The one thing that we constantly put a lot of energy into and have probably since the beginning of mankind is relationships. Now relationships can be very very rewarding in your search for clarity or they can be just the opposite. They can be very crippling.

Now whether they're crippling or helpful, everybody is relating. I know we use the word 'relationship' to mean a certain kind of relationship, what we might call a 'love relationship' but in reality everyone is relating all the time. You can't not relate. And this will be helpful for you if you can see that you are in a relationship even if you don't have what we normally call a lover or a partner or a mate or whatever.You're constantly relating to people, even if you run away from them you're relating to them. This is your way to relate is to run away, to avoid; if you're running toward people, this is your way to relate.

It's really important for you to, if you want to use relationships as a way to help yourself become clearer and more free, is important first to see what's behind the relationship. Now, to a large degree, we think that sex is behind relationships but actually sex plays a minor role. We use it in a different way but if you really look at it it plays a relatively minor role.

Basically the traditional relationship is a rerun of your childhood. And, even if you're not in a relationship or you don't have relationships or you have anti-relationships, they're also reruns of your childhood if you'll really look at it. And these relationships can be traced back to our first relationships with people, with others and with ourselves.

Remember that when you were born you were helpless. I have to keep coming back to that because it is so fundamental. And you were not complete at that time without the other because without the other you would have died. You needed someone to take care of you. If there was no one there to take care of you you would have died. It's just very simple.

So you experienced this idea that I'm not complete without the other. Without the other I'm in trouble. And this idea is basically still present. And this gives a feeling of completion that we think the other is going to give us. If only I can find the right other person, then I'll be complete, then I'll be safe, then I can be happy and so forth. Until then, it's a kind of frustration because a part of us feel I need the other in order to survive and I don't have the other so of course you have to put a lot of energy into that.

Childhood

Now it can be that in childhood you experienced that the other which you needed let's say rejects you. But if that's the case, then that's your relationship. Your relationship is one of being rejected by the other which you need in order to be complete.

Now I said a moment ago that relationships are basically reruns of childhood. So if as a child your relationship was one of rejection, of being rejected, then that's the kind of relationships you're apt to have as an adult. You're going to be in relationships where people reject you. You're going to follow the old script that you wrote as a child. And it's going to go around and around and around.

If you're with somebody and it looks like you're going to complete something, that something is going to change, usually it doesn't happen, unfortunately. What changes is your lover. In other words, you get a new one. The moment you feel like something really is going to change which isn't in the script you don't change and you don't change the script. You change lovers. And you start all over again because it's safe. And it's familiar and that's just the way it works.

So we keep playing again and again the relationships of our childhood. And actually as a child you had more than just one relationship. You had several. You had a relationship to your mother, a relationship to your father, relationship to your older brothers and sisters, relationship to your grandmother, grandfather if they were there, relationship to an aunt or an uncle that might have lived in the house with you, or whatever.

But you had several relationships, close relatives perhaps also. And these few people were your world when you were a young child. And they formed the major people in your script. They were the major actors in your script. So there's your mother, your father, let's say your grandmother and your older sister. This was the family you were born into, let's just say.

Basically everybody else in the world didn't count. Like everybody else in the world were really minor actors: the postman, the milkman, neighbors. They weren't really important in your life. The people who were important were your mother, your father, your grandmother, and your older sister. Now you might have loved your grandmother, hated your sister, let's just say. You're going to find women who represent your grandmother that you can love in that way, in that grandmotherly way. And it doesn't mean that the person that you find to play that role is going to be an old woman. That doesn't necessarily mean that's the case at all.

But you'll find that there will be certain women that remind you of this relationship to your grandmother and that relationship or those relationships will be a part of your life. You'll find other women that you'll hate in the same way that you hated your sister and then you'll find women that will play the role of your mother and there will be those three kinds of women in your life: your mother, your grandmother and your sister. Other women won't be important at all. You'll never have any kind of close relationship with any other kind of woman. They'll just be minor actors in your life.

Friends

So if you're a women and you are looking for a woman friend, you're probably going to choose someone like your grandmother. And you will also find that a big part of your life are those women that somehow come into your life that you hate, playing the role of your sister. You won't be able to ignore them. You'll attract them. You'll be fascinated with them, but you will pull them into your life somehow. And other women just won't be important, just as if they're not there. And the same with all the other members of your family- the people that you experienced as a child.

