Questioner: Living in a family, we have to deal with our loved ones’ ideas and opinions about our life. How do we handle that?
Sadhguru: These are not your loved ones. These are your extra limbs. You are not able to stand on two legs, so you need four or eight or twelve, I don’t know how many. These are extra limbs. And, when limbs are not well co-ordinated, they tangle up, you know.
Emotional connectedness just brings dependency
There are four or five brains, four or five power centres in the home. And for it to be well coordinated, certain things have to be done. One way of doing it is with an enormous level of connectedness – not emotional. Emotional connectedness just brings dependency. Emotion is something to be enjoyed, it is the juice of life. You don’t make your emotions work, you should not make them work. You can make your thought work, you can make your body work. Don’t try to make your emotions work. Whenever you try to make your emotions work for you, your situations turn nasty, isn’t it? Yes or no?
Initially ‘I love you’ works. After some time, you’re trying to make emotions work for you. The harder you try to make it work, the nastier your life gets. Because emotion is not for work, emotion is just to sweeten your life. Your thought and your body should work – emotions just there. It’s like a flower that you wear in you hair. Nobody wears anymore! You don’t make these flowers [pointing to a flower kept for decoration in a vase] work. The microphone works. Something else works. The flowers need not work, they’re just there. That’s all. Emotion is like that, it’s just there – pleasant and wonderful. If you try to make it work, if you try to extract some life from around you with your emotions, it is bound to turn ugly.
So, if you don’t have a working brain, if you are not capable of thought, then you try to use your emotion to make it work. And, it may work sometimes, that’s the whole problem. It works initially, and then you try to push it further, then your life turns so nasty, so horribly nasty…
The nastiest situations happen not among enemies, but among the so called loved ones
Amongst people who are supposed to care for each other – the nastiest situations happen not among enemies, but among the so called loved ones. You agree with me, or no? Am I being too harsh on you? Yes or no? So, people have their opinions. If you love somebody, you should have no opinion – that’s what love means. Love means you are willing to nurture another life, without forming opinions – that’s what love means. We have loved ones, we have strong opinions each other – no, that means you are trying to fix life.
An opinion is a way of fixing a person into a straight jacket. Love means nurturing a person into a new possibility. These two things can not go together. No way, they can be together. You make some judgements for the moment, to nurture it better. You’re rearing children at home, you have to make some judgements, where the child is right now. To rear them to the next possibility, not form an opinion on him. The moment you form an opinion, you have no interest in nurturing that life into a new possibility. You only want to fix it in a shell of your opinion. And you will be disappointed, if he doesn’t go by your opinions. No – that’s not the way it works.
An opinion is a way of fixing a person into a straight jacket. Love means nurturing a person into a new possibility
If you want to live closely with people, it should be a relationship of nurture, not opinionated. It will not work like that – fundamental mechanics are wrong, so how will it work? By accident, because of the newness of the situation, because it’s honeymoon time – it may work for some time. But after that, it will not work. So, if truly it’s a loving relationship – there should be no opinions. There should be only nurture.
