J.Krishnamurti - What Love Is Not

 

 

 LOVE IS NOT DESIRE.

 It is a great thing to find out this for oneself. And if love is not desire then what is love? Love is not mere attachment to your baby, love is not attachment in any form; love is not jealousy, ambition, fulfilment or becoming; love is not desire or pleasure. The fulfilment of desire, which is pleasure, is not love. So I have found out what love is. It is none of these things. Have I understood these elements and am I free of them? Or I just say, ‘I understand intellectually, I understand verbally, but help me to go deeper’? I can’t; you have to do it yourself.

Krishnamurti in Saanen 1979, Discussion 2

Facing the Fact That You Do Not Love

QUESTION: The strongest underlying commandment in all religions is to love your fellow man. Why is this simple truth so difficult to carry out?

KRISHNAMURTI: Why is it that we are incapable of loving? What does it mean to love your fellow man? Is it a commandment, or is it a simple fact that if I do not love you and you do not love me, there can only be hate, violence, and destruction? What prevents us from seeing the very simple fact that this world is ours, that this earth is yours and mine to live upon, undivided by nationalities, by frontiers, to live upon happily, productively, with delight, with affection and compassion? Why is it that we do not see this? I can give you lots of explanations, and you can give me lots more, but mere explanations will never eradicate the fact that we do not love our neighbour. On the contrary, it is because we are forever giving explanations and causes that we do not face the fact. You give one cause, I give another, and we fight over causes and explanations. We are divided as Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, this or that. We say we do not love because of social conditions, or because it is our karma, or because somebody has a great deal of money while we have very little. We offer innumerable explanations, lots of words, and in the net of words we get caught. The fact is that we do not love our neighbour, and we are afraid to face that fact, so we indulge in explanations, in words and the description of the causes; we quote the Gita, the Bible, the Koran, anything to avoid facing the simple fact.
With the facing of that fact there comes a different quality; and it is this quality that saves the world.
What happens when you face the fact and know for yourself that you do not love your neighbour or your son? If you loved your son, you would educate him entirely differently; you would educate him not to fit into this rotten society, but to be self-sufficient, to be intelligent, to be aware of all the influences around him in which he is caught, smothered, and which never allow him to be free. If you loved your son, who is also your neighbour, there would be no wars because you would want to protect him, not your property, your petty little belief, your bank account, your ugly country or your narrow ideology. So you do not love, and that is a fact.
The Bible, the Gita or the Koran may tell you to love your neighbour, but the fact is that you do not love. Now, when you face that fact, what happens? What happens when you are aware that you are not loving, and being aware of that fact, do not offer explanations or give causes as to why you do not love? It is very clear. You are left with the naked fact that you do not love, that you feel no compassion. The contemptuous way you talk to others, the respect you show to your boss, the deep, reverential salute with which you greet your guru, your pursuit of power, your identification with a country, your seeking – all this indicates that you do not love. If you start from there you can do something. If you are blind and really know it, if you do not imagine you can see, what happens? You move slowly, you touch, you feel; a new sensitivity comes into being. Similarly, when I know that I have no love, and do not pretend to love, when I am aware of the fact that I have no compassion and do not pursue the ideal, then with the facing of that fact there comes a different quality; and it is this quality that saves the world, not organized religion or a clever ideology. It is when the heart is empty that the things of the mind fill it; and the things of the mind are the explanations of that emptiness, the words that describe its causes.

So, if you really want to stop wars, if you really want to put an end to this conflict within society, you must face the fact that you do not love. You may go to a temple and offer flowers to a stone image, but that will not give the heart this extraordinary quality of compassion and love, which comes only when the mind is quiet, and not greedy or envious. When you are aware of the fact that you have no love, and do not run away from it by trying to explain it, or find its cause, then that very awareness begins to do something; it brings gentleness, a sense of compassion. Then there is a possibility of creating a world totally different from this chaotic and brutal existence which we now call life.

Krishnamurti in Bombay 1961, Discussion