Would an enlightened person marry and be at peace with a narcissist that lies/ gaslight or would they only be open to marriage with someone on the spiritual journey?

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The answer to this has multiple dimensions.

The first thing that comes to mind is that as a person develops spiritually, they tend to move in one of two directions. Either they become more sensitive to things that bother them, or they become more open to experience.

This ties into the two-prong model I have for personal spiritual development. Perceptive responsiveness is the first prong and refers to how quickly your mind comes up with accurate recognitions of complex things. It allows mind to grip very tightly to things.

The second prong is surrender. This refers to your ability to let go of the things that you were holding very tightly onto.

Development of both of these abilities produce a capability of the mind to conjure up identities for itself using perceptive responsiveness, and then discard them using surrender. While this process is taking up a person’s conscious awareness, the person has no spare time to consider a ‘self’. Self-identity is therefore muted and buried deep in the psyche.

We call this nonduality. While a thing is being observed, mind does not consider other things, including self. The person becomes the thing.

Attention feels like the swells of the sea. It collects onto one thing and then swallows up loads of other things. Then it washes down and leaves everything stark.

So how does this relate to interpersonal interaction? Because the enlightened person’s attention only rarely is occupied with the thing called self, it’s extremely difficult to relate to others. What I’ve seen most people do is to conjure up a self for the purposes of the interaction.

This conjured self is mostly an illusion, it has the appearance of the self you interacted with yesterday, but because the mind you interacted with yesterday is gone, the new self that’s conjured by the new mind is only going to look like the old one.

Lies, gaslighting only affect the conjured self. The conjured self is a real self, so if you injure the conjured self, insult or attack me, while I’m interacting with you, I feel it and it hurts. But the feelings and the hurt only last as long as the self does. Personally, I have been moving in the direction of holding on to my conjured selves for extended periods of time and trying to connect them together better.

So for me I might hold onto feelings and hurt for a day or so. But the self will eventually disappear completely, subsumed into whatever new identity I’m conjuring up.

The self may stick around underneath the surface. During the weekends I tend to have a lot of social interaction. The selves I create during these interactions might stick their heads above the water, say, on my walk home from work.

I do have a friend who I believe has narcissistic personality qualities. It hurts when I interact with her. In the past, before I started moving in this direction of keeping the selves around longer, whenever I’d get hurt, I’d obliterate the hurt self simply by looking at something else and conjuring up another identity.

Essentially, the enlightened person is in control of what makes up his identity at any given time. They can get hurt by toxic relations, but the hurt is only surface deep. Even should I choose to keep a self around and experience hurt and suffering, it’s something I choose to do and not something I have to do.

It’s a bit difficult to talk about how an enlightened person comes to decide what to do with themselves. Some of them seem to be content to simply experience the waves of pure existence. Others seem to want to go in a more meta direction and focus on understanding and explaining their subjective experience. Others seem to go in a direction ‘chosen’ for them. I can’t talk much further on this subject without invoking higher-than-human agency, which is getting pretty far off topic.

But it’s this decision process that determines whether an enlightened person will choose to marry and what criteria is used for choosing a mate. How the person makes them feel on a day to day basis may or may not be a relevant factor.

It’s hard to answer for me personally because it’s not a done decision for me, I’m still single.