Relationship is not possible where there is greed, ambition and hope

Relationship is not possible where there is greed, ambition and hope. Love comes only when the mind is quiet…If you have no love, you cannot resolve any social problem. You can go into politics, exhibit faith, try to reform the poor, write books or poems, but you are a dead human being.

Life is a movement in relationship. Relationship is not possible where there is self-seeking. Self-seeking includes fear, greed, envy, jealousy, ambition, despair and hope. Using another person as the means for your own happiness creates conflict and confusion. An image of someone – thoughts, experiences, hope – is not relationship. Only the person who understands the whole structure and process of society, and is freeing himself from it, has character, and he alone can flower in goodness.

If you have no love, you cannot resolve any social problem. You can go into politics, exhibit faith, try to reform the poor, write books or poems, but you are a dead human being. Any form of compulsion, however subtle, does not bring beauty or compassion. There must be freedom, freedom from compulsion. Love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centered. This is communion.

When the means of my happiness is a living person, then the conflict and confusion, the antagonism and pain are far greater. If relationship is based on mere usage, is there any relationship, except the most superficial, between the user and the used? If I use you for my happiness, am I really related to you? Relationship implies communion with another on different levels; and is there communion with another when he is only a tool, a means of my happiness? In thus using another, am I not really seeking self-isolation, in which I think I shall by happy? This self-isolation I call relationship; but actually there is no communion in this process. Communion can exist only where there is no fear; and there is gnawing fear and pain where there is usage and so dependence. As nothing can live in isolation, the attempts of the mind to isolate itself lead to its own frustration and misery.

See yourself as others. We are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Do not steal, exploit, or cause suffering

"I will not deceive, or cause to be deceived, any human being for my gain or pleasure; nor hurt, or cause to be hurt, any human being for my gain or pleasure; nor rob, or cause to be robbed, any human being for my gain or pleasure." John Ruskin


'How am I to act, supposing my own brother was lynched before my very eyes?' 'I must not wish ill to these, but neither must I cooperate with them. It may be that ordinarily I depend on the lynching community for my livelihood. I refuse to cooperate with them, refuse even to touch the food that comes from them, and I refuse to cooperate with even my brother Negroes who tolerate the wrong."
Mohandas Gandhi

“If I take anything that I do not need for my own immediate use and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else....You and I have no right to anything that we really have until these many millions are clothed and fed..”
Gandhi, The Gandhi Reader, 140-141, ‘The vow of non-thieving.’ “I suggest that we are thieves in a way. If I take anything that I do not need for my own immediate use and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else....I do not want to dispossess anybody; I should then be departing from the rule of Non-Violence. If somebody else possesses more than I do, let him. But so far as my own life has to be regulated I dare not possess anything which I do not want....You and I have no right to anything that we really have until these many millions are clothed and fed.”
Mohandas Gandhi. ‘The vow of non-thieving.’

“Possess nothing that should belong to others. Respect the property of others but prevent others from enriching themselves from human suffering or the suffering of other beings.” (Precept 13) See Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, Fourteen precepts of the order of Interbeing.

Try to find out how you agree with others

“Whenever in any religious faith, dark or bright, we allow our minds to dwell upon the points in which we differ from other people, we are wrong, and in the devil’s power…At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ from other people, but in what we agree with them; and the moment we find we can agree as to anything that should be done, kind or good, (and who but fools couldn’t?) then do it; push at it together: you can’t quarrel in a side-by-side push; but the moment that even the best men stop pushing, and begin talking, they mistake their pugnacity for piety, and it’s all over.” The Genius of John Ruskin, The mystery of life and its arts, 354

Look for the spirit of unity and likeness of God

The psychological aspect of love, its passion and emotion, is but an aspect of an ontological situation. When man loves man he enters a union which is more than an addition, more than one plus one. To love is to attach oneself to the spirit of unity, to rise to a new level, to enter a new dimension, a spiritual dimension. For, as we have seen, whatever man does to man, he also does to God.


