CHAPTER 15
Assume Relationship
SRI DA AVABHASA: As My devotee, your function is not to
analyze and convince others but to be communicative with
others and to assume relationship as the principle of all
your communications. Do not react to the present attempts by
you and others to withdraw from one another. Do not try to
argue another out of withdrawing from you or dramatizing
un-love in relationship to you. As soon as you stop assuming
that relationship, you have lost your humor and you must try
to deal with your intimate from the point of view of the
drama of humorlessness. If you assume your relationship with
the other person as the principle on which you communicate
and live with one another, there is no possibility of losing
your humor.
If you assume relationship with someone, then anything
you talk about with that person has the quality of humor.
You can laugh about it, you can be free with it, you can
play games with it.
You can fail to assume relationship only if you decide to
be unconscious. Then you have nothing but ways to assume
that the relationship does not exist. But there is only
relationship. Even in purely human terms, there is only
relationship. Everything relates to everything else.
Everything is interdependent. There is one great process,
and all beings are involved in it, so there are only
relationships.
Now, there are special kinds of relationships. One has a
different relationship to one’s grocer than to one’s
intimate partner. There are agreements, contracts, special
forms of relationships. But even though you may not be a
close intimate of another person, the relationship with that
person exists. Whenever you communicate with any person,
relationship is the condition that already exists, and
relationship is the source of humor and intelligence. On
that basis communications occur.
Ordinarily, people do not communicate while making the
assumption of relationship. They communicate while making
the assumption of alienation, separation. Therefore, they
approach one another in fear and mystery, in doubt, as if
they did not have anything to do with one another, as if
they had to prove something to one another. They do not
assume that the relationship already exists, and so allow
the force of relationship, which is life and love, to undo
limitations.
Such people are always trying to create relationship from
a point of view of disadvantage, of alienation, of
separation. But you cannot create relationship. You cannot
discover relationship as the end phenomenon of a long series
of talks. Relationship is not established as a result of
something that somebody does. An act by someone else may
remind you of relationship, but it does not create it.
Relationship fundamentally already and always exists. It
always has existed, and it is your Condition in Truth,
Realizable in Satsang with Me.
Relationship is always already the case. If you are
sitting in the house, weeping, screaming, feeling upset and
negative about somebody you live with, then this is your
suffering. This activity is your suffering. Remember that
person. Remember the relationship. Live the relationship.
Let the force of life move again, and there is no suffering
at all. You’ve obviated that whole “tour”, including the
making up and everything else.