Question (Q): What is physical cheating and what is mentally cheating in a relationship? So if two persons are in a relationship and one is cheating on the other physically, and still wants to be with that one; this is one kind of cheating. And the second one is, when two people are living for very long time, still the one or the other, or both, in their minds or in their fantasy world, want to be with some other person. Is it not called 'cheating'? Or only the physical cheating is called 'cheating'?
Acharya Prashant (AP): See, your definition of cheating describes the plane on which your relationship exists. The relationship could be on one of these three planes broadly. The relationship could be on a Spiritual plane, it could be on a mental plane, it could be on a physical plane. And cheating is possible on all three planes. Cheating is possible on all three planes.
What is a relationship on the physical plane?
"You give me pleasure, I give you pleasure. And to ensure an uninterrupted and secured supply of physical pleasure, you remain physically committed to me and I remain physically committed to you. What do I want from you? Pleasure; 'physical pleasure'. And we are committed to each other."
What does this commitment now mean? "You must be there when I need pleasure from you, because our relationship is physical; we exist in each other’s lives to scratch each other's itch. So it should not happen that one particular night I have the itch, and I don’t find you by my bedside. That should not happen."
So the commitment practically means - "You should be there when I need your body." And now what is cheating on this level? "I needed you, but you were somewhere else, and that’s cheating. That’s a violation of the physical contract."
What is cheating in simple terms? - a violation of a contract. Two parties agree to something, and then one of them goes back on the agreement, reneges; that’s called 'cheating'. So if the relationship exists purely on the physical domain, then you will be greatly offended if you find your partner sleeping around with somebody else, because that was everything that there was to that relationship - the body.
The relationship was all about the body, and the body is with somebody else - "I have been cheated. FIR! (a police report)." Hundred percent of the relationship was about the body, and the body is now somewhere else, so the relationship has been hundred percent destroyed, because hundred percent of it was about the body.
If you are very offended, if you are absolutely offended when you find your partner physically with someone else, then that only means that your relationship itself is absolutely physical.
If you are absolutely offended if you find your friend, your partner, whatsoever, with somebody else in the physical sense, then that feeling of absolute offence implies that the relationship itself is absolutely physical.
Are you getting it?
Then there is a mental relationship.
In the mental relationship, there is an exchange of emotions - "I am emotionally related to you; it’s a romantic relationship." Right? "You do good things for me, I do good things for you, not necessarily in the physical way. You bring me stuff, I cook something for you; you take me places, I say nice things to you. Sometimes you click me in a cool pose, sometimes I sing a song for you," - that kind of a relationship. Now in this relationship, what is it to cheat? In this kind of a relationship, what is the agreement all about? - "You keep doing things that please me mentally; maybe not so much physically, but surely mentally."
"So you keep doing things that please me mentally, and I will keep reciprocating by doing stuff that pleases you mentally. We will be each other’s ‘ego friends'. I boost your ego, you please my ego." Now what is it to cheat in this kind of a relationship? - "Why did you offend me? I asked you, 'Am I looking fat?,' and you said, 'Yes'." And this is cheating.
"Weren’t we supposed to say nice things to each other? Why did you tell me that I have no awareness, that I have read nothing, that I don’t know how to relate with anybody in the world?" You are not supposed to say these things; neither am I of course. It’s an agreement." So now that’s cheating.
And where there is cheating, there is anger and violence.
So in this kind of an emotional relationship, the moment you say something bad to the other, it’s cheating. And you will be met with a lot of aggression. You will be delivered blows - "Why you did such things? Why did you not look kindly at me? I bought this new wonderdress, and you ignored me? Cheating! Cheating!" And obviously on this plane if you find someone going around with someone else, that too is offensive to the ego. So that too is cheating. Right?
But this kind of mutual mental pleasure-giving would not be a part of a purely physical relationship. There you really don’t want to say good things to the other; the relationship is purely physical. And mind you, such relationships do exist. And they exist in greater abundance than we might conceive. In those relationships, people do not even say good things to each other. They just undress! There is no need to say anything. Just get in the bed, that’s all.
"I don’t want to hear my praise from you. I’m not here to share emotions with you, neither am I here to write a poem in praise of your divine beauty. We are here to fuck, and that’s it!" That’s physical relationship.
In emotional relationships, before you fuck, you say nice things to each other. Right? You know, otherwise it looks quite horrible, and you need to have some face-saving mechanism. "How do we just get on with it? So let’s have first mandatory half an hour of whatever you call it." Knowing fully well that this half-an-hour is just an alibi, you are constantly looking at the clock - "Let those thirty minutes be completed so that we can get on with business."
Getting it?
And then there is relationship on the Spiritual plane.
Here the primary relationship is not with each other; here the primary relationship is with something else. You are committed to something; let’s call it as 'something', he too is committed to 'something’, and the two of you are together because this togetherness will take you both to that 'something’. This is a Spiritual relationship, in which two people are together not for the sake of each other, but for the sake of that 'something’.
Now, what is cheating? Now cheating is not about - "Whether you deceived me or whether I deceived you," now cheating is about - "Whether either or both of us deceived that 'something’."
"Now I won’t stay with you a second if I find you not loyal to that ‘something’. You do not need to be loyal to me; I neither demand nor deserve your loyalty. But I surely want that you need to be loyal to that ‘something’. And if I find you being disloyal to that ‘something’, then you have had it! Then you have had it!"
