If you really value your friendship; you should understand that money is only changing hands and you’re not losing it. Your friend will earn more and hence he may benefit more. If your money is benefitting your friend; what is the problem in it; if you really value this friendship more than money? As you can understand; money is indeed more important for you than your friend because when it comes to choose between who will have this amount of Rs. 1000 per month; which is the amount of discount or no discount in question; you choose yourself instead of choosing your friend. It means you’re putting price tags to your friendship and you choose to keep it only up to a price that you may have to pay for it.
Hence money is more important for you and it is your primary objective. You’re only interested in friendship as a secondary objective and it is not your primary objective. As soon as love or friendship fails to be your primary objective; it becomes trade. Though this trade may be of the worst quality which means you don’t care at all for the other person or it may be of very good quality which means you make adjustments or you suffer losses up to a point; it still is trade. As soon as you reach the point which has been defined by you as the boundary for adjustments, compromises or losses; you choose to disengage from such love or friendship.
This is what makes it trade because your interest is still primary for you and the interest of the other person is secondary. As a general rule; as long as your interest remains primary for you; it is anything but pure love you’re dealing with. Since your interest is represented and even created by your ego; the presence of ego means corruption in love. As already explained in an earlier part of this book; higher ego means more corruption which further means more focus on you.
For instance, in the present example; valuing Rs. 10 more than your friendship means you have high ego which doesn’t want to lose anything at all, even for the ones you care for or you think you care for. Valuing your friendship more than Rs. 10 but less than Rs. 1000 means you have reasonable amount of ego but not very high ego since you’re willing to go some distance for your friendship. Similarly; valuing your friendship more than Rs. 1000 but less than Rs. 10,000 means you have an even smaller ego since you’re willing to go even longer in order to save your friendship.
It means that the person who can suffer a loss of more than Rs. 1000 but less than Rs. 10,000 in this case; is a more evolved person and hence his chances of witnessing pure love or friendship are the highest in the near future; among all these people. The person who can suffer a loss of more than Rs. 10 but less than Rs. 1000 lies in between and he has more distance to cover; before he may witness pure love. The third person who can’t afford to lose even Rs. 10 is the least evolved and accordingly; a thing called pure love or even a thing called love is merely a dream for him at this stage; whether or not he knows it consciously.
Looking at this equation from your friend’s angle; all these rules apply to him also. It means if he gets angry with you for Rs. 10, Rs. 1000 or for Rs. 10,000 respectively; he also values money more than friendship or more than you. If he gets upset with you for Rs. 10, he’s the least developed one; if he doesn’t bother when you purchase from the other shop and he suffers a loss of Rs. 10 but he gets upset when this amount jumps to Rs. 1000; he is a relatively evolved person.
Similarly; if he doesn’t bother when you purchase from the other shop and he suffers a loss of Rs. 1000 but he gets upset when this amount jumps to Rs. 10,000; he is an even more evolved person. As already mentioned many times; the journey of each soul is very long and it has to cross a great number of points before reaching its destination, which is the highest stage of spiritual evolution.
Coming back to the second type of love; you’re in love with your wife’s personality and you’re not in love with her true self, which lies even deeper within her. Since her true self always remains the same; you simply won’t have the need to stop loving her if you love her true self. This is because you’ll always find the same thing there and hence there’ll be no disappointments like in case of physical love or love for her personality. As her physical beauty fades away or as her personality changes to the extent which you may not tolerate, your love may go away.
How much adjustment you can make or how much you can tolerate is dependent on how much she’s done for you as well as on your overall spiritual growth. If you’re a less grown person, you may move away at the earliest. If you’re a relatively grown person, you may give her time to change herself back and if you’re an even more grown person; you may tolerate her even longer. It’s like you choose to suffer a loss of Rs. 10, Rs. 1000 or Rs. 10,000 for your friend; depending on the level of your spiritual evolution.
Hence, even if you tolerate certain very bad habits of your wife for 5 or even for 10 years before choosing to break this marriage; your love is still not pure and there is a percentage of trade or corruption in it, though it is certainly purer than that of the first two people of this type. It means you’re better than the person who leaves his wife within 1 year of seeing unwanted changes in her personality, and you’re also better than the person who does the same in 2 to 3 years. However, even your love is not pure though you have the best chances among all these cases; to witness pure love in future.
