On love
THE DEMAND TO be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and
fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity. Have you ever
found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Most of us want
the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one
of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path? We are not
loved because we don't know how to love.
What is
love? The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it.
Everybody talks of love - every magazine and newspaper and every
missionary talks everlastingly of love. I love my country, I love my
king, I love some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure, I love
my wife, I love God. Is love an idea? If it is, it can be cultivated,
nourished, cherished, pushed around, twisted in any way you like. When
you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a
projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in
certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble
and holy; so to say, `I love God', is absolute nonsense. When you
worship God you are worshipping yourself - and that is not love.
Because we cannot solve this human thing called love we
run away into abstractions. Love may be the ultimate solution to all
man's difficulties, problems and travails, so how are we going to find
out what love is? By merely defining it? The church has defined it one
way, society another, and there are all sorts of deviations and
perversions. Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the emotional
exchange, the companionship - is that what we mean by love? That has
been the norm, the pattern, and it has become so tremendously personal,
sensuous, and limited that religions have declared that love is
something much more than this. In what they call human love they see
there is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire to possess, to
hold, to control and to interfere with another's thinking, and knowing
the complexity of all this they say there must be another kind of love,
divine, beautiful, untouched, uncorrupted.
Throughout the world, so-called holy men have maintained that to look
at a woman is something totally wrong: they say you cannot come near to
God if you indulge in sex, therefore they push it aside although they
are eaten up with it. But by denying sexuality they put out their eyes
and cut out their tongues for they deny the whole beauty of the earth.
They have starved their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human
beings; they have banished beauty because beauty is associated with
woman.
Can love be divided into the sacred and
the profane, the human and the divine, or is there only love? Is love
of the one and not of the many? If I say,`I love you', does that
exclude the love of the other? Is love personal or impersonal? Moral or
immoral? Family or non-family? If you love mankind can you love the
particular? Is love sentiment? Is love emotion? Is love pleasure and
desire? All these questions indicate, don't they, that we have ideas
about love, ideas about what it should or should not be, a pattern or a
code developed by the culture in which we live.
So to go into the question of what love is we must first ideals and
ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide anything into
what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with
life.
Now how am I going to find out what this
flame is which we call love - not how to express it to another but what
it means in itself? I will first reject what the church, what society,
what my parents and friends, what every person and every book has said
about it because I want to find out for myself what it is. Here is an
enormous problem that involves the whole of mankind, there have been a
thousand ways of defining it and I myself am caught in some pattern or
other according to what I like or enjoy at the moment - so shouldn't I,
in order to understand it, first free myself from my own inclinations
and prejudices? I am confused, torn by my own desires, so I say to
myself, `First clear up your own confusion. Perhaps you may be able to
discover what love is through what it is not.'
The government says, `Go and kill for the love of your country'. Is
that love? Religion says, `Give up sex for the love of God'. Is that
love? Is love desire? Don't say no. For most of us it is - desire with
pleasure, the pleasure that is derived through the senses, through
sexual attachment and fulfilment. I am not against sex, but see what is
involved in it. What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment
of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a
repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no
worry, no problem, no self. You say you love your wife. In that love is
involved sexual pleasure, the pleasure of having someone in the house
to look after your children, to cook. You depend on her; she has given
you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of
security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored
or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is
destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don't like, is called
jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence. So what you
are really saying is, `As long as you belong to me I love you but the
moment you don't I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to
satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment
you cease to supply what I want I don't like you.' So there is
antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate
from another there is no love. But if you can live with your wife
without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless
quarrels in yourself, then perhaps - perhaps - you will know what love
is. Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas if you depend
on her for all your pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves
there must be freedom, not only from the other person but from oneself.
This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished
by another, depending on another - in all this there must always be
anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt, and so long as there is fear there is
no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is;
sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with
love. And so love is not to do with pleasure and desire.
Love is not the product of thought which is the past.
Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and
caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active
present. It is not `I will love' or `I have loved'. If you know love
you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is
neither respect nor disrespect.
Don't you know
what it means really to love somebody - to love without hate, without
jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is
doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing - don't you
know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you
love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your
body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally
abandon yourself to that love there is not the other.
Does love have responsibility and duty, and will it use
those words? When you do something out of duty is there any love in it?
In duty there is no love. The structure of duty in which the human
being is caught is destroying him. So long as you are compelled to do
something because it is your duty you don't love what you are doing.
