A vulnerable mind will have vulnerable relationships || (2015)
Questioner: Why is it that we knowingly let our loved ones hurt us?
Acharya Prashant: The hurt is not coming from the loved ones, the hurt is coming from the shallow nature of the love itself. It is not the loved one that hurts, it is your fake love that hurts. Kindly do not unnecessarily put the blame on somebody else. What hurts you is that in spite of being the object of ‘my’ love, he hurt me!
Have you seen that if you are abused by a stranger and if you are abused by a loving friend, you obviously feel more hurt in case of the friend? Same words both of them have uttered to you, and yet you feel more hurt when the so-called friend says those words to you. ‘In spite of being my friend, he hurt me.’ It is the quality of your relationship that hurts you. The ego feels bad. ‘He is ‘my’ friend and he is behaving in this way. He is my loved one and he is doing this.’
Let it get fully hurt. Let it get so hurt that it is shredded down! Let it get so hurt that it is altogether destroyed! Let the hurt penetrate you fully. Getting it?
Yes, that is the reality. This is the quality of our love. Our love emanates not from the heart but from the mind. It is a very accidental love, it is a very reasonable love, it is a very calculative love. If the reasons go away, this love disappears. If the situations change, this love changes. There is no worth in this love anyway. The loved ones are not at all at fault. In fact, you do not know them. You know them only through the narrow tunnel of your relationship with them.
You know what is this tunnel vision? You do not know your so-called ‘loved ones’. Nobody does. We don’t know anything. How can we know a particular man or a woman? We do not know anything. And it is all the more difficult to know somebody when a so-called ‘relationship’ has been cemented. And then we blame them. They are not to be blamed, the quality of your relationship is to be blamed. There is nothing in this relationship except hurt, and it is a blessing that there is some hurt in this. Bad, woeful, and terrible will be the day when this same relationship will stop hurting you, then your possibilities will be closed. Today at least there is something that is pinching you constantly, this may wake you up from your dream!
When a sleeping man is pricked and pinched, it may wake him up! Hurt is like that. A stage comes when with experience and time, you stop feeling hurt. You start thinking that it is normal. ‘Oh! My husband! Yes, it is normal.’ You don’t even feel hurt about the quality of the relationship. That is hell!
You know, hell and heaven are alike, in the sense that at none of these places do people really get hurt. You go to heaven and ask somebody, ‘Are you hurt?’, he will say, ‘No, not really.’ You go to hell and you ask somebody, ‘Are you hurt?’, he will say, ‘No, not at all.’ But there is a difference. In heaven, you will find people crying a lot. They would be hurt to the extent one can get hurt. But they will have something which cannot be hurt. Are you getting it?
In hell, nobody ever gets hurt. That is why it is hell. Hell is a very normal place, a well-adjusted and nicely compromised place. Like our regular homes. It’s all okay there. Do you think that hell consists of all these boiling cauldrons, ferocious animals, and slave drivers who are coming and hitting you all the time? No, not really.
Hell is a very regular and normal place, like our society, like our homes. Nobody gets hurt there. You won’t find anybody crying there. In hell, nobody says, ‘I am hurt’, because they have become numb, insensitive, and dead. That is Hell! In heaven, nobody is actually hurt, even though they might be crying. Do you get the difference?
Go to heaven and you will find all the colors there. Somebody says something to somebody and he takes that with some pinch. Somebody is feeling bad, somebody is cracking a joke, somebody has a headache, all these things are happening, but there is a solid core that cannot be touched or hurt. Hell? A deadness, which cannot be hurt.
In heaven, there is a core that cannot be hurt. In hell, there is a deadness that cannot be hurt. That is the difference between heaven and hell and that is also the commonality.
So, if you are hurt, you’re standing at a point from where you can move in two directions, either towards heaven or towards hell. If you let things continue as they are, slowly the hurt will disappear, slowly you will become one of the regulars. Getting it?
Or you can go right to the root of the hurt and you will find something far beyond hurt there. Just going to that root will build you up. You will have to be bold, you will have to face the facts, you cannot run away, you will have to talk. You will have to unearth all the rubbish, you will have to go to all the hidden rooms in the mind, look at the rubbish there, feel it and clear it. This act of boldness requires a lot of faith. Don’t shy away.
When you see that there is something wrong with your relationship, don’t sweep the fact under the carpet. Face it, confront it! Don’t just say that 'These things keep happening, let’s not give too much attention to them.' No! Let the other person sit across the table. Have a direct conversation.
I have said that repeatedly that the most important conversations are those that never happen. They are the ones that you deliberately avoid, and each one of us know which conversations we must not have, and we never have them because we know that the moment you open that topic, the relationship would crumble. If you start talking about it, there would be an explosion, the relationship would be torn apart. That is the strength of the relationship. So you just avoid talking about those things. We say, ‘Let’s just bypass it, let’s talk about other things. Let’s talk about things that are more agreeable. Let’s not face the facts squarely.’ But the more you do that, the more you are moving towards numbness, insensitivity, hell.
Be bold. Confront these demons. There is nothing so terrible that you cannot look it in the eye. There is nothing that you cannot talk about. So, if you are hurt, that’s the good news. You can now talk your way to heaven. (Laughingly) How do I reach heaven? By talking!
Talk and talk about the real issues. Don’t talk about the weather, the sandwich, and the pet dog. That is what we usually talk about with our loved ones. ‘How is the weather? How is your stomach? What was your sugar level today?’ Are these things to be talked of? Talk the real things! Don’t deal in, ‘How are you? I am nice’, this kind of stuff. All this is rubbish. Whom are we fooling?
