Author of the well-known international bestseller Conversations with God and founder of the non-profit organisation called Conversation with God Foundation and Creator of a Humanity Team, Neale Donald Walsch says that we all are involved in relationships with everything and everyone all the time. We have a relationship with mystics, we have a relationship with our family, we have a relationship with our environment, we have a relationship with our work and we have a relationship with each other. ?In fact, everything that we know and experience about ourselves, we understand within the context that is created by our relationships. For this reason, relationships are sacred.?
It is also a fact that nothing has caused more problems for the human species, created more pain, produced more suffering, or resulted in more tragedy than that which was intended to bring us our greatest joy?our relationship with each other. It is through his book that Walsch tries to answer the question that the greatest human tragedy is that neither individually nor collectively, socially nor politically, locally nor internationally are we able to live in harmony. It seems that the human being is the only living species who simply finds it difficult to get along with each other?much less actually love each other.
Walsch begins by admitting that he has had some considerable number of relationships?in making them work, and making them last ?and really in caring for them to ever make any sense in my life.? He admits he could never fathom what made relationships work and what was their purpose in life and why he could not prevent himself from getting into relationships which was ?for all the wrong reasons.? He is downright frank to concede that by and large, ?I got into relationships with an eye towards what I could get out of them.? Hence he found himself through the largest portion of his adult life getting out of relationships from which he did not get what he wanted. Ultimately he became a serial monogamist?one relationship after another, after another, seeking and searching for the right and perfect mate who could, at last fulfil him.
Walsch wants the institution of marriage to be reconstructed in a way that it does not limit the partner in the relationship in any way. He announces his own concept of a ?New Marriage? which says, ?I recognise that even you yourself will change. Your ideas will change, your tastes will change, your desires will change. Your whole understanding of who you are had better change, because if it doesn'tchange, you?ve become a very static personality over a great many years and nothing would displease me more. And so I recognise that the process of evolution will produce changes in you.?
Walsch values relationships and concedes that all human beings yearn for it but according to the laws of evolution, since everything undergoes a change we too should be prepared for change and evolution in our relationships.
(Jaico Books, 121 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Mumbai-400 001.)
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