And it can be that as a child your family was visiting friends one day and there just happens to be a stranger who is present visiting the friends of your family. And it can be that this person makes a very deep impression on you. And that person becomes a main actor in your life. It isn't necessary that these people are there constantly, but it's whoever made an impression on you in those early years. And you'll find that there aren't a lot of people. It's a relatively small number.

And now today what you're doing is you're looking for people to play those roles again for you. And then you'll relate to them basically the way you were relating to the people in your childhood. Of course the most dramatic of all these are the so-called love relationships because it is from these relationships that we expect to be fulfilled, that we expect to be satisfied, that we expect to blossom. And sometimes it happens and when it happens it is because we feel like all the circumstances are right. But if we didn't really blossom as a child, it is very difficult for us to allow ourselves to blossom as an adult. If we blossomed to some degree, relatively speaking, as a child then that can happen again as an adult through relationships.

But you have to be able to see that in most relationships the predominant feeling is "I'm not o.k. without you", "I'm not o.k. as I am", "I'm not complete without you". And behind that actually is a feeling of the infant, "I won't survive without you". And this is what makes us needy. This is what makes us jealous. Jealousy is just a fear that the other is going to go away and leave us and we're going to die. It has nothing to do with love. It's fear, plain old fear. And of course it is a fear of the infant who can't take care of himself or herself.

A good test of love in a relationship is whether your love is directed to the other. If your love is directed to the other, it's a kind of investment. You're investing all your love in the other so that you get something back. But the focus is on getting something back. If your focus is on giving and you are not expecting anything back, then there's a good chance that that is love. But if you're giving without giving anything back or expecting anything back, then probably you are not focusing your love on one person. You are simply love.

True love is like a light bulb that's turned on. It just shines. And the love is coming from within and doesn't depend on what is happening outside. This is a pretty hard test. Most relationships don't pass it because in more relationships we want something from the other and our happiness depends on whether or not we get it. But if we want to be free we also have to free ourselves from these patterns because it is what it is. It is a pattern of helplessness, it is a pattern of inadequacy, it is a pattern of dependency.

Lovers

There are such things as adult relationships, I've heard. But they will look totally different than the average relationship because in the average relationship both partners are taking turns playing the infant. Both are thinking the other is going is going to take care of me, the other is going to make me happy, the other is going to complete me. And sometimes the patterns to two people fit so closely together that they do become in a sense one and they do in a sense complement each other and they do spend their whole lives together being happy. But usually they also spend their entire lives being infantile, playing house in a sense. But they never really get any real freedom. Both of them are like a person with only one leg and saying "I can't walk unless my partner is here and that way I have two legs."

And that is great. You might make a great dance team if you can call two legs a dance team. But you might develop a great act and everybody is impressed with your harmony and your synchronicity and so forth, but you still only have one leg. And you still aren't free because you have to compromise constantly with the other. And you can do that. And if you are satisfied with that that's fine, perfect. But once you become really aware you'll see that this is still just an old pattern from your childhood. And if you are really going to be free it means learning to enjoy dancing in your own independence, in your own freedom. Then when you relate to somebody from freedom, from your own strength your relationship is a totally different kind of relationship. It is a relationship of respect in which you allow the other do do what the other wants to do, whatever it is, even if it means leaving you. You respect that. You don't try to cling because when you cling, you are really saying "my life depends on you and if you leave me I am going to die."

Now that is a pretty heavy statement to make to somebody. In the old days when passion and jealousy were considered high ideals the greatest compliment was to have someone say to you, "I can't live without you." But if you are a relatively adult person and someone says "I can't without you" you realize what a drag that is. That means they are saying that unless you do what they want you to do, they are going to go kill themselves. And that is a drag. Nobody wants that responsibility.

And the game of lovers in relationships is very often a game of the hunter and the hunted. And the successful relationship consists of two people who know when to switch from the hunter to the hunted and from the hunted to the hunter. Otherwise it gets boring.

But there is always this sort of tension, that one is supposed to be running away from the other and the other is supposed to be chasing. This is what makes it fun? But this is also still just a duplication of what was happening in childhood. So if you are interested at all in true freedom, true strength, true happiness then it will be very useful for you just to look at your patterns that you have with other people-- all of your ways of relating to all kinds of people. And included among those ways to relating looking specifically at your love relationships or your one to one partner relationships.

