Krishnamurti: … You are asking what love is. We are saying we may come upon it when we know what it is not. Anything that brings about a division, a separation, is not love, for in that there is conflict, strife and brutality.
Questioner: What do you mean by a division, a separation that brings about strife – what do you mean by it?
Krishnamurti: Thought in its very nature is divisive. It is thought that seeks pleasure and holds it. It is thought that cultivates desire.
Questioner: Will you go into desire a bit more?
Krishnamurti: There is the seeing of a house, the sensation that it is lovely, then there is the desire to own it and to have pleasure from it, then there is the effort to get it. All this constitutes the centre, and this centre is the cause of division. This centre is the feeling of a “me”, which is the cause of division, because this very feeling of “me” is the feeling of separation. People have called this the ego and all kinds of other names – the “lower self” as opposed to some idea of a “higher self” – but there is no need to be complicated about it; it is very simple. Where there is the centre, which is the feeling of “me”, which in its activities isolates itself, there is division and resistance. And all this is the process of thought. So when you ask what is love, it is not of this centre. Love is not pleasure and pain, nor hate nor violence in any form.
Questioner: Therefore in this love you speak of there can be no sex because there cannot be desire?
Krishnamurti: Don’t, please, come to any conclusion. We are investigating, exploring. Any conclusion or assumption prevents further enquiry. To answer this question we have also to look at the energy of thought. Thought, as we have said, sustains pleasure by thinking about something that has been pleasurable, cultivating the image, the picture. Thought engenders pleasure. Thinking about the sexual act becomes lust, which is entirely different from the act of sex. What most people are concerned with is the passion of lust. Craving before and after sex is lust. This craving is thought. Thought is not love.
Questioner: Can there be sex without this desire of thought?
Krishnamurti: You have to find out for yourself. Sex plays an extraordinarily important part in our lives because it is perhaps the only deep, firsthand experience we have. Intellectually and emotionally we conform, imitate, follow, obey. There is pain and strife in all our relationships, except in the act of sex. This act, being so different and beautiful, we become addicted to, so it in turn becomes a bondage. The bondage is the demand for its continuation – again the action of the centre which is divisive. One is so hedged about – intellectually, in the family, in the community, through social morality, through religious sanctions – so hedged about that there is only this one relationship left in which there is freedom and intensity. Therefore we give tremendous importance to it. But if there were freedom all around then this would not be such a craving and such a problem. We make it a problem because we can’t get enough of it, or because we feel guilty at having got it, or because in getting it we break the rules which society has laid down. It is the old society which calls the new society permissive because for the new society sex is a part of life. In freeing the mind from the bondage of imitation, authority, conformity and religious prescriptions, sex has its own place, but it won’t be all-consuming. From this one can see that freedom is essential for love – not the freedom of revolt, not the freedom of doing what one likes nor of indulging openly or secretly one’s cravings, but rather the freedom which comes in the understanding of this whole structure and nature of the centre. Then freