on Relationship

 

 

The More Loving You Are, the Less Is the Possibility of Any Relationship

 

The moment love becomes a relationship, it becomes a bondage, because there are expectations and there are demands and there are frustrations, and an effort from both sides to dominate. It becomes a struggle for power.

 

Relationship is not the right thing, at least for my people. But love as a state of being is a totally different word. It means you are simply loving; you are not creating a relationship out of it. Your love is just like the fragrance of a flower. It does not create a relationship; it does not ask you to be a certain way, to behave in a certain way, to act in a certain way. It demands nothing. It simply shares. And in sharing also there is no desire for any reward. The sharing itself is the reward. [....]

 

The loving state is unaddressed. And I am not preventing you from being in the state of love, but you can be in the state of love only if you drop the old mind pattern of relationships. Love is not a relationship.

 

Two persons can be very loving together. The more loving they are, the less is the possibility of any relationship. The more loving they are, the more freedom exists between them. The more loving they are, the less is the possibility of any demand, any domination, any expectation. And naturally, there is no question of any frustration.

 

-Osho, "The Hidden Splendor, Talk #23, Q1"

 

 

 

 

Relationship Is Not Love At All

 

Osho,

I remember you saying, “Don’t surrender to a person, surrender to love.”

I’m in a relationship with a beautiful and powerful woman and we both definitely don’t want to surrender to each other. What does it mean to surrender to love while being in relationship? I’m quite in a mess.

 

 

Prem Avida, I can understand; you are really in a mess and there is no way out.

I have heard that there are three rings of love: the engagement ring, the wedding ring and the suffering ring.

 

Your question makes it clear that you have not understood what I mean when I say, "Don't surrender to a person, surrender to love." And love is never a relationship; this is your problem. Relationship is bound to be a bondage. In relationship either you have to surrender or the other has to surrender.

 

And you yourself are recognizing that you are in relationship with a beautiful and powerful woman, "and we both definitely DON'T want to surrender to each other."

 

Then just live in coexistence. Live the way all poor husbands are living. Show to the world that your wife is so surrendered to you... who is preventing? You just have to tell a lie and there is no mess -- and surrender to the powerful and beautiful woman. But remember, the moment a man surrenders to a woman he loses dignity in her eyes. She starts looking here and there for someone who has the guts not to surrender.

 

You don't seem to have guts. There is no need to surrender to each other. Surrender to love means: enjoy in the happiness of the other, rejoice in the being of the other; be in tune with each other, dance in harmony.

 

The question of surrender is political, it is not a question of love. And relationship is not love at all; it means love has ended and relationship has begun. It begins very soon after the honeymoon -- mostly in the middle of the honeymoon. It is not easy to live with another person whose life-style is different, whose likings are different, whose education and culture is different, and above all the other happens to be a woman — even their biology is different.

 

But one thing you have to understand clearly, Avida, is that it is the man who longs for domination, and it is the woman who dominates. This is what I call coexistence: live and let live. More than that is all imagination. If you really had known what love is... The basic thing is not to create a relationship. Stand aloof as the pillars of a temple stand aloof, but support the same roof. Don't destroy the individuality of the other, enhance it if you can; otherwise, at least leave it as it is, uninterfered with.

 

Freedom is not to be destroyed in the name of love.

Freedom is a far higher value than your so-called love.

 

-Osho, "Om Shantih Shantih Shantih, Talk #15, Q1"

 

 

 

 

Relationship Is a Kind of Bondage

 

“When you are happy alone, when you can live with yourself, there is no intrinsic necessity to be in relationship. That does not mean that you will not relate. But to relate is one thing, and to be in relationship is quite another. Relationship is a kind of bondage, relating is sharing. You will relate with many people, you will share your joy with many people, but you will not depend on anyone in particular and you will not allow anybody else to depend on you. You will not be dependent, and you will not allow anybody to be dependent on you. Then you live out of freedom, out of joy, out of love.”

 

-Osho, "Be Still and Know, Talk #1, Q3"

 

 

 

 

Relationship Is a Security

 

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.

 

-Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, Talk #12, Q2"

 

 

 

 

Love Is a Give-and-Take Relationship

 

Love respects the other. It is a give-and-take relationship. Love enjoys giving, and love enjoys taking. It is a sharing, it is a communication. Both are equal in love; in a sexual relationship both are not equal. Love has a totally different beauty to it.

The world is slowly slowly moving towards love relationships; hence there is great turmoil. All the old institutions are disappearing -- they have to disappear, because they were based on the I-it relationship. New ways of communication, new ways of sharing are bound to be discovered. They will have a different flavor, the flavor of love, of sharing. Nonpossessive they will be; there will be no owner.

