My vision of a real humanity is of pure individuals relating to each other, but not tied in any relationship. They will be loving to each other, but not being possessive of each other. They will be sharing with each other all their joys and all their blessings, but never even in their dreams thinking of dominating, thinking of enslaving the other person.
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.
Relationship is a mirror.. Every moment the other reveals you, exposes you. The closer the relationship, the clearer is the mirror.
If you are not capable of being alone, your relationship is false. It is just a trick to avoid your loneliness, nothing else.
But one thing you have to understand clearly 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.
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.
Relationship is the need of those who cannot be alone. Two alone persons relate, communicate, commune, and yet they remain alone.
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 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 good-bye. 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.
So what 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 relationship. 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.
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.
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.
Freedom is not to be destroyed in the name of love. Freedom is a far higher value than your so-called love.
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.
Meditation for me is not a children'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 someone? Are you trying to dominate someone? Then you are violent. How can one dominate anyone? Love cannot dominate, love cannot possess.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
Then the highest state of love is prayerfulness. In prayerfulness 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 longer 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 prayerfulness.
Become alert! Relationship destroys love, destroys the very possibility of its birth.
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.
Love has these three stages, and compassion accordingly has three stages, and both can exist in different combinations.
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.
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