Understanding of IB Education

In our life, we learn many things. We go to schools and colleges, we learn music, art, sports, and cooking, but no one teaches us about how to utilize our mind. How to, let us say – what should we do, when we have problems with anxiety, anger, have a fight, or suffer from a depression? We all take training to be a doctor, a teacher, a professor or a businessman, but do we take training to become a husband or a wife, or a parent for that matter? Is this training necessary? May be, may be not? World’s top human mind and relationship experts have been however, retrospectively realizing that it indeed is necessary. Just as you would do an MBA, before you venture out, let us say in to the world of Corporate Management?

We need to be aware of this most amazing computer thing called human mind. The complexity and difficulty, of the human mind, make humans distinct from animals and other species?

The more advanced we are, the more complex is our relationships. Animals have no problem with their relationships, neither do they go for any counseling, nor did the early civilizations like our tribal?

The Urge To Connect
There is an urge for every human being to connect. This urge sets us out to look for relationship. Once you have a relationship, you want it to last forever. When you say, or hear from someone, “I love you very much”, the typical response is, and “Will you love me forever?” We like our love to last for `all time’. Also we would like to know and feel, that our relationship is connected from the past. Often people say, “I’m sure we have a connection from the past, may be you are my soul mate”. This very tendency in our relationship indicates something deeper. That the relationship comes from, not just some mental level but from some unknown corner that we are yet to fathom.

When things are nice and fine, you think your relationship has always been that way, you have always been in love. When things start to go wrong, even after many years, you change your thought process and think you must have been mistaken, and you never were together in your past life. Just look at this. If our relationship is based on a personal need, it is not going to last very long. Once the need is fulfilled, on a physical or mental level, the mind looks for someone else, somewhere else. If, on the other hand, the relationship comes from `sharing & giving’, and then it can last very long.

“If you know how to row a boat, you can row any boat?”
If you, on the other hand, you do not know how to row a boat, will changing the boat help?    Often we think, “Oh, I am single, I am so bored being by myself, I need a companion, I need a relationship.” If we are so boring with our own self, how boring will we be for some one else? Two people bored with themselves, get together and bore each other. Love and boredom have something in common. Repetition. We have to look somewhere deep within us from where we start relating. First of al what is our relationship to ourselves. Who are you to yourself? Once you are connected with yourself, the ‘boredom’ vanishes and comes from within a sense of peace and connectedness. This connectedness is with you and with everyone – happiness shines beyond all boundaries – you’re bubbling, with cheerfulness and there is a smile on your face, all the time – You see God in everyone.

When we go on and realize that we are the source of the love, we are then the giving end and not the receiving end, only then can our relationship blossom. Parents care several times more for their own children than for their own parents. Because their attention, their love has shifted from `what is in it for me’ to `what can I give to my child’? Their attention has shifted from their parent to their children. A similar shift often happens in the relationship between husband and wife when a child comes. This may, temporarily, be an answer. In the long run, for a relationship to last, you need to come from the area where you could say, how could I make my partner more happy?

When we seek security, love and comfort from our partner, we become weak, we are on the receiving end. When we are weak, and then all the negative emotions come up within us, demands come up in us. Demands destroy love. If we only know this one thing, we could save our love from getting rotten. The common expression is, “I fell in love.” I think we need to think, and not —— “Fall in love, but rise in love.” Having a limited awareness of ourselves and a limited experience of love encapsulates us in a tiny, tight compartment where we start suffocating. We want freedom in life. With “Love, if there is no depth, can be very suffocating”? In love we want to merge with each other, we cannot bear the separateness. That is why lovers often want to know everything about the one whom they love. Because ‘a secret’ in between, means distance, and love cannot tolerate distance.

When the charm comes from one’s own depth, the very core of one’s own being, then the mind is totally in the present moment and has a broad wide angled lens, instead of singly focused telephoto lens. Then every moment of our life is full of charm; everything is beautiful in this world around us. And then one never gets bored with oneself. You want to share everything, with every one and especially with the one, in whom you find, your God / Goddess.

This is the ultimate relationship, when you can relate to yourself one hundred percent. Then you come from the space of contributing. “What else can I do for you? How can I make your life better? If each partner comes from this space “What can I do for you? Then only ‘the relationship’ becomes the ultimate relationship between two people.

First we need to meet our soul before we try to create a soul mate in someone else. If you are not connected with your soul, you do not know who your soul is. Then how would you know, how does your soul mate look like? And often, you find it a matter of convenience and call your partner, a soul mate, to find soon enough, a huge chasm, of only emptiness and separateness. Lying down in the same bed, and yet you are miles apart from each other. This is a mistake.

When we see who we are, we see that we are not our emotions, or our feelings, nor our thoughts. We are not our concepts either. Then who are we? This very inquiry creates an awakening within us and takes away the shackles of our expectations in every relationship – “That the other person should change”. We never think of how we should change. If we change first, then we create an atmosphere that brings change in the other person automatically, whoever they may be!!

The ultimate relationship is beyond time, because we are timeless. Time and mind are synonymous. Time is nothing but a distance between two events, two happenings. Love is not happening, it is `being’. Love is not an act, it is our existence, and it is `being’. Love is not emotion, it is our very own nature. If there is one thing you can begin today which will start your relationship soaring, then that is coming from the space of contributing, from the space of giving. Giving what?Giving everything – giving time, attention, giving help, giving money, giving patience, giving —— ‘whatever’?

The divinity is within you. The divinity is within your partner. You are the gift. Do not be happy with only the wrapper. Open the wrapper, look deep within and you will find this wonderful love within and in your partner. Seeing love within and then in your partner is “The ultimate relationship”. And then your partner is not just another man or a woman, a husband or a wife?

Then this ultimate relationship could be with every one around you – Your friends – Your brothers – Your sisters – Your colleagues – Your parents – Your juniors – Your seniors and specially those who come to you, with an open palm; who needs you to uplift them, with your smile, kindness, love and company.