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Marriage, Love, Lovers, Infidelities, Platonic Relationships
by
The Master Justin Moreward HaigQuestion: Do you consider marriage compatible with spiritual advancement? If not, why do the Indian books on Yoga tell us that marriage is not?
Answer: The Indian books you speak of were written by Yogis for aspiring Yogis. Their teachings are only suitable to European conditions when subjected to a process of selection and adaptation. That is what the Gurus are for. As to marriage, it brings bondage to fools and spiritual progress to wise men; it is a playground with many dangers for children, and a school for the enlightened. It is that fertile ground on which may be grown the beautiful flowers of a hundred virtues, or the noisome weeds of a hundred vices.
Question: Do you consider that people are beginning to understand the spiritual value of marriage?
Answer: In Europe and America, alas, very few people indeed understand its true value. And at present the whole attitude toward matrimony is a disastrous one, which, instead of leading to contentment and spiritual progress, leads to the divorce court. So long as jealousy is regarded as a reputable passion, and romantic infatuation is considered the chief raison d'etre for entering wedlock, how can we expect it to be otherwise?
Question: Do you mean to say that romantic love is never a secure foundation for marriage?
Answer: Wise men are chary of bringing the word never in to any argument. Romantic infatuation is very seldom a secure foundation for marriage--except in novels. And yet in countries where the laws are easy, when people who have married for pleasure on the strength of an infatuation, find themselves unsuited to one another, instead of trying to learn the lesson their egos (higher selves) wish them to learn, they shirk it and, like cowards, run away--to the divorce courts. Because it is too much trouble to adapt themselves, and conquer the dislike and irritation they feel towards each other once the glamour has worn off, they seek the easiest way out of the dilemma. Rather than obey the dictates of the higher self, they listen to the voice of the lower self which says: " You thought you loved this man or woman--you've been cheated--So make an end of it and separate forever. "
Question: But how are you going to prevent people from marrying because they're in love?
Answer: By gradually setting before the much higher ideal. It will take a long time but what of that? Teach him to marry neither for passion, pleasure, nor, as goes without saying, for material advantage.
Question: Do you mean that companionship (platonic) marriage is the only marriage likely to endure?
Answer: If two people, who are mentally sympathetic but physically antipathetic, wish to marry, that hardly concerns a Guru in his--shall I say official capacity. . . But except in very rare instances, I do not advise enforced Platonicism. These platonic marriages which occur nowadays between people belonging to various mystical and cult societies, are symptomatic of a false conception of so-called purity. These good people are trying to progress too fast; and because they are attempting to run with their spiritual feet before they can walk, they are engendering nervous complaints and other evils. The women become hysterical and often suffer from uterine troubles which cloud their judgment and hinder their general activity; and the men suffer from irritability, neurasthenia, and such complaints as occur when there is no Guru handy to teach them how to avoid these results. They say to themselves: " We are making ourselves pure vehicles for the Masters to work through. . . " And the books that they read, full of beautiful sentiments, uphold them in their belief. Some of these well-meaning but misguided people have been monks, nuns or ascetics of a sort in their last lives.
Yet why do you suppose in this life they have been born into the noisome turmoil of a European or American civilization? It is in order to learn a different lesson--to learn the particular lesson the civilization--such as it is--has to teach. But if they merely tried to repeat their last lesson, so to say, in a different environment, they are wasting their incarnation. I will tell you a little piece of occult news. --Not so long ago a great Yogi lived in India; so much revered was he, that when he was expected in the big towns, the buildings were decorated with flags and the streets with festoons. That Yogi died, and is now reincarnated as a little girl in England. What a "come-down", the unenlightened will say! But no. The ego of that Yogi has still something to learn, and he can only learn it in a female body and in the western world, even though he is nearing masterhood. And what's more, if this soul carries out the program the Gurus have planned, that erstwhile Yogi may marry and have children.
So what I'd impress upon you is to help people learn the lesson their particular environment has to teach. If they are married, they should fill all the obligations of marriage, so that they may come to cultivate those virtues which marriage can educe. It is you who must begin to teach mankind the super-morals of marriage.
Question: And please, what are the super-morals of marriage?
Answer: Conjugal super-morality is conjugal unselfishness pursued to its logical conclusion. If a woman desires a child and her husband is impotent or sterile, he should permit her to have a child by another man, if she so wishes.
