The karma and conditioning levels work in tandem to control the actual circumstances and course of a relationship. For example, if on the conditioning level we decide to reenact a parent’s abandonment of us and we choose a partner who will abandon us, we might select for that role someone whom in a previous lifetime we abandoned. This can be considered a penance; but we can also look at it as a kind of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” – like saying, “I made you suffer in that lifetime, and now I want to know how you felt – to feel the feelings I made you feel.”
On the karma level, as on the conditioning level, we try to restage events which will produce a resonance with some unresolved emotional issue in the totality of our being. The agendas we have set up with other people on the karma level are often revealed in the very first impressions we have of them and which we immediately repress.
It’s hard to describe this, and it’s different for everyone, but often upon meeting someone with whom we have a heavy karmic agenda going, we get a FLASH, a conscious feeling or thought, of something we desire or feel threatened by about that person. And then we immediately “forget” what we just felt, because if we have bad karma going with the person, then that flash was of a side of ourselves which we don’t want to consciously face or acknowledge – a side we are calling upon that person to enact openly for us, to ram down our throat for us, until we’re forced to acknowledge it. Thus we “forget” this first impression, and later on pretend we don’t understand why the person we loved and trusted so much could have changed so.
Of course, we can run past-life regressions to check what sort of karma we have going with someone before getting seriously involved with them – sort of like running a credit or AIDS check on a prospective spouse. In India astrology has been historically relied upon for this sort of information. But we can also avoid difficulties just by being alert to our own gut feelings and intuitive impressions of other people, rather than ignoring this most essential information in a relationship. Thus the basic intensity or emotional theme of a relationship is set up on the karma level; the particular script, the sequence of events which will unfold in a relationship, is set up on the conditioning level; and the costuming, the superficial appearances or show put on for the benefit of the neighbors, is set up on the expectations level. The glare of the expectations level blinds us to what is happening on the two deeper levels; and the expectations level is a lie.
What is actually going on in a relationship on the conditioning and karma levels is always quite visible; but we pretend we don’t see it, we pretend we don’t understand it, in order to uphold our expectations as long as possible. By “lie” is meant something that we feel, but which we suppress or conceal. For example, if our sex partner is doing something that doesn’t feel good and turns us off, and we lay there and take it because we’re too embarrassed to speak up and possibly hurt our partner’s feelings, then that’s a lie. Any time we do not communicate something we are feeling because we are embarrassed to do so, or because we don’t want to hurt or provoke the other person or become a target for his or her disapproval, we are lying. Lying leads to sneaking around behind the other person’s back.
Lies lead to more lies. We can tell if lying is taking place in a relationship this way: if there is an area in which we don’t trust the other person; where we withhold from the other person; where we are afraid of the other person (his / her disapproval or rejection); where we feel something other than GOOD about the person; then that is a place where we are lying. We are trained to lie to other people, and then to feel betrayed when our lies are exposed. All a lie is, is a contradiction. Lies must always exist in pairs, whereas the truth – love – just is. For example, on the level of our expectations we might set up the pair: “I want you to be honest with me” and “I don’t want to hear how turned on you are by someone else.”
On the level of our conditioning we might set up the pair: “I truly love you, mommy!” and “I’ll never question your love for me!” On the level of karma lies don’t exist per se (it’s repressing this level that makes a lie out of it); but one could say that the basic lie or duality of the karma level is: “You and I are two” and “You and I are one.” All the lies in a relationship are laid down right at the beginning. By 'laid down' is meant: conscious. Conscious for a moment, and then – just as consciously – repressed, ignored, 'forgotten.' The basic lies of the karma level may be laid down in the first few seconds of a relationship.
The lies of the conditioning level (the game plan of who’s going to hurt whom, and how) are usually laid down at the time the relationship is formalized – when the mutual decision is made to commit, to 'get serious' as it were. And the expectations level is a complete lie from the first pop: love is not something you get - it's something you give.
Repeat: Love is not something you get - it's something you give.
Anyone with their eyes open could see what’s going on. Sometimes our parents, friends, or other people who care about us try to pass us warnings. But we’re “so much in love” and “love is blind” and we’re so “happy” that we don’t want to see it. We don’t want anything to call us down from this lovely cloud we’re on; this lovely lie we’re telling ourselves. And for each and every lie, the piper must be paid. There’s a karmic law at work in all this, and EVERY single lie, no matter how teensy-weensy, will someday have to be brought into the open and admitted, else the relationship is doomed – doomed to be something other than a love relationship, because in a love relationship there is no room whatsoever for lies of any kind, at any time, for any reason.
All the alarm about the soaring divorce rate in our society, the call for a return to “traditional values”, is a bunch of baloney. Those traditional values were a total lie, and it’s amazing that the human race put up with that lie as long as it did. Traditional values means you get married on the expectations level and you never question it. You learn somehow to live with a lie, with unhappiness, and you bite your tongue because the social sanctions (what the neighbors might think) against divorce were so stringent.
Instead of returning to living out lies, our society ought to stop glorifying the expectations level. As is the case also with war, when society stops glorifying infatuation people will stop seeking it. Love relationships fail because we go into them with a lot of la-de-da thought forms about who we are and what we expect to get, and we run smack into heavy karma and conditioning agendas we had no conscious idea even existed. We are not consciously aware of what expectations we have until those expectations aren’t fulfilled; and we don’t understand what our parents did to us until we find our partner doing the same thing – make us feel that old, familiar feeling in the pit of our stomach. As long as we’re relating to the other person on one of these three levels, we’re not relating to an actual person at all, but only to our own self-reflection, our childhood wounds, or our deep-seated fears and insecurities.
On the expectations level our attention is focused on the future; on the conditioning level it’s focused on the past; and on the karma level it’s focused on the remote past. A true love relationship, however, involves relating to a real, live person in the now moment.
(Excerpted from Bob Makransky's book Magical Living)
