Love is never a relationship

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. For attachment you need not be aware and alert. There is no need. Even animals can be attached very easily, rather, more easily. A dog is more attached to his master than any man can be. The dog is completely unconscious so attachment happens. That is why in the countries where human relationship has become poor, such as in the West, man goes on seeking relationship with animals, with dogs, with other animals, because the human relationship is no longer there. Human society is disappearing and every man feels isolated, alienated, alone. The crowd is there but you are not related to it. You are alone in the crowd and this aloneness scares. One becomes afraid and fearful.
4. Two individuals relating remain individuals; two individuals getting into a relationship lose their individuality. They become a couple, and to be a couple is an ugly thing. That means you have lost your freedom, you are no more yourself; the other is also no more himself or herself. Both have lost their freedom and nobody has gained anything out of it.
5. Our relationship with persons is also as it is with things. A husband behaves towards his wife as if she is a thing: he possesses her. The wife possesses the husband just like a thing. If we behaved with the other as if they were persons then we would not try to possess them, because only things can be possessed.
6. For attachment you need not be aware and alert. There is no need. Even animals can be attached very easily, rather, more easily. A dog is more attached to his master than any man can be. The dog is completely unconscious so attachment happens. That is why in the countries where human relationship has become poor, such as in the West, man goes on seeking relationship with animals, with dogs, with other animals, because the human relationship is no longer there. Human society is disappearing and every man feels isolated, alienated, alone. The crowd is there but you are not related to it. You are alone in the crowd and this aloneness scares. One becomes afraid and fearful.
7. If you behave as if everything is a thing, then you are the center and things are just to be used. The relationship becomes utilitarian. Things have no value in themselves — the value is that you can use them, they exist for you. You can be related to your house — the house exists for you. It is a utility. The car exists for you, but the wife doesn’t exist for you and the husband doesn’t exist for you. The husband exists for himself and the wife exists for herself. A person exists for himself; that is what being a person means. And if you allow the person to be a person and don’t reduce him to being a thing, you will by and by start feeling him. Otherwise you cannot feel. Your relationship will remain conceptual, intellectual, mind to mind, head to head — but not heart to heart.
8. When you are in love, then you start showing your real face. Love is a mirror. The other starts functioning  a mirror. Every relationship becomes a mirror. Alone, you don’t experience your own smell — you cannot; one becomes immune to it. You have lived with it so long, how can you smell it? It is only with the other that you start feeling that he stinks and he starts feeling that you stink. And the fight starts
9. When one becomes too fed up with ordinary relationships with people one starts imagining a relationship with God; that is the longing for the divine. Now God is a little better in the sense that you can never be disappointed because you will never meet him; for the simple reason that there is going to be no honeymoon, the honeymoon can never be over; for the simple reason that there is going to be no living together with God, you can go on hoping. Now you are alone: it is a monologue, it is not a dialogue.
10. Relationship originates in misery, relating originates in bliss.
11. When you enter into a love relationship with a Master — that’s what entering into a Buddhafield is — you start losing your old identity, your definition becomes blurred. It was arbitrary anyway — it starts melting; your limits start merging with the unlimited. You are no more somebody; you start becoming a nobody, a nothingness.