How can we deal with people with nondevotional values?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
I make healthy relationships in material social circles, if they are defined by materialism.
Yeah, actually, we do have a professional life, an academic life, where we need to relate with people who are materialistic. At the same time, in every relationship, there are, whether it is explicitly spoken or unspoken, there are certain terms of the relationship. And sometimes we let others define those terms too much.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. That means that, say, when we are dealing with others, you know, if they start talking about certain things which we are not interested in, start talking about, say, some anti-devotional things, we can just, maybe at that time or later, politely tell them that I’m not interested in talking about these things. But they may or may not respect it.
But we have made our position clear. And then if they are again talking about this, we can just switch off. We can just start doing our work, not paying attention.
And basically, we spend a lot of time thinking about what other people are thinking about me. Actually, let’s turn it around. And how much do we think about other people? You know, this person was dressed like this.
Why did they dress like that? What were they thinking about? We have our own life. And we have so many things to think about in our life. How much do we really think about other people? So we would not worry so much about what other people thought about us, if we knew how little other people thought about us.
Nobody has time to think too much about others. Everybody is busy in their own lives. So if we just recognize that, actually, everybody’s life is a movie.
And in their life’s movie, they are the hero. And we are simply extras. So in their life’s movie, we are simply extras.
You know, in a movie, how many people notice what is the costume that extras wear? Like that, people really don’t have time to worry. People don’t have time to think about what we are doing. So it is we only who take it too seriously.
If we just decide to be ourselves, people will push us a little bit. But afterwards, you just understand, this person is like this, they will accept it. So we can, to some extent, set the terms of our relationship with others.
And not in an arrogant, not in a morally patronizing sense that you are wrong and I am right. This is the way I live. I don’t like, I’m not interested in these things.
And if we set the boundaries, there is a saying in English that good fences make good neighbors. So like that, if we set fences in our relationship properly, then we can have people with very different worldviews. They can be good friends, you know, online.
There are some Muslims who are very good friends of mine. And we focus on the commonalities. And we know we have our differences.
We don’t mind that so much. So if we set the fences, then we can have relationships as are required in our maternal life also, without too much difficulty.