Eyes closed in bhav

This is the instruction he gives most often about difficult relationships, and it applies as readily to a marriage as to a brother, a business partner or an aging parent. Complete your own obligation properly, and stop running the ledger in which the other person's failures are recorded against it. The ledger is the thing doing the damage, not the relationship.

He points out how the accounting actually works, because most people have never looked at it directly. It is never balanced. Your own contributions are counted in full, including the ones nobody saw and the ones that cost you something. Theirs are counted at face value, without whatever it cost them, because you were not inside it. A record kept on those terms can only ever produce one result.

The consequence is that the ledger converts every ordinary interaction into evidence. A forgotten errand stops being a forgotten errand and becomes another entry in a case that has been building for years, and the response it receives is sized for the case rather than for the errand. Both people then experience the same conversation completely differently, which is why these arguments never resolve.

He is not asking anybody to accept mistreatment, and he draws the line explicitly. Where there is real harm, judgement applies and distance may be the right answer. What he is dismantling is the running tally inside an ongoing relationship you have already decided to stay in, because in that situation the tally has no function except to generate resentment at regular intervals.

There is a practical claim attached that devotees test and report back on. A person who genuinely stops keeping score usually finds the other side softening, not because anything was demanded of them but because they have stopped being met by an accumulated case. He does not promise this and is careful to say the point does not depend on it. Your own part is worth doing whether or not it is reciprocated.

What it asks of you is to notice when you are updating the record, which is usually in the gap after something small goes wrong. Do not complete the entry, do not review the earlier ones, and do not compose the summary you would deliver if it ever came to a full accounting. Put the name there instead, do your own part properly today, and let the rest go uncounted.

The rest of his most repeated sayings are on the quotes page, the teaching they belong to is set out on the teachings page, and the questions devotees bring him about anger, money, family and grief are answered on the questions answered page.