Question: But if that woman is married with a husband who is sterile isn't that karma?
Answer: If a woman is drowning in a river, and two men are standing on the bank, one who can swim and one who cannot, shall the man who cannot swim pinion the other man and say: " leave her to drown, it is her bad karma? How can he know that it is not her bad karma merely to get a fright or ducking or to spoil her newest dress? Besides, what about the good, the other man would do by rescuing her? No--let us teach husbands and wives to leave the workings of karma to the Lords of Karma.
The duty of all super-moralists is to act in accordance with the highest principles of unselfishness, and leave the consequences in Higher Hands. It is these principles, and these only, which can save the marriage-state from the chaotic condition into which it has fallen. Marriage as it is at present exacts too much from human nature on the one hand, and too little on the other. In countries like Italy and Spain it allows a man to behave like a despot, and expects a woman to behave like a saint. This despotism is hidden under a fig-leaf on which are the words preserving my honor, but it is despotism all the same, and the matrix of brutality, cruelty, and even murder. Preserving my honor means in plain words preserving my vanity and my selfishness--hence all the tragedies that ensue.
Question: Do you consider conjugal fidelity so unimportant that its breach ought not to be punished?
Answer: Fidelity is a virtue to be always admired but never exacted. There's a form of fidelity which is far more important than sexual fidelity: that is the fidelity of mind and soul. To violate this involves much more serious consequences, because physical links are broken with the death of the body, whereas mental and spiritual links persist into future lives.
Question: You think that sexual fidelity which ordinary marriage teaches is not of great value, because it is largely the result of fear--I mean of a scandal or divorce? What sort of lesson would that type of marriage teach in which fidelity was never exacted?
Answer: Many lessons, but I will only mention one. It's easy enough to be gentle, kind, and affectionate toward wives as long as we're in love with them, but it's not so easy when we're in love with somebody else. The man who, although he may be in love with another woman, can still be just the same kind, affectionate husband to his wife, has learned to behave in accordance with that higher fidelity which is one of the lessons Free Marriage has to teach.
Question: My wife has taken on a lover. What should I do?
Answer: There is a great distinction between a man allowing his wife to have a lover and condoning it when she has got one, because he knows that her passion is stronger than herself. Why do you condemn her for her weakness in not being able to renounce this man, yet omit to condemn your own weakness in not being able to forgive? Your wife still loves you as I predicted and her affection must be really deep and true if she can fall in love with another and still love you. As I said the other night, if you remember perhaps, you have been led by a process of hypnosis, so the speak, to believe that one love kills another. That is untrue; that criterion of real love is that it lasts beyond the birth of a new passion.
Has it ever struck you that true love always thinks of the happiness of the beloved? And if that happiness comes even through another man's arms, love doesn't mind.
What, after all, is marriage and what does it become? The ordinary man starts matrimony with a mixture of romantic sentiment and physical passion; the sentiment by degrees dies away, the passion dies away also (dwindling into an occasion of gratification of the senses), and in the place of these two things comes either friendship or utter indifference. If the latter, then, for a man to be upset when his wife also falls in love with somebody else seems unreasonable; if the former, then, for him to be upset seems equally reasonable, true friendship being greatly enhanced when it can act as the receiver of confidence. You yourself admitted you were never so fond of your friend as when you were able to confide in him your own romantic passion. And what does that mean? Why, that if you had sympathized with your wife over this new love of her's, and let her fearlessly confide in you, she would never have felt so fond of you as during that exchange of confidence and sympathy.
And it would be so because she, all the time, would sense the nobility of your unexpressed forgiveness, and therefore not only be grateful, but full of admiration as well. Indeed, nothing augments affection so much as gratitude and admiration combined and, therefore, I cannot think I was wrong when the other night I told you had let slip the great opportunity of your married life. For where there is true affection, no opportunity is so golden as the one which affords us something to forgive, since to forgive is at the same time to manifest nobility of character, and thus to show ourselves noble before the object of our love. Yet, as one form of forgiveness may need to express itself in words, the greatest of any is that which is so self-evident it requires no words to express it at all, its presence being rendered all the more conspicuous by its very absence.
