Strangers

You have to accept the fact that you are living alone -- maybe in a crowd, but you are living alone; maybe with your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, but they are alone in their aloneness, you are alone in your aloneness, and those alonenesses don´t touch each other, never touch each other.

That you may live with someone for twenty years, thirty years, fifty years -- it makes no difference, you will remain strangers. Always and always you will be strangers. Accept the fact that we are strangers; that we don´t know who you are, that you don´t know who I am. I myself don´t know who I am, so how can you know? But people are presuming that the wife should know the husband, the husband is assuming the wife should know the husband. Everybody is functioning as if everybody is a mind reader, and he should know, before you say it, your needs, your problems. He should know, she should know-- and they should do something. Now this is all nonsense.

Nobody knows you, not even you, so don´t expect that anybody else should know you; it is not possible in the very nature of things. We are strangers. Perhaps by chance we have met and we are together, but our aloneness is there. Don´t forget it, because you have to work upon it. Only from there is your redemption, your salvation. But you are doing just the opposite: how to forget your aloneness? The boyfriend, the girlfriend; go to the movie, the football match; get lost in the crowd, dance in the disco, forget yourself, drink alcohol, take drugs, but somehow don´t let this aloneness come to your conscious mind -- and there lies the whole secret.

You have to accept your aloneness, which in no way you can avoid. And there is no way to change its nature. It is your authentic reality. It is you.