And that’s what my sannyas is all about. You can have the cake and eat it too – that is intelligence. Be alert, aware, intelligent. See the rhythm and move with the rhythm without any choice. Remain in choice-less awareness. See both the extremes. On the surface, they look opposite, contradictory, but they are not. Deep down there is a complementariness. It is the same pendulum that goes to the left and to the right. Don’t try to fix it at the left or at the right; if you fix it you have destroyed the whole clock. And that’s what has been done up to now.

Accept life in all its dimensions.

I understand your problem; the problem is simple, well known. The problem is, when you start relating, you don’t know how to be alone. That simply shows unintelligence. It is not that relationship is wrong, it simply shows that you are still not intelligent enough. So relationship becomes too much and you don’t find any space to be alone, and you feel exhausted and tired. Then one day you decide relationship is bad, it is meaningless. “I want to become a monk. I will go to a Himalayan cave and live there alone.” And you will see great dreams of being alone. How beautiful it will be, nobody encroaching on your freedom, nobody trying to manipulate you; you don’t have to think of the other at all.

Jean-Paul Sartre says, “The other is hell.” That simply shows that he has not been able to understand the complementariness of love and meditation; therefore the other is hell. Yes, the other becomes hell if you don’t know how to be alone sometimes, amidst all kinds of relationships. The other becomes hell. It is tedious, tiring, exhausting, boring. The other loses all beauty, because the other has become known. You are well acquainted; now there is no surprise any more. You have known the territory perfectly well; you have traveled in the territory so long that there is no surprise any more. You are simply fed up with the whole thing.

But you have become attached, and the other has become attached to you. The other is also in misery, because you are her or his hell, just as he or she is your hell. Both are creating hell for each other, and both are clinging to each other, afraid to lose because anything is better than nothing. At least something is there to hold onto, and one can still hope that tomorrow things will be better. Today they are not better but tomorrow things are going to be better. One can still hope and one goes on hoping. One lives in despair and goes on hoping.

Then sooner or later one starts feeling it would be better to be alone. And if you go into aloneness, for a few days it will be tremendously beautiful, as it is beautiful with the other – for a few days. Just as there is a honeymoon in relationship, there is a honeymoon in meditation too. For a few days you will feel so free, just to be yourself, nobody there to demand of you, nobody there to expect anything from you. If you want to get up early in the morning, you can; if you don’t want to get up early in the morning, you can go on sleeping. If you want to do something, okay, if you don’t want to do anything, there is nobody…