What Business is Your Business?
— Understanding fate, time and space in the light of ethics
One of my teachers I was studying Family Constellations with once told me that there are only three kinds of businesses — my business, your business and God’s business. I asked him what the third meant. He said, we don’t know whether God exists or he doesn’t but ancestors do, the earth does, the force that drives the planet does and time & space does. Events like wars, tragedies, massacres, killings. The Apartheid, the partition, The Spanish Flu, Corona Pandemic are beyond the categorization of right and wrong or good and bad. We only know that they can affect us gravely and change the way we look at the world. These events drag us into an unknown darkness and propels us into a bottleneck where some of us perish into suffocation, and some of us move through and get out to see a new reality emerge. It is not a matter of skill or luck that we made and the others did not. It’s a matter of fate. Fate, beyond our religious or mythological construct, is neither luck nor a fixable astrological algorithm of life. Fate is Time.
Carlo Rovelli in his book The Order of Time shows us how an independent, universal, newtonian time doesn’t exist. It’s not uniform all over. Time in the hills is different from time in the plains. Time for a moving person is different from time for a stationary one. There is speeding up and slowing down of time happening at all places differently for different people. A universal ‘NOW’ for everyone doesn’t exist for any of us. Infact many years before Rovelli wrote the book, Einstein had already expressed that the difference between past, present and future is a strong and persistent illusion. A ubiquitous, common ‘present’ doesn’t exist for all of us. Each of us as human beings in our own individual capacity carry ‘the present’ like a bubble around us. And present is not just time. It is time and space both. How do you define your present if there is no frame of reference to where your body is? We carry both with us and around us. And it expands and contracts. Like how we have no track of it while we descend into a deep slumber, but in a bus journey to meet the love of our life an hour can feel like days (even when we know that the vehicle is progressively moving closer to the destination).
I know I have digressed from my main point. But what I wanted to unveil is each of us have our own time (t1, t2, t3, ….) and my time can never be your time, for if you are present in my time (and space) then I cease to exist, and be elsewhere. Fate looks (and works) exactly this way. Your fate is yours and my fate is mine. The moment you take up my fate or I take up yours there will have to be an exchange of a severe nature which will question the existence of the taker. Children take up the fates of their parents: they fall ill and manifest similar diseases in their bodies (genetic inheritance), they replicate similar relationship patterns with their spouses as adults (mirror neurons), they become proxy partners to one of the parents and support them emotionally when the other is not available, they also fall into repeated patterns of sabotage (or even addiction) to fulfil a pattern followed by one of their parents (from their parents, and they from theirs). In transgenerational healing work, we help people have an understanding at an intellectual as well as energetic level that the stories we carry, the stories we tell ourselves and get ‘entangled’ could be the stories of others: our parents, our ancestors and people who came before us. Because there is truly no real line between past, present and future and time is only seen as a succession of events. Therefore these events are ever-present in a collective quantum reality and we continue to experience the flux of these experiences like a zillion lights going on and off continuously and yet intermittently all around us. Therefore others’ business may feel like our own business, others’ fate may feel like a part of our own fate. Others’ time may feel like our own time. We borrow, consume as well as atone others’ share. We live their stories — their time and space. And in the process give our own up. Perhaps Karma can be explained by what is lost once what is taken. There is a balance in the imbalance that gets created in the exchange of fates (read: time-spaces of others). And it continues in a loop generation after generation.
As therapists, I believe, we should have the keen eye to track whose time-space has been taken by our client and what has been given up in exchange — that is clearly affecting the life of the client. There are processes and methods like Family Constellation that we use to find a true healthy balance in the ownership of one’s own fate and giving up what doesn’t belong to them. A child looks up at its parents and says: “whatever is between the two of you remains between the two of you. I absolve myself from the guilt of keeping you two together. I go back to being your child.” A successful businessman who’s recently lost all his money reflects at the devastatingly poor life of his once successful grandfather and breaks down. After having known how he has carried the fate and lived the time-space of someone else, he bows down his head and says: “Grandfather I love you and it is out of love I allowed it to happen to me. Now that I know, this is not what you would want me to carry, I leave it to you.”
Fate, like time and space, is deeply personal and must be handled with careful recognition. It is not only true for the client that they realize that the business of others is actually the business of others, but the same is true for the therapist as well. If I start treating the business of my clients as my own, I will run the risk of inhabiting a time and space that is not mine. I will be trapped in a room and not know where the doors are. In another language it could be somewhat similar to selling my soul to another body whose functionalities are beyond the scope of my awareness. Scary as this may sound, there are people who do take up what my teacher chose to call as God’s business and what I choose to call business of the Black Hole. If you step inside, gravity + time + space — all will collapse. We witness and study it, we don’t locate or try to get in.
That’s exactly what has happened in recent times. After the death of a young bollywood celebrity, people from the healing fraternity are scampering all over social media trying to perform numerous seances calling the spirit of the deceased and asking him how he died. While I was already trying hard to swallow the preposterousness of such publicity gimmicks by paranormalists, my disappointment hit a severe low when I witnessed a fellow family constellation facilitator putting up posts on social media about constellations they had performed to investigate into the matter of this young man’s death. Whether it was a suicide, a murder, a planned coercion or a designed breaking of the brain. Without going into the details of the process performed, it was conveyed in numerous posts (expecting engagement and eventual publicity from the online crowd), that they will keep doing these constellations for the sake of justice as well as to find out the truth — until the truth is revealed. My questions are: with whose permission? In what ethical framework? Towards what therapeutic goal? In what right?
While there is a natural need for each of us to function from a position of morality and justice when we start identifying with the victim of a national or community tragedy, therapists who have the ability to affect the thinking of the masses must also exercise caution. Acts like the one I have mentioned above are not only unethical and inane, they posit great danger to what people will now imagine their services to be like. Additionally, over a period of time the lens of the public is affected to such an extent that all other therapists in the fraternity are looked at as occultists who can bring back the dead to speak the truth, or fix someone’s wife into getting pregnant when she doesn’t want to, or voodoo-ing a tumor into the intestines of an angry lover of a client. As farcical as it may sound, such ideas brought up by a therapist is only a reflection of their personal endorsement by capitalizing a public event. It has nothing to do with justice or fairness. A facilitator doesn’t truly have the right to do so. For if they do, they cease to be who they were. They now carry the time-space and the fate of the victim.
One of my favorite terminologies in system based therapeutic frames is ‘Systemic Phenomenology.’ Originally defined by Bert Hellinger (founder and creator of Family Constellations), it simply means allowing things to be the way they are. Just like, when we look at the clear sky turning blue to yellow to red we imagine that the sky is moving with time and turning on us. But that’s not true. We are the ones moving and turning. And when the sun goes down in the evening, it’s not the sun that’s moving or going down, it’s the earth that’s turning. What is happening in the world is a happenstance. Each event has its own power, significance and rationale. Each event hence has its own fate and its own time. What happens to us as a result of these events is something that comes from within us. It could be our curiosity, our complaints, or willingness to correct things — our judgements. But we must recognize these as our own needs, not the needs of the event. This is what my teacher meant by the three businesses. What lies within us and what we bring into this world with us is essentially our business. Then there is the ‘simple’ business of the others that we cannot own — even if we feel we can. And then there is the business of God which is larger than our assumption that we may be able to take it in our hands and affect it. It is the vast womb of nothingness from where everything emerges and everything once will go back. Not a day before, not a day later.
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