The Pain Of Ignorance - Why There Is No Perfect Framework For Relationships

If you are actively approaching people and improving your social skills, as time goes on you might come to the realization that there is no real framework for understanding human beings. Each person has to be evaluated individually, and while we can make a few generalizations and make guesses using frameworks, at the end of the day, there is no substitute for extending your curiosity in understanding each person individually.

I Know That I Know Nothing

Intellectually, many will understand Plato's accounts of Socrates statement. However, in their lives minute by minute, they have no experience of what it feels like to be constantly pained by ignorance. Most people live their lives thinking they are a master of reality, having genius insights and conclusions that is only accessible to them.

As my experiences of people deepens, I find that there is no such framework, theory, understanding or experience that can conclude things about people. Two similar individuals might even have the same experiences, but have wildly different levels of perception, leading to different inner experiences.

In a sense, attraction frameworks nails it perfectly on how us individually can activate the biological programming and attraction in another person. But, what I find is that it has nothing to do with long term compatibility and sustainability. Activating someones hormones only work for the first 3 months until the hormones goes away and you'll have one big continous fight after that.

Even so, many who are have a wide variety of experiences will often say that attraction frameworks are incomplete and unreliable that cannot be applied universally across people. Worst to say that even people are constantly evolving moment to moment, so they are never the same day after day.

Knowing The One Within

Often, the relationships I get myself involved in are those that has something to teach about myself. This has led me curious in thinking that it is not possible to understand one another without the complete understanding of the one within. In a way, understanding yourself is the doorway to understanding others.

Without the necessary capability to understand others, I think it will result in one long continuous fight in a relationship. Without the understanding, we make cries and explanations in the hopes that someone else will understand us. But how can that be possible when you do not understand yourself?

I believe it is smarter to extend this understanding to others first. If we understand the expereinces and the intrepretations of those experiences which leads to the behaviour we observe today, it tends to bring out a certain compassion and love for the suffering that they have endured.

Without the liberation of your own suffering, it is not possible to empathize with the suffering of others. If your head is stuck within the sands of survival, then naturally you will think about yourself first. When you think about yourself first, then your relationship has turned into a marketplace of give and take.

Illusion Of Attraction

When we distill the nature of attraction, it is just your hormones firing up as a result of your imagination. If we make decisions based on hormones, then you can imagine what kind of trouble you will get yourself into. So why do so many people require attraction to be the necessary component for a long term relationship?

Emotions are also fleeting. If you get into a fight and argument with your partner, do you think you will have the hormones of attraction flowing with you? Of course not! My conclusion is that attraction is a very short term emotion that reflects the needs that you lack within yourself.

When they are fulfilling your needs, they are the best and most attractive person in the world. But when they dont, you will experience a dose of dissappointment. Again and again, you will be in a rollercoaster of attraction and dissappointment.

Illusion Of Compatibility

There is really no one in this universe that understands you. If you are growing through self improvement or spirituality, you yourself know that you were not the same person three months ago. So how is it possible that your partner is updated upon your personal development day after day?

When you change, your partner has to update his framework of who you have became, then adjust his or her own behaviour to reflect your current personality and finally communicate and negotiate new boundaries. If you are rocketing towards new stratoshpeheres of growth, it is safe to assure that misunderstanding is on the horizon.

There is just no such person as "the perfect man or woman." Unless you are a creature of habit whom does not change, and they are also a creature of habit who does not change, then it is impossible to engineer a relationship that is reflects "high compatibility."

The Contradiction Of Needs

You have all sorts of needs which are psychological, emotional, physical etc. Living upon this planet is a certain bondage in that you have to maintain the needs of your body. Creating a pleasant enviorement around you is one such example. So if one has the capability and competence to be able to be content alone, he doesn't need anyone else in his life.

However by involving yourself in a relationship, naturally you will need to be involved in the other persons' life, and because you are now increasingly overlapping survival functions (like earning money, sharing the burden etc.), naturally you will need each other more and more as you become interdepenent.

The dillema comes when you have entrusted the other person to fulfill your survival functions but failed to do so, forcing you to reclaim independence to fulfill it yourself. When this is done, interdependence breaks and on a small level you reclaim a certain degree of boundaries.

As opposed to neediness, this is a different problem. Both parties have the capability to fulfill their own needs by themselves, but fail to do so in the presence of one another. This creates a constant faliure to operate as one single organism, leading to constant seperation and union.

So in a sense, a relationship requires not only your ability to fulfill your own needs, but also the extra space to handle additional survival demands your partner places on you. If you refuse to take responsibility of your partners needs, or lack the competence to share the burden, then it is going to create a the independence-interdepence loop.

The Single Organism

By coming together and claiming yourself to be in a relationship, you now claim that you are both a single organism. The motivation for coming together is that you can achieve what you yourself cannot, and the relationship itself serves as a function for your growth and development.

The single organism can only be achieved when there is no sense of seperation and declarations of independence. In a way you have sacrificed yourself for the greater and benefit of the both of you. If you have agenda A and the girl has agenda B, then you are heading for seperation.

This is why you see that the most successful relationships have a common "mission" or underlying agenda. Not only that, they agree and are willing to compromise in the mechanism in which they will achieve the goal. If I have method A and you have method B, then we will argue on which way is best.

This is why there is no formulation and framework for a successful relationship. Successful for how long, what purpose and according to who? Needs are different, agendas are different and the level of self awareness is also different. How can there is a formulation and method to unite two beings that is different into a single organism?

The Pain Of Ignorance

Once this dillema has dawn upon you, you will really feel the pain of ignorance. That even though you have great social skills, and presumably fancy yourself to understand a lot about human nature, but in reality, there is very little you can know about human beings because you have such little knowledge about yourself.

You might have so little knowledge about yourself that you have fallen silent into observation. The questioning behind the basis of what you do and why you do it will begin and there seems to be no answer and resolution for your ignorance. This ignorance will show in everything that you do, because you can never be sure that you have the truth.

I find that frameworks and conclusions about reality is rather a deceptive use of my "intelligence." Sure, it made me more certain about reality and helped me take action, but on the basis of what? I always think that I have a solution, only to find out in the end that the solution is incomplete and creates a new set of problems and dillemas.

So this pain of ignorance is really at the forefront of my life right now. I am never really sure of what I am doing to be "right", but I have to keep going anyway because I have to stay alive. When I think I know something or someone, I am defentely scoring myself at the top percentile of idiots.

The Blind Leading The Blind

You can never really know something until you have given it a taste with your direct experience. Even so, your intrepretation of those experiences can be deceptive and dishonest towards the real conclusions about reality. Accepting leadership also risk the fact that you will entrust your faith upon a person who is as blind as you.

If a person seem to have a higher perspective and know something you do not, then I would say that you can readily allocate some trust. I find it helpful that if the authority in question provides some means of self practice and techniques in order to evaluate the effectiveness of his teachings for self verification.

You are in serious trouble. If your ignorance is causing you pain, you yourself have identified that you are ignorant. But you have no insight into what is the basis behind your ignorance. You can only rely on people who seems to know more than yourself and entrusting them towards your process of enlightenment, whatever that may be. In relationships, wealth, spirituality and health.

Conclusion

In everything that we do involves ourselves, and the action externally we take is somehow connected to the need to be liberated from the pains of ignorance. We might think that we have a solution to the emptiness that we feel inside, but all roads leads to the very place where you have started.

If all roads leads back to the place in which you have started, then it must be that something is wrong. The suggestion is that we know nothing about the reality in which we live in, and that we need to observe our own patterns that causes repeat experiences instead of forming new and false conclusions about reality.

Cheers,
FriendlyWrenChilling