............... From Fantasies (About Your Mate) to Being Blissful
The muladhara chakra is concerned with sex, fantasy and imagination.
What is sex? It s a tremendous creative energy. The whole world has arisen out of the sex energy.
Most people are confused about their desires and fantasies and that is why they are not happy wherever they are. When you sit on the floor on a mat, you are not happy because you are thinking of a chair. When you get to a chair, you are thinking of a throne. When you get to the throne, you lose the capacity to enjoy it!
We do the same thing with our mate. We are not happy with ourselves and so we decide to try to change our mate to suit our fantasies, thinking that will make us happy. We collect images mostly from the media and try to relate to that image. We need to understand that no living person can live up to the image we carry in our minds simply because the image is not built from reality! The image is a cut-and-paste from various quarters of our dream world! No image can be matched with reality because at the end of the day, it is only an image, a fantasy! It is alright if you collect your images from real life characters, from the people you see around you. But you collect from the media.
As long as we float and flirt in love, as long as we keep our distance and keep our time short with the other person, we are fine, we remain in a fantasy world, we are not at the functional level. It is only when the floating stops and the real relationship starts, when the distances reduce and time increases, that the problem starts!
The more fantasies you collect, the more your falling time is before you hit the ground in a relationship and so the more the damage. The fewer fantasies you collect, the fewer the number of things there are to compare with and the less trouble you will have. If you don't have any fantasy or imagination, you will immediately meet your soulmate. If you don't have fantasies, anyone you marry will become your soulmate.
In Vedic marriages, there is a beautiful verse which the priests have the couple recite. The wife tells the husband, 'Let you be my eleventh son,' and the husband tells the wife, 'Let you be my eleventh daughter.' It means, in the eleventh year of marriage, they will look upon each other as a son or a daughter; the relationship would have undergone that much of a transformation by then.
Daily Awareness Practices
From now on, try to watch with awareness, the play of your mind in whatever you see. Try to see how your mind plays in every scene that you see and distorts it with fantasy. Try to catch the scenes as they are before your mind steps in and passes judgment on them. You will then see how subtly and seamlessly your mind plays in whatever you see, causing you to believe that there is always something wrong with what you see. When you do this, you will see how much of reality you are missing. Once you are aware of this, you will start seeing things as they are and appreciating the genuineness in things. Once this happens, the same world will look more beautiful than ever before.
Write down your ideas on how a perfect husband, a perfect wife, a perfect father, a perfect mother, a perfect child and a perfect friend should be. Choose any five relationships relevant to yourself, and note this. Do it honestly. Then read objectively what you have written down. You will find, deep down in your unconscious, pretty much all your ideas are drawn from popular media. Once this hits you, you can consciously catch the moments when media figures enter your unconscious. Once you become aware of the impact the unconscious has on you, you will stop registering such kind of information.
Of course, you will be aware now of the need to accept your partner and you will be trying to move in that direction. But watch when you tell yourself to accept your mate as he or she is. Even the word 'accept' carries a feeling of condemnation. When you say the words 'with all his faults', it is like a silent complaint. It is like saying, 'What to do, we have to live with it!' No! Welcome the other person into your life, just as he or she is. There is a difference between accepting and welcoming. Accepting is like making a compromise. Welcoming is opening out your being to the other person without any expectation, unconditionally. Welcome your mate!
Just do an honest check. How long is it since you looked into the eyes of your husband or wife and spoke to him or her? A very long time I am sure. And we feel that the early days were golden days and that life has become boring. It is your attitude that makes it boring. That is why, if you decide that your wife is a fool, she will always look like a fool to you. If you decide that your husband is the type who controls you, he will always appear that way to you, whatever he may be doing. Drop this attitude. You will then find a certain freshness in every person and thing that you come by.
For just 24 hours, make up your mind that you will see your wife (or husband) as if you are seeing her for the first time. Receive every word or action of hers with a freshness and innocence without jumping to conclusions. Feel lovingness in you towards her. Even if she says things that provoke you, listen to those statements with awareness and respond in a calm and loving way, instead of in the usual argumentative way. You will see that you are actually opening out new avenues for both of you, you are giving the two of you a new space to evolve. Suddenly, you will realize that all along it was your attitude that made things look miserable. Of course, you might say that the wife too must reciprocate. You have the power to transform yourself and others. With just a change in your mental make-up, you can do much. When you decide to change, your wife will automatically change her ways too. We are all ready to point our fingers at another when it comes to relationships. We forget that two hands are needed to clap and make a noise. When you work on yourself, you can make things better for yourself and for others. Don't worry about the other person also needing to change.
..................................................... Moving from Lust to Love
Lust, like anger, is a tremendous energy. Actually, until such time as you understand what lust is and how it can be transformed, any action that you do is lustful. Even if you pick up a pen, it is lustful; if you are petting a small child, it is lustful. There is a certain animal nature in most of the things that you do because your energy is still 'base' and has not transformed into higher energy. The problem with lust and sex is, they have been magnified and imagined to be much more than what they are. Because of suppression, sex is made out to be much more than it is. There starts the whole problem. It has been contaminated to a great extent by the media.
................................Understanding Chiseling
A relationship can never happen as long as you have fantasies. Even if you stay for twenty-four hours in the same house, you don't look into the other's eyes, because you live with fantasy and not reality. You don't actually live with the real person. You see all that the other person does through your imagination and conclude that your life is a punishment to you from God.
At this point, if we accept reality, there is no problem. But do we accept the other person? No! We take out our brush and paints, and try to adjust the color! We try to change the other person to suit our mental image. This is the most damaging thing in any relationship. We try to sculpt each other in the way we have imagined them to be. We try to possess the other and convert them into matter. We degrade energy into matter. Here starts the problem of the unending war of life!
If you are unmarried, drop your fantasies so that you can choose your life partner and not a dream partner. When you select a person, just remind yourself that you are going to be spending your entire life with him, not just a few months. Don't think of it as just a fling. It is a life-long matter. If you are already married, drop your fantasies; only then can you start a real relationship with anybody. If you enter with a chisel and hammer, a real relationship cannot happen. What happens in chiseling is, you start chiseling and when you think that you have finished chiseling, your imagination has changed; it has become something different and so you have to do more chiseling to match the slightly changed imagination! This becomes a never-ending cycle.
Actually you love the image of your wife, not your wife, and whenever she acts as you expect her to act, you love her. Your real love is not for your wife; it is for your mental image. If you really loved your wife, you would change your image to suit your wife, but if you love your image, then you will try to change your wife to fit the image.