Love relates, but it is not a relationship.
A relationship is something finished.
A relationship is a noun;
the full stop has come, the honeymoon is over.
Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm, now all is finished.
You can carry it on, just to keep your promises.
You can carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy.
You can carry it on because there is nothing else to do.
You can carry it on because if you disrupt it,
it is going to create much trouble for you.
Relationship means something complete, finished, closed.
Love is never a relationship; love is relating.
It is always a river, flowing, unending.
Love knows no full stop;
the honeymoon begins but never ends.
It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point
and ends at a certain point.
It is an ongoing phenomenon.
Lovers end, love continues. It is a continuum.
It is a verb, not a noun.
And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship?
Why are we in such a hurry? — because to relate is insecure,
and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty.
Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight
stay and in the morning we say goodbye. Who knows what is going to
happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain,
we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according
to our ideas; we don’t allow it freedom to have its
own say.
So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.
You are in love with a woman or a man and immediately you start thinking
of getting married. Make it a legal contract. Why? How does the law come
into love? The law comes into love because love is not there. It is only
a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will disappear. Before it disappears
settle down, before it disappears do something so it becomes impossible
to separate.
In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more
enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely,
but their love will remain a relating, not a relationship. And I am
not saying that their love will be only momentary. There is every
possibility their love may go deeper than your love, may have a higher
uality of intimacy, may have something more of poetry and more of God
in it. And there is every possibility their love may last longer than
your so-called relationship ever lasts. But it will not be guaranteed
by the law, by the court, by the policeman.
The guarantee will be inner. It will be a commitment from the heart, it
will be a silent communion. If you enjoy being with somebody, you would
like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like
to explore the intimacy more and more. And there are a few flowers of
love which bloom only after long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers
too; within six weeks they are there in the sun, but within six weeks
again they are gone forever. There are flowers which take years to come,
and there are flowers which take many years to come. The longer
it takes, the deeper it goes.
But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has
not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It
has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being.
It has to be understood, not said.
It is so ugly seeing people going to the church or the court to get married.
It is so ugly, so inhuman. It simply shows they can’t trust themselves,
they trust the policeman more than they trust their own inner voice.
It shows they can’t trust their love, they trust the law.
Forget relationships and learn how to relate.
Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted.
That’s what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man,
the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either. It is impossible
to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other
for granted is insulting, disrespectful.
To think that you know your wife is very very ungrateful.
How can you know the woman?
How can you know the man?
They are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew
yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges;
she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again,start again,
don’t take it for granted.
And the man that you slept with last night, look at his face again
in the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has changed.
So much, incalculably much, has changed. That is the difference between
a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the
man and the woman, they are no more the same. Explore again,
start again.
That’s what I mean by relating.
Relating means you are always starting,
you are continuously trying to become acquainted.
Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other.
You are trying to see the many facets of the other’s personality.
You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into his realm of
inner feelings, into the deep recesses of his being.
You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unraveled.
That is the joy of love: the exploration of consciousness. And if
you relate, and don’t reduce it to a relationship, then the other
will become a mirror to you. Exploring him, unawares you will be
exploring yourself too. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his
feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings, you will be knowing
your own deeper stirrings too.
Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then
love becomes a meditation.
Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.
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