Right Understanding And Relationship

Right understanding and Relationship:

Our basic aspirations are happiness (mutual fulfillment) and prosperity (mutual prosperity). Happiness is ensured by the relationships with other human beings and prosperity is ensured by working on physical facilities. Relationship refers to the interpersonal relationships that a person builds in his/her life – at home, at the workplace and in society. Physical Facilities includes the physiological needs of individuals and indicates the necessities as well as the comforts of life. It means the feeling of having or being able to have more physical facilities than is needed. Today we are unable to have fulfilling relationships all the time: in family, outside family, and as a society – in the world at large. If there is a problem in relationship, we feel uneasy, it bothers us. Even if we are interacting with someone, and something we said or did offends them, it makes us uneasy; i.e. we want mutual fulfilment in relationship. Similarly, we want to feel prosperous, but end up working only for accumulation of wealth. We want to enrich nature, but are exploiting it, destroying it. But our natural acceptance is that we want to live in harmony with nature. The reason behind these problems is that we have to focus on one more aspect, i.e. right understanding. Right Understanding refers to higher order human skills – the need to learn and utilize our intelligence most effectively. In order to resolve the issues in human relationships, we need to understand them first, and this would come from ‘right understanding of relationship’. Similarly in order to be prosperous and to enrich nature, we need to have the ‘right understanding’. The ‘right understanding’ will enable us to work out our requirements for physical facilities and hence correctly distinguish the difference between wealth and prosperity. With nature as well, we need to understand the harmony in nature, and how we can complement this harmony.

Thus we can say that when we use right understanding with relationships it gives us mutual fulfilment because if we have right understanding, then we can be happy in ourselves and work to have fulfilling relationships with humans and mutual prosperity with nature. If we do not have the right understanding, then we have problems. Thus, our happiness depends on the fulfilment of these three basic requirements.

Right understanding Relationship = Mutual fulfilment.
Right understanding Physical facilities = Mutual prosperity.

Animal and Human Consciousness:

Giving all priorities to physical facilities only, or to live solely on the basis of physical facilities, may be termed as ‘Animal Consciousness’. Living with all three: Right understanding, Relationship and Physical facilities is called ‘Human Consciousness’.

From the diagram we can say that:

For animal, physical facility is necessary as well as complete – whereas for human beings it is necessary but not complete.
Working only for physical facilities is living with Animal Consciousness.
Working for right understanding as the first priority followed by relationship and physical facilities implies living with Human Consciousness.
There is a need for transformation from Animal Consciousness to Human Consciousness. It can be accomplished only by working for right understanding as the first priority.
This transformation from Animal Consciousness to Human Consciousness forms the basis for human values and values based living.

The content of education is the understanding of harmony at all the four levels of our existence – From myself to the entire existence. Right living or sanskar refers to the ability to live in harmony at all the four levels of living. This dimension of society works to ensure ‘right understanding’ and ‘right feelings’ in individual. Or all encompassing solution called samadhan in every individual and ensures that our succeeding generation have both the content and the environment available to work towards achieving their goal of continuous happiness and prosperity.