The secret Michael Barnett discovered on the beach in England is at the core of translucent relating. In the Iago trance, we appear to be separate entities, with independent sources of thought, affecting each other with our words and actions. With focused inquiry, we come to know who we really are: we recognize that what is really meeting this moment is limitless space, context more than content. We can call this recognition Self-realization.

You can also look into the eyes of another and discover who is looking back at you. We need to look beyond the appearance of a face, a name, and an agenda and find out who is really there, behind those eyes, seeing you. When this inquiry extends to another person, we can call it Other-realization.

Kathlyn Hendricks never really lost the recognition of herself as limitless space as a child. She told me that it was deeply threatening to her family and that she tried to conceal it. When she met her husband, Gay, she experienced the meeting as “an invitation to take off the artificial veils so that I could directly experience my spaciousness again”:

We recognized infinity in each other in the first few seconds that we met. The experience of seeing the space in each other, and recognizing and affirming that in each other, was the ground of our relationship. We didn’t come together out of personality, we really came together out of that space, and then all of the other layers got filled in. Feelings and different personality structures got altered from that first commitment, from that first recognition.

The Hendricks’ experience is not isolated. It is the flavor of every description of translucent relating: the capacity to see oneself in the other, as the other. This does not mean that I look into my wife’s eyes and see Arjuna Ardagh, the man with his thoughts and opinions and habits. That would be dementia. It means that I know myself to be that which is deeper than a man and his story. I know myself to be space, free and open and with an infinite capacity to love, and I recognize that the same mystery is looking back at me. The packaging may be a little different, but there I am, just the same. This is not a philosophical conclusion, but a direct perception. You look into the eyes of another from the wakefulness in yourself, and their eyes become windows rather than objects. They become “mirrors,” is another way that people often phrase it. You see your own infinity looking back at you from behind the window, and, just like Punch and Judy, you realize that even in conflict you are still in relationship with the one Self.

This recognition makes every kind of interaction potentially intimate, even humorous, not because of the content, but because of the context in which it occurs. After this happens enough times, we get used to it. We relax into knowing that we are a wave, rather than a solid entity. When we pause long enough to look deeply into and through another wave, we are no longer surprised to find the same ocean there, looking back at us. Translucent relating is like sitting down on our side of the canyon with our most beloved friend and enjoying a picnic together, looking at the view. There is no gulf to be crossed. Eckhart Tolle puts it like this:

The essence of every human interaction that takes place is the freedom of stillness. You meet another human being through that. That often enables one to not get entangled in the game of thoughts and emotions that may be there in the other person as you meet them. It seems that when you are relating from stillness, you can touch the stillness in the other person, without a prior intention. It just happens, and that’s often how transformation takes place. This is “healing” in a wider sense.

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