Krishnamurti: Passion
Without Motive – What is Love Part Two
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 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 practice love.
I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practice being kind
and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others”?
Do you mean that you can discipline yourself to love,
exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love
goes out the window. By practicing some method or system of loving you may
become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of
nonviolence, 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 it.
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 only come
into being 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 a perfume, you can smell it or pass
it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes the trouble to
breath it deeply and to 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 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 upon 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 you are not seeking, not wanting, not
pursuing; there is no center at all. Then there is love.
(Freedom from the Known in Total Freedom –The Essential Krishnamurti
p.131 ff.)
