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Loyalty in Human Relationships

 

   The greatest endowment the Divine has given man in collective life is human relationship. As man is gregarious, he seeks company which makes his life enjoyable. The acme of human relationships is to be found inside the family. Its best expression is the one that exists between the husband and wife when the bond is made in devotion. Sincerity in the individual is translated as loyalty in relationships. Loyalty of the husband to the wife and that of the wife to the husband is the richest form that loyalty has acquired. In a wife, loyalty to her husband is often vital attachment. If her purity of affection for the husband goes down to the very cells of her body, it rises to still greater heights. Such ‘chastity' is really a condition of the mind that also pervades the vital and the physical body. Mother's definition of purity is exclusive reliance on the Divine. Vital loyalty and purity expressed in human relationships have a great power.

   Human relationships rise in grades from merely being together physically as in an office, to the greatest heights of one loving another for the sake of love, a sublime version of platonic love. The lowest type of compelling human relationship is a physical relationship of man with woman for the biological purpose of begetting a child. This is a necessity for creation to continue. As man rises in civilisation and lives in a community, he comes to be attached to the group and that is the first step in his march to mature civilisation. The loyalty to the group rises to its pinnacle when man founds a family consisting of parents and children. Its central live thread is the husband-wife nexus.

   As the civilisation rises to greater heights, the physical attachment between husband and wife is elevated to vital loyalty making a higher intensity possible. A further grade is added to this when the primitive love of vital loyalty is guided by the mental ideal of purity or chastity. All these noble aspects of loyalty are within the framework of the socially generated arrangement of marriage which is not necessary for biological existence. At the next step, civilisation ripens into culture.

   In a society that lives for a long time on the peaks of its culture, man's soul emerges and seeks for the first time a spiritual relationship with its origin.  The spiritual quest  gave birth to ascetics, rishis, yogis, avatars, etc. The relationship of the disciple and the teacher or guru acquired a greater significance in human relationship than the husband and wife relationship within the social institution of the family.

   The relationship of the disciple and teacher is one based on an inner bond of souls. Through loyalty in this relationship, sincerity can reach its perfection, intensity and ripeness. One of the reasons that gurus wait for a long time to admit a disciple is the commitment made by the guru to the disciple, a commitment of his soul. The disciple may wait for long, patient years to be accepted, during which the guru makes up his mind not only about the suitability of the disciple, but about the sanction from above. Once the guru finally accepts a disciple, the entire responsibility for the karma of the disciple passes on to the guru who in his spiritual purity should dissolve it. Disciples are fulfilled in their aspiration by the acceptance of their teachers, and the teachers are fulfilled in their spirit by the loyalty and devotion of their students whose souls they are privileged to nurture and foster into maturity. Always the disciple has the potential to rise greater than his guru. A guru who succeeds in raising his student to greater spiritual heights than his own has fulfilled his spiritual maximum.  Loyalty in this relationship reaches universal dimensions and raises sincerity to the intensity of being sincere to the Origin.



story | by Dr. Radut