When God talks about Relationship (Book I)

Relationship are sacred because they provide life's grandest opportunity--indeed, its only opportunity--to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of Self. Relationships fail when you see them as life's grandest opportunity to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of another.

Let each person in relationship worry about Self--what Self is being, doing, and having; what Self is wanting, asking, giving; what Self is seeking, creating, experiencing, and all relationships would magnificently serve their purpose--and their participants!

Let each person in relationship worry not about the other, but only, only, only about Self.

This seems a strange teaching, for you have been told that in the highest form of relationship, one worries only about the other. Yet I tell you this: your focus upon the other--your obsession with the other--is what causes relationships to fail.

...If you cannot love your Self, you cannot love another. Many people make the mistake of seeking love of Self through love for another. Of course, they don't realize they are doing this. It is not a conscious effort. It's what's going on in the mind. Deep in mind. In what you call the subconscious. They think: "If I can just love others, they will love me. Then I will be lovable, and I can love me."

The reverse of this is that so many people hate themselves becuase they feel there is not another who loves them. This is a sickness--it's when people are truly "lovesick" because the truth is, other people do love them, but it doesn't matter. No matter how many people profess their love for them, it is not enough.

First, they don't believe you. They think you are trying to manipulate them--trying to get something. (How could you love them for who they truly are? No. There must be some mistake. You must want something! Now what do you want?)

They sit around trying to figure out how anyone could actually love them. So they don't believe you, and embark on a campaign to make you prove it. You have to prove that you love them. To do this, they may ask you to start altering your behaviour.

Second, if they finally come to a place where they can believe you love them, they being at onece to worry about how long they could keep your love. So, in order to hold onto your love, they start altering their behaviour.

Thus, two people literally lose themselves in a relationship. They get into the relationship hoping to find themselves, and they lose themselves instead.

This losing of the Self in a relationship is what causes most of the bitterness in such couplings.

Two people join together in a partnership hoping that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, only to find that it's less. They feel less thatn when they were single. Less capable, less able, less exciting, less attractive, less joyful, less content.

This is because they are less. They've given up most of who they are in order to be--and to stay--in their relationship.

Relationships were never meant to be this way. Yet this is how they are experience by more people than you could ever know.

It is because people have lost touch with (if they ever were in touch with) the purpose of relationships.

When you lose sight of each other as sacred souls on a sacred jouney, then you cannot see the purpose, the reason, behind all relationships.

The souls has come to the body, and the body to life, for the purpose of evolution. You are evolving, you are becoming. And you are using your relationship with everything to decide what you are becoming.

This is the job you came here to do. This is the joy of creating Self. Of knowing Self. Of becoming, consciously, what you wish to be. It is what is meant by being Self conscious.

...Your first relationship, therefore, must be with your Self. You must first learn to honor and cherish and love your Self.

You must first see your Self as worthy before you can see another as worthy. You must first see your Self as blessed before you can see another as blessed. You must first know your Self to be holy before you can acknowledge holiness in another.