Relationships Fail…

Photo Credit: The Chopra Centre

Relationships Fail…

When one becomes too fed up with ordinary relationships with people, one starts imagining a relationship with God; that is the longing for the divine. Now God is a little better in the sense that we can never be disappointed because we will never meet him; for the simple reason that there is going to be no honeymoon, the honeymoon can never be over; for the simple reason that there is going to be no living together with God, we can go on hoping. Now we are alone - it is a monologue; it is not a dialogue.

All human relationships fail because the other is there and we start clashing with each other, we start dominating each other, we start being jealous of each other, we start being possessive of each other. We are afraid that we may lose the other. And then one day we see that there is nothing to lose – the other is as empty as we are. One dream is shattered, then another dream and so on. That is the beauty of the religious dream - we can go on dreaming; it can’t be shattered. The relationship with God can never be on the rocks – it is impossible because we are simply alone. When we are praying, what are we doing? Talking to ourselves! It is like whistling in the dark – there is nobody to listen.

God is not a person with whom we can have any relationship. God is not somebody in particular whom we can address, whom we can long for. But all our frustrations, all our relationships, which have failed, have not made us alert enough to the fact that it is better to drop the whole idea of desiring the other. Now we are trying to desire something which we are never going to get. One thing is good about it - we can go on hoping birth after birth. There is never going to be any end to it; the journey is unending. The other does not exist at all; now we are living in pure dreams.

First, we were living in dreams but the other was there, so between the two realities the dreams were bound to be crushed – and they were crushed. But now there is nobody else, one is alone. One can make one’s God the way one wants.

Ultimately, we do realise that God lies within us, we are a part of God, then all the illusions disappear and we just are. We become content with the God we have found within…..now there is silence and untold bliss.