What Is a Balance Between Developing Self vs. Relationship?  Question:   If you find that most of your day or nighttime or whatever is spent in trying to achieve compatibility with your mate, does that detract from the time you might spend developing yourself? RK: It shouldn’t detract. I mean, you have to compartmentalize those things to some extent. The whole name of the game of being incarnate is to grow Egoically. To develop yourself to a higher level than what you are today. To acquire a still more refined character. To work towards more nobility of being. That’s the main purpose of incarnating. And the end object of all this is to ultimately achieve Adeptship wherein you know how to control all the things in your environment, as well as yourself. And then there’s no point—and no need—to incarnate any longer on your continuing development from Adeptship to Mastership. Although some Adepts do incarnate. I really do believe that close relationships, loving relationships, whether they’re with your parents, your children, your spouse, or just dear friends of the same gender and opposite gender, are all very important linkages to having a sound psychology; to be emotionally healthy; to be psychologically mature. And all relationships have the potential of forming those growth-engendering linkages which keep us sane. There is no guarantee that any relationship with another person is supposed to make you happy. But if you can have contentment in your life, you are truly blessed. Happiness seems to be dependent on novelty, just by definition. And there’s all kinds of ways of creating new contexts within a relationship, so you can explore one another on a far new level that you hadn’t seen before. And that tends to keep things fresh. But that depends on your inventiveness; your ingenuity; your interest in seeing more and more of the other person and revealing more and more of yourself. It requires feeling safe. Intimacy requires of us that we make ourselves vulnerable, but yet feel safe. So we do put ourselves at risk whenever we are in any kind of relationship. It’s real easy just to shut down and just be very closed within yourself and not have to extend yourself in any way and the other person is made to try to keep things alive by putting the burden of inspiration on that other person. But that’s a terrible burden to place on that person, because you’re really not helping under those circumstances. When we get down to marriage, we get down to the very basics of how you’re able to relate to other human beings. And if you can’t relate to other human beings very well, you’re probably not going to relate to your spouse very well. And we do need to be socially adept in dealing with other people so that we can be socially adept with the person who’s going to be playing a very major role in presumably the rest of our lives. We can expand on any of these ad infinitum. Return