Trust and the Loving Person
Swami Dayananda Saraswati
We need to discover that we are loving and compassionate.
Intrinsically every individual is a loving person whether one knows one’s self or not. And that love transforms itself into various emotions such as compassion, sympathy, giving, sharing, and understanding. These are considered virtues and values that are to be cultivated.
We are preached at all the time, “Be loving! Be compassionate!” What can we do about that mandate? If we are loving, then all of those emotions such as compassion, sympathy, giving, sharing, and understanding are manifestations of that love. And it is that same love alone in a distorted form that is discerned as hatred, jealousy, and so on. We have to discover that we are loving and compassionate.
If we understand the reasons that inhibit and stifle the expression of that loving person and are alive to that understanding, we can safeguard that uninhibited love from various habitual emotions. Neither do we like to have those habitual emotions, nor do others like to see them in us. I am going to cover those reasons one by one. One of the most powerful factors that inhibits our love and stifles the expression of that loving person is lack of trust. Trust is one of the most eroded things in our life.
A baby is absolutely helpless and is absolutely trusting.
A child is born absolutely helpless. It was safe being one with the Mother. Even though the child had an independent heart beating in a body of its own, still it was connected to the Mother. Once the child is born and that cord of connection is snapped, it starts its independent life. What an independent life! It is something like an unemployed and unemployable man getting married and wanting to live an independent life. Where? How? One should be able to stand on one’s own in order to live an independent life. But that’s not the case with the baby whose connection is severed from its mother. It starts its independent life all right, but it doesn’t have the skills or the growth to stand on its own, literally and figuratively.
Naturally, as a living organism, the urge for survival frightens the child. That fright, to a great extent, is neutralized and removed because of the presence and protection of the Mother and the availability of the Mother’s lap. Even though separate, the child still feels safe and secure in the embrace of the Mother. Now, the problem is: the availability of Mother isn’t always there. Mother has a number of other things to do. She has to work, or she has to go out, even if she doesn’t work. The baby doesn’t know that, and is totally helpless. That helplessness is compensated for by trust. There is absolute helplessness and absolute trust.
Usually, we trust a person who is trustworthy with reference to one thing. We trust someone with computer skills, for instance, or we trust someone with cooking skills. We trust different people in different areas, but the same person is not trusted in every area. For the baby, there are no such areas. There is only this one person, and the baby is helpless, and the trust is absolute. That means, “My mom is infallible”; and, as the child grows, it finds that Mother is a giant. She may be a small woman, but in the baby’s eyes, she is standing on her own legs and she is a giant. Just imagine that little baby looking at Mom and Dad as giants. The child’s capacity to trust gets eroded.
Then, as the child grows, it begins to discover, “Mom is not as infallible as I thought.” If there is a cockroach or some other insect, the child runs to Mom—“Mom!” and Mom calls Dad. Then Dad becomes infallible, and Mom becomes more-or-less infallible. The child feels safe and grows, trusting totally.
But there is repeated erosion of trust, and the capacity to trust gets stifled—the Father falls ill, and the Mother is not available—she disappears in the morning and suddenly appears in the evening. The child doesn’t know, “My mom is a working mother.” This caring, loving mom, in whom this child discovered a certain infallibility, who appears and disappears, has to be taken as infallible. That is what is called absolute trust; the baby doesn’t have the power not to trust. The baby must trust the hands that pick it up, and the baby innocently trusts.
Then, slowly, the child comes to appreciate that Mom and Dad are fallible. When Mother goes away, definitely, the trust is gone. There is fear that, “There is nobody for me; nobody likes me; nobody loves me; my mom doesn’t love me.” And this is compounded when another child is born. When the child is two years old, it begins to become conscious of its own ego, and there is only one ego at that time. The two-year-old child’s ego is like God’s ego. That is why it is called “the terrible twos.” The child is conscious of himself or herself as a person, and doesn’t see anybody else. Then, between two and three, slowly, the child begins to discover that there are other egos around. That is the first blow. There is no more humbling experience for the individual than this. The child thinks that it is on top of the world and that there is only one ego; then it finds out that there are other egos around, and each one has his or her own thinking. The child is humbled.
That is the time when the child needs a lot of attention. But then, after two years, there is one more child born, and the attention has to go to the new baby. The two year old is definitely going to throw tantrums to draw the attention of Mother and Father, and it also has its small little appreciation, “Because of this baby, Mother is not available.” This is what they call a sibling problem. There is a problem, but it is not that Mother’s love is split into two.
