Interview with Ted Strauss On Levels of Mutuality for Mutuality Matters issue #9

Eduardo: One of the things that has fascinated me in Waking Down in Mutuality, has been the mutuality part. So far, our knowledge and practice of mutuality has not been in actual (physical) community.

Ted: Yes, except in Fairfield and a few other small pockets, mutuality is also practiced in sittings, workshops and private sessions. But I would say that mutuality is mostly practiced in couples, because that’s when people spend most of their quality time in relationship. I think it’s very interesting that the mutuality aspect of our work is a different facet of the jewel of sangha. I don’t really know much about what meaning Buddhists assign to Sangha other than spiritual family and community. But mutuality in itself doesn't mean community. Mutuality is a way of relating when you are in contact with another human.

Eduardo: But isn’t mutuality the first ‘cellular unit’ of community?

Ted: Yes, well let’s put it this way. When you’re relating in the style we call mutuality, you’ll create a completely different kind of community than was possible without it.

Eduardo: Ooh, that’s juicy. I’ve been in community and seen the power that it can bring, even if the members aren’t yet awake; I can’t wait to see community of awake individuals in action!

Ted: For a human being to relate in what we would call mutuality, they must be awake enough to be aware of themselves, their impact on others and others’ impact on them. And they would have to be awake enough to have explored their real motives for being in any relationship. 

Eduardo: Ah, there’s self awareness?

Ted: Deep self awareness is a prerequisite for mature mutuality. 

Eduardo: But awakeness as well?

Ted: Assuming you’re willing to allow the natural movement of awakening, it will necessarily bring deep self awareness.

Eduardo: So then, is mutuality only the domain of awakened folks?

Ted: No, it’s not an exclusive thing like that. Usually I define mutuality as having a range of meanings from ‘a practice disposition prior to second birth’ all the way to ‘advanced mutual onlyness.’ There are levels of mutuality. You can't really draw a line anywhere, and say on this side it’s not mutuality and on that side it is. But I also want to say that to me, awakening is an endless, lifelong process that, for some people, includes high contrast shifts, while others simply experience gradual, continuous growth.

If I was the Emperor of Waking Down, I’d ask all teachers and participants to please stop using the word ‘awakening’ to refer to the second birth transition. When everyone’s saying ‘did you have your awakening yet?’ it makes people feel uncomfortable. That whole way of talking tends to perpetuate the worst of our myths of enlightenment, especially the feeling that only special people ‘get it’ and you probably never will. It’s violent, and disrespects our natural, organic unfoldment. Like awakening, mutuality has a range of meanings, and it certainly isn’t limited to any particular stage in the process. Generally speaking, the more mature we are, the more capable we are of functioning in deep mutuality.

However, if we look through the lens of distinct stages, we can see stages of mutuality. In what I call Stage 1 (from conception to about 3 year old), there’s no hope of mutuality, because there is neither a self to relate from, nor an ‘other’ to relate to. One must at least be aware of self and other for mutuality to be experienced. In Stage 2, people experience self and other as exclusively separate entities, so the best we could hope for would be a willingness to practice feeling the other’s reality as equally valid, if not equally compelling. At the peak of Stage 3 (in which awareness of Self either includes or is primarily identified with Consciousness), mutuality in relationship is still an ideal to lean toward, because there isn’t even mutuality between one’s own body-mind self and one’s consciousness self. There’s still a perceived split between the human and the Divine. Until the ‘both and’ is realized, mutuality is still basically a practice.

After second birth, the direct experience that everything is part of Self provides an entirely new platform for relationship. You’re no longer a separate person in a bubble, relating to other apparently separate people in their bubbles. You see everything as part of the same, singular Beingness, which is simultaneously Self and Others. At this stage (I call it Stage 4), there is the direct experience of mutuality at a basic level, but it’s still not a fully matured version of mutuality. That’s because, even though there’s been a fundamental realization of Onlyness, there’s still the appearance that others’ realities are separate from our own. Only by practicing allowing others into your own reality and feeling others’ realities as they open to you can you begin to know a deeper mutuality in your own direct, embodied experience.

And the prerequisite for that is the willingness to feel what I call the wound of relationship; the discomfort and paradox of the ways in which we feel both same (connected or non-separate) and different (disconnected) from each other. When two or more people are willing to be in that discomfort together, you have an opening to a whole new stage of awareness I call Mutual Onlyness, or Stage 5.

Eduardo: So, Onlyness evolves into Mutual Onlyness?

Ted: Yes, because awakening is about an ever-expanding awareness of Self, including how Others are part of Self. This gets revealed as you relate with at least one other with whom you’re able to relax enough to allow the boundaries to become a little permeable. We all have boundaries on many levels, physical, energetic, emotional, etc. But most of us perceive ourselves as living in an extremely scary world, and we’re afraid that the only way we’ll survive is to have the boundaries up all the time. So that becomes our default position in relationship. 

The problem is, having our boundaries up all the time takes a lot of energy and attention. It takes juice. The body is not designed to have the walls up all the time. It causes our immune system to go into overdrive and get exhausted. That’s actually more stressful than the stress we think we’re protecting ourselves from with those boundaries in the first place.

Mutuality starts to become something significant when you let yourself relax the walls enough for your reality and others’ to begin to co-permeate; when you’re willing to let your reality out a little and to let others’ reality in. Mutuality has to do with a willingness and capacity to be in direct mutual contact, with all the wonder and pain that implies. Mutuality requires us to endure the pain and difficulty of intimacy without fleeing. I call the pain of intimacy the ‘wound of relationship’ because it can feel like that. Being in direct, intimate contact with another being is raw, vulnerable… some-times even terrifying. To me mutuality is very much about speaking the truth of our reality, feeling the strangely different but equally valid truth of the other’s reality, and allowing our realities to blend into a paradoxical new whole, an entity of ‘us’ together.

Eduardo: And what’s the advantage of having an ‘us?’ 

Ted: There’s a lot of advantages. The more you're able to actually get others’ realities, the more skillfully you can navigate the world of relationship, which turns out to be the larger world of yourself. The more you’re stuck in your own view and assuming that others should be seeing the world the way that you do, the more frustrated, confused and separate you feel, even if you’re in your second life.

An awakened subjective bubble is still a bubble. Until you wake up enough to get why you’re still holding onto the bubble of separation, you’re still assuming that that separation, even awakened separation, is the only way to be. But when you start to see that it’s all been part of an elaborate defense system that’s no longer serving you, then you are ready for something way beyond the second birth.

It’s an awareness of being part of humanity. It’s an awareness of the crucifixion of love, a pain we can no longer run from because it’s an inescapable aspect of who we are as divinely human incarnations of Being.