Between Men And Women
In marriage, two entirely different individuals encounter each other, unite, and create a new world. While interacting with, respecting, recognizing, forgiving, and helping each other, they gradually attain harmony and perfection together. It is a if the void that existed when each was alone and arid starts to heal as it is filled little by little. This process resembles the way the two totally different atoms, hydrogen and oxygen, encounter each other to create a new material called water.
Unless one blossoms more beautifully than before through marriage, it cannot be called true marriage.
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Essentially, marriage should offer freedom, not restraint. One ought to be far freer in marriage than when alone. This is real marriage. Because people donʼt understand this, many marriages fail. The two people must share more freedom than before with each other, and continue to give more freedom to each other. Each partner must value his or her own freedom, and equally respect the otherʼs freedom.
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Husband and wife are like mirrors. If you reflect your spouse and find an ugly image there, you cannot blame him or her, because that ugliness is projected by your own thought.
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Husband and wife are like the hands of a clock. Only when the long and short hands are perfectly balanced can the clock fulfill its purpose of telling the time. If either one of the hands tries to exert itself, ignoring the work as a whole and working on its own accord, the clock wonʼt be able to tell the correct time. In the same way, husband and wife must harmoniously advance the clock of life together in the flow of the whole universe.
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You never encounter the same person twice, for everyone perpetually changes second by second. This even applies to parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister. You are wrong in grabbing the past image of a person and thinking that what you see now is the same person you saw in the past. Of course, it is also a fact that you too are changing second by second. You should live with this fact strongly imprinted in your mind: All human beings are constantly renewing themselves.
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How many couples and lovers have the illusion that they love each other deeply? Their love, if probed merely turns out to be self-love, because there is always fear and anxiety within themselves. This is not true love. People who have true love are totally devoted and can offer all of their lives to the ones they love. Among such people their is neither fear nor anxiety; there exists in them only the joy of mutual support and devotion. Love makes you selfless. For those who love, death no longer exists.
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If you forever continue to be obsessed by your own failures, as well as your husbandʼs, wifeʼs, or childrenʼs past behaviours, weaknesses, and so forth, you will recall and repeat similar failures. Every one of those failures, events, and shortcomings belongs to a past that has already disappeared. Each tomorrow is absolutely new, and your radiant future is about to begin. However, if you constrict yourself with your own thoughts and feelings, refuse to forgive, criticize your husbandʼs, wifeʼs, or childrenʼs past, tremble with fear that the same may be repeated, and carry those past memories with you forever – then you will never attain true peace. No matter how large failures and shortcomings are, they are of the past and are gone and vanished. Take courage and change your thinking, trusting in your familyʼs wonderful future, and firmly sever yourself from past events with your own will.
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Manʼs history has been one of battles. Womanʼs history has been that of bearing and raising children.
Battles do not require any of the virtues needed for child raising – such selfless and devoted love, compassion, benevolence, affection, gentleness and patience. On the contrary, these virtues are in the way on a battlefield. If, during a battle, love and benevolence toward the enemy rise in the heart, there wonʼt be a battle. War requires hatred, anger, fear, cruelty, conquest, and destruction.
Since the worldʼs history has evolved as manʼs history of war, the human race is far from attaining peace. For this very reason, women have to truly awaken and then, for the first time, they can make the world peaceful. World peace depends on each womanʼs merciful heart.
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by Masami Saionji
Chapter 4, pg 42
Su Au 