There is love for the first child; it is complete. Then there is a second child, and that love is complete; then a third child, and that love is complete. Love can never be divided. It is always whole; it is always complete. People do not understand this. That is why all the problems. Love is not divisible.
The child cannot handle emotional pain.
In the olden days, people used to have as many as ten children. Does that mean that the tenth child has one tenth of the Mother’s love? No. But timewise, definitely, the older child will have less attention from the Mother because the baby is going to get more than the two year old. And the two year old needs attention. Therefore, the child feels, “Someone else is more important for my mother and father.” And that is how the feeling “nobody likes me; nobody wants me” begins. That is how that complete trust in Mother’s love, care, and infallibility is eroded. And if Mother and Father quarrel every day, the capacity to trust is further eroded.
The Father, moreover, is often non-communicative, especially an Indian father. They always talk in monosyllables—“Yes! No!” That is how they saw their parents behave. But it was a joint family at that time; there were Uncles, Aunties, Cousins, and Grandparents in the house, and there was always an empty lap available, sitting on which the child was told stories.
Therapy would take place there itself. If the Mother shouted, screamed, or punished the child, it would go crying to its grandmother, who was the Mother’s Mother-in-law. Now the Mother-in-law would get her chance. She would help the child process the whole thing by saying, “She is like that; her mother is like that; her upbringing is like that. You don’t worry. You are very good; you are wonderful.” Like this, therapy would take place right away. That is the advantage of having a Mother-in-law at home—the child doesn’t internalize the situation.
When the child falls down and cries, the Mother says, “Oh, this floor made you fall. I will beat the floor.” I used to think this was a silly thing to do, but now I am enlightened. That is to make the child feel, “Nobody can touch me as long as Mother is with me; Mother will beat the floor.” That is therapy; that is processing. That allows the fear to go away so that it doesn’t get lodged in the unconscious. The child cannot handle emotional pain. Whenever there is the pain of abandonment or the pain of not being loved and cared for, that pain is pushed back into the unconscious to be processed later.
The child’s emotional pain is pushed into the unconsciousness to be processed later.
Every individual starts with the capacity to trust. We are capable of absolute trust because we took our parents to be infallible. Now there is lack of trust, and even the capacity to trust is eroded because of the dysfunctional situation at home. When there is no communication, the child is forced to read body language. Once the child is forced to read body language, thereafter it cannot trust at all because of the lack of communication. If this is the situation, what kind of security and self-love will the child have?
When I know my parents love me, there is trust. Love is one thing that we cannot see. That is the problem with it. It is a nuisance. When somebody says, “I love you,” we want to know how much he or she loves us. What can one do? Can you quantify it? Is there a way of revealing that? Many a good relationship is broken because of this incapacity to communicate. Love works only in the form of trust. If we trust, we can love. If we don’t trust, then what happens is the discovered love gets stifled and mutilated by this lack of trust. We find later that it is all due to one’s own unconscious. One cannot relax in that discovered love.
Everyone grows with an unconscious, which is the greatest blessing given to a human being. In Sanskrit, our masters knew this unconscious as kaṣāya. Kaṣāya means, “Unknown things in our unconscious that control and drive us.” The unconscious is a means of protection for the child because the child cannot handle pain.
We must understand this: no child can handle emotional pain. It can handle physical pain to some extent, but not emotional pain. The child is self-conscious; and at the same time, it is helpless. Therefore, nature has given the child the capacity to just drop the whole thing and smile, for it has to win Mother’s and Father’s love. There are rules at home that have to be followed; pain is there, and there is no communication. Therefore, what happens is this: the child goes on smiling in order to please Mom and Dad and to get their approval, as much as it can. It goes on smiling, and the pain is pushed back into the unconscious to be handled later.
The unconscious waits until the child has grown; then that pain comes out.
If anybody who is depressed and having problems tells you, “My father and mother were wonderful,” do you know what that means? There is, definitely, a veil, a cover there. The denial of the problem reveals the problem. If a person praises his or her Father too much, then with reference to the Father, there is a problem. The child thinks like this: “Why doesn’t Father discipline Mother? Why is Father incapable of making Mother understand? My mother is unreasonable in her behavior towards me. Why can’t Father do anything about it? After all, he is all-mighty.” This is how the child would feel, if not think. The Mother and Father are not to blame. Nobody is to blame. But we must look at the entire situation from the child’s standpoint.
