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 either. 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 wife is very 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 yesterday 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 that you slept with last night, look at his face again in the morning. He is no more 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 more the same. Explore again, start again.

That's what I mean by relating.

-Rajneesh

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. And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? -- because to relate is insecure, and relationship 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 goodbye. 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.

-Rajneesh

...the third possibility is of interdependence. That happens very rarely, but whenever it happens a part of paradise falls on the earth. Two persons, neither independent nor dependent but in a tremendous synchronicity, as if breathing for each other, one soul in two bodies -- whenever that happens, love has happened.

-Rajneesh

This is something which has to be continuously remembered. If it becomes a fundamental remembrance in you, your life will have a totally new flavor -- the flavor of freedom, the flavor of unclingingness, the flavor of nonattachment. Whatsoever comes, you remain still, silent, accepting.

And the person who is capable of being still, silent, accepting of pain, frustration and misery, transforms the very quality of misery itself. To him, misery also becomes a treasure; to him, even pain gives a sharpness. To him, even darkness has its own beauty, depth, infinity. To him, even death is not the end but only a beginning of something unknown.

-Rajneesh

There is no heaven and there is no hell. They are not geographical, they are part of your psychology. They are psychological. To live a life of spontaneity, truth, love and beauty is to live in heaven. To live a life of hypocrisy, lies and compromises, to live according to others, is to live in hell. To live in freedom is heaven, and to live in bondage is hell.

You can decorate your prison cell beautifully, but that makes no difference, it is still a prison cell. And that's what people have been doing, they go on decorating their prison cell. They give it beautiful names, they go on painting it, putting new pictures on the walls, arranging the furniture in new ways, purchasing more and more things -- but they live in prisons.

Your marriage is a prison, your church is a prison, your nationality is a prison. How many prisons you have created! You are not living in one prison, your prisons are like Chinese boxes: a box within a box within a box within a box, it goes on. You are like an onion: peel it, another layer, peel that, another layer. Destroy one prison and you find another inside. This is what hell is.

To reach the very core of the onion, where all layers have been dropped and there is only nothingness in your hands, that is freedom, nirvana, bodhichitta. The consciousness of a buddha, the pure consciousness of a buddha, that is heaven.

-Rajneesh