Relationships (August 2017 Newsletter)

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) in the 1920s

At the start of our classes we each talk about health, work, home and about all of life in general. Many YWB practitioners regularly address their difficulty with relationships. These range from simple daily interactions at home and work, to more serious personal and life-changing ones. Our perceptions are our own, and are the result of our personal experiences from the moment of birth and even in-utero. It is difficult to change ourselves to accommodate the thinking and perceptions of another. Read the contemporary philosopher, Krishnamurti's thoughts below:

You have only one head and look after it for it's a marvellous thing. No machinery, no electronic computers can compare with it. It's so vast, so complex, so utterly capable, subtle and productive. It's the storehouse of experience, knowledge, memory. All thought springs from it. What it has put together is quite incredible: the mischief, the confusion, the sorrows, the wars, the corruptions, the illusions, the ideals, the pain and misery, the great cathedrals, the lovely mosques and the sacred temples. It is fantastic what it has done and what it can do. But one thing it apparently cannot do: change completely its behaviour in its relationship to another head, to another man. Neither punishment nor reward seem to change its behaviour; knowledge doesn't seem to transform its conduct. The me and the you remain. It never realizes that the me is the you, that the observer is the observed. Its love is its degeneration; its pleasure is its agony; the gods of its ideals are its destroyers. Its freedom is its own prison; it is educated to live in this prison, only making it more comfortable, more pleasurable. You have only one head, care for it, don't destroy it. It's so easy to poison it. 

Krishnamurti's Journal, September 17, 1973

Among other things the above paragraph may bring to mind, do you begin to see the difficulty with relationships? They are always teetering in the balance. This is known as 'Dukha' (meaning 'bad axle hole' in an old-fashioned bullock driven cart,) the state of humankind to always suffer a bumpy ride on life's journey, rarely in a state of contentment where life flows smoothly. Relationships are thrilling and yet contain a twinge of anxiety, of uncertainty, of loss, of fear...it is so because you are you, and I remain my ego self.

Is it possible to change this state of being? Rumi states, "Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." Maybe we should all give it a try every day, and all our lives.

Namaste,

sipra