While on the way to my gym, with my usual relaxed mood, I picked out a book from my bookshelf so that I could read it on the train – The Spirit of Loving (Reflections on love and relationship by writers, psychotherapists, and spiritual teachers) For the past few weeks, I have been dwelling on this profound issue of relatedness or connectedness, wherever I go, whatever I do. My deepest thoughts were promptly revealed in my dream just a few nights ago. The following is the quotation from the book:
Have we actually a relationship with another? To be related means to be in contact. You may be sexually, physically in contact but that does not constitute a relationship. We are talking of a relationship in which there’s no image between you and another. I do not know if you have ever tried it. Do. Have no image about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, or about another; just look, just see, directly, without the image, the symbol, the memory of yesterday, of what she said to you, what you said to her, how she annoyed you and all the rest of it. Stripped of these things there is a possibility of right relationship. Because then everything in that relationship is new; relationship is no longer of the dead past.

- J KRISHNAMURTI