Two people who meet, it’s two worlds who meet. The thing is not simple, but on the contrary very complex, the most complex there is. Each person is a world in itself: a complex mystery, with a distant past and an eternal future.
At the start of the relationship, only the peripheries meet.
But if the relationship grows in intimacy, becomes closer, becomes deeper, then little by little, the centers begin to meet.
When the centers come together, this is called love.
When the peripheries meet, it is called getting to know each other.
You make contact with the other, from the outside, just from the edge: you get to know each other.
Frequently, you start calling your love encounter. You are then in error. To get to know is not to love.
Love is very rare.
To meet someone at its center is to go through a revolution yourself, because if you want to meet someone at its center, you will have to allow them to arrive, also at your center.
You will have to become vulnerable, absolutely vulnerable, open. It’s risky.
Letting someone come to your center is risky, dangerous, because you don’t know what they’re going to do to you.
And once all your secrets are known, once your privacy is revealed, once you are fully exposed, what will it do? You do not know. And the fear is there. That’s why we never open up.
A simple meeting and we think that love has arrived.
The peripheries are touching and we believe that we are met. You are not your periphery.
In reality, the periphery is the border where you end, it is the palisade that surrounds you. It is not you!
The periphery is where you end and where the world begins.
Even husbands and wives who have lived together for many years may be strangers, they do not know each other.
And the longer you live with someone, the more you completely forget that your centers have remained unknown.
The first thing to understand is, therefore:
Do not confuse relationship, couple and love. Even if you have s**x, even if you have s**x, s**x is also on the periphery. Unless the centers meet, s**x is only the meeting of two bodies.
And the meeting of two bodies is not your meeting.
S**x, too, remains a superficial relationship – physical, bodily, but always superficial.
But you can only allow someone to enter your center if you are not afraid, if you are not afraid.
Also, I tell you that there are two kinds of existence:
One is driven by fear, the other by love.
Living in fear can never allow you to have a deep relationship. You remain fearful and you cannot let the other do the work: you cannot allow them to really enter your heart. You tolerate each other to a certain extent, and then it’s the wall and everything stops.
Being turned to love means: not being afraid of the future, not being afraid of the result or the consequences: living here and now.
