What I have observed, and I’ve come to observe this well because my own family lives in two worlds, is the influence of modern society on our ability to be defenceless. My children live at home in a world which is my world of philosophy, scholarship, thinking gentle thoughts, meditation, and peaceful feelings. Then my children go to school and in response to peer group pressure, they have to build defences and cultivate aggressiveness to stay alive and survive, because gentleness and quietness does not work.

I saw a transformation in my children from what they were 6 years ago as young children and what they had to become to survive in school. I found them much easier at home in the summer when they were not going to school. They were much more difficult in the evenings after school because they did not know that they could make a transition from school to home, and then back again the next morning from home to school. Instead, they brought home all the assertiveness, the aggressiveness, and the defensiveness that they had to use in school. I must say that my wife and I could not figure out what our children were angry about, why they were so assertive and defensive. So, I pulled myself out of the situation, neutralised myself, and looked at it to see where the fault was. Was it in me? I found the children were in a separate world and did not know how to make a transition into the trust of our home.

This has happened in the life of almost everyone in the western world: your school, work, and political relationships are ones of high competitiveness. This constant watching out for your self-interest is brought into your personal relationships also. Recognise this fact and you will be a changed person, making a transition from your work and school relationships into your personal relationships. You have to recognise this fact that the values of the professional, economic and political society are ones of polarisation in which confrontation is a virtue, where being able to take care of yourself is what counts and where the fittest survive. You have formed mental habits along these thought patterns; created a psychological bondage and you express your emotions in those terms. You must remember that when you enter the gate, the doors of your house, literally or figuratively, you have to become the person you were as a child: defenceless, loving and trusting in your relationships. There is no other way. Otherwise, one confrontation leads to another and that one leads to the third one. Before you know it, the relationship has fallen apart. And then what? You fall apart.

People say, “But it is so difficult. It is so difficult to follow the advice you are giving.”

Whenever they say this, I ask one question, ‘Tell me what is easy? Is the present way of relationships easier? You are scared of things the way they now are. Try a new approach. If your present way is easy, then why are you here?’

Some people say, “But how do I make the transition. It’s easy for someone to say, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But what do I do?”

You must learn to recognise the divine presence within you, that divine presence which you experience in moments of meditation. Some of you say, “I don’t experience anything, so where do I find this divine presence?” But you do. If someone were to say to you right now, “You are sitting in the light,” would you have otherwise realised that you are sitting in a light? Were you thinking about that fact? No, you take the light for granted; that is human nature. We always take divine things and things of light for granted. You never think they are remarkable, but the divine is part of your inner nature. When a little quietness comes to you, you say, “Oh that’s nothing remarkable,” because your nature is rediscovering itself. No matter how shallow a meditation you have, if you look you will find that you always come out of your meditation just slightly quieter than when you sat down. This means that you did experience some higher-presence, a state of consciousness beyond what you are involved with in the ordinary world. Take the optimistic view.

I said to my spiritual teacher some years ago over the phone, ‘I want to make progress towards freedom, and I want to be an enlightened being, but there seems to be two of me. There is one who stands up, gives good advice to everyone, and conducts meditations and so on. I am very happy when I am in that place. Then there is this other one of me that comes home and gets upset because my wife did not put enough salt in the dal. What do I do with this other one?”

He said, ‘Identify the divine aspect within you. Don’t identify with that person who quarrels, who gets upset and who is angry. Identify with your highest moments, those moments when you gave love, when you succeeded in bringing a smile. Know that you have that strength. Know that at that moment you did have that courage. Identify with that courageous one.’

Perhaps you have given love, shown strength and courage and nothing came of it. But then, when you fought, when you defended, when you were aggressive, when you wrote a 10-page letter full of poison, what happened? Go back to the moment that gave you the pleasure of trusting, the pleasure of having caused a smile, and of having given someone satisfaction. The origin of the word love is founded on the idea of pleasing-to have a pleasant mind, and to be pleasing and to give pleasure. Do that thing that brings out a smile in the other person. Don’t pursue that which upsets him or her and avoid that; it’s a negative effort. Instead, find out what pleases the other person, what gives him or her pleasure and what brings on a smile, and start with that.

Editor’s Note

This is an extract from Path to Successful Relationships by Swami Veda Bharati, pages 55-57.