Love - Freedom - Aloneness

A relationship is a puzzle with no clue to it. Howsoever you try to manage it, you will never be able to manage it. Nobody has ever been able to manage it. It is made in such a way that it simply remains puzzling. The more you try to demystify it, the more mysterious it becomes. The more you try to understand it, the more elusive it is.
It is a greater koan than any koan that Zen masters give to their disciples, because their koans are meditative -- one is alone. When you are given the koan of relationship it is far more complicated, because you are two -- differently made, differently conditioned, polar opposites to each other, pulling in different directions, manipulating each other, trying to possess, dominate... there are a thousand and one problems.
While meditating, the only problem is how to be silent, how not to be caught in thoughts. In relationship there are a thousand and one problems. If you are silent, there is a problem. Just sit silently by the side of your wife and you will see - she will immediately jump upon you: "Why are you silent? What do you mean?" Or speak, and you will be in trouble - whatsoever you say, you are always misunderstood.
No relationship can ever come to a point where it is not a problem. Or if sometimes you see a relationship coming to a point where it is no longer a problem, that simply means it is not a relationship anymore. The relationship has disappeared - the fighters are tired, they have started accepting things as they are. They are bored; they don’t want to fight any more. They have accepted it, they don’t want to improve upon it.
Or, in the past, people tried to create a kind of harmony forcibly. That’s why, down the ages, women were repressed - that was one way of sorting things out. Just force the woman to follow the man, then there is no problem. But it is not a relationship either. When the woman is no longer an independent person the problem disappears - but the woman has also disappeared. Then she is just a thing to be used; then there is no joy, and the man starts looking for some other woman.
If you ever come across a happy marriage, don’t trust it on the surface. Just go a little deeper and you will be surprised. I have heard about one happy marriage...

A hillbilly farmer decided it was time to get married, so he saddled his mule and set off for the city to find a wife. In time, he met a woman and they were married. So they both climbed up on the mule and started back for the farm. After a while, the mule balked and refused to move. The farmer got down, found a big stick, and beat the mule until it again began to move.
"That’s once," the farmer said.
A few miles later, the mule balked again, and the entire scene was repeated. After the beating, when the mule was moving again, the farmer said, "That’s twice."
A few miles later, the mule balked for a third time. The farmer got down, got his wife down, and then took out a pistol and shot the mule in the eye, killing it instantly.
"That was a stupid thing to do!" the wife shouted. "That was a valuable animal and just because he annoyed you, you killed him! That was stupid, criminal..." and she went on like this for some time. As she stopped for breath, the farmer said, "That’s once."

And it is said, after that they lived forever in married happiness!
That is one way of solving things, that’s how it has been done in the past. In the future, the reverse is going to be tried - the husband has to follow the wife. But it is the same thing.
A relationship is a koan. And unless you have solved a more fundamental thing about yourself, you cannot solve it. The problem of love can be solved only when the problem of meditation has been solved, not before it. Because it is really two non-meditative persons who are creating the problem. Two persons who are in confusion, who don’t know who they are - naturally they multiply each other’s confusion, they magnify it....



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