The Perfect Mother

There is a kind of relationship which on the surface doesn't look like a rerun of your childhood but it is important just to mention. And that is your relationship with your ideal that you formed in childhood. You might have had a certain experience with your mother and out of this experience with your mother you formed the idea of the perfect mother. And later when you become an adult still looking for the perfect mother you find the perfect woman who may not be like your mother at all. She may be just the opposite of your mother. But see that it is till coming from your relationship with your mother. It is just let's say a revolution against that. But still you will be tied to your mother as long as you are with this woman because you are tied to this ideal that you started as a child.

And then you'll make life probably hell for this woman because then you will require her to fit this ideal. And the moment she varies from the ideal, which you call ideal, then you will accuse her of not being honest, not being fair, not being what she claimed to be and maybe she did not claim anything. Maybe you did it all yourself because that is one of the characteristics of falling in love is we look for someone who more or less fits out script and we project the whole script on them whether they like it or not. If we want to think great things about them then we think great things about them and totally ignore the reality. And this is what we call falling in love. It is like suddenly somebody comes along that totally fits our patterns or almost totally fits our patterns. And then we give up seeing the real person and we fall in love with our old ideal.

And then it comes a a shock six months later when we start slowly slowly seeing the person that really is there. And then we accuse them of lying to us and being false and putting on false airs and all that sort of thing. But actually the main problem was that we projected onto them. They had just enough qualities to qualify and then all the other qualities we gave to them because we wanted them to have them and then felt disappointed later on when we discovered that actually they didn't have them. And then we are angry and hurt and disappointed and we feel cheated.

But all of this again can be traced back to what we experienced as a child. We all put a lot of energy into relationships. Even if you haven't actually been with with a lover let's say for months or for years, you are still relating and you are relating according to a pattern. And you can free yourself from those patterns so that you can really genuinely relate to people, relating as an adult. Because you have to see that one of the most important things when you relate to other people as you did when you were a child, this keeps you regressed. It keeps you childish. You can't grow up and hang on to these old patterns. And the old patterns will keep you in those childish attitudes. That is just the way it is. And being in a childish attitude means also that at the subconscious level you feel weak and helpless and dependent.

So it is going to take all your power away from you. You may feel strong as long as a substitute mommy or a substitute daddy is there but at a real deeper level you're going to still be feeing dependent. And when you can see that you are not dependent that it is alright for the other to leave you any moment and if you really love them and they want to leave then you're going want for them to leave if that's what they want and if you love them. But any kind of holding on your part indicates that you feel you need them and that need in turn represents a kind of dependency, a kind of helplessness.

This is not very easy for us to look at in our culture because for one thing religions have made much of relationships, have established the whole institution of marriage based on this sort of thing so it is very difficult for us also to separate one thing from the other. And I've only briefly mentioned sex which comes in. But sex is actually a different issue which we won't get into today. But you can have a sexual relationship as a child as with the mother or you can have a sexual relationship as an adult with another adult. But the sex itself as such is not the issue in relationships. It sometimes seems a way, seems an excuse; it is part of the game, yes; but it is not the real thing. There is a kind of you might even call it sometimes sexual energy. It is just energy of aliveness which attracts the baby to the mother or the baby to any sort of alive warm human being and this could be called sexual but at that age it is not usually what we would call sexual. It is just energy, it is life energy being attracted to other life energy.

Sex

But sex is a different issue and of course when you put the two of them together then you multiply the complexities and sometimes the fun but like I say that's another issue.

From experience I know that when I say that relationships are basically reruns of your relationships from childhood many people feel threatened. They're like one-legged dancers feeling like I'm pulling out the other leg from under them and they don't really like to hear that. But that is the way it is so the best thing to do is just to openly, honestly look at the way you relate to people and especially the way you relate to close friends, to lovers, people who really play an important part in your life and just see how much of the way you relate is actually a repeat or a pattern, a rerun of the way you related to people when you were a child and when you were an infant. And if you want to you can free yourself from those things. If you don't want to then you can enjoy them--either way. But let yourself have that choice, that's the main thing.

Do what you do from awareness and not just as a pattern, not just as a habit because habits always if you use them with unawareness will make you slaves, keep you from really being free. If you can use your patterns with awareness, consciously, then that is something different.

But our relationships to people are a part of our relationship to our self. You can't have a true relationship to yourself unless you are clear about your relationship to other people. So you owe it to yourself somehow to become clear about relating because it is through relating as a child that you have the feeling about who you are, whether you are lovable, whether you are worthwhile, whether you are worthy, whether is is all right to be free, whether it is all right to be creative, to be joyous. All this comes from other people.

