Reflection 279

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The Basis Of Loving

If we really look at what it’s like where we are, surely we can see we are built for loving, we are built open, we are built as capacity for the other one, the loved one - or the one who is perhaps not consciously loved so much. We disappear in his or her favour, not because we are very nice or very loving people really but because that is the way we are, to vanish in favour of that one there. Now, if I am relating to my boss or my employee or my wife or my child, it is going to make an enormous difference if I experience myself as space for them to happen in. It means that I am going to let them be what they are, because space has no way of manipulating and using and exploiting them. Space is very patient, very hospitable. In a certain sense it is the very basis of loving. If one experiences oneself as space for the other, one listens, one looks, one attends to the other. And the other one feels attended to, feels entertained and valued, because after all if you have nothing where you are, no face, no thing at all, that other one is doing you a marvellous service of supplying you with this fascinating scene, this fascinating personality there, this warm human personality filling your space. This is a totally different thing from the imagined basis of our personal relationships, which is a symmetrical one. No wonder we have head-on collisions, no wonder confrontation is the rule. I suggest confrontation is a fiction. No one ever confronted anyone else. Only to a third person can the symmetry be seen. If you identify with that third person, sure, you can make yourself opposite and equal to that one there. But if we tell it like it is, and are truthful about what we are for ourselves, we see that we are built open, built for loving. I do recommend this most highly as immensely practical, imperative I would say, for good personal relationships. (Douglas Harding. On Having No Head. DVD.)