All human relationships fail because the other is there and you start clashing with each other, you start dominating each other, you start being jealous of each other, you start being possessive of each other. You are afraid that you may lose the other. And then one day you see that there is nothing to lose -- the other is as empty as you are. One dream is shattered, then another dream....
That is the beauty of the religious dream: you can go on dreaming, it can't be shattered. The relationship with God can never be on the rocks -- it is impossible because you are simply alone. When you are praying, what are you doing? Talking to yourself! It is like whistling in the dark -- there is nobody to listen.
God is not a person with whom you can have any relationship. God is not somebody in particular whom you can address, whom you can long for. But all your frustrations, all your relationships, which have failed, have not made you alert enough to the fact that it is better to drop the whole idea of desiring the other. Now you are trying to desire something which you are never going to get. One thing is good about it: you can go on hoping for lives. There is never going to be any end to it; the journey is unending. The other does not exist at all; now you are living in pure dreams. First you were living in dreams but the other was there, so between the two realities the dreams were bound to be crushed -- and they were crushed. But now there is nobody else, you are alone. You can make your God the way you want.
In India people worship God in such ways that one feels sorry for them.
It is madness. It is the same madness, even a little worse, because when you love a real person there is at least somebody real, good or bad, frustrating or not frustrating. But when you start longing for the divine it is simply living absolutely in the abstract.
What is then the difference between longing for the divine and loving another?
There is no difference at all -- longing is longing.
Try to understand the nature of longing, the nature of desire. When you understand the nature of desire, in that very understanding the desiring disappears. Then you start enjoying your aloneness, you become utterly joyous with yourself. There is no need for the other, there is no dependence on the other.
I am not saving that you will not be able to love then. In fact you will be able to love then and only then because then love will have a totally different quality, the quality of sharing. You will not be a beggar, you will be an emperor. You will love because you have something to give, not to get something. You will love because you are overflowing with joy and you would like to share it with people. But then it will not be a relationship at all.
I call it relating.