Of course, you go on missing realities, real persons. And it creates a thousand and one complexities and problems. Unsolvable problems. Do you talk to your wife really? When you are in bed with your wife, are you really in bed with your wife, or with a certain image?

This is my feeling – that wherever two persons are meeting, there is a crowd really, not two persons. At least four persons certainly are there. Your image of the other and the other’s image of you, those two images are there. And they never fit – the real person goes on changing, the real person is a flux. The real person is a river, it goes on changing its color.

The real person is alive! The day you label the person he has not gone dead, he is still alive.

Once somebody asked Chuang Tzu, “Is your work finished?” He said, “How can it be finished? – because I am still alive!” See into it: he says, “How can it be finished? I am still alive. It can only be finished the day I am dead. I am still flowing, things will still go on happening.”

When a tree is alive, flowers will come, new leaves will come, new birds will come and make their nests on it, new travelers will come and stay overnight under it…things will go on changing.

Everything remains possible when you are alive. But the moment you label a man as good, bad, moral, immoral, religious, irreligious, theist, atheist, this and that – you are thinking as if the man has become dead. You should label only when a certain person is dead. You can label him on the grave, not before it. You can go to the grave and you can write: This Man is This. Now he cannot deny you; now things have finished, things have come to a stop. The river flows no more.

But while a man is alive…. And we go on labeling even children, small children. We say, “This child is very obedient, and this child is very disobedient. And this child is such a joy, and this child is such a problem.” You label. And remember, when you label you create many problems. First, if you label somebody you help him to behave the way you label him – because he starts feeling that now he is under an obligation to prove that you are right.

If the father says, “My child is a problem,” now the child thinks, “I have to prove that I am a problem, otherwise my father will be proved wrong.” This is a very unconscious reasoning – how can a child prove his father wrong? So he creates more problems. And the father says, “Look. He is a problem.”

Three women were talking about their children. And, as women talk, they were bragging about their children. One said, “My child is only five years old, but he writes poetry. And such beautiful poetry that even accomplished poets will feel ashamed.”