The complexity and difficulty of relationships make humans distinct from other species. The more advanced we are, the more we face the challenges of relationship. Animals have no problem with relationships. They don’t go for any counseling. Not do tribal societies have problems with relationships.
The urge to connect
There is a deep urge in every human to get connected. This urge set one to look for relationship. Once you have a relationship, you want it to last forever. When you say, or hear someone say,” I love you very much,” the typical response is, “ Will you love me forever?” we want that love to be for all time. This moment someone is in love with you or you are in love with someone, but that is not sufficient. Many also say,” I love you forever, for lifetimes, till my last breath.” The words may vary but we want the love to be forever. We are not satisfied that we have the love only right now.
Also we would like to know that the relationship is connected to the past. Often people say,” I’m sure we had such a deep connection from the past, maybe you are my soul mate.” We want the connection to be deep and we aspire for it to last for eternity. This very tendency in our relationship indicates something deeper. It shows the urge is coming not from a mental level but from some unknown corner that we have not fathomed.
So what if someone was related to you in the past? What is the need that they should be in your future? When things are nice and fine, you think your relationship has always been that way, you have always been in love. When things start to go wrong, even after many years, you think you must have been mistaken and you were never together in a past life. Why then do so many stay together for all those years? Just look at this. If our relationship is based on a personal need, it is not going to last very long. Once the need is fulfilled, on a physical level or emotional level, the mind looks for something else, somewhere else. If the relationship comes from the level of sharing, then it can last longer.
If you know how to row a boat, you can row any boat. If you don’t know how to row, changing the boat won’t help. Changing the relationship does not solve the issue of relationship. Sooner or later we will be in the same situation in any relationship. We have to look somewhere else. We have to look somewhere deep within us from where we start relating. 1st of all what is our relationship to ourselves? Let us ponder on that. Who are you to yourself?
Repetition
Often we think,” Oh, I am single; I am so bored being by myself, I need a companion, I need a relationship.” If you are so bored by your own company how boring will you be for someone else? Two people bored with themselves get together and bore each other. Love and boredom have something in common. Repetition. If you go in repeating something again and again, you will get bored. When you are in love, you go on repeating the same thing. Lovers insists a thousand times, “ oh I love you so much, I love you so much, I love you so much, you are so beautiful.” Say it once, that’s enough! Lovers seem to have ‘lost it’. When you are in love, what you speak does not mean much at all. Many do not even know what they are speaking.
Often you will see in high schools or college rooms where someone is in love they write their names all over the place, books, walls, everywhere, a kind of graffiti. Often their rooms and home is not sufficient and then even go and write on trains, metros, and bus stop; repetition.
Spiritual practice is also a repetition. Having a rosary, chanting the name of God, doing something like this is a repetition. At first the repetition brings boredom in you. When you sustain that boredom, instead of just dropping it and running away, the spring of love gets opened. When you go and realize you are the source of the love, you are giving end and not the receiving end, only then can your relationship blossom.
Relationships change.
The nature of relationship always change. Here I am using the word relationship in a broader sense, in its true sense, in the relatedness. When you were a child, you had much love for your parents, friends, and toys and as you grew older the love from the toys and candy shifted onto other friends and from friends it shifted on again. When you became a parent, see how much love you have for your children, as compared to your love for your parents. Parents care several times more for their own children than for their parents, because their attention, their love, is shifted from the elders to the younger ones. A similar shift often happens in the relationship between husband and wife when a child comes.
When you are looking for security, love and comfort from your partner, you become weak, you are on the receiving end. When you are weak, then all the negative emotions come up in you, demands come up in you. Demands destroy love. If we just knew this one thing, we could save our love from getting rotten.
