The Union of Wills

‘Union of Wills’ whose ultimate fruition is service to all beings. It will make the man-woman relationship more beautiful than a symbiotic union.

Man is a thought - adventurer, says D.H. Lawrence. Real thought is an experience. It begins as a change in the blood, a slow convulsion and revolution in the body itself. It ends as a new piece of awareness, a new reality in mental consciousness.

On this account, thought becomes an adventure, and not a practice. In order to think one must risk oneself doubly. First one must meet life in the body. Then, face the result in the mind.
The risk is double, because each of us has two selves. First is the body which is vulnerable and never quite within our control. The body with its irrational sympathies, desires and passions, its peculiar direct communication, is defying the mind. And second is the conscious ego, the self.
Historically, the male has changed considerably in the past fifty years. The earlier male was a person who was hard-working, responsible, fairly well-disciplined: he didn’t see women’s souls very well, though he looked at their bodies a lot. The present day male is vulnerable to collective opinion: if you were a man you were supposed to like football, cricket and other games, be aggressive, never cry and always provide. But this image of male lacked female. It lacked some sense of flow; it lacked compassion. He was a macho man.
Separation and unity – the excitement and fear, the triumph and anxiety they generate-will remain continuing themes in adult life. In adulthood, when we find ourselves in an intimate relationship, each of us experience again, even if only in highly attenuated form, those early struggles around separation and unity-the conflict between wanting to be one with another and the desire for an independent, autonomous self. 
For each woman and man who comes into any relationship stirs the yearnings from an unremembered but still powerfully felt past; each brings with her or him two people-the adult and the child. Both know the agony and the ecstasy of a symbiotic union. Ecstasy, because in the mother’s arms the infant could experience the bliss of unity and the security that accompanies it. Agony, because from the time of birth life seems a series of separations. 
Of course as adults we know there is no return to the old symbiotic union; survival is no longer at stake in separation. But the child within feels as if this were still the reality. And the adult responds to the archaic memory of those early feelings even though they are far from consciousness. Thus, we do not usually know what buffets us about-what makes us eager to plunge into a relationship one moment and frightens us into anxious withdrawal in the next. We know only that we long for closeness and connection with another, and that we feel uncomfortable when we get it. 
In this process, two things are central: the crystallisation of a gender identity and the maintenance of what psychologists call ‘ego boundaries’ that set us off from the rest of the world. This in larger part, is what a child’s separation struggle is all about-a struggle that’s different for boys and for girls just because it is a woman who has mothered them both.
It’s obvious that the experience of being male and being female is different. But what has been less clear until now is how the process of developing and internalising a gender identity affects the development of ego boundaries and thus, determines the shape of feminine and masculine personality in adulthood. 
Today, the man-woman relationship is a microcosm of the interaction of larger forces in the greater cosmos. However, this sacredness is lost when men and women relate to each other primarily as personalities. Then their magnetic polarity is diminished by what is known as ‘little needs’ for entertainment, excitement, security, admiration and so on. The real magic of love can happen when their connection reflects the dynamic interplay of the energies in the cosmos at large.
J.G. Bennett writes about the inner meaning of marriage as a ‘Union of Wills’ whose ultimate fruition is service to all beings.  
In order to be able to serve others, we first have to learn to serve one another, to consider other person’s well-being before our own. This union of wills will make the man-woman relationship more beautiful than a symbiotic union.