How Can I Decide Who Is to Be My Partner? | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

Questions that people have sent in and voted on. Everybody wants to know the answer to me, including if, let's say we love all. If let's say we love, we all love each other unconditionally. How can I decide who is to be my partner? Is this based on physical attraction? Isn't this a contradiction with this higher state of consciousness? Okay, so if you love everybody unconditionally, how can you possibly decide who is going to be your partner? That's the question. Because it seems that there's no preference anymore. Or if it's physical attraction, isn't there a contradiction? If you're in a higher state of consciousness, are you then shouldn't or not be physically attracted to anybody? Is that the implication, the question? Well, the love we are talking about, the unconditional love towards human beings and life forms is a. See, what is it that you love in the other? When you love unconditionally, you don't love their physical form, you don't love their psychological form, their personality. The unconditional love goes deeper. It's a transcendent love that what you love is not the form, but the formless essence of the other. And you can only love that when you can sense within yourself that dimension, the formless. When you can be still and present enough and then look at another human being. And then you can recognize something. What you recognize is, for lack of a better word, the consciousness, which is the essence of the other human as it is the essence of who you are. Consciousness. Prior to the consciousness being born into some kind of form personality which is there, and the physical form which is there. But in every being there is still the dimension of consciousness that is prior to form. Although the human being has become form, consciousness assumed form, has incarnated, so to speak. But that doesn't mean that the formless in timeless consciousness is lost. It's still there as the essence. And when you can sense it in yourself, you can sense, because you are still and present enough from that dimension in yourself, you can sense it in the other. And that is love. It's basically a recognition that in essence the other is the same as you. But then of course, there's always. That is the transcendent dimension to every human being. In addition to that transcendent dimension, there is a form identity of every human being. Every human being has a physical form and emotional form and a mental form. That's the inner, that's the personality. So the. The physical appearance and the personality consisting of mental, emotional, conditioning and so on. So there are the two levels, the unconditional love towards all humans is the transcendent love. You love the formless. Your recognize the formless as yourself in the other, but then you are still here as a form too. And the form may respond to another form, the physical. There can be physical attraction. It is not incompatible with the transcendent realization. Although some ancient or not so ancient traditions may tell you that it is not incompatible. You can have physical attraction on the level of form. You can also have an attraction towards the mental, emotional, form of that other human being because it resonates with something in your own form. So that means you may be drawn to another human being physically or mentally, emotionally, because you resonate with that. And then perhaps you enter into a relationship. So different levels operate. The transcendent remains. It can become obscured through excessive attachment, of course, to the mental or emotional dimension, the other. So in a relationship, the realization of essence identity, as I sometimes call it, can become obscured when form identity takes over completely. Which could happen through the pain body, which could happen through emotional getting identified with arising emotions and losing touch with the transcendent. Yes, that can happen, but it's not incompatible. Everybody's challenge is to balance the two in their lives, in their relationships, to relate to the other on the transcendent level. And at the same time, if it's there on an emotional, mental, physical level. Without the transcendent dimension in a relationship, it's not ultimately satisfying and it cannot really truly work for long. If the transcendent is missing completely in a relationship, it's physical attraction. And attraction between personalities is not enough to keep it going. It can be going for a while, but then it becomes frustrating and you see more and more of the limitations of the other person. And the other person sees more and more of your limitations which are always there. And when you live together, it becomes very obvious that the other person has his or her limitations. Now, as long as the realization of the transcendent dimension is there, that fine, those limitations can exist within the space of the transcendent and they are not destructive of the relationship. Now you may find with it's sometimes easier to have this unconditional love towards people that you don't know so well than people easier than towards people with whom you share a lot of past because they are the past. The form identity of that person can be very powerfully there in your mind, in your interaction. So that's the challenge of being present with family members, parents, grown up children and so on. And of course, as you know, Ram Dass recommends if you think you're enlightened as a test, he recommends that you spend two weeks with your PAR parents, and that will tell you whether you're really enlightened or not. Go and spend two weeks. Stay with your parents for two weeks. In most cases, that is a good test, unless your parents are enlightened, in which case there's not much point in using it. It doesn't tell you any It.