One has just opened their mouth and started to speak, and the spouse knows full well what is coming, and their response is blurted out even before the completion of the first sentence. The response does not require much thinking as they are readymade and ready to be fired.

The spouse knows what the other person is going to say in response to their response, and knows what they have to say in response to what will be said by the first person in a moment. Such is the intimacy and understanding of each other’s minds.

The extent of animosity and bad-mouthing is understood to reflect the depth of the relationship and the freedom and ease one feels in sharing their negative emotions.  They wouldn’t be comfortable doing such things with someone with whom they have a superficial relationship.

Occasionally, one realizes that their spouse wanted to say something totally different, in fact, it was meant to be a compliment which the spouse mistook as an attack. These automatic responses are pre-set in our minds and can be triggered in a fraction of a second without needing much thought. They have been used hundreds of times, perhaps thousands of times, and may well have formed grooves of their own in our brains.

We have innumerable such responses frozen in our minds and the list can be endless.

Some examples are as follows. I knew he will let me down.., she doesn’t care about me…, I am wasting my time with this person…, he is only after my money and doesn’t want to work…, he is only trying to be nice to me…, tigers don’t change their spots…, now that he has got the money he is going to mess me about and won’t complete the job…, it was my mistake to trust him…, I have to be careful with this person…, these kids have no value for money…, my spouse has never taken any responsibly in the house…, you can’t trust these republicans with your national policies…, these far-right parties will break up and destroy our nation…, etc.  Many of these statements may well be true but allowing these thoughts to slip into our conversations before we have thought things through can be dangerous.

All the above statements show a preparedness to react in a paranoid or a negative way, but the opposite of it can also be true when we see everyone as good, understanding, kind, compassionate, and wanting to help us. I once read a book entitled – “If you meet the buddha on the road kill him” by Sheldon B Kopp wherein he discussed the “Narapoid” position as opposed to the “Paranoid.” By the way, Narapoid is not a scientifically accepted concept. He said Narapoid people see imagined goodness in every human being and everywhere. And they also suffer as many knocks in life as the paranoid people, as they are not worldly wise. It seems that Narapoid people have a different kind of readiness to react, in a trusting way and that can also be faulty.

It seems that external situations trigger something in us, and what gets stirred up depends upon what is inside the pot of our minds. C G Jung, a famous psychiatrist and therapist once said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” We can free ourselves of all that readiness to react if we empty our mental pots so there is no chance of things getting stirred up. An angry person must empty the pot of anger, a fearful person must empty it of fear and a depressed person must get rid of the stored-up sadness inside.

The above discussion will make us believe that readiness to act of any kind is not good, but that can also be challenged. One must build armies and defenses not during war but during peacetime, we, therefore, need to create a different kind of readiness that can be helpful to us in an automatic fashion and protect us from making mistakes. Here comes the role of self-fulfilling prophecies, if you start off with a premise that this person is not going to cooperate and will create obstacles – it will get reflected in the tone of your voice, in your choice of words, in your eye contact, in your facial expressions and your body posture, and the other person is going to mirror your emotions and thinking. An old Indian story reminds us that this world is just a hall of mirrors – you see hundreds of your own reflections in it, you smile and all the mirror images smile at your, and you shout and all the images shout at you.

So, we need a different kind of readiness. This readiness has four components – friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. To spell it out further, it will go like this: –

• I know this person has been nasty a lot of the time to a lot of people, but he can be nice to me during this interaction if I approach him in a proper way.
• The majority of people are insecure within, they want to do a decent job, want to be fair, don’t like discord, want you to be nice to them, want to be appreciated for whatever effort they have put in, need encouragement to keep going, etc.
• If he was my brother, how will I react?
• He doesn’t like my way of doing things; without taking any major risks, I will let him have his way and see if we get a reasonably good outcome.
• Not just mine but the other person’s happiness is also my goal during our interaction.
• Our conversation should be enjoyable for both, just as I want to enjoy it.
• He comes across as a rude and domineering person but inside he may be insecure and struggling.
• I don’t know what the long-term impact will be of what is happening to me right now, and it’s no good losing my equanimity.
• Have I listened to this person’s perspective enough?

In trying to change one’s readiness to react one may pass through the following four stages

Stage 1. Action – Where one can overcome a particular reaction in favor of an action in a given situation. The individual has mastered only one situation.

Stage 2. Habit – where one has changed one’s habit in favor of non-reaction (stopping the knee-jerk reactions)

Stage 3. Character – where the new behavior has become part of the individual’s character, a code of conduct. It can still be altered in adverse circumstances and due to faulty learning.

Stage 4. Nature – the new behavior has become an essential/integral part of who they are, and it cannot be altered, despite whatever experiences they go through in life. In spiritual terms, it can be described as “Shrotapan” which literally means entering the stream, and there is no coming back, no matter what happens. For example, Jesus couldn’t do anything bad to others no matter what people did to him.

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