Does Spirituality mean you can forgive yourself for cheating?

A few weeks ago I had an individual counselling session here at the Ashram with an Ashram guest. It was a man who had come to India to find physical relaxation and mental clarity. He had decided to book our Ayurveda Yoga Holiday and thus had yoga classes and received Ayurvedic massages and treatments. On top of that, he asked me to have a talk with him. It was, in fact, a talk all about the question of secrets and clarity.

This man told me about his relationship. He had been together with a woman for eight years already. They love each other and cared a lot for each other but they just never felt the need to marry. They were happy as they were, without any official certificate of ‘belonging together’. For the past three years they have been living together.

At this point he hesitated before he continued: ‘But I have not been faithful.’ He had been cheating on his partner for a long time already. He had slept with several other women. Most of these encounters had been one-night-stands with women he had only just met and didn’t know further but he had also slept with a common friend of theirs.

I have had a lot of people sitting in front of me in counselling sessions and also this topic is not completely new to me. So when this man stopped and looked at me, expectantly, I told him what I usually recommend: be honest! If you love your partner, tell her about it. If you hide it, it is a secret that will slowly poison not only your relationship but also your mind. You will feel so guilty inside that you won’t be able to hide it anymore at some point. There is a chance that she can forgive you if you are open about it and regret it. Otherwise you will go through a hell full of guilty feelings.

I got a very unusual answer to this: ‘Oh, I don’t feel guilty! I am not that kind of person. I am able to forgive myself! But I am afraid that she will freak out! It is her house we are living in – she might kick me out… I am not sure whether I could afford a flat in our town on my own!’

Oh well, so there was the truth: this man was spiritually so advance that he could forgive himself for cheating on the woman he had just told me he loved. Very clear. At the same time he also very clearly saw the benefits of living in her home… Now it was just up to me to clear one confusion in his mind: it cannot really be love if you do something that would clearly hurt your partner and then hide it because you want to take advantage of her love!

A clear case – what do you think?