It is not the same in your other relationships. But if you have learned the art in the presence of the master this can become your lifestyle: it can happen between you and your wife, between you and your child, between you and your husband, between you and your father, between you and your mother, between you and your friend. It is only a question of knowing that such a thing is possible, humanly possible. And if it is possible between the master and the disciple, why is it not possible between two lovers? – that each time they meet it is not a repetition, it is not a memory. It is not something that they have known before, it is utterly fresh, absolutely young, just born.

And if it can spread into all your relationships, you have brought magic to your life. That is my hope and dream: that my sannyasins will be able to bring this magic to their lives, that their whole world of relationships will go through a total change.

Ordinarily if you ask a husband to be truly honest about how long it has been since he has seen his wife’s face, perhaps he will say years have passed. Although they live in the same house – they fight in the same house, they produce children in the same house, they do all kinds of things in the same house – he has not looked at the face of his wife for years. So much dust of memories has gathered that even if he wants to see, he cannot see her face – so many faces, so many masks. Neither can the wife say…

When two persons fall in love – when it is not yet a relationship but only a dream, a beautiful hope – they look at each other, they touch each other’s hands, they feel the warmth, they see into each other’s eyes. They have thousands of ways to relate, and there is no relationship. There is something poetic; life has not yet become prose. But let them get married, and marriage has a certain chemistry of its own: poetry becomes prose, everything becomes flat.

At the most, something of those beautiful days when they were not married hovers over them till the end of the honeymoon – if you are fortunate. But very few people are so fortunate; otherwise the people who go for a honeymoon with suitcases labeled “Just Married” come back home as if they are coming from Hiroshima, Nagasaki. A disaster has happened.

A newly married couple in a beautiful holiday resort, a full-moon night…and the woman is lying on the bed waiting for the husband, and the husband is sitting at the window. She asks him again and again, “It is midnight. Are you coming to bed or not?”

He said, “Shut up and go to sleep. My mother has said to me, ‘Don’t miss a single moment.’ It is a honeymoon night, and I am not going to sleep. There is the whole life to sleep – you can go ahead.”

This idiot is still listening to his mother’s advice – “Don’t miss a single moment” – so he is looking at the moon. Naturally, “honeymoon” is concerned with the moon, not with the wife.

Now, their boat has already crashed on the rocks.