To relate means to love

To relate is one of the greatest things of life: to relate means to love, to relate means to share. But before you can share, you must have. And before you can love you must be full of love, overflowing with love.

Two seeds cannot relate, they are closed. Two flowers can relate; they are open, they can send their fragrances to each other, they can dance in the same sun and in the same wind, they can have a dialogue, they can whisper. But that is not possible for two seeds. Seeds are utterly closed, windowless – how to relate?

And that is the situation. Man is born as a seed; he can become a flower, he may not. It all depends on you, what you do with yourself; it all depends on you whether you grow or you don’t. It is your choice – and each moment the choice has to be faced; each moment you are on the crossroads.

Millions of people decide not to grow. They remain seeds; they remain potentialities, they never become actualities. They don’t know what self-realization is, they don’t know what self-actualization is, they don’t know anything of being. Utterly empty they live, utterly empty they die. How can they relate?

It will be exposing yourself – your nudity, your ugliness, your emptiness – safer, it seems, to keep a distance. Even lovers keep distance; they come only so far, and they remain alert to when to turn back. They have boundaries; they never cross the boundaries, they remain confined to their boundaries.

Yes, there is a kind of relationship, but it is not that of relating, it is that of possession: the husband possesses the wife, the wife possesses the husband, the parents possess the children, and so on and so forth. But to possess is not to relate. In fact to possess is to destroy all possibilities of relating. If you relate, you respect; you cannot possess. If you relate, there is great reverence. If you relate, you come very close, very very close, in deep intimacy, overlapping. Still the other’s freedom is not interfered with, still the other remains an independent individual. The relationship is that of I-thou, not that of I-it – overlapping, interpenetrating, yet in a sense independent.

Khalil Gibran says: “Be like two pillars that support the same roof, but don’t start possessing the other, leave the other independent. Support the same roof – that roof is love.”

Two lovers support something invisible and something immensely valuable: some poetry of being, some music heard in the deepest recesses of their existence. They support both, they support some harmony, but still they remain independent. They can expose themselves to the other, because there is no fear. They know they are. They know their inner beauty, they know their inner perfume; there is no fear.

But ordinarily the fear exists, because you don’t have any perfume. If you expose yourself you will simply stink. You will stink of jealousies, hatreds, angers, lust. You will not have the perfume of love, prayer, compassion.

Osho, The Book of Wisdom, Ch 27 – 9 March 1979

Quote published in The Book: An Introduction to the Teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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