"LOVE" IS A VERB

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Love is existential; fear is only the absence of love.
And the problem with any absence is that you cannot do anything
directly about it. Fear is like darkness. What can you do about
darkness directly? You cannot drop it, you cannot throw it out, you
cannot bring it in. There is no way to relate with darkness without
bringing light in. The way to darkness goes via light. If you want
darkness, put the light off; if you don't want darkness, put the
light on. But you will have to do something with light, not with
darkness at all.
    The same is true about love and fear: love is light, fear is
darkness. The person who becomes obsessed with fear will never
be able to resolve the problem. It is like wrestling with darkness:
you are bound to be exhausted sooner or later, tired and defeated.
And the miracle is, defeated by something which is not there at
all! And when one is defeated, one certainly feels how powerful
the darkness is, how powerful the fear is, how powerful the igno-
rance is, how powerful the unconscious is. They are not powerful
at all, they don't exist in the first place.
    Never fight with the non-existential. That's where all the
ancient religions got lost. Once you start fighting with the non-
existential you are doomed. Your small river of consciousness will
be lost in the non-existential desert, and it is infinite.
    So don't make a problem out of fear. Love is the question.
Something can be done about love immediately; there is no need
to wait or postpone. Start loving! And it is a natural gift from exis-
tence to you, or from God, or from the whole, whichever term you
like. If you are brought up in a religious way, then God; if you are
not brought up in a religious way, then the whole, the universe,
existence.
    Remember, love is born with you; it is your intrinsic quality.
All that is needed is to give it a way--to make a passage for it, to
let it flow, to allow it to happen.
    We are all blocking it, holding it back. We are so miserly about
love, for the simple reason that we have been taught a certain eco-
nomics. That economics is perfectly right about the outside world:
if you have just so much money and you go on giving that money
to people, soon you will be a beggar. By just giving away money
you will lose it. This economics, this arithmetic has entered into
our blood, bones, and marrow. It is true about the outside world,
and nothing is wrong in it, but it is not true about the inner jour-
ney. There, a totally different arithmetic functions: the more you
give, the more you have; the less you give, the less you have. If you
don't give at all you will lose your natural qualities. They will
become stagnant, closed; they will go underground. Finding no
means of expression they will shrink and die.
    It is like a musician: if he goes on playing on his guitar or on
his flute, more and more music will come. It is not that by playing
on the flute he is losing music--he is gaining. It is like a dancer:
the more you dance, the more skillful you become. It is like paint-
ing: the more you paint, the better the paintings you create.
    Once, while Picasso was painting, a critic and friend stopped
him in the middle and said, "One question has been bothering
me and I cannot wait anymore, I cannot contain it. I want to
know: you have painted hundreds of paintings; which is your best
painting?"
    Picasso said, "This one that I am painting right now."
    The critic said, "This one? What about the others that you
have painted before?"
    Picasso said, "They are all contained in it. And the next one
that I do will be even better than this, because the more you
paint, the greater is your skill, the greater is your art."
    Such is love, such is joy--share it! In the beginning it will
come only like dewdrops, because your miserliness has been in
existence for so long, it is very ancient. But once even dewdrops of
love have been shared, you will soon become capable of sharing
the whole oceanic flood of your being, and you contain infinities.
    Once you have known the higher mathematics of giving and
gaining, you will find that just by giving you gain. Not that some-
thing is returned; in the very giving you are becoming richer.
Then love starts spreading, radiating. And one day you will be
surprised. Where is the fear? Even if you want to find it, you will
not be able to find it at all.
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, con-
venient, 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 cre-
ate 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.
    Why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why
are we in such a hurry? Because to relate is insecure, and relation-
ship 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.
    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 disap-
pears, 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 relation-
ship. 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 godliness in it. There is every possibility
that their love may last longer than your so-called relationships
ever last. But it will not be guaranteed by the law, by the court, by
the policeman. The guarantee will be inner. It will be a commit-
ment from the heart, it will be a silent communion.
    If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it
more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to
explore the intimacy more and more. And there are a few flowers
of love that bloom only after long intimacies. There are seasonal
flowers too; within six weeks they are there in the sun, but within
six weeks again they are gone forever. There are flowers which
take years to bloom, and there are flowers that keep blooming for
many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes.
    But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another
heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is
to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment: eye to eye, heart to
heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.
    It is so ugly seeing people going to the church or the court to get
married. It is so ugly, so inhuman. It simply shows they can't
trust themselves, they trust the authorities more than they trust
their own inner voice. It shows that because they can't trust their
love, they trust the law.
    Forget relationships and learn how to relate. Once you are in
a relationship you start taking each other for granted. That's
what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the
man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows! It is
impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to
take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful.
    To think that you know your partner is very ungrateful. How
can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are
processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yester-
day is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges;
she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again,
don't take it for granted.
     And the man who you slept with last night, look at his face
again in the morning. He is no longer the same person, so much
has changed. So much, incalculably much, has changed! That is the
difference between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room
is the same, but the man and the woman, they are no longer the
same. Explore again, start again. That's what I mean by relating.
     Relating means you are always starting, you are always trying
to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing your-
self to each other. You are trying to see the many facets of the
other's personality. You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper
into his realm of inner feelings, into the deep recesses of her being.
You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unraveled.
    That is the joy of love: the exploration of consciousness.
    And if you relate, and don't reduce it to a relationship, then
the other will become a mirror to you. Exploring the other,
unawares you will be exploring yourself too. Getting deeper into
the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings,
you will be knowing your own deeper stirrings too. Lovers become
mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation.
    Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.
    In relationship both persons become blind to each other. Just
think, how long has it been since you saw your lover eye to eye?
How long has it been since you looked at your partner? Maybe
years! Who looks at one's own wife? You have already taken it for
granted that you know her. What more is there to look at? You are
more interested in strangers than in the people you know; you
know the whole topography of their bodies, you know how they
respond, you know everything that has happened is going to hap-
pen again and again. It is a repetitive circle.
    It is not so, it is not really so. Nothing ever repeats; everything
is new every day. Just your eyes become old, your assumptions
become old, your mirror gathers dust and you become incapable of
reflecting the other.
    Hence I say relate. By saying relate, I mean remain continu-
ously on a honeymoon. Go on searching and seeking each other,
finding new ways of loving each other, finding new ways of being
with each other. And each person is such an infinite mystery, inex-
haustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that you can ever
say, "I have known her," or, "I have known him." At the most you
can say, "I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery."
    In fact the more you know, the more mysterious the other
becomes. Then love is a constant adventure.


				*"LOVE" IS A VERB*