Sadhguru: When you say ‘a spouse,’ you have touched,
and there is a certain level of memory.
The whole system will go through a certain level of suffering.
It is not just an emotional and psychological process,
it is a very physical process.
How to conduct this gracefully and well?
Find the completeness of what this life is.
Sadhguru: You need to understand this: what you call as myself right now
is a huge volume of memory.
Your body is the way it is simply because of the genetic memory that it carries.
You have your mother's nose, your father's complexion and something else,
your grandfather's something else,
simply because what you call as your body is a complex amalgamation of memory.
A very ancient memory lives in your body.
What you call as ‘my mind’ is 100% memory right now.
So, you are a huge heap of memory, in many ways.
And memory goes into you in different ways,
through all the 5 senses you gather memory:
what you see, what you hear, what you smell, what you taste, what you touch.
Of all these 5 different ways of gathering memory,
what you see and what you touch are the deepest forms of memory.
Especially what you touch creates a certain level of memory in the system.
So, when you say ‘a spouse,’ you have touched, and there is a certain level of memory.
Now, 2 people who have shared their emotion, their body, their sensations,
and their living spaces, because 2 memories have merged in many ways,
ripping it apart is almost like tearing yourself apart.
And... that's not going to be easy, for various reasons.
But at the same time, the very fact that you're going through your divorce means,
you want to be finished with that memory in some way.
Maybe not erase that memory, but someone who was a spouse,
someone who was, in many ways, a part of your life,
slowly, for whatever reason, you have begun to experience them
as a baggage that you're unwilling to carry.
So, you want to keep the baggage aside,
but you find the baggage is not something that you voluntarily carry,
it is something that compulsively sticks to you.
So, when whatever sticks to you compulsively, if you try to rip it off, there will be pain.
Even though you might have begun to
almost come to a place where you can't stand the person anymore, still it hurts,
simply because you're trying to rip out a memory which is you.
Because you are a bundle of memory.
Memory has built up about your spouse, you can't just get rid of it just like that.
If you do it – even mentally, psychologically, if you're equipped to do it –
you will still see the whole system will go through a certain level of suffering invariably.
Even if emotionally, psychologically, you're in a balanced state that you can deal with it,
the system will go through a certain process.
Especially when you are taken away from your spouse, either through divorce or death,
you will see, the memory within your system
plays up much more strongly when they're not here.
Particularly when death happens, you will see,
the memory of your spouse works in every cell in your body.
If you have lived long enough together,
it is not just an emotional and psychological process, it is a very physical process.
So, divorce is a voluntary death,
you have decided to kill something that is a part of you, in some way.
It is because of this reason that having this understanding of the existence,
and the way the system functions,
that they always told you, ‘till death do you apart’ you will not part,
because there is a physical memory about this,
and the body, it doesn't have the balance of the mind.
The mind can decide and turn around, but the body cannot turn around;
the more memory you build into it, the more confused it becomes.
So, one type of memory, body handles it much better.
Now that you've chosen to divorce, for whatever reasons which I don't want to delve into,
if it could be avoided, that would be best.
But for some reason you have come to that situation where this has to happen,
you need to understand this, that divorce essentially means,
you have chosen to kill something which is a part of you.
Because what you call as ‘myself’ is just a certain volume of memory.
Now, how to conduct this gracefully?
Most people think the best way to conduct a divorce is,
immediately jump into another relationship, and another relationship of the same kind.
No, you will cause much more struggle and turmoil within the system by doing that.
It's extremely important the body has enough time to work out the memory,
the body has enough time to keep the memory at a certain distance,
otherwise you will render yourself to a space where
to make yourself peaceful and joyful will become an extremely hard thing to do in your life.
So, conducting this process gracefully and well is important,
as it is important to conduct every aspect of your life gracefully and well.
You're only divorcing your spouse, you need not divorce yourself.
But you need to understand this,
you have already divorced yourself, you're quite divorced from your own self.
Your existence has been nurtured by making a bond,
a partnership, or a bondage – depending upon how you conducted this –
to make yourself feel whole in some way.
Most partnerships of this nature are made because by yourself you would feel insufficient, incomplete.
But that's not how life is – this is a complete life process by itself,
it does not need any assistance from outside.
So, now that you come to such a situation, it is time to turn inward and see.
You're anyway going through one divorce which could have been avoided, but it's happening.
So, you at least don't divorce yourself from yourself.
When I say ‘yourself,’ not the memory part of you,
that which gathers the memory, that which is fundamental to your making.
You as an existence, you as a being, don't remain divorced from that.
It is time that you find the completeness of what this life is.
It is time you discover that this being is a complete being,
it does not need any external assistance to be the way it is.
To conduct our life in a society we may need... we are interdependent,
but the fundamental existence of this, the balance of what this is,
the space of what this is, the possibility of what this is, is a complete process by itself.
Our interdependence is only according to our external requirements,
but our inner existence is complete by itself.
You're divorcing your spouse, which is bad enough; do not divorce yourself from yourself.