Nay, real love forgives its object always--even before there would seem something to forgive--and all true friends love each other the better, the one for having some fault to pardon, and the other for being pardoned respecting that fault. And so my friend, is it not obvious what is the most heroic and practical thing for you to do? Take your wife back again, and bide your time, and show her, by pointing out that hitherto you have not acted as nobly as you might have done, that she, too, on her part has something to forgive; for she will think you far the nobler (as you will be) for confessing to being at fault as well, and the result will be that both of you can enjoy the felicity of forgiving the other.
Question: I am not altogether convinced.
Answer: Yet surely, although not to forgive is a form of childishness, there can be little doubt that to forgive is not only the best policy, but also a true joy.
My friend, the seat of nearly all trouble is the sense of possession or the feeling of mine and me. And in your own case this undoubtedly applies, as it applies in too many other cases as well: for in your heart you say to yourself, "She is my wife," yet fail to make the wisdom-fraught distinction that, although she be your wife, she herself, soul and body, is not completely and undeniably yours. And therefore, to desire that she should be so--since a person's soul belongs to himself or herself only, and to nobody besides--is in reality as futile as the desire to exercise ownership over the sun or the moon; while to grieve because this may not be so, is to waste one's grief on the "desert air,"and one's activity of mind and emotion as well. And even if you think to discard the soul, and care only for the ownership over the body, your predicament is scarcely the less, for since you cannot enclose your wife in a prison, spying on her and her actions from morning till night, she is at liberty to do with her body whatever she likes: and should you exact from her more than she can fulfill, she will only deceive you in consequence, and more wrong will be added to the sum of her actions.
Besides, after all, for what is your grief, when you trouble to try and regard its real cause? For, truly, is the exchange of a kiss here and there worthy of so much distress, and is the merely physical, which has gained so much importance in the eyes of the world, really not infinitely less than the love of the soul, and the affection which hardly cares for the physical at all? Surely the eyes of the world are blinded when they would repay one fault by a fault far greater, and make one sin an excuse for a far greater sin in return? And just because you have the world to encourage you in a lapse of nobility, permitting you to cast your wife away on account of a little passion which sooner or later by reason of the transience of all passion must fade of its own accord, are you really going to succumb, and thus lose the great because of the little? Truly the action were not the action of a hero, and, that being so, you will take the nobler course instead.
Question: Then, should every husband allow his wife to have a lover whenever she wants one?
Answer: To that I must reply both "yes" and "no"; for what you ask depends entirely on the circumstances of the case, and on the wives and husbands' concern, and therefore can never be regulated according to rule. And just as it is one thing for you to allow your wife lovers, as you allow her jewels and fine dresses, it is quite another to forgive her and condone her actions when she is already in love. For if you command her to renounce the object of her affections, she will either leave you, as in your own case, or else deceive you to guard herself against the effects of your anger--in that you are exacting something from human nature which it can rarely be expected to fulfill. Moreover, there is nothing which makes a person desire a thing so much as an obstacle put in the way of its gratification, just as there is also nothing that kills affection so soon as the feeling of imprisonment; so that to thwart your wife, is to impel her all the more quickly into the arms of the other man, by reason of the resentment you awaken in her heart toward yourself; and thus by trying, as a word, to obtain her love by force, you only succeed in losing it all together.
Question: So what is true Love?
It is so strange when we reflect that love is simply the Principle of Attraction and that the whole universe hangs together through love. That is why love is the most important thing in the world.
A human being is not merely his physical body: he has an emotional body, a mental body, and a spiritual body as well; all of these interpenetrating his physical one. In throwing out a feeling of love, to a person, you are actually reaching those subtler bodies; in merely doing good works, so-called, you are only assisting the transient part of him, for those subtle bodies are more or less eternal, while the gross body dies in but a few years. To feed the starving material man, I grant you, is practical; but to feed the inner eternal man is still more practical, for the more lasting effect of the thing the more practical it is. And, although to give money is to give a portion of one's belongings, and it is not without merit, yet to love is to give a portion of one's self. That is why he who can love truly is never really selfish.
Selfishness and unselfishness are words bandied about by people with very hazy ideas as to their meanings. Selfishness is the centering of one's mind on oneself; to love is not only to center the mind on someone other than self, but at the same time to give a portion of that self to the being to whom one directs that love. The most practical of all good deeds, therefore, is to give our labor and money and ourselves combined. And what is more, in doing this we reap happiness, for to love is to feel the most pleasant of all sensations.
Taken from The Initiate and The Initiate in the New World