Intro to Mirror of Relationship - Scribd Test

I. The Machinery of Image-Making

Have you ever looked at your wife, or your husband, or your children, or your
neighbor, or your boss, or at any of the politicians? If you have, what is seen?
The image you have about a person, the image you have about your politicians,
the prime minister, your god, your wife, your children—that image is being
looked at. And that image has been created through your relationship, or through
your fears, or through your hopes. The sexual and other pleasures you have had
with your wife, your husband, the anger, the flattery, the comfort, and all the
things that your family life brings—a deadly life it is—have created an image
about your wife or husband. With that image you look. Similarly, your wife or
husband has an image about you. So the relationship between you and your wife
or husband, between you and the politician is really the relationship between
these two images. Right? That is a fact. How can two images which are the result
of thought, of pleasure and so on, have any affection or love?
So the relationship between two individuals, very close together or very far, is
a relationship of images, symbols, memories. And in that, how can there be real
love? Do you understand the question?

New Delhi, 3rd Public Talk, December 22, 1966

Collected Works, Vol. XVII, pp. 112-113
To have relationship with another is only possible when there is no image.

Are we ever related to anyone, or is the relationship between two images which
we have created about each other? I have an image about you, and you have an
image about me. I have an image about you as my wife or husband, or whatever
it is, and you an image about me also. The relationship is between these two
images and nothing else. To have relationship with another is only possible when
there is no image. When I can look at you and you can look at me without the
image of memory, of insults and all the rest, then there is a relationship, but the
very nature of the observer is the image, isn’t it? My image observes your image
—if it is possible to observe it—and this is called relationship, but it is between
two images, a relationship which is nonexistent, because both are images. To be
related means to be in contact. Contact must be something direct, not between
two images. It requires a great deal of attention, an awareness, to look at another
without the image which I have about that person, the image being my memories
of that person—how he has insulted me, pleased me, given me pleasure, this or
that. Only when there are no images between the two is there a relationship.

New York, 1st Public Talk, September 26, 1966

Collected Works, Vol. XVII, p. 7
To look there must be silence.

If you would look at a flower, any thought about that flower prevents your looking at it.
The words the rose, the violet, it is this flower, that flower, it is that species keep you
from observing. To look there must be no interference of the word, which is the
objectifying of thought. There must be freedom from the word, and to look there must
be silence; otherwise you can’t look. If you look at your wife or husband, all the
memories that you have had, either of pleasure or of pain, interfere with looking. It is
only when you look without the image that there is a relationship. Your verbal image
and the verbal image of the other have no relationship at all. They are nonexistent.

New York, 5th Public Talk, October 5, 1966

Collected Works, Vol. XVII, pp. 35-36