It means though all of you are engaging in trade in the name of love; you’ve reached closest to love among all these people and hence your chances of reaching pure love are the maximum. This is how we evolve. It’s not that you can either have 100% pure love or 100 pure trade; which means you can have either 100% conscience or 100% ego. It is that you can have a number of different combinations of these two; between 0% and 100%. Hence whichever combination of pure love and trade or corruption you have at this time; it can certainly be changed in any direction; with your own efforts. It means you can choose to grow more love or conscience; and you can choose to grow more corruption or ego.
It is interesting that even a perfect looking couple of the second type may be making a number of compromises for each other, even when they don’t want to. Accordingly, things may look perfect on the surface but a lot of disturbance may keep happening at the bottom of this relationship. For instance, the wife may not like her husband’s parents as they may not be good people and they may trouble her from time to time on account of various reasons. However, she may still keep respecting them on the outside though she may absolutely dislike or even hate them deep down. She’s respecting them because she knows her husband does a lot for her; he loves his parents and hence she has to make this adjustment or compromise.
You see, a trade is in place where the wife is making adjustments as she knows that a negative change in her visible behavior towards her in-laws may give birth to a negative change in her husband’s behavior towards her. As her husband’s behavior changes; she may have to face problems. Hence this practice is being carried out so that she may keep benefiting in the same way, and problems may not appear for her. It should be noted that when a wife engages in purer love; she may do one of the following two things in such case.
She may either refuse to respect her in-laws and she may tell her husband that they must deserve respect as otherwise; she can’t pretend to respect them when she hates them in reality. As a second option; she may keep respecting them despite what they do to her; and this time; this respect is not generated due to a fear of facing problems; but it is generated purely because of love. It means that the wife in this case feels that disrespecting her in-laws will hurt her husband and that’s it. She may not go beyond this and she may keep respecting her in-laws as she purely loves her husband and she simply doesn’t want to do anything which hurts him.
This difference should be understood properly as this is an important distinction between the love of the second type and the love of the third type. In the first case, the wife keeps respecting her in-laws primarily because of fear of facing problems through her husband. Hence, she’s putting her before her husband, and this respect is happening because she wants to avoid problems or she wants to keep benefitting. This is an act of ego as the moment your benefit becomes primary and that of your lover becomes secondary; the moment you start fearing that your loved one may trouble you and you don’t want to be troubled even by him; love goes away and ego or trade comes in.
However in the second case; the wife keeps respecting her in-laws not because she may suffer otherwise; but because her husband may suffer. The husband may suffer in the first case also but all she cares about is his reaction when he suffers, which means he may take his anger out on her; and she doesn’t care about what he may go through. However in the second case, she doesn’t even think about what her husband may do to her if he gets upset; and she gets stuck at the point where her husband suffers in her imagination; if she chooses to disrespect her in-laws.
It should be noted that in both these cases; she may already calculate the consequences of this action of hers; before she actually engages in the act of disrespecting her in-laws for the first time. Though these calculations may not be done consciously; they’re always done subconsciously in all the cases; as you simply can’t deal with an already existing situation without interference or guidance from your subconscious mind since it knows each and everything about this situation or equation; much better than your conscious mind.
Hence you can choose to disrespect a random old man if he does something bad to you; without much involvement from your subconscious mind since it has no record of any equation that you may have with this old man. Accordingly, your conscious mind may do most of the job since you’re dealing with this old man for the first time, though certain standard guidelines may still be forwarded by your subconscious mind; related to situations like this; based on experiences from the past. However, when it comes to your in-laws; things are a lot different and most of the decisions may be made by your subconscious mind since this equation is a very big equation and a number of variables are already there for many years.
Hence whether it is the first case or the second case, the subconscious mind of wife may do all the calculations well in advance and it may reach the point of conclusion; through those calculations. However, the point of conclusion may differ in both these cases and this is what changes everything on the inside though things may look the same on the outside. It means though the outward expression is respect for the in-laws in both the cases; the inward expressions or conclusions are different.