So if you really want to discover yourself it is really important to see how much of what you think you are, who you think you are, has come through your relationships to other people in your infancy and childhood.

So...anybody like to argue?

Discussion

Question: "I almost said I'm scared but that's not true. Actually I am very curious. I have been without a partner for quite a long time and I have had the experience of these dependent relationships a few times, long times, short times, and now I see that I am in the process of, now I start connecting more deeply again with one person.

I don't know how far it goes but I feel I connect truly and I am more open to give and take and also I see so many things popping up and I see I could fall right back in to it again and I just catch myself and 'oops' and go back with myself and get myself some space and look at it and breathe and say wow that was just a ...(?). And it is every day, I mean every moment it is like the old thing or something new and it's like hot and cold. I feel really very excited about it.

It is like as if it is not possible to make a decision like I want this love relationship. It is not possible. It is just that it has to be, it is work every day. And I don't see that it is changing. I cannot say from tomorrow on I will be in a deep love relationship and it will be forever. It is like every day, every morning, I wake up. I have been dreaming and I have to say to myself, 'well it is today. He is not my daddy even if he looks like him and his son is not my brother and I don't need to be jealous about my brother. Every day."

Jeru: "O.k. It is work. But this is also the way to get clarity. And you do bring up something which I wanted to mention and didn't at least not so clearly. And that is relationships can really be a tool for you, if you will use them that way, to see your patterns, to see what you cling to.

And two people can help each other tremendously if they will learn to be open and just help each other see those patterns, help each other become free of those patterns. So I am not suggesting for example by any means that you just simply drop relationships. Rather the best thing to do is to go into them but with as much awareness as you can manage, not with the idea of clinging to each other but helping each other or allowing the other to help you see where you are stuck, to see where you are somehow crippling yourself by feeling dependent on the other, and learning to give the other more and more freedom and learning to take the freedom that the other gives you.

That way respect grows. And neediness begins to disappear. You help each other truly become an adult. And then you have a really beautiful adult friendship. Who knows where it will go to but at least it can be very very rewarding, very nourishing.

Question: "I keep telling myself there is another way. I even got it from a master but I may have misunderstood him, in that if you have had lots of relationships and you have had a lot of time in practice and you see your child in every relationship and so you decide "I don't want those scripts anymore" so I'll just pull away and take the path of meditation or whatever. And some people can make progress on their solitary path. Perhaps they're afraid but if they have seen that everything leads to chaos, why not choose the solitary path of peace and ...(?) just when you can?

Jeru: "There's nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that at all. The only thing that would be a little bit tricky is whether or not at a deeper level, the subconscious level, you still do feel dependent on the other. That would be the thing you would have to check because if you do then it is like running away from something that you really want, settling for something that seems to be second best, then rationalizing that it is what you really wanted.

On the surface it can look exactly the same. Someone who has, let's say, transcended dependency and is relatively satisfied to be alone and that doesn't mean not being with people but not being with any one single person, can look exactly like someone who is afraid of relationships or who wants relationship but feels like it is never going to work out so why don't I drop the whole mess but actually at a deeper level still wanting it. So that is something that everybody just has to look at, to see whether or not the child within them still wants someone but because they're afraid of being hurt or afraid of being disappointed or afraid it is never going to work out anyway or whatever, they turn their back on that.

It is a kind of resignation, rather than freedom. And that is something that everybody has to answer for themselves and you answer that basically by looking into the subconscious. The conscious mind doesn't know these things but the subconscious has a very precise idea about it all. And this does happen very often in mediation, that people go into meditation as a kind of sour grapes thing and that is why you get a lot of sour meditators. They say 'well who wanted it anyway you know, who wants to be successful anyway, who wants to be happy anyway, who wants to famous anyway, who wants to have whatever?'

So then they go into meditation but it doesn't really work for them. And, again, when they are sitting they may look just somebody who is sitting there because it is the greatest joy in their life but inside one person is squirming and discontented and the other is flowering. So, from the outside you may not tell the difference at all and it is up to every individual to look inside and see actually why they are doing what they are doing.

Question: "I grew up in a family where I was surrounded by men. I had a father and two brothers and with my mother was the only woman. And I find today that I have very beautiful and deep friendships with women, women my age or women younger, and I cannot with what you explained about it being you know a kind of a reproduction or a continuation from the special relationships you had in childhood because I don't recall having any relationship with with women outside of my mother and these women don't at all seem to have anything to do with my mother for the most part.

