Forget Relationships and Learn How to Relate

nirvikalpa:

Question - Beloved Osho, is relationship there because love is not?

Osho -  Mukti Gandha, yes. Love is not a relationship. 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 quality 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.

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Sadness as a Meditation

“Sadness can become a very enriching experience. You have to work on it. It is easy to escape from your sadness — and all relationships ordinarily are escapes; one simply goes on avoiding it. And it is always there underneath…the current continues. Even in relationship it erupts many times. Then one tends to throw the responsibility on the other, but it is not the real thing. It is your loneliness, your own sadness. You have not settled with it yet, so it will erupt again and again.

You can escape in work. You can escape in some occupation, in relationship and society, this and that, in travelling, but it is not going to go way, because it is part of your being.

Every man is born alone — in the world, but alone; comes through the parents, but alone. And every man dies alone, again moves out of the world alone. And between these two lonelinesses we go on deceiving and fooling ourselves. It is good to take courage and enter into this loneliness. However hard and difficult it may look in the beginning, it pays tremendously. Once you settle with it, once you start enjoying it, once you feel it not as sadness but as silence, once you understand that there is no way to escape, you relax.

Nothing can be done about it, so why not enjoy it? Why not go into it deeply and have a taste of it, see what it is? Why be unnecessarily afraid? If it is going to be there and it is a fact — existential, not accidental — then why not come to terms with it? Why not move into it and see what it is?

Whenever you feel sad, sit silently and allow sadness to come; don’t try to escape from it. Make yourself as sad as you can. Don’t avoid it — that’s the one thing to remember. Cry, weep…have the whole taste of it. Cry to death…fall down on the earth…roll — and let it go by itself. Don’t force it to go; it will go, because nobody can remain in a permanent mood.

When it goes you will be unburdened, absolutely unburdened, as if the whole gravitation has disappeared and you can fly, weightless. That is the moment to enter yourself. First bring sadness. The ordinary tendency is not to allow it, to find some ways and means so that you can look somewhere else — to go to the restaurant, to the swimming pool, meet friends, read a book or go to a movie, play a guitar — to do something, so that you can be engaged and you can put your attention somewhere else.

This is to be remembered — when you are feeling sad, don’t lose the opportunity. Close the doors, sit down, and feel as sad as you can, as if the whole world is just a hell. Go deep into it…sink into it. Allow every sad thought to penetrate you, every sad emotion to stir you. And cry and weep and say things — say them loudly, there is nothing to worry about.

So first live sadness for a few days, and the moment that momentum of sadness goes, you will feel very calm, peaceful — as one feels after a storm. In that moment sit silently and enjoy the silence that is coming on its own. You have not brought it; you were bringing sadness. When sadness goes, in the wake, silence settles.

Listen to that silence. Close your eyes. Feel it…feel the very texture of it…the fragrance. And if you feel happy, sing, dance.” — Osho, Be Realistic: Plan for a Miracle

(Source: nirvikalpa)