Then the highest state of love is prayer. In prayer there is communion. In sex there is the I-it relationship, in love the I-thou relationship. Martin Buber stops there; his Judaic tradition won't allow him to go further. But one step more has to be taken: that is "neither I nor thou" -- a relationship where I and thou disappear, a relationship where two persons no more function as two but function as one. A tremendous unity, a harmony, a deep accord, two bodies but one soul. That is the highest quality of love: I call it prayer.

Love has these three stages, and compassion accordingly has three stages, and both can exist in different combinations.

Hence, Dorothy Kaplan, there are so many kinds of love and so many kinds of compassion. But the basic, the most fundamental, is to understand this three-rung ladder of love. That will help you, that will give you an insight into where you are, what kind of love you are living in and what kind of compassion is happening to you. Watch. Beware not to remain caught in it. There are higher realms, heights to be climbed, peaks to be attained.

 

-Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, Talk #19, Q4"

 

 

 

 

Only Death Is Certain

 

Osho,

How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship? 

How can one go deep with a person when he is afraid?

 

 

Relationship and love are totally different things. Love is never a relationship, and relationship is never love. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. Relationship is a dead thing, a closed thing. Love is a flowing.

 

You ask me: ‘How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship?’

 

So the first thing to be reminded of: love is never a relationship. Then something else is masquerading as love. Maybe you are searching for a husband or a wife -- you are searching for some security, you are searching for some structure. A structured life is a murdered life.

 

There is a fixation in the human mind for structures, because in a structured life one feels secure, one knows where one is, one knows where one stands in relationship to the other. It seems that because man is born in the womb of the mother and for nine months remains in a structure, that continues deep down in the psyche -- and man is always trying to find a structure somewhere.

 

If he loves, he wants to make a relationship out of it immediately! He wants to get married. He wants to create a certain conditioning. He wants to make it a contract. Or he enters a church, or he enters a political party, or he enters into ANY club and he wants to be structured, he wants to know where he stands in the hierarchy, in what relationship. He wants to have an identity -- that "I am this." He does not want to remain uncertain.

 

And life is uncertain. Only death is certain.

 

Remember: in your whole life, once you have taken birth, only death is certain and everything else is uncertain. Uncertainty is the very core of life. Insecurity is its very spirit.

 

But we are always hankering for a structure.

 

Relationship is a structure, and love is unstructured. So love relates, certainly, but never becomes a relationship. Love is a moment-to-moment process. Remember it. Love is a state of your being, not a relationship. There are loving people and there are unloving people. Unloving people pretend to be loving through the relationship. Loving people need not have any relationship -- love is enough.

 

Be a loving person rather than in a love relationship -- because relationships happen one day and disappear another day. They are flowers; in the morning they bloom, by the evening they are gone.

 

You be a loving person

 

But people find it very difficult to be a loving person, so they create a relationship -- and befool that way that "Now I am a loving person because I am in a relationship." And the relationship may be just one of monopoly, possessiveness, exclusiveness.

Relationship may be just out of fear, may not have anything to do with love. Relationship may be just a kind of security -- financial or something else. The relationship is needed only because love is not there. Relationship is a substitute.

Become alert! Relationship destroys love, destroys the very possibility of its birth. One thing.

 

-Osho, "Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind, Talk #8, Q3"

 

 

 

 

Relationship Cannot Happen Before the Egos Are Gone

 

Osho,

What happens in and with the relationship between two partners if their egos drop?

 

 

Then relationship happens. Before that it is just an empty name. Relationship cannot happen before the egos are gone.

 

You only believe that it is a relationship. It is a conflict, it is enmity, it is jealousy, it is aggression, it is domination, it is possession, and many things -- but not relationship. How can you relate with two egos there? When there are two egos, then there are four persons.

 

In every bed you will find four persons sleeping together. It is very rare to find a double bed, because then four persons are there overcrowding it. The wife is there and the ego, and the husband is there and the ego -- husband is hidden behind his ego, wife is hidden behind her ego, and those two egos go on making love. The real contact never happens.

 

The word 'relationship' is beautiful. The original meaning of the root from which the word 'to relate' comes is exactly the same as 'to respond'. Relationship comes from that word 'respond'. If you have any image of your wife or husband, you cannot respond, and hence relate, to the truth of the person. And we all go on carrying images.

 

First, we have our image that is our ego -- 'who I am'. And then we have the image of the other -- who she is, or he is. The husband relates not to the woman that is there, he relates to the woman he thinks is there. So now, four are not there, six there are, and it goes on crowding. Now you are there -- that is one thing, your ego is there -- that is another thing. And now you don't relate to the woman who is there, you relate to the idea of your woman -- 'My wife is such and such, or should be such and such' and he is also having these things -- so six persons. It is really a miracle how people go on managing. It is very complicated. Relationship is not possible, there are too many people in between.

 

You go on reacting to the image not to the person, and hence there is no relationship. When there is no image, then there is relationship.