The child has a simple, innocent, self-conscious mind. And since it cannot handle the situation, there is a provision to cover it up, to keep a veil over it. Exactly like people who are expecting houseguests and have a lot of junk in the drawing room. They put the junk in a corner, put a sheet over it, and then put a flower vase on top of that. We want to believe that our mother and father are infallible. That is what the child wants to believe; and, thus, that is the flower vase.
Have you seen a child crying and then, when the Mother threatens it, suddenly the child laughs? The Mother thinks that she has accomplished that. But the pain has been pushed into the unconscious. When the child grows up, his or her spouse is going to suffer. The unconscious waits until the child has grown up and can handle the pain; then that pain comes out. The child is a survivor.
During the first four years, the core person, the unconscious, is formed.
If the trust has been significantly eroded, we become defensive, a ‘Ninja’. We cannot trust anybody. We cannot trust the laws or our in-laws or anything at all. We are distrusting, not simple, loving people. The loving person and the distrusting person are one and the same, but the distrusting person stifles and strangulates the loving person. This is common to all human beings, but more so for people who grew up in homes where there was no communication between their parents and between the parents and children. And Grandfather, Grandmother, Uncle, and Auntie were not there at home to neutralize that non-communication. So how can the child not be damaged emotionally?
The child does very well cognitively, because it is trying to prove itself. The parents say, “My son and daughter are doing very well in class.” That means wait a few more years; then you will understand. The child does well because it has to prove itself; and if a cultural difference is there, it will do even better. Children want to be included by the majority. The poor, small child is being sent to pre-kindergarten or to daycare when it isn’t even three years old. During the first four years, the core person, the unconscious, is formed. That is the time when the child has to be with Mother and Father.
It should feel secure. The child can be sent to school later during its fifth year. Children can be taught everything at home. That is the best way. This is my thinking, and I am totally, one hundred percent convinced about this. Talk to any psychologist. He says up to four, the unconscious keeps getting formed. That means up to that age the child has to be with Mom. The parents think that the child will lose its competitive skills. Why should the poor little child compete? Compete for what and with whom? Why should we not make the home a school? (Anyway, that is by the way.)
We are incapable of relaxing because we do not trust.
Everybody distrusts everybody else more or less. Therefore, what happens: those survivors, if they have their own choice, will pick a person to marry who is equally distrusting. It is uncanny that only that person is chosen. If one comes from a dysfunctional home, that person will choose another person who is from a dysfunctional home. And if one has cultural conflicts, then that person will choose someone who also has cultural conflicts. It is very interesting. I don’t want to get into psychology, but it is all connected. It is all the truth. We are incapable of relaxing because we are distrusting Ninjas. But we can be loving now and then, when we forget this Ninja. The greatest grace we have is the capacity to suspend our notions. Notions are memory and impression based, and because they are notions, they have to be remembered. Therefore, we can just drop the whole thing, and see ourselves as loving, understanding, and compassionate. But, then, we cannot afford to be so. We crave love and care, but we cannot trust. We look for some trustworthy person, and when that person somehow comes around and we find ourselves being loved, there is no trust.
We can rediscover that trust.
We can rediscover that trust, perhaps, if we discover one person in our life that we can trust. Look at this. What are our clothes and makeup for? They are to present ourselves to the world. I want you to understand what our clothes and makeup mean. They mean that we cannot be ourselves with reference to the world. The world has to look at us a little differently. Therefore, this individual has to discover at least one person in life with whom there is no need to present himself or herself differently from what he or she is; the person is totally accepted as the person is. That is what love is all about.
The more you understand the person, the more love you can discover love. Arranged marriages are based on this principle. I do not mean to say that every arranged marriage is right, but more often than not, they work out because they start with trust. That the person can enter an arranged marriage shows that the person is capable of trust. We have to safeguard that capacity to trust.
When there is love, two egos fuse to become one; that is, there is total acceptance. That doesn’t mean that whatever you think I think, and whatever I think you think. It is just giving freedom to the other person to be what that person is. If we are incapable of giving that freedom, we cannot discover love. It is always strangulated love. The intrinsically loving person is stifled by distrust.
