~~FREEDOM AND LOVE~~

Freedom is the ultimate desire of man. Man comes to flowering only in freedom. Meditation will bring freedom.

And I am not against love; it is just one step lower than freedom, and it is beautiful to have love as a fragrance around you. Let freedom be your center and love be your circumference. Let love be the circumference and freedom the center, and you will have a total being, a whole being.

But relationship never works. You are asking me: “How can two people be committed to each other?” They cannot be. Commitment is toward existence, not toward each other. Commitment can only be toward the whole, not to each other.

“How does a relationship work?” you ask. It does not work – and you can see it everywhere. It only pretends to. People go on saying that everything is okay, everything is good. What is the point of showing one’s misery? What is the point of showing one’s wounds? One goes on hiding them. It is humiliating to show one’s wounds, so people pretend that everything is going well. They go on smiling, they go on repressing their tears.

Friedrich Nietzsche is reported to have said, “I go on smiling and laughing for the simple reason that if I don’t smile I may start crying.” Smiling is a way to cover up tears: you shift your energy from the tears to the smile so that you can forget your tears. But everybody is full of tears.

I have looked into thousands of people’s lives, their relationships. It is all misery, but they are covering it up, pretending everything is going okay. A relationship does not work, cannot work.

And you say: “I am afraid of commitment, so I avoid relationships.” You are perfectly right in being afraid of commitment and you are perfectly right in avoiding relationships, but don’t avoid relatedness. Don’t make any exclusive relationship, be friendly. Let love rise to the level of friendliness, let it be just your quality. Be loving. Don’t make it a relationship, just be loving.

These are the three stages. Relationship is the lowest, it is animal. Love as a quality of your being. Just as you breathe, let love be, that is human. And love at its ultimate expression is not even a quality, you become love itself. Then it is not even like breathing, it is your very being; then it is spiritual. But the third possibility can happen only through meditation. That refinement is possible only if your energies go through the whole alchemy of imitativeness.