I was talking to Ashok tonight about the kind of fragility we see in relationships today, all the doubt,the negativity, pain and generally low energy states that we have we almsot sleep walk. He said something that I felt was very insightful, "If things are not working out because of confusion, it just means that we haven't done our homework".

The first thought that passed through my head was what does he mean when he said homework in relationships before the "aaha" hit me. This is precisely what I had posted here a few days ago, that relationships especially one that can be vitally tranformative as marriage will be exciting only if the aspirations of both the people are clear and they have mapped it out for themselves. We went on to talk about how one might try to do this homework and we agreed that what should happen and what we should strive to change is our identification with the ego.

He asked me, "Did you have this person in your subconcious, when you did a certain action in the course of your day? For example you go to the store and buy a shirt. Was this person in you, when you did that?" "Wohaa, wait a minute', I said, "you are saying that one should try to conciously check if this action or this identification is with I or with us?" He said, "Certainly because if in the end you want to be US rather than I!" As I sit here and I write this I can see how such an attitude can be tranformative and change the dimension of the whole relationship. What if the point of referral is no longer I and us? Wasn't this what we claim love is all the while clinging, of course unknowingly, through our acts to this sense of identification with this is mine and that is yours.

Going back to my own experience I can see how such breaking down of ego identification helped between me and my bosom buddy. At a ceratin point of time, we decided not to bother about money i.e. decided to make money a non issue between both of us. If either of us had money, it didn't matter whose it was, although when I think about it, this just happened naturally. The end result: we had one less thing to worry about, one thing crossed out from our mental processing lists. A usual mental process, "Oh wait I paid for the dinner twice already, this guy should pay now." If he doesn't,I get distrubed,keep score, increase my mental garbage and thus have less space to manifest positive things between both of us. I think neither of us can really remember who paid for what and who borrowed how much. And both of us agree that was a good thing.

In contrast with this relationship, in other relationships I was in, somehow for a very strange reason money, even though it wasn't a full blown issue, was identified with the ego, my money and your money. Though this seperation really didn't cause conflict in me, I wouldn't know if it did in my counterpart, I think it was another area in life where there was no merging, no symbiosis.

This example I wrote about is just one illustrative example and what Ashok said was true, as long as we tend to identify with "I" rather than us, relationships wouldn't deepen. So as I end this note, I pray that when all of us dance. we be granted wisdom so that we aspire to become the whirling, that perfect circle of one rather than staying as two akward bodies. Two bodies that keep trying to push or pull and thus keep fumbling and falling down.

Thank you Ashok.

Much love and joy. Sashi