Relationship between human beings is based on the image forming, defensive mechanism. In all our relationships each one of us builds an image about the other and these two images have a relationship, not the human beings themselves. The wife has an image about the husband - perhaps not consciously - but nevertheless it is there and husband has image about the wife. One has an image about one’s country and about oneself, and we are always strengthening these images by adding more and more to them. And it is these images, which have relationship. The actual relationship between two human beings or between many human beings completely ends when there is the formation of images.

 

In the understanding of meditation there is love, and love is not the product of systems, of habits, of following a method. Love cannot be cultivated by thought. Love can perhaps come when there is complete silence, the silence in which the meditator is entirely absent; and the mind can be silent only when it understands its own movement of thought and feeling.

 

Meditation is to find out whether the brain, with all its activities, all its experiences, can be absolutely quite. Not forced, because the moment you force, there is duality. The entity that says, “I would like to have marvellous experiences, therefore I must force my brain to quiet” — will never do it. But if you begin to enquire, observe, listen to all the movements of thought, its conditioning, its pursuits, its fears, its pleasures, watch how the brain operates, then you will see that the brain becomes extraordinarily quiet; that quietness in not sleep but is tremendously active and therefore quiet. A big dynamo that is working perfectly hardly makes a sound; it is only when there is friction that there is noise.

 

A meditative mind is silent. It is not the silence which thought can conceive of; it is not the silence of a still evening; it is the silence when thought — with all its images, its words and perceptions — has entirely ceased. This meditative mind is the religious mind — the religion that is not touched by the church, the temples or by chants.