Jeru: "You would have to look into the subconscious for that. It has nothing to do with younger or older. But my guess is that if you will look you will see that in your relationships with women either they represent your mother, whatever that relationship was, or they represent the incidental women in your life as a child. In other words, somehow not so important.

And it isn't only the mother. It might be somebody else in your family that you related to as a child, other woman I mean. And like I say it doesn't have to be someone that's there all the time; it could be just someone that you met once but you felt so relaxed, so open, or something that you're always sort of looking for that kind of a woman again and finding her. But I would suggest using the pendulum. Make a list of the women in your life what have been somehow important to you and then just ask to what degree does this woman represent someone from my childhood?

To what degree is she representing or reminding me of someone from my childhood? And include in that list your ideal woman, your ideal mother that you formed in childhood. Because on the surface people can look very different but at the subconscious level the subconscious is seeing something similar there. Maybe it is their attitude about you, the way they accept you; maybe it is a certain quality that they have that is important for you. The other qualities may be totally different. But the main thing is that you would actually have to check out the subconscious, the subconscious level, that is where it is really and truly happening."

Question: (cont.): "It has nothing to do with the sex(?) because I found out that you were my mother and ??? was also my mother."

Jeru: "See. I bet her mother didn't have a beard, you see, So it is a quality that we look for, not necessarily the outer features. And sometimes it can be the outer features, sometimes that is what does it. But you just have to look to see where it is coming from. You may be attracted to someone because they smell a certain way. You may never suspect that it is just the smell. Or the way a person walks may turn you on or remind you of an old familiar pattern or whatever. It doesn't necessarily have to be a photograph that does it."

Question: " Once you realize that basically you are relating to others through these old kind of movies, could you say something about communicating from that space once you have seen that pattern, communicate in that new light?"

Jeru: "Well, one thing you could do is you could say to the other when you want something from the other, "My four year old would like this, or my four year old gets angry when you do this or my four year old feels threatened when you don't do this and blah, blah, blah. If you really want to go for it you can call your lover "daddy" or if your lover doesn't represent daddy like hers perhaps then you can call your male lover "mommy" and let yourself exaggerate to some degree what it is you want, let yourself be childish about it at times.

It is best to have some kind of agreement about this, however. Like Monday to Wednesdays and Fridays you can play mommy and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays your partner can play daddy. And then just allow yourself in a way to feel childish if the other agrees to that, to play the daddy and you play the little girl and then just let those roles be there like that and then see what it feels like and see what you do once you realize it's o.k. to be a little girl.

See what you demand, see what you want, see what you give, see what you expect. And then other days you be the mommy, strong and capable and all that sort of thing and let your partner be the little boy, let him allow his childish side to come out, his dependency side to come out. That is one way to do it. I mean it is a bit shattering but it can also be fun if you do it lighthearted and you have nothing better to do because in your relationships you are doing that anyway but you put so much energy into trying to appear adult and trying to appear rational and trying to avoid responsibility and that sort of thing so often.

So it really is easier if you can recognize this in each other and play it as a game and not take it very seriously. And it is fine if you play the little girl on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and let him be the daddy and tell you bedtime stories or whatever it is that comes out for you. That will be the thing. Just give yourself permission to express that which is there. You don't have to pretend. It is not a matter of pretending to be a little girl, but rather just expressing what is there, saying what you want, and saying what you don't want, how you don't want to have any responsibility basically for everything.

You want the other to take that responsibility because after all I am just a little girl and you are the big daddy. And then the next day do the same for your partner, reverse that. You take care of your partner, you play the role of mommy and let your partner be the little boy and see what comes from that.

Question: "The problem with that seems to be that changes so fast like my girl friend wants to be a little girl sometimes and I say 'fine, go for it' and as soon as she starts doing it my four year old goes 'I don't like this'. He listens to her for a little while and the whole time he is going 'when is she going to be finished?' So he complains like immediately, as soon as she wants to regress, he agrees and says 'go for ii, do it' and then he gets bummed out.

Jeru: "It sounds like you have a contract in which you are allowed to be the child all the time and then when she wants to be the child just for a break, you know, that your child can only handle that for two or three seconds. And if you see that, that's fine. Nothing wrong with that."

Question: (cont.): "She doesn't feel fine with it."

