spiritual oneness is not a loss of self in the other, not the merging of identities that is so often a problem for people in relationships. It is the unity, and continuity, of two individual people. In the dimension of fundamental consciousness, we grow simultaneously towards wholeness within our own body and oneness with other people.

We can enter into spiritual oneness through a subtle channel that runs through the vertical core of the body. This channel is the center of the ckakra system in Hindu Yoga and is called sushumna. In Buddhism, it is called "the central channel". The subtle core of our body is both our deepest connection with ourselves and the basis of our oneness with other people. In the dimension of spiritual oneness, partner can relate with each other "core-to-core". This releases a flow of subtle energies between them which provides a non-verbal foundation for communication.

Through the subtle core of our body we can also develop the essential qualities of our being. In this book I describe the three primary qualities of our being as awareness, emotion and physical sensation. These are also the three major pathways of our contact with other people. As we realize the spiritual foundation of life, we experience contact with other people as a continuity of awareness, emotion and physical sensation.
Most people have more access to some of these essential qualities than others. For example, they may be able to experience emotional and mental contact with another human being, but physical sensation is more difficult. When two people feel out of contact with each other, or when they reach an impasse in their communication, it is often because they are each open to different aspects of contact. The realization of fundamental consciousness balances and integrates these three essential qualities of being, making contact and communication between partners easier, and more complete. Also, the process of two people opening to each other in the realms of sensation, love and awareness can facilitate, for both of them, the path towards spiritual oneness.

The realization of fundamental consciousness gradually transforms the functioning of our senses. It is as if our senses are washed clean of our habitual ways of focusing on the world, and stripped of the mental elaborations that usually accompany our perceptions. The traditional spiritual literature of the East calls this "direct" or "bare" perception. We feel that, for the first time, we are perceiving the world as it really is. Our senses also become more refined, and, as I have said, they reveal a more subtle world. Everything that we perceive appears to be made of energy and consciousness.

This bare perception is part of our oneness with other people. Usually, we see and touch only from the surface of ourselves to the surface of other people. But in fundamental consciousness, we are able to see and to touch beneath the surface to the feelings and qualities within. We are able to hear the qualities of a person’s whole being in the sound of their voice, or in the sensation of their touch. With an intimate partner, bare perception can provide the basis of deep understanding and attunement.

Spiritual oneness also brings a deepened perspective and compassion to one of the main stumbling blocks in relationships--coping with each other’s childhood wounds and defenses. In the clear, pervasive space of fundamental consciousness, it becomes much easier to recognize and release the defenses, beliefs and behaviors that prevent us from experiencing contact with another person. Wherever, in our own organism, we are not available for contact, we are also unable to experience the stillness, spaciousness and unity of the spiritual dimension. Therefore, there is a direct correlation between psychological maturity (the dissolution of defenses and projections) and spiritual realization.
 
Attunement to fundamental consciousness also helps release the psychological holding patterns that diminish sexual pleasure. It can help people tolerate a greater intensity of stimulation, and achieve more genuine, and therefore more pleasurable sexual contact. Physical sensation is an inseparable part of the essence of our being, and of our spiritual oneness with other life. The limitation which many people experience in their capacity for sexual pleasure is also a barrier to the realization of spiritual oneness.
In some Tantric traditions, partners use the energy of sexual release to "fuel" the rise of energy through their bodies. These exercises usually involve ways that partners can circulate their breath and energy systems. This book shows how partners can include fundamental consciousness in their sexual practice, to reach an even deeper level of contact with each other, and to facilitate the most profound level of spiritual realization.

There are exercises at the end of each of the following chapters to practice relating with other people in the dimension of spiritual oneness. They include ways for partners to directly experience the clear, unified space of fundamental consciousness, to contact each other from the core of their bodies, to experience the continuity of love, awareness and physical sensation, and to refine their senses so that they can see, hear and touch each other on a more subtle level. There are also exercises that combine traditional Tantric energy exercises with attunement to fundamental consciousness during sexual union.
These exercises are from Subtle Self Work (R), a method that I have developed over the past twenty-five years. Unlike most traditional spiritual techniques, Subtle Self Work focuses directly both on awakening spiritual essence in our whole body, and on relating with other people while remaining in this essence.
Traditionally, spiritual transformation has been taught as a solitary practice, even requiring the avoidance of social attachments and commitments. This book views the true meaning of spiritual detachment to be the ability to allow life to flow without manipulation or defense. This means that we need to be fully open and available in our reception and response to life. Since our defensive strategies and rigidities were formed in relationship to other people, relationships are the ideal context for releasing those defenses.

If we do not include relationships in our spiritual practice, we often lose our realization as soon as we encounter another human being. But if we have practiced relating with other people in fundamental consciousness, we can maintain our spiritual realization in our daily lives, so that it is not a temporary peak experience, but a lasting transformation of consciousness.

Fundamental consciousness is a relational field, a unity of self and other. When we attempt to shut out either our environment or our internal life, we fragment our own consciousness, and this immediately conceals our essence. Spiritual oneness is the absolute balance of inward and outward contact. It is the deepest contact we can have with our own self and with everyone and everything that we encounter. It means that we are able to see through the surface of people and things to their essence. When we touch a plant or an animal or another human being, we can feel the streaming of the life force and the responsiveness of the subtle intelligence and love within them. We can experience that our own essence of sensation, love and awareness resonates with the same essential qualities of everything around us.
In the dimension of fundamental consciousness, intimate partners begin to know each other, to experience each other, through the whole internal depth of their being. This is immensely satisfying, because it is the goal of our driving hunger for contact with other life. This contact--the ability to feel genuine love for another person, to experience the mental excitement of two minds meeting and the pleasure of unguarded physical sensation--is among the greatest rewards of spiritual awakening.

Judith Blackstone