Relationships and renunciation

It started with a man I saw lifting his hand to intimidate a school girl outside the school where I go to drop my girl. This enraged me and I could not resist intervening. But wonder of wonders, before I could get going, my wife who fears for my well being and is afraid that one of these days I shall get beaten up butted in and started shouted at me to shut up and mind my own business. This certainly gave the man enough support to put up a show of indignation and show some more of his violent side. Not only that, others around rallied to cool me down and indirectly ended up giving even more moral support to the perpetrator of the action. Well, this shows how well we feel towards children who cannot fight back both due to their size and the overwhelming authority adults have; and our sense of psychology of the situation and values.

But things went further. My wife was more than just vexed and showed it. She called me psychologically unhinged and rued the day she hitched her star to mine and so on so forth. This was not simply getting annoyed and angry. I felt there was something else behind it. Again for the umpteenth time I noticed that this became an excuse for my wife to assert her independence as an individual and separate entity.

This will require some preamble explaining as to what I am getting to. I have had this thought floating for many years that though we want closeness, hunt for affectionate relationships and love affairs yet do not really ever open the doors to our whole selves. My education in an ashram made me sensitive to this issue early on but I have begun to understand it only lately after marriage and having to live with my mother after my father’s death.

I recognize this fact because I could sense it in me. So I made it a point to study myself and others more closely. It is obvious that what we consider to be our ‘self’ is a very egocentric persona and not very stable at that. Every time closeness would develop in a relationship I would get a funny, not-so-comfortable apprehension that by merging my self in the relationship I would lose my entity as a person. It was like an undercurrent of unexplained discomfort and I would then do some thing stupid that would ensure that the relationship did not cross a fine point and most often would then fade away.

This experience is explained in many philosophical and meditative techniques. Just imagine letting ourselves go and becoming one with the universe; will our ‘self’ still exist? But it is a fact that when we let our selfish selves go we do feel a release and a friendlier atmosphere builds up around us. But this is not an easy thing to experience or bring into being by mere thinking and wanting. A certain amount of self-transformation is required. Even people who go for it consciously through meditative and yoga techniques tend to falter at the crucial moment. So if my wife gets scared whenever a “closeness” begins to develop, I am not surprised. This is a very unconscious happening. Few would agree to it and would never admit to going through it. But the subconscious has many tricks hidden at its core. The newer generation is showing it more openly; laced with gadgetry they feel secure in their aloneness, even a bit superior, fully confident that they can manage perfectly by their lone selves as if enclosed in a block of ice.

I have seen this happening mainly with mentally advanced, city bred people, especially if they have the good luck to have succeeded by the material world’s standards and their egos have had the pleasure of getting inordinately inflated. These people are difficult at the best of times but transform into veritable hissing anacondas if crossed. Every little irritation is magnified into a show of opposition as if attacked then logically merits an exemplary retort and retaliation. In this mood every word uttered or gesture is calculated to cause grievous hurt. Often pots and pans fly.

I have seen that whenever they feel that they have been wronged and this happens ever so often, scorned women will bring out the “cat-o-nine-tails” and thrash you nice and proper. It is a good exercise to make you grovel and remind you of your place in the equation. You can forget peace, quiet and affectionate hugs. It is a grace that they don’t run away with another man there and then. When my wife is in this mood, all I wish to do is pick up my ‘kamandal’ and run for a cave in the hills and embrace monkhood. Had it not been for my daughter, I would have even done it in a fit of pique.