Human Relationships

“The past never comes back
Like the breath taken never comes back
Different faces have different stories
The life is a strange story of relations”

By
Chand Saluja, Lucknow

This is a very interesting and meaningful rubai. I am motivated to expand on the thoughts that it stirred in my mind.

It is true that “the life is a strange story of relations”. I will use the terms “relationship” here. How many relationships can we see around us? Some of these include:

• Relationship between our parents or any married couple – do they have a loving, trusting and mutually respectful relationship or a controlling and disrespectful relationship?
• Relationship between parent and child – is it loving, trusting or controlling and authoritarian?
• Relationship among siblings – do they love and support each other or they fight and compete with them for love of their parents or for other things?
• Relationship among young couples and/or lovers – is it loving, trusting and supportive or it is antagonistic and suspicious?
• Relationship between friends – is it honest, unselfish and fun or selfish?
• Relationship between boss and the worker – is it of mutual respect or of distrust and manipulation?
• And last of all, the relationship with God – do we have a relationship at all? If we do, is it of love, faith and worship or just ritualistic.

His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has this to say about relationships:

“If you know how to row a boat, you can row any boat. If you don’t know how to row a boat, 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.”

He continues.

“ There are three aspects in relationship. One is the attraction; that is on the physical level. The second aspect is love on the mental level. The third aspect is a deeper connection, or devotion, on the spiritual level. Our feelings and emotions change all the time.”

“The ultimate relationship is when you can relate to yourself one hundred percent. Then any face you look at, there is love, there is charm and there is beauty. Then you come from the space of contributing, “What can I do for you? How can I make your life better?””

“The urge in us is not just for love but also 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. If you have no depth and if you are shallow, how can you gain respect?”

“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 time, giving attention, giving help, giving money, giving whatever. This will uplift the relationship. Then you can row any boat.”

What kills a relationship? The biggest killer of relationships is the ego. When we are under the control of ego, then we are not coming from the space of giving. We are coming from the space of taking, from the space of selfishness.

From "Wisdom for the New Millennium", Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, 2006