"You don’t want to please me, no problem; even I am not here to please you. Chances are, I will do stuff that’s not going to please you, because in going towards that ‘something’ the ego has to take a beating. You won’t usually happily and agreeably move towards that ‘something’. If I am to help you, assist you move towards that ‘something’, I will have to push you against your wishes. You’ll resist; not always maybe, but mostly."
So obviously this is not a relationship in which there is mutual exchange of pleasure. "We are not pleasing each other. What are we doing? We are pushing each other, we are assisting each other, we are helping each other." Some people say that it is the best way to say, "We are loving each other." But then, that’s not the commonly accepted definition. Only some weird spiritualists feel that that is the right definition of 'Love'.
What is that right definition of love? We both are pushing each other towards that ‘something.’ What is that ‘something?’ Some people call it ‘Truth’, some 'Liberation'; some call it 'Realisation', some call it 'Joy'.
"On our own, we probably won’t reach there independently, because even though I do have a desire to reach there, yet I have my tendencies, I have my inertia, I have my laziness, and I have my ready excuses."
"So on my own I would have raised some story and said, 'You know today again I cannot move in that direction, because I have something else more important to take care of,' but when you are there, you call me out, you expose my lies. And that’s your place in my life, that’s your contribution in my life. You call my bluff. You do not let me remain my usual tardy self."
"And that’s exactly how I reciprocate - I do not let you remain who you are. And who you are usually, is not someone you would want to remain. Even you agree that you do not want to remain who you are; yet there is a tremendous inertia - ‘sloth’. My role is to keep nudging you, pushing you; sometimes gently prodding you and sometimes kicking you hard in the butt! That’s my role in your life."
This is a Spiritual relationship. This is ‘Love’ on the spiritual plane.
And we have already discussed what is meant by 'cheating' on spiritual plane. What is 'cheating' on spiritual plane? "I entered your life so that we may both move towards that 'something'; instead you got attached to me. Now this is cheating."
Now, this is a very inverted definition of 'cheating'.
On the physical and emotional planes, it was cheating when you were looking at somebody else. On the spiritual plane, it is cheating when you are looking at each other. "How dare you look at me? Am I not your lover? You are not supposed to look at your lover; you are supposed to look only at that ‘something’. If you look at me, you are cheating on me. Don’t look at me. No!"
"The more you look at me, the more you are guilty of adultery, because 'He' is the real target, 'He’ is the one we both have to go to. So we both have to look only at Him; we don’t have to look at each other. We are fellow passengers, co-passengers. We are travelling alongside each other, we are not travelling to each other. We have a shared destination, and we are together only so that we may more easily, more practically reach that shared destination."
This is spiritual affinity.
Getting it?
So your definition of cheating tells of who you are. If the relationship is primarily Spiritual, it won’t really matter to you whether you are able to arrest that person’s body or not. You will say, “Your body is not my concern; the body anyway does not ever reach anywhere. It is not the body that wants to reach that ‘something’. So do whatever you want to do with your body, I won’t object; not my concern. My bigger concern is something else. And I need to take care of That.”
Questioner: So why is it that people are obsessed with only bodily cheating? If two persons are madly in love with each other for years, eight-nine years, and suddenly one finds out that he cheated on her or him, all the love is vanished and they start looking each other as an enemy. I am just confused that - is the physicality that much important?
AP: That only shows that for the last eight years, the relationship was only physical. If for the reason of a physical transgression, the relationship can collapse, then the relationship itself was just physical. What else? Is the conclusion not obvious?
You have had the relationship since eight years, and then one fine day you find that your partner has been sleeping with somebody else, and you are so outraged that you break up. What does that tell about the relationship? That the physical part was absolutely central to that relationship.
It’s just that one feels a little guilty, a little ashamed of accepting that 99.99% of our relationships are just sexual; so we cover it up with fancy names. Covering it up with fancy names, we somehow manage to convince ourselves as well that the relationship is not just physical. But all that self-deception falls into pieces when you have instances like these; you know, instances of cheating and such things. It was just physical. That’s how animals relate, don’t they?
Yeah, we are animals!
We are animals. And animals can get extremely violent if they discover their mate being stolen away. There was one board, I once read. It said how to be cautious of dogs. It particularly warned against disturbing dogs on two or three occasions.
One - when they are having their food; second - when they are fighting among themselves, when they are angry; and third - when they are mating. Don’t disturb them at that point. Even the most emaciated kind of dog will leap at your throat like a lion, if it is in the process of lovemaking. That’s how even our relationships are as well.
We are fundamentally animals, but we are very cunning animals. Animals do not try to obfuscate their intentions. Dogs do it on roads, and no dog first allures the bitch with gifts or promises, or rounds, or stuff over the fire, or holy chants. All that doesn't happen. The dog knows what it wants, the bitch knows what it wants, and they just get over it quite quickly. Done and dusted!
Human beings spend five years, seven years in courtship, knowing fully well that the objective is just one, but neither the man nor the woman - assuming it’s a man-woman relationship - would dare confess it to the other; especially not in India, and especially not if you are a woman. You cannot tell the man, “You know, all I want is your body." (Laughingly) Here is a hint - the man won’t be offended, even if he is an Indian. It’s far better to be honest.
Very-very rare are relationships on a higher plane.
We have moved out of the jungle, but within we remain animals. And it’s been not a long time since we migrated out of the jungle. Look at the entire evolutionary history; we are pretty recent immigrants.
So the jungle is very much alive and kicking within us.
(Pointing at the sound of a barking dog, present in the room) See!
