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    Understanding The Institution Of Marriage By Jude Idada

    You need to understand the institution of marriage.
    It is about bringing a certain sanctity to the simple basic needs that every human being has.

    There are physical needs, there are psychological needs, there are economic needs and emotional needs, social needs, a variety of needs.
    To fulfill all these things we set up an institution called marriage where all these can be conducted in a sensible manner, otherwise, if we did it on the streets like every other creature, it will turn ugly for us and we will fill not good about it.
    So it is done to bring some sense of organization, some aesthetic, some stability because man and woman coming together naturally brought fresh life.
    Man compared to any other creature is the most helpless life, which needs the maximum amount of support.
    You could leave a puppy on the street, as long as it gets food, it grows up into a good dog, no problem.
    But not so with a human being, he doesn’t need just physical support, he needs a variety of support and above all a stable situation.
    Whether there should be marriage in society or not, one will debate when they are eighteen years old, because the physical body is asking for freedom at that age.
    At that time everybody questions things even marriage, they ask, is marriage really needed? Why can’t we just live, whichever way we want?
    But when you were three years of age, you valued a stable marriage immensely isn’t it so?
    Not so?
    Again when you become forty-five years old, or fifty years old, you’re a hundred percent for marriage, while between eighteen and thirty-five you were questioning the whole process.
    Because where the physical body is dominant, at that time if you give in to that, then it will question every institution.
    This is hormone fired freedom okay.
    Your intelligence has been hijacked by hormones.
    So you question the fundamentals of everything.
    I am not saying marriage is the thing.
    But do you have a better alternative?
    If you have a better alternative, then, damn the marriage.
    But you have not come up with a better alternative.
    Because a stable situation is a must for a child.
    Once you have a child it is a twenty-year project.
    Your whims and fancies will change.
    Your emotions will change.
    If that is what it is, and you don’t want the change, then don’t get into such situations.
    It is not compulsory for everybody to get married.
    It’s good young people and other people are thinking about whether to get married.
    I’m glad.
    It is not necessary for everybody.
    But if you get into it, and especially if you get into children you must understand that its a minimum twenty-year project!
    Whether you like it or you don’t like it.
    Otherwise, you shouldn’t get into the project of marriage and bringing children into the world.
    You don’t walk into a project, drop it halfway and walk away, isn’t it?
    It’s your choice but at least choose consciously.
    You don’t have to get married because everybody is getting married.
    Neither do you have to talk about marriage and divorce in the same breath, as if they come together.
    This is completely an American idea.
    You’re thinking of marriage and divorce together.
    Nobody thought of divorce in this country like a common looked forward to reality that you plan for during your plan for marriage until recently. Isn’t it?
    So divorces happen now because people are talking about it.
    If something truly went wrong between two people and they have to separate, that will inevitably happen anyway.
    You don’t have to plan it at the time of marriage.
    When you say, love.
    Your experience of love means, you feel a certain sweetness of emotions within yourself.
    Either by looking at this person or this person or this person.
    We don’t know who stimulates this in you.
    It doesn’t matter who helped you but essentially it happened within you isn’t it?
    It is wonderful that you are experiencing such sweetness of emotion, stimulated by somebody.
    You are using the other person as a key, to open up an experience within you essentially.
    I am asking you, why are you using a key when there is no lock, when there is no door, when there is no any kind of barrier?
    It is just that you are a push start machine.
    I am asking, would you like to upgrade your technology?
    That you are on self start if you wake up in the morning, you are all flowing with joy and love and exuberance, by yourself.
    You don’t need anybody to stimulate you.
    It is very important that you are a self-start machine.
    Otherwise, after some time, in marriage or a love relationship, you will try to extract happiness from the other person.
    That is when these love affairs become tedious and horrible.
    Because you are trying to extract happiness from the other person instead of from yourself.
    You are giving them the responsibility for your happiness instead of taking charge of it yourself.
    No, life should instead be like this.
    When it comes to joy.
    When it comes to love.
    When it comes to the exuberance of life.
    You must be the source of this happiness,
    There are two ways to enter into a relationship.
    One way is because you want to extract something from somebody.
    Another way is because you want to share something with somebody.
    These are two ways.
    If you are out to share, your life will be good.
    If you are out to extract, when they close the tap, it’s going to get terrible and nasty.