Give that person total freedom (until otherwise proven wrong, of course). Enjoy the other person as the person is. That is what love is. Love does not come with a precondition. Love is reckless, and sometimes, it is blind also. Love is reckless because that is our nature. The eyes do not discriminate between what to see and what not to see; it is their nature to see. Whatever objects the eyes happen to fall upon, they will see. They don’t discriminate. We differentiate and decide if what we see is good or bad for us. The eyes only report to us whatever the thing is. If it’s a gutter, it’s a gutter; if it’s Gaṅgā, it’s Gaṅgā. Our eyes don’t discriminate, much less our nose, deciding, “This is a foul smell; I am not going to pick it up.” How are we going to say it is a foul smell unless we pick it up? Similarly, we are intrinsically loving. We are recklessly and non-demandingly loving. What happened to that loving person? Where has that person gone and hidden? It is not hidden anywhere. It is stifled by distrust.
In the beginning, when these two egos meet and have not yet discovered each other’s personalities properly, they are carried away by enthusiasm, by love. “How is he?” “Oh… Oh…” There are no words; words fail. When words are not there, other things are there! This is the beginning point. Do you know what happens afterwards? The unconscious is waiting to get out. It does not want to stay inside any longer.
The unconscious was given to the child to save it from emotional pain. It has been waiting for twenty years. Twenty years—“Let him grow. Let him discover some love or trust or whatever.” In marriage, there is that trust. But, there is no person in the world that is going to fulfill all our demands—a custom-made person. Suppose God were to send such a person, straight from heaven, without any core issues or childhood problems, meeting all of your specifications. And you marry. Then, after a while, you begin thinking, “Oh, I forgot to request these particular things: The type of music he loves, I can’t stand; and the type of food he likes, I can’t eat. I think we need Space!”
Lack of trust is superimposed upon our love; then a ‘locked-horns” situation develops.
What happened to the trust that was discovered in the beginning? The trust is still there, and because of that trust, everything in the unconscious comes out, thinking that the support is there to help process the whole thing. The other person doesn’t know what is happening, and he can’t satisfy that person no matter what he does, and what he does is never remembered either. Once this starts, the person has an uncanny way of looking at things. But the person is not to blame; it is the unconscious, the inner child. Therefore, what happens is this: whatever love was there in the beginning seems to have evaporated; and, in the meantime, a child, the wounded child, surfaces. Basically, you trust the person, but not understanding what is happening, you lock horns. It is a “locked-horns” situation. You love the person; that is why you quarrel with the person. You argue with the person because you trust the person. The very fact that you argue shows that you trust. You don’t argue with your friends and other people. Why? Because there you are a Ninja smiling nicely and saying nice things—“The weather is very good.” That is nothing. Here, the very fact that you argue and quarrel shows that there is trust, which invokes, to put it in psychological terms, transference. What they missed from their mom or dad, they see in the spouse. They argue daily, “You don’t do this; you don’t do that.” Do you understand how ignorant we are? The husband and wife really care for each other; they trust each other; they love each other, but still they are at loggerheads because this lack of trust is superimposed on their love. It is pure superimposition. The lack of trust is a superimposition.
The entire world is given.
If only you can understand this properly you can relax. The entire world, including certain fundamental laws and forces that we can make use of, is given. To understand the world, I reduce it, without resorting to reductionism, for my own benefit, into the form of various orders. There is a physical order, which includes physics, astrophysics, geophysics, gravitation, and all the various physical laws and forces. Here, on this planet, we find there is a biological order; there is life. The genetic mutations have their own ranges; they don’t cross those boundaries. How this body grows from a simple encoded series of genes into a very complex organism that is all within the biological order. This body is what it is today because there is a biological order. There is also a physiological order, where medicine comes into the picture. There can be an illness or a malfunction, and that it can or cannot be corrected is within the order. There is a minimum requirement in order for the body to keep going. All this falls within the physiological order.
There is also a psychological order. That I am not able to love is because of that order. It is not that I have to discover a new loving person; I am a loving person. Then what is it that denies me being that loving person? Well, there is a psychological order, which we have to understand; and that order is not separate from the Lord. There is also a cognitive order, an order that really makes the difference in our life. That is the basic order for a self-conscious human being. This world is like a jigsaw puzzle. Things have to fall in their own place. And to make things fall in their own place is cognitive. It is because of the cognitive order that we know, we explore, and we inquire. Whether we inquire into the cosmos scanning the sky, or we inquire into this micro world of particles, electrons, and their behavior, still that is the cognitive person. That is the person who has to understand, basically, what the whole thing is. There is an order of memory, too, which includes the unconscious. It is all memory—feeling memories; feelings-with-words memories; feelings-without-words memories. All these come under the same psychological order alone. To get out of this ‘locked-horns’ situation, we must discover the Lord, who is manifest in the form of order.