Jeru: "Well, she doesn't feel fine with it but she does. She does. She does feel fine with it, otherwise she wouldn't be doing it. She'll find in her childhood a similar pattern of some kind. Now it might sound like in her childhood that she was playing father but that's not, or excuse me mother, but that's not really the case because her relationship probably is with the father if you represent her father who himself wanted to be taken care of, maybe her mother was taking care of her father, you understand, allowing her father to be the four year old and her relationship to her father might have been one of having to let him have his way in order to get any attention from him.

Even so she will find if she looks she will find a pattern there and part of her pattern will be frustration, not liking it and yet that's what she went through and that is what she is going to repeat until she becomes free of it. So part of her pattern will be the frustration of trying to have someone give her attention even though she is doing what she wants to do. Do you follow that? In other words, her pattern probably is she had to play second fiddle, she had to place her own desires and so forth in second place in order to get any attention.

Maybe she in a sense flirted with her daddy playing the little girl but at the same time the real thing would be that she had the feeling she couldn't really truly be herself with him and that he demanded whatever it was he was demanding. I am just saying these words but I am sure if she looks she will find a pattern there and even though now she says she doesn't like it it is a familiar pattern and it is easy for her to be in it. If you should turn around by some miracle and totally drop the four year old and totally be there for her and just say 'whatever you want I'll do it, whatever you, you know, you just say the word and I'll do it, I'll take care of it. You can be totally childish and I'm totally adult for you.

I am the big strong daddy and I'm giving you total freedom.' You do that for a couple of days and she would lose interest in you totally. Now we're going to get the other side."

Jeru: "...I have had the opposite case. And I was running away. I was working hard to get into that position and as he was like that, he was a real daddy ...I am liking it." J.: "This is exactly the way it is. The moment you come out of the pattern you feel uncomfortable and you say about this guy that you have been trying to train to be with perfect daddy when he finally the perfect daddy, then you say "he'd not the man I thought he was. He has changed. He is not what he used to be." And then you go out and say "now what I want is I want a real man, not one of these fuddy-duddies that let's me do what I want to do." It is good that you've seen that."

Question: "There is really no clear absolute way of doing this. You just have to work with it basically."

Jeru: "You mean is there like one set formula that you can follow?"

Question: (cont): "Not one set formula but I mean ...clear, I know basically that all the patterns are different in some ways and yet they are all the same in other ways so I'm ... means you can basically use one way."

Jeru: "Yes, I understand your question. The patterns can be totally different in all kinds of people but there is one thing that they all have in common. They are all based on the dream. They are all based on memory. They are not based on the here and now. They are not based on truth. They are not based on reality. In other words, all of these things are still coming from the dream that is happening at the subconscious level, based on your feelings of inadequacy at birth.

So, the knife that can cut through all of these things, it doesn't matter what patterns they are, the knife that can cut through all of them is focusing on the here and now on the one hand but allowing the memory to come to the surface so that you can see that it is just a memory, which is the same with everything. The whole subject of relationships for somebody who is on the Path is no different than any other subject. It is still a matter of trying to see the difference between memory, how it is affecting you, how it is creating patterns, and the truth, the reality of the here and now. And in the here and now you are not a helpless infant.

In your memory you are. In the here and now you just live and experience that which is happening. And if another person is in your presence then you try to experience them if you are an adult. You just experience them then in the here and now. You see their beauty, you see their intelligence, you see their harmony and you see, if you are really in the here and now that they are a divine being, a divine creature, and that you are too. And you also see that you don't need that person for survival. Otherwise you wouldn't be alive right now probably, you see.

But you have to understand that at the subconscious level what you are dreaming is that you need the other and that your idea of the other has become fixed by your experiences of infancy and childhood. It can even be talking about the mother and the father many people have very strong attitudes about let's say men based on the way the doctor if it was a male doctor handled them at birth. This can be a very very strong influence. That is the strongest moment of your life and if you got some male person handling you as if you are a bag of beans or something, slapping you around and all that kind of thing then it can be a certain attitude that you will have towards men. So it doesn't necessarily have to be your father but definitely experiences from your infancy and your childhood. But the secret will be and for those of you who sort of consider yourself on the Path, people who are trying to find out who you really are, understand that relationships in that sense are no different from anything else. They definitely can be used because relationships represent our deepest attitudes about ourselves. That is the important thing. The way we relate to other people says something about us.

That is the most significant thing and if your relationship indicates that you need the other then that means you are saying about yourself 'I can't take care of myself. I am not o.k. as I am. I am not complete as I am. So see that the important thing about relationships is that it tells you something about your relationship with yourself."