At fourteen, the child attains physical maturity. His activities become diversified and the child or teenager doesn’t spend as much time with his parents. The child now begins to collect images from outsiders and media. The media are perfectly aware of this. That is why you will see that all advertisements always have sexual undertones – an attractive woman or man will be modeling for the product, even if the product has nothing to do with them.

Almost all motorbike ads show women, but how many women ride motorbikes! Whatever the product may be, you will find a smiling woman recommending it. When you go to the market, you promptly pick up that product, forgetting that the woman does not come with it! This is the media’s way of cashing in on your suppressed desires.

If you are alert and aware, advertisements can never fool you. Of course, by seeing them, you can always be aware of the latest things on the market, no doubt, but they will not deceive you.

You see, while on one side the media feed your imagination, on the other society tries to suppress you.

The more society tries to suppress your imagination and desires, the more they grow, because society aims at suppressing the symptoms without getting down to the root cause. You collect ideas from all sorts of media and build up an image of the perfect woman or man. From each person, you collect the best nose, the best eyes, the best personality, and create your own ‘ideal person’. You follow a ‘cut and paste’ method like you do in your computers!

This stage lasts for around seven years, until we are about twenty one. By then the identification with media wears off, but the ideas are already deep-rooted in our minds. Then a fresh search begins, to find that ideal person in our real life. This is the search with the idea of how our ‘would-be’ should be. This is where expectations start.

After a long search, we suddenly find a person who seems to match our mental image but from a distance. The picture in our mind is green, and the image that we see also seems to be green. A match seems to be found!

What happens at this point is what is called ‘falling in love’. This is the science behind falling in love. Note that it is always ‘falling’ in love, never ‘rising’ in love! Because of our own strong needs and expectations, we see things as we want to see them. We project our mental image upon the other. Now, the world becomes filled with greenery and music and life becomes poetry. This is the stage at which we begin to write poetry, make paintings of each other and what not.

As long as this distance is maintained, things go on smoothly. We continue to project our imagination upon each other. But as the person slowly comes closer we then feel that what we saw as green was not so green but only a pale green. We feel it is alright and move on. After a while, we come still closer and feel that it is not even pale green but actually a sort of yellow.

But at this stage, we don’t want to accept that our imagination has turned out to be a lie, so we start making excuses for the situation. We say to ourselves, ‘This is life! Everything can’t be perfect!’ and so on. It requires tremendous courage, tremendous intelligence to live with reality. So we use these excuses instead, as a buffer system, to shield ourselves from reality.

Finally, when we get close enough we find that it is not even yellow, it is just white! What is inside us is green and what is outside is white. Fantasy and reality are totally different. As long as we float and flirt in love, as long as we keep our distances and time short, we are fine. We are in a fantasy world. It is only when the floating stops and the real relationship starts, when the distances reduce and time increases that the problem starts!

The fewer fantasies you collect, the fewer the number of things there are to compare with and lesser the trouble. If you don’t have any fantasy or imagination, you will immediately meet your soul mate. If you don’t have fantasies, anyone you marry will become your soul mate.

We need to understand that no living person can live up to the image we carry in our minds simply because the image is not built from reality! No image can be matched with reality because at the end of the day, it is only an image, a fantasy!

source: Living Enlightenment