Only with one person in this world do we have to fuse our ego. The problem in our individual relationships is this ‘locked-horns’ situation. So we have to go a little beyond that in order to get out of this situation. Otherwise, we cannot get out of it; and, at the same time, we cannot happily get along with it.
The only way is to discover another ego. Don’t try to discover another person; it will be the same. That is not going to work. Discover another ego. What kind of ego? The one who has no agenda for us. How many people are there in the world who have no agenda? Everyone wants to grab it. And in the very embrace of love, there is a tendency to grab, possess, and own, all because of lack of trust. Therefore, love is going to be very painful. The same wholeness, that is manifest in the form of love, with reference to the total is called the Lord. Creation is a manifestation of love. It is born of love alone. In the eyes of the Lord, can I go wrong? Can I be wrong? He is the only one who understands. My own understanding of the Lord gives me a permanent therapist. After all, what is therapy? It is validation, helping us see, “Hey, I am right.” The therapist is one person who will not say you are wrong. It is a wonderful thing. He has to say, “You are right; if I were in your place, I would have gone crazy. There must be something working for you.” That is what he would say, which is totally true, because you are within the order. If there is an order, who is wrong? Nobody is wrong. All are within the order. When the therapist validates you, however, his validation of you is only as good as your validation of him. And, being a limited individual, you are going to find him wanting, at some point. Therefore, we need to appoint a therapist who cannot go wrong; he cannot go wrong because he is in the form of order.
The infallible is God.
We don’t say, “God is infallible.” That means he becomes fallible exactly like Mom and Dad. Originally, Mom and Dad were infallible, now they are fallible. The whole world is full of fallible people. We say, on the other hand, “The infallible is God.” It requires a lot of understanding to say that. We have to intimately understand that the infallible order, which is the Lord, pervades everything, including me.
The infallible is not somewhere up in heaven. It is present right here and now. We can even come to understand that everyone’s behavior is in keeping with the order. Even the person who behaves strangely is not outside the order. Any strange behavior is within the order of the Lord. There is always a reason for it, and that reason can be discovered, and remedial work can be done, all within the order.
If we can grasp this, then we have no reason to blame ourselves or to blame anyone else, because everybody is within the same order. The order provides certain possibilities. Wherever there is a behavior pattern that is hurtful to others, it is understandable. There is something in the person’s background that is the cause, and it can be corrected. It is all within the order. We can become more understanding, and if at all we can help, we help.
If we understand that there is a bigger order, that is good enough. We must understand and be aware that there is an order; and in that order, what is to be done by us, we keep on doing. Then we’ll find that our love remains unstifled because we are intrinsically a loving person. That is the discovery—we are a loving person. We simply have to see what stifles that person.
We are intrinsically a loving person; we simply have to avoid what stifles that love.
A human being is a complete person. When two people get married, that is a great accomplishment. Why should anybody marry us? What is it that we’ve got so that one should completely dedicate one’s life to us? We’ve got nothing! But our love is invaluable. That cannot be priced by anybody. Love means we have to respect the other person totally, completely, as a human being, as a person who is connected to us, as a person who cares for us. Then we will find that love is natural.
In order to love, we need not do anything. We are loving. Being loving is not like heating up water; we put it in the microwave for five minutes and it becomes warm, similarly, we become warm hearted. No! We are always warm hearted. Intrinsically, we are loving. We simply have to avoid what stifles that love; then we will discover love. When we reach out and give love, that brings out the loving person in us.
There is one truth here that we need to understand: You are loving, and not only when you are loved. Whether the other person loves you or not depends upon your perception. When you give love to another person, however, you are definite. It doesn’t depend upon anybody’s perception. Whether you give love or you receive love, you are the same person. When you are loved and you think you are loved, the happy, loving person is out. And when you give love to another person, it is the same. When we reach out and give love, that itself, in time, brings out the loving person in us. This is how people change. When we reach out, we become loving. When we give love, we definitely discover the loving person.
How we receive love depends upon our perception. Today, we perceive this way; tomorrow, we will perceive another way. But when we make an attempt to be loving by an act of consideration, by an act of giving and sharing, then we will discover the loving person. It is definite, satyam. It is the truth. Keep doing it, and love will come. Love will become real because that is your nature. You want to be yourself; that is all. If a sugar cube wants to become sweet, what does it have to do? It has to know. It doesn’t need to do anything. You are loving. And that loving person will be out when you extend love, when you do an act of love in real life. That is how we discover love.