“The awe that we sense or ought to sense when standing in the presence of a human being is a moment of intuition for the likeness of God which is concealed in his essence. Not only man; even inanimate things stand in a relation to the Creator. The secret of every being is the divine care and concern that are invested in it. Something sacred is at stake in every event.”
“There can be as sublime a holiness in performing friendship, in observing dietary laws day by day, as in uttering a prayer on the Day of Atonement. It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness.” 384
“What we strive for are not single moments of self-denial but sober constant affirmation of other selves, the ability to feel the needs and problems of our fellow men. Never call such an attitude self-effacing or being spiteful to the soul…The self may be turned into a friend of the spirit if one is capable of developing a persistent perception of the non-self, of the anxiety and dignity of fellow beings.” 399
God In Search of Man

“The good is an ontological fact. Love, for example, is more than cooperation, more than feeling and acting together. Love is being together, a mode of existence, not only a state of the soul. The psychological aspect of love, its passion and emotion, is but an aspect of an ontological situation. When man loves man he enters a union which is more than an addition, more than one plus one. To love is to attach oneself to the spirit of unity, to rise to a new level, to enter a new dimension, a spiritual dimension. For, as we have seen, whatever man does to man, he also does to God.”
“Where man meets the world, not with the tools he has made but with the soul with which he was born; not like a hunter who seeks his prey but like a lover to reciprocate love; where man and matter meet as equals before the mystery, both made, maintained and destined to pass away, it is not an object, a thing that is given to his sense, but a state of fellowship that embraces him and all things...We become alive to our living in the great fellowship of all beings, we cease to regard things as opportunities to exploit.”
Man is Not Alone

"I woke early embracing the love of the few who stirred, I felt sorrow in the knowledge I would soon leave this beautiful village family. I say village family because all the elders treat all the children just as their own. As well, all the children respect and love all the elders considering each as a parent. The result of this is confusing at first when you hear one man speaking to twenty or so children calling each one my son or my daughter. Conversely each child would refer to each elder as father or mother making it appear like one child has many fathers. In fact this is the essence of their demeanor, they truly are a family of 200. Imagine, if all people around the world treated their neighbor as a sibling or a parent! How easy it would be to find love replacing the corporate fear paradigm."
Ram Dass

Discuss the possibility of good, true, love and beauty

"The beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and to cherish – and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature."


"Such men have much more to share with each other and a stronger friendship than that which comes from rearing children, since they share in the rearing of children who are more beautiful and more immortal." Symposium
“And beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature." Symposium
talk of virtue to such a listener, and to discuss what human goodness is and how the virtuous should live – in short, to undertake the other’s education.
this vision of the very soul of beauty.
"After turning toward the great sea of beauty, he studies it and gives birth to many splendidly beautiful conversations and thoughts in a magnanimous philosophy, until, as he becomes more capable and flourishes in this situation, he comes to see a knowledge of a singular sort that is of this kind of beauty."
Symposium

'The true object of a noble life can only be attained by passionate friends, bound together in the chains of close yet temperate comradeship, seeking always to advance in knowledge, self-restraint, and intellectual illumination.'
"Fate which has ordained that there shall be no friendship among the evil has also ordained that there shall ever be friendship among the good. And when he has received him into communion and intimacy, then the beloved is amazed at the goodwill of the lover; he recognizes that the inspired friend is worth all other friendships or kinships, which have nothing of friendship in them in comparison."
"And so, if the victory be won by the higher elements of mind guiding them into the ordered rule of the philosophical life, their days on earth will be blessed with happiness and concord, for the power of evil in the soul has been subjected, and the power of goodness liberated; they have won self-mastery and inward peace."
Phaedrus

Apprehend and affirm others as a whole

“You is more than It knows. You does more, and more happens to it, than It knows. No deception reaches this far: here is the cradle of actual life.”
“I do not find the human being to whom I say You in any Sometime and Somewhere. I can place him there and have to do this again and again, but immediately he becomes as He or a She, an It, and no longer remains my You.”
“The You encounters me by grace – it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, it is my essential deed. The You encounters me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it....I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter.”