 

See it! And see it immediately, without the interference of thought. Don't have any image of the person you love. If you love me, don't have any image of me. There is no need. Just look into me as I am. The image will not allow you to see who I am. Don't have any image of the person you love; the person is enough. The truth of the person is enough whatsoever it is. And don't have any image of yourself, just be true, authentic, as you are. And there will be relationship. Then there will be a response. Then two realities will respond to each other. And when realities respond there is great harmony, melody, joy. There is great beauty.

 

Don't have any image of me, don't have any image of your husband, don't have any image of your son, don't have any image of Jesus, and don't have any image of God. If you can drop all your images, you will enter into a totally different dimension -- the separate reality, the other shore. Approach truth imageless, thoughtless, nude, empty, uncovered. And the response will come out of your being of its own accord.

 

-Osho, "I Say Unto You, Vol. 1, Talk #4, Q5"

 

 

 

 

In Relationship You Come to Know Your Pitfalls

 

Relationship shows where they are, who they are. Sitting in their caves in the Himalayas they feel perfectly beautiful because there is no mirror.

 

Never escape from relationship. That's why I have introduced sannyas with relationship, not without it. There is great meaning in it. Never on the earth has sannyas existed with relationship, that's why I say that sannyas has not really existed. or, the sannyas that has previously existed was anaemic, bloodless. People thought they were beautiful without the mirror they thought they were beautiful. It is very easy to befool yourself when the mirror is not there.

 

When you are in relationship with people, in a thousand and one ways you are provoked, challenged, seduced. Again and again you come to know your pitfalls, your limitations, your anger, your lust, your possessiveness, your jealousy, your sadness, your happiness all moods come and go, you are constantly in a turmoil. But this is the only way to know who you are.

 

Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.

 

Love is the mirror. Let your meditation be mirrored in love. If you find that something is missing, meditate more -- but never escape from love; let it be mirrored in love again and again, because that will be the only criterion of whether you are growing or not. If you are really growing in love soon you will see that love has remained and jealousy has disappeared; love has remained and possessiveness has disappeared: love has remained and hatred has disappeared. A great purity arises. a great innocence. A fragrance is released into your soul. Go on meditating and go on loving. Let love and meditation be two wings. Let them help each other.

 

-Osho, "Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol. 2, Talk #6"

 

 

 

 

Relationship Exists Only Between Equal People

 

Up to now, men and women have not been living in relationship – because woman has never been thought equal. And relationship exists only between equal people; it cannot happen between unequal people. Unless woman is given total freedom, absolute equality, there will be no possibility to relate. Up to now, man has exploited woman, woman has exploited man; there has not been real relationship.

 

It cannot be, because the way man has treated woman has been basically wrong. Only between two equal persons is there a possibility of relationship, because fear is not there – one can be open, one can be true, one can be honest. Only between two equal persons, when there is no fear, is there love. Love arises when fear has left you. When fear is there, love cannot enter: they are never together.

 

-Osho, "The Divine Melody, Talk #7"

 

 

 

 

Relationship Is the Mirror

 

Relationship is the mirror: see your face there. Always remember that relationship is the mirror. If your meditation is going deep, your relationships will become different -- totally different! Love will be the basic note of your relationships, not violence. As it is, violence is the basic note. Even if you look at someone, you look in a violent way. But you are accustomed to it.

 

Meditation for me is not a child's play. It is a deep transformation. How to know this transformation? It is being reflected every moment in your relationships. Do you try to possess someone? Then you are violent. How can one possess anyone? Are you trying to dominate someone? Then you are violent. How can one dominate anyone? Love cannot dominate, love cannot possess.

 

So whatsoever you are doing, be aware, observe it, and then go on meditating. Soon you will begin to feel the change. Now there is no possessiveness in relationships. By and by, possessiveness disappears, and when possessiveness is not there relationship has a beauty of its own. When possessiveness is there, everything becomes dirty, ugly, inhuman. But we are such deceivers that we will not look at ourselves in relationships -- because there the real face can be seen. So we close our eyes to our relationships and we go on thinking that something is going to be seen inside.

 

You cannot see anything inside. First you will feel your inner transformation in your outer relationships, and then you will go deep. Then only will you begin to feel something inner. But we have a settled attitude about ourselves. We do not want to look into our relationships at all because then the naked face comes up.

 

-Osho, "The Ultimate Alchemy, Vol. 2, Talk #18, Q1"

 

 

 

 

Relationship Creates a Fallacious Oneness

 

“In love, for example – the so-called love – we are ‘related.’ We appear to be related. We create the fallacy of a relationship, but in fact we are just deceiving ourselves. The two will remain two. Howsoever near, the two will remain two. Even in sexual communion they will be two. This two-ness, this duality will never last. So a relationship is only creating a fallacious oneness. It is not there. Oneness can never exist between two selves. Oneness can only exist between two no-selves.”

 

-Osho," I Am the Gate, Talk #1"