It is possible to relate without having the need to relate. It is possible to have a totally purposeless, aimless, useless relationship. Of course, we are trained in usefulness, we pride ourselves on deriving uses out of even seemingly useless things. No? That is what we call as innovation. That we also call as human creativity. “You see, this was just sand and we made a nuclear bomb out of it. Look at our creativity.”
This summary is AI-generated. Please read the full article for complete understanding.
Speaker: The topic today reads: The secret of Joyful Relationships.
I am reminded that I recently saw a limping man using a branch of a tree as walking stick and that was not very distant from a place where kids were using similar branches as hockey sticks. And who knows, at the same hour, at some other place, people might be attacking each other using weapons made of strong branches. Teachers often give this assignment to their students – a simple object would be named, such as a paper weight, a slipper, an empty bag; and the students, the kids, would be asked to enlist twenty-five different kinds of uses for that thing. I suppose as kids, probably all of us would have done a similar exercise. It’s quite entertaining. Same object, the same thing, outside of me, is looked at by me so variously and so differently. For the old man, it’s a walking stick. For the fighter, it’s a weapon.
My relationship with the world depends on what I think of myself. In the case of the old man, or the man with an infirmity or the kid – their position or situation, at least, has a factual basis. But in most situations in life, our position hardly has a purely factual basis. When I say, “Who am I?” Rarely does it correspond to a fact. It corresponds, rather, to my conception of myself – How I look at the world, how I look at the people in the world, how I look at the universe around and all the objects there in, will depend upon how I conceive myself, what I think of myself. Just as I said that we hardly are objective realities, similarly, the world that appears to our senses is hardly an objective reality.
