Acharya Prashant responds to a question about a relationship with a person who has "ten faces and ten masters" and has now left. The speaker begins by questioning the questioner's own existence, asking, "Where are you to love?" He points out that all the conversation is about the other person, but the questioner needs to first talk about themselves. To love, there must be someone to love. He recalls a quote from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" that struck him in his college days: "To say 'I love you,' one must first know the 'I'." The phrase "I love you" starts with "I," but the speaker asks the questioner, "Where is your 'I'?" The speaker explains that the entire conversation is about the "you" in the relationship, but the "you" comes much later. The alphabet of love begins with "I," not "A." He advises the questioner to first fix themselves. Once they are alright, the other person's ten faces will no longer be a problem, let alone a source of pain. The problem with the other's ten faces arises because the questioner also has ten faces. The speaker uses an analogy of a physical body with scattered positive and negative charges and magnets. When a similar body comes close, a coincidental attraction occurs between a positive and negative charge. This is what people call love. However, since everything in nature is in constant motion, these charges shift, and what was once attraction can turn into repulsion, causing the other person to leave. He further elaborates that we are all strange beings, like spheres with various forces. The person we are attracted to is often just a reflection of ourselves with a different gender; they are not a different entity, but a "Miss X" to our "Mr. X." The illusion is that we have found something new and unique, but it's just ourselves in another form. The pain from a past mistake persists because the person who made the mistake is still the same. The issue is not the memory of the past event, but that the person is still the same as they were ten years ago. If you are the same person you were ten years ago, you will repeat the same mistakes, perhaps with a different person who is fundamentally the same as the last one. The speaker concludes by describing the sign of a person who is truly progressing on the path of consciousness. Such a person looks back at their past and finds it unrelatable. They look at their old pictures, activities, and relationships and wonder, "Who is this person? What are they doing?" The identification with the past breaks. He advises that it's not about breaking old relationships but understanding that a person progressing in consciousness will find it impossible to maintain the same thoughts, behaviors, and patterns. The old self and its world become disconnected and irrelevant.