    You have seen people who thought that they were absolute lovers, how terrible it becomes for many of them. Not because there is anything wrong with them, simply because they started off on the wrong footing. Thinking the other person in the relationship is the source of their joy.
    No.
    Joy or misery the source is within you, yes or no?
    Where there are joy and misery, the source is within you.
    It is for you to decide.
    If you are a joyful human being, your partner will want to be with you.
    If you are a source of misery, they will endure you for some time.
    So the phrase ‘I love you’ for a whole lot of people, is like that popular phrase, open sesame.
    You want to get something.
    Maybe your needs are physical, psychological, emotional, financial, social or we don’t know what else.
    You have needs to fulfill.
    So you use this mantra ‘I love you’ and it works.
    Or half the time it works.
    I’m saying, it’s important, you know the joy of being loving because the sweetness of emotion is needed for you instead of giving that responsibility to someone else.
    If you want to take, really big steps in your life, if you do not have the sweetness of love in your heart, believe me, if you try to take big steps in the world particularly in India, you will end up frustrated.
    See, marriage is not, a commodity that you carry on your head.
    But many people carry it on their heads.
    It is just an arrangement.
    So that, socially there is some sense to the way you fulfill the needs that you have.
    A human being has needs, physical, psychological, emotional, financial, social, various kinds of needs.
    To fulfill these things in a dignified manner, we came up with something called marriage.
    So that it is fulfilled within a framework.
    Your desires don’t run wild and disturb everything in the society.
    Some kind of a framework, so that it can be conducted in a sensible manner.
    Now you have raised marriage to heaven because somebody told you that marriages are made in heaven.
    Only the unmarried ones think so.
    They are still naive.
    Married people know the truth.
    Now, spiritual process is about turning inward.
    Can I turn inward with somebody else?
    Marriage is an arrangement to fulfill certain aspects of your life not to embark on spiritual journies.
    Don’t complicate life and marriage by thinking we will walk together on the spiritual path.
    There is no such thing.
    Because the spiritual path is not the path that you take into the Villangeri mountains.
    That you want to walk together, even if you go to the Villangeri mountains, please don’t walk hand in hand, it has a narrow pathway and it’s not an appropriate way to walk in the forest.
    You can walk in the park, hand in hand.
    You can go shopping hand in hand.
    You can sit in a cinema hand in hand.
    But you can’t turn inward hand in hand.
    Someone who is married is someone who has made an official arrangement for their needs in life.
    A formal arrangement for the simple needs a human being has.
    Which are biological, which are psychological, which are social, many things.
    So these arrangements that you have made, conduct them gracefully, so there will be time and space for you to turn around for the inward journey of spiritual growth.
    If you pay excess attention to these arrangements of marriage, then turning inward will not be possible.
    It does not mean that if you are alone you will do it.
    If you are alone you may be always looking out.
    You will spend your entire time and life looking out for somebody.
    That will also not help.
    If you think, your desires, your longings, and your needs can be well handled by the arrangement of marriage, don’t try to raise it to heaven, it doesn’t happen in heaven believe me.
    And if heaven is making you make so many mistakes in your marriage, since you say everything that happens is because of heaven, then you have to seriously reconsider many things.
    In India, we don’t blame our mistakes in marriage or relationships on the heavens, because we do our own calculations, and make all the arrangements.
    Marriage is about two people.
    If they are sensible they can manage it.
    Nobody else can match these two people.
    Or make their relationship really work.
    Priests have tried.
    gods have tried.
    Ghosts and goblins have tried.
    It’s not worked, and not worked, and not worked.
    Two sensible people can manage to make their marriage or relationship work if both of them understand the limitations of the arrangements and the possibilities of the arrangement.
    They can conduct it sensibly.
    If you try to raise a marriage or relationship to heaven, you will see that it will for sure crash.
    Because your marriage or relationship has nothing to do with your spiritual process.
    Your spiritual process is an inward journey.
    That involves only you.
    While your marriage is for two people being sensible and practicable.
    And those who do not want to marry have chosen to walk alone as you do in the spiritual process, knowing that somehow they can meet all their needs without the arrangement of marriage.
    But then to walk alone, people falter.
    Actually, this question was asked to Gautama the Buddha.
    “Is it better to walk alone or in company?”
    Gautama looked and said,
    “It is better to walk alone than to walk with a fool.”
    (I have transcribed and paraphrased this from a talk given by Jaggi Vasudev, known publicly as Sadhguru, an Indian yogi and author, who was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award, by the Government of India for his services in the field of social services.)
    Lagos
    Jude Idada
    July 19, 2020

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