If you enjoy ecstasy without thinking that it should be for always, then there is no problem. When ecstasy comes, enjoy it, and when it goes, enjoy that it has gone – because if it remains forever it won’t be ecstasy anymore. It will become agony.

Existence is wiser than you. It takes things away from you before they lose all significance for you. And it is good that beautiful things should happen and then there should be a gap, a rest.

One needs rest from love too. One needs rest from ecstasy too. One needs rest from everything. Don’t take that rest as being against your ecstasy. It is really in favor of it. It creates the background that tomorrow again you will be able…

One of the great poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, has written a book. The name of the book is The Last Poem, but it is not a book of poetry; it is a novel. And the uniqueness of it is that the hero and heroine are in deep love, they want to get married, but the heroine has only agreed to marry him on one condition: that they will not live in the same house.

They are very rich people and the woman suggests, “You can make a house on the other side of the lake. We will not invite each other; we will be meeting accidentally. Once in a while I may be boating, you may be boating; or I may be walking around the lake when you may be walking…but I want it to be accidental, and once in a while, not every day. I want to long for it, I want to wait for it, and I don’t want to destroy it by having too much of it. I love you.”

The man cannot understand. He says, “This is nonsense. If you love me, then what you are suggesting, no lover has ever suggested. Lovers don’t want to be separate even for a single moment. And what kind of love is this? – that I will be living far away on the other side of the lake. It is miles distant: you cannot invite me, I cannot invite you. And we will be married but we will have to meet like strangers, once in a while by chance, not by arrangement.”

The woman said, “If you cannot understand it, then I am not for you.”

And what the woman is saying is perfectly true. If every lover had understood it, life would have been a very joyful experience. But lovers cling; they want to be together for twenty-four hours. And they destroy something beautiful because they don’t give rest. It becomes a burden rather than a joy. They don’t allow a gap for longing, for waiting.

So all lovers who get married soon find that the only mistake they have committed is the marriage. All love marriages fail – without exception. The only successful lovers are those who, by circumstances, by society, by parents, were not allowed to meet, to marry and to be with each other. They are the only successful lovers. They love each other to the last moment of their lives; their longing goes on growing. They are unhappy, they are miserable that they cannot meet the person they wanted to. But they don’t know the reality and its way of functioning.

I have heard: