The Three Faces of Longing -- by Joel Rachelson
A companion piece to The Zen of Being Single

In part one, the Zen of being single was described as having to do with the proper stance toward meeting your life partner. Simply having the goal of meeting a "life partner" contributes to the difficulty of maintaining the proper psychic posture. With a goal this important to our lives, how do we maintain a detached attachment? Detached attachment in our journey as a single looking to be partnered is in fact, the proper Zen of being single. This should be the "goal on our way to our goal," and hopefully we as a community can support each other in maintaining good "search Zen."

The difficulty of maintaining good search Zen is especially strong if one has been single for a while and particularly if one is particular. In fact, one of the reasons Conscious Singles was started was because I was having difficulty meeting others on the path. It's been a while now that I have been single and I have been accused by some of being too picky. I am somewhat confounded about whether I have a case of particularitis commitmentphobia or whether I am looking for someone with whom I can deeply share common values and a conscious lifestyle, and it just hasn't been in the stars yet.

It may be politically incorrect to say, but it has been difficult to find someone who is attractive to me on several levels. (I am seriously bumfuzzled on the issue and importance of physical attraction, and this will be a topic for a later discussion.) It does seem true that being conscious makes one part of a lesser populated subgroup from which to select from, at least for now. And being conscious makes us by definition more discerning and selective. How does one who is committed to ongoing inner work and has been single for a long while avoid feeling too lonely and too desperate to find a soul mate?

How does one maintain a good search Zen stance?

I do get lonely. So one major task is determining how much of this loneliness and longing is my soul's healthy interest in finding someone to hang out with and how much is looking for what the Course in Miracles calls an unhealthy "special relationship".

As I ponder this question, it seems to me that there are three faces of longing or three kinds of lonely.

The first kind of lonely is an understandable missing of someone to share life with-a divine relationship or life partner. The reality is I think we have a genetic predisposition to be partnered. That it is almost supposed to be that way-even though we may be part of a unity, there is a fundamental duality that defines this reality. It is, I think, my souls mission to work on things in a relationship. This is not just being needy or clingy. I can be quite content with my own company. It just feels like a basic natural need to share my experience, bed and potpies with someone.

The second kind of lonely or longing is a manifestation of an early childhood longing to have someone so I can feel fulfilled or okay. There is in our development a predisposition to primary emotional abandonment or unmetness - no matter how healthy our families were. The result of this unmetness is a sense of incompleteness and negative feelings. The second kind of longing, then, is an attempt to find an antidote for this abandonment or unmetness. Also, this longing is intensified if there is self blame for this early, childhood loss. If I feel responsible and flawed for this childhood loss then I can easily feel flawed and thus responsible for my current non-attachment.

So this is the basis for the urge to merge that I mentioned in Part 1. If I can find someone, it is a vindication and a remedy to an infantile undercurrent of emptiness and incompleteness. This puts a ton of pressure on someone else and gives someone else vindication rights over our fundamental sense of being okay. In this dynamic, I am destined for trouble either in my needing to control this person/remedy or in the inevitable disappointment that comes from this unrealistic need for someone else to be my gateway to a safe Eden.


The third kind of longing is a spiritual one. This is good news really. That we are living in a time of a spiritual renaissance where more folks are openly recognizing the need to be god-connected. There is something in the nature of our relationship to god such that there is longing in it. I don't know exactly why this is. Maybe it harkens to a child longing to be perfectly met. Maybe it is the thirst of our souls to reconnect or remember or be shed of the ego-clothed limits and experience the pure joy/ecstasy of union with the infinite.

As Sam Keen writes in his book Hymn to An Unknown God, "We yearn for something that will give a sense of meaning and purpose to our daily lives, something more engaging than paying lip service to the idea of god or attending worship on the weekend. We are haunted by a vacuum. Our hearts are shaped by something that hasn't happened to us-yet. Multitudes of modern seekers are full of emptiness, aching to be soulful, longing for a spark of inspiration that will ignite a passion that will lift them beyond the pettiness of getting and spending, that will animate their minds, their bodies, their spirits. We are hungry to recover that sense of the sacred that is currently painfully missing from our love affairs, families, jobs, and politics" (1994, p.xvi)

The Sufis talk about a quality of the One Being which is called "Ishq." This is the divine longing, the primal attraction of everything that exists-or even that does not exist-to everything else. The quality of consciousness they express draws none of the familiar boundary lines of thought and word and concept that we are accustomed to in our everyday lives. Ishq is the active principle when lovers eyes meet and they fall into one another's hearts. It is the principle which guides the stars in their motions and attracts the planets to one another, which we describe with an air of heaviness when we say "gravity." And it is the tugging at our hearts that we feel when we long for union with whatever it is we think we are thinking about when we think about god.

So maybe this emptiness isn't necessarily a bad thing or a psychological complex to be healed, maybe it is something more fundamental, some kind of sign post pointing us back home. If so, these painful and sometimes unhealthy feelings might in themselves be the beginning of the union we so deeply desire and so richly deserve. Maybe sacred partnership with a beloved one here on earth can be a mirror right here to the reality of god.

The goal here is maintain good search zen by working on the discerning the unhealthy longings, finding a deeper connection and meaning in the good god longings, and having a good game plan for creating a healthy connection with ourselves and our sought after life partners. Given that the goal is a journey and not a destination and that no stance can be maintained statically, the first step is to accept the "Zen Wobblies" of being a conscious single. I would like for the Ask Dr Joel page to be a support group for the Zen Wobblies.

I'll close with an e.e. cummings poem quote about "Ishq" :

" …and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart: I carry your heart. i carry it in my heart."



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