The common expression is “I fell in love”. I say don’t fall in love. Having a limited awareness of ourselves and a limited experience of love encapsulates us in a tiny, tight compartment where we start suffocating. We want freedom in life. Love can be suffocating. We want freedom in life. Love can be suffocating if there is no depth to it, and that is what we see today. Many people fall in love, and then they fall apart. We can’t even handle what we are asking for, what we desire, what we want, because we have never probed into the depth of our own psyche, our own mind, our own consciousness.
In love we want to merge in the other, we cannot bear the separateness. That is why lovers often want to know everything about the one whom they love. They cannot tolerate any secrets, because a secret means distance. Love cannot tolerate the distance.
Feelings change.
There are three aspects in relationship. One is the attraction; that is on physical level. The 2nd aspect is love on the mental level. The 3rd aspect is a deeper connection, or devotion, on the spiritual level. Our feelings and emotions change all the time. We feel good about something, and then a little later we feel bad about the same thing. What’s the big deal about our feeling? People often say, "Oh, follow your feelings." I tell you, never follow your feelings! You will be ruined if you follow your feelings, because feelings change all the time. We feel good and then bad about the same thing. Follow your commitments, your wisdom. You will be much better off.
Any student who goes to a medical college, the 1st year or the 2nd year feels very frustrated and wants to quit medicine and do something else. Often people feel like that then they take a long career or difficult studies. If they simply followed their feelings, they would not get into any profession because nothing can maintain charm for a long time. Often for those who are very sharp, nothing stays charming. That is one of the signs of intelligence. A person who is dull can go on with anything, but those who are more alert find everything seems to lose its charm very fast- except when the charm is coming from one’s very depth, the very core being. Then the mind is totally in the present moment and one has deep roots and a broad vision of life. Then every moment is full of charm, everything is beautiful in the world. That’s when one never gets bored with oneself.
That is the ultimate relationship, when you can relate to yourself one hundred percent. Then any face you look at, there is love, there is charm, there is beauty. Then you come from the space of contributing, “What can I do for you? How can I make your life better?” If each partner comes from this space “What can I do for you?” that becomes the ultimate relationship between two people.
We don’t have to sit and wait for some soul mate to come to us. Often people ask me,” When will I meet my soul mate?” you can dial up psychics who will say,”Oh your soul mate is coming.” Soul mate??? I tell you, you can never meet your soul mate unless you first meet your soul. If you haven’t met your own soul, how will you know your soul mate?
When we see who we are, we see that we are not our emotions, we are not our feelings, we are not or thoughts, we are not our concepts. Then who we are? This very inquiry creates an awakening within us and takes away the shackles of our conditioning. There is a great expectation in every relationship that the other person should change. We never think about how we should change instead of the other person. If we change first and develop such an awakened awareness, we create an atmosphere that brings change in the other person, however they are.
Respect
The urge in us not just for love but also for respect. The greatest fear in any relationship is of losing respect. Respect demands some distance. Love cannot tolerate distance. This is the basic conflict in relationships. When you are not centered and when you have no depth within you, when you are shallow, how can you gain respect? The more someone comes close to you, the move you fear they will come to know about your fears, your anxieties, and small-mindedness. This does result in a loss of respect, and once the respect is lost, the love loses its charm.
Have you taken some time for yourself to cleanse your system of negative emotions? Have you taken some time off to find your source? Have you inquired into where you have come up and where you will be going back? Don’t think you’ll be here forever. When someone dies we say, “Oh poor man dies, poor person. God has been so merciless.” We never fully grasp the fact that we are also going to go one day. In another fifty years or sixty years, none of us will be here.
Where will you go? Where did you come from? What is your relationship with this cosmos? What is your relationship with people around you? Pondering on this, understanding your emotions, your thoughts, your own body, your breath, your own beauty, you will come out of fear. Once the fear is out from life, respect will stay forever. Then the closer your partner comes to you, or anyone comes close to you, the more they will respect you. With the fear gone, keeping some distance essential.