When there is love there is no duty and no responsibility.
Most parents unfortunately think they are responsible for
their children and their sense of responsibility takes the form of
telling them what they should do and what they should not do, what they
should become and what they should not become. The parents want their
children to have a secure position in society. What they call
responsibility is part of that respectability they worship; and it
seems to me that where there is respectability there is no order; they
are concerned only with becoming a perfect bourgeois. When they prepare
their children to fit into society they are perpetuating war, conflict
and brutality. Do you call that care and love?
Really to care is to care as you would for a tree or a plant, watering
it, studying its needs, the best soil for it, looking after it with
gentleness and tenderness - but when you prepare your children to fit
into society you are preparing them to be killed. If you loved your
children you would have no war.
When you lose
someone you love you shed tears - are your tears for yourself or for
the one who is dead? Are you crying for yourself or for another? Have
you ever cried for another? Have you ever cried for your son who is
killed on the battlefield? You have cried, but do those tears come out
of self-pity or have you cried because a human being has been killed?
If you cry out of self-pity your tears have no meaning because you are
concerned about yourself. If you are crying because you are bereft of
one in whom you have invested a great deal of affection, it was not
really affection. When you cry for your brother who dies cry for him.
It is very easy to cry for yourself because he is gone. Apparently you
are crying because your heart is touched, but it is not touched for
him, it is only touched by self-pity and self-pity makes you hard,
encloses you, makes you dull and stupid.
When
you cry for yourself, is it love - crying because you are lonely,
because you have been left, because you are no longer powerful -
complaining of your lot, your environment - always you in tears? If you
understand this, which means to come in contact with it as directly as
you would touch a tree or a pillar or a hand, then you will see that
sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the
outcome of time. I had my brother three years ago, now he is dead, now
I am lonely, aching, there is no one to whom I can look for comfort or
companionship, and it brings tears to my eyes.
You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it. You can
see it fully, completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over
it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this
shoddy little thing called `me', my tears, my family, my nation, my
belief, my religion - all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you
see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the
very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow.
Sorrow and love cannot go together, but in the Christian world they
have idealized suffering, put it on a cross and worshipped it, implying
that you can never escape from suffering except through that one
particular door, and this is the whole structure of an exploiting
religious society.
So when you ask what love is,
you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete
upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not
love your wife or husband or children - do you? - you may have to
shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple.
But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear
is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love,
possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are
not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not
love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the
opposite of vanity. So if you can eliminate all these, not by forcing
them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days
from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower which
man always hungers after.
If you have not got
love - not just in little drops but in abundance - if you are not
filled with it - the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually
that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way,
but who is going to teach you how to love? Will any authority, any
method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is
not love. Can you say, `I will practise love. I will sit down day after
day and think about it. I will practise being kind and gentle and force
myself to pay attention to others?' Do you mean to say that you can
discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you
exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out of the window. By
practising some method or system of loving you may become
extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of
non-violence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love.
In this torn desert world there is no love because
pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your
daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no
beauty. Beauty is not something you see - not a beautiful tree, a
beautiful picture, a beautiful building or a beautiful woman. There is
beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. Without love
and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well
that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only
be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and
poverty in your own heart and mind. But when there is love and beauty,
whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how
to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other
problems.
So we reach the point: can the mind
come upon love without discipline, without thought, without
enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader - come upon it as
one comes upon a lovely sunset?
It seems to me
that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without
motive - passion that is not the result of some commitment or
attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what
passion is will never know love because love can come into being only
when there is total self-abandonment.
A mind
that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without
seeking it is the only way to find it - to come upon it unknowingly and
not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will
find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is
both the one and the many. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell
it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who
takes trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight. Whether
one is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is the same to the
flower because it is full of that perfume and therefore it is sharing
with everybody.
Love is something that is new,
fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the
turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love
is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.
To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through
sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through
every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to
understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no
opposite, then love has no conflict.
You may
ask, `If I find such a love, what happens to my wife, my children, my
family? They must have security.' When you put such a question you have
never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness.
When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a
question because then you will know what love is in which there is no
thought and therefore no time. You may read this mesmerized and
enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time - which means
going beyond sorrow - is to be aware that there is a different
dimension called love.
But you don't know how to
come to this extraordinary fount - so what do you do? If you don't know
what to do, you do nothing, don't you? Absolutely nothing. Then
inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means?
It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is
no centre at all. Then there is love.