Relationships: Trust & Broken expectations || Acharya Prashant
Video Information: 16.02.23, International Psychology Summit Conference
Context:
How to maintain a good relationship?
What is the right time to be into a relationship?
What is relationship?
How to make relationship healthy?
When and how a relationship turns into a toxic relationship?
How to choose a life partner?
What is real love?
Is live-in relationship sign of degradation of our culture?
Music Credits: Milind Date
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#acharyaprashant #relationship #expectations
Transcript
00:00 Does the person you are with encourage you to read?
00:06 You have to ask, what does he bring for me? Roses or books?
00:11 If someone has a stake in making you better, that person will push you towards books.
00:17 Books are what we all need.
00:21 Acharyaji, we have talked about friends and we have the freedom to choose our friends.
00:43 And elaborating on that thought, we don't have freedom to choose our family members, our relatives.
00:53 And the way we are brought up, the way we are socialized, there is an implicit trust that we take for granted.
01:09 We can trust them and we never question them.
01:16 And years and years pass by in that trust.
01:23 But when the environment around us is like this, when challenges and problems come, then those relationships are tested.
01:42 We are tested and so are others.
01:47 And sometimes there is a lot of betrayal. It can happen to them and it can happen to us.
01:55 Their expectations are there, which we are not able to fulfill.
02:01 And we have some expectations that they are not able to fulfill.
02:05 I understand all that. I have gone through this pain also, post COVID.
02:13 A lot of emotions, a lot of pain, a lot of trauma.
02:19 I have risen above it now. I am functioning well. In fact, I am flourishing.
02:27 But what keeps coming back to me is the karmic account.
02:34 First, is that a concept? Do you believe in that?
02:40 Do you think that so much karmic account has been built up over the years?
02:46 23 years, we have lived in a particular way.
02:51 Never thought negative. Nothing happened.
02:55 Neither did they do it nor did we do it.
02:58 So what bothers me is whether there is so much karmic account and whether I will ever be able to liberate from it.
03:05 I have no intention of taking revenge from them.
03:09 I don't know about them.
03:11 But how do I try to liberate myself from that? Is there a possibility?
03:18 But what is a karmic account?
03:23 First of all, I don't have clarity on that.
03:28 Karmic account is that so many things are common, entangled.
03:35 There are still memories. There are so many things which are entangled.
03:39 All that is mind stuff. Simply mind stuff.
03:43 There is no account anywhere. It's just mind stuff.
03:47 So how do we free our mind from that and move on and then again trust people?
03:59 The mind is dictated by the ego, I.
04:09 If there is something in the mind, it is only because the ego thinks that it is profitable to keep it in the mind.
04:22 The mind is the house. The ego is the owner of that house.
04:33 The mind is the house of which the ego is the owner.
04:41 So if you find stuff in that house, it is because somebody thinks that it is of use to keep that stuff there.
04:50 Otherwise, why would the stuff remain there?
04:53 So if there are memories, entanglements and such things,
05:00 then please observe the benefits you think you are deriving from them.
05:08 There has to be a certain benefit, a pleasure that you are taking from them.
05:14 Otherwise, they cannot stay there.
05:16 I'll ask you a question.
05:19 Even in that pain, there is security for identity.
05:26 Think of it. Do you remember everything over the last 23 years?
05:31 None of us would probably even remember what we had for breakfast the day before yesterday.
05:36 Do you remember that? We don't remember that.
05:41 So the mind selectively stores stuff and it very precisely follows the dictates of the ego.
05:52 It remembers only that which it considers important from the point of view of pleasure or identity.
06:01 Otherwise, you won't remember it.
06:05 There is an auto-deletion process inside.
06:09 Things get auto-deleted.
06:11 You must be wondering why there is stuff that did not get auto-deleted.
06:19 It does not get deleted because we derive pleasure from it.
06:26 We go back to it and we want to virtually repeat the experience to again have the experience that we once had.
06:43 If that experience gave you pleasure, you want to revisit it, don't you?
06:48 In fact, you want to model your future experiences on the past experience.
06:54 So to have a future in some sense remembering the past becomes important.
07:00 Once you have your source of joy firmly within you in the present,
07:14 there will be no need to time and again go back to the past.
07:20 In that sense, it is the insufficiency of the present that shows up in a constant, almost ritualistic hankering for the past.
07:38 If the present is healthy, well nourished and demanding, full of the right kind of challenges,
07:52 how will you have an opportunity to reminisce, be nostalgic and all those things?
08:02 And we all know that, right?
08:06 When life is full of the right kind of activity or occupation,
08:13 then there is no space for the past or even the future.
08:20 And if there is a certain hollowness or vacuum in the present,
08:26 then the mind fills it up by streaming in the past and by projecting a future.
08:34 So the solution lies in living, forcing yourself, almost forcing yourself to live a fulfilling life.
08:49 And then those things will become too small to be remembered.
09:01 Right? Yes.
09:04 So you mentioned for the first answer, right in the beginning of the session,
09:10 you said that we are living hollow lives.
09:13 Then as a part of the answer to end the question,
09:16 you mentioned that we need to have friends which move, which take us from the lower pleasures to the higher pleasures.
09:27 And just now you mentioned that we need to live a fulfilling life.
09:31 And there is nothing like a karmic balance.
09:34 So I would like you to elaborate on what is the purpose of life and what actually Karma stands for.
09:41 See, right since the moment of our birth, we are crying.
09:49 So that's the purpose of life, to stop crying.
09:56 And it's just that we become nuanced and sophisticated enough to not to shed tears.
10:06 And that would be quite upsetting also and irritating to be always seen wiping one's face.
10:18 But internally there is always a certain gloom that shows up in the various mental states of hope, of ambition, fear,
10:38 even happiness and pleasure, attraction, attachment.
10:46 Why is the mind so vulnerable to these things?
10:53 It is because we are unfulfilled since birth.
10:58 There is the one we are within, right? The I that keeps saying, "Hello, me".
11:09 It's constantly saying, "I'm still not complete. Something is missing".
11:15 Don't you see we all remain desirous our entire lives?
11:20 And the fulfillment of any particular desire never succeeds in fulfilling us.
11:29 A particular desire might get fulfilled. That does happen sometimes.
11:35 But still we never get fulfilled.
11:39 So that points at the purpose of life, to seek what that lack of fulfillment is about,
11:48 to understand this self, internal self that is always clamoring, always complaining, never complete.
11:59 What is that thing within?
12:02 And that understanding makes it then easy to be liberated of suffering.
12:09 So mukti, that's the purpose of life.
12:14 And it's easy, if we can just see where all our desires come from.
12:27 The game of desires in itself is sufficient to point at anything.
12:44 But we rush behind our desires.
12:50 Or we sometimes suppress our desires.
12:55 But rarely do we understand our desires.
12:59 If we can understand the process within, by just looking at it,
13:04 our daily actions, our relationships, thoughts, feelings, instincts.
13:10 If we can look at them, that proves to be very liberating.
13:23 Yes.
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13:38 [MUSIC PLAYING]