Selfishness clouds all our important relationships in life

CHENNAI: What actually is our relationship between man and woman. Apart from sexual relationship, is there any relationship at all? Or each one going separately in their own way, never meeting except sexually, like two railway lines never meeting. Right? That is our relationship, is it not? No? So our relationship is merely a sensory relationship, sexual relationship and the relationship between each other is based on the images we have built about each other. Right? Are you aware of all this? Am I talking Greek or Chinese? Are you aware of all this, what actually your relationship with the another is? Or you have no relationship at all, except sexual?

If you have no relationship with each other, which I am afraid is the fact, then what is your life? Life is relationship. Without relationship we cannot exist. But we have reduced that relationship to mere sensory responses. I wonder if one is aware of this complexity of relationship. You cannot escape from it by becoming a hermit, a sanyasi, a monk, you cannot escape from having human relationship.

So, we must examine very closely why human beings have lost, not only relationship with nature but also with each other. Do you understand? Why? Merely seeking the cause will not help to bring about the resolution of the problem. We may find the cause, I’ll show you the cause, but the understanding of the cause, the examination of the cause will not solve the problem. Right? I know, for example, we are selfish, totally self-centred and we are self-centred because it is our habit, it is our tradition, it is our religious upbringing: you are a separate soul, you must seek your salvation and so on. This emphasis on being selfish, self-centred through education, through pressure, it has existed from time immeasurable. That’s the cause of all this misery —right? That’s the cause.

We understand that discovering the cause does not make us less selfish. So, we said, as yesterday, what is important is not the analytical process of discovering the cause but remaining with the problem, which is we are selfish. That is a fact. And therefore there is no relationship with each other. Each goes his own way. Divorces are multiplying in Europe and in America and it is also coming here, more and more. When women can earn their own livelihood, they walk out on men. So gradually there is the world in which hardly any relationship with each other exists. So we become very callous, self-centred, pursuing our own way. That is, our way is to become something — become more rich, become the chief executive or become the high priest, archbishop and so on. There is all this struggle to become something, which is essentially selfish.