Letting go of the fear is not just an idealistic thing,” okay, it’s nice to hear about this but it is not realistic.” No, it is realistic. Many can see this happening in their own lives. At first, from time to time, keep a little distance from whosoever is very close to you. At least take one week off every year to recharge your batteries, and take some time off regularly for your own space and go deep into yourself, dig deep.
Meditation is that process of dwelling deep into that area of yourself that is love. Meditation is not just sitting and having a boring thing to do or sitting and day dreaming or dozing off. You are an ocean; there is so much wealth deep inside you, so much beauty. You have so much love that you can offer, and your mind is so much more powerful. You can create the situation that you would like to have around you. Then the ultimate relationship is possible.
The ultimate relationship is beyond time, because you are timeless. Time and mind are synonymous. Time is nothing but the distance between two events, two happening. Love is not a happening, love is being. Love is not an act, it is existence. Love is not emotion; it is your very nature. Feelings change, thoughts change, ideas change, bodies undergo change all the time, but the thirst deep within us is for something that is not changing, something that is eternal, something that is always same. That is why we use these eternal phrases or expressions when we are in love. We want to feel this love forever because love takes you beyond time. When you are in love you don’t notice time, you feel it has only been five minutes when you might have spent five hours.
There is one thing you can begin doing today which will start your relationship flourishing immediately, and that is to come from a space of contributing, from a space of giving. Giving what? Giving what is needed; giving time, giving attention, giving help, giving money, giving whatever. Just living with an awareness of wanting to give, and keeping patient, will uplift the relationship. Then you can row any boat. (Of course there still can be times when the boat has a hole in it, so sometimes you do change the boat, but that is for an entirely different reason).
God
We also have our relationship with God. God is referred to in three persons. In the third person God is ‘he’ or ‘she’, in the second person God is ‘you’ and in the first person is ‘I’. People are most happy addressing God in the third person because that feels very safe, there is no relationship there at all. He exists somewhere in the clouds, in the heaven. He, she or God is somewhere else in the third person. This is the way you can escape from being in touch with the reality.
Seeing God in the person next to you, or seeing everyone around you as God, or just addressing God as ‘you’ is more difficult. How can I say ‘you’ are God? If we address God in the second person, we fear God may want to punish us. That is not safe. If I say ‘I’ am God, seeing God in the first person forget about it, because the moment I look into myself and see all the imperfection, how could I be God? We think this is not possible. Keeping God in the third person is safer, easier to grasp and conceptualize. We want to leave the perception the way it is. This is the amplitude people have.
If we see God only in the third person we are not connecting with the reality, there is no relationship with the divine. A relationship is what? Feeling no separation, I am you and you are me. You are part of me, I am part of you. If someone who is part of you is insulted, you feel although you are insulted. If someone who is part of you is praised, you feel happy, as though you were praised. In the third person, how can this happen?
That’s why Jesus said,’ To go to my Father you have to go through me, there is no other way, because I am right in front of you.’ This is also what Buddha said and all the enlightened masters said, ‘If you have to go to God, you have to go through the Master.’ This is because a master is the second person. He is the link between the third person and the first person. Coming to the Master makes you realize there is no separation.
The divine is within you, you are God and God is in you. This realization can happen when the stress, tension, worries, and anxieties are all lifted off from the mind. The mind is the cover that is holding the divinity within us. Once that wrapping paper is unwrapped you find, ‘Oh, this beautiful gift is here within us.’ Our life is like having a Christmas package, a beautiful package, and living with the beautiful gift without ever opening it.
Suppose a set of gifts are bought and given to everyone, and they all say, ‘ Oh, what a beautiful gift,’ and they are holding the wrapping papers and satisfied just looking at the wrapping papers and satisfied just looking at the wrapping papers, but not going past the wrapping paper. The secret is that all the charm and joy you see in the world is just a wrapping paper, colorful and beautiful, with all glittery designs, but inside you is a real gift, the divinity itself. Seeing this you begin relating to yourself one hundred percent and begin seeing God in the first person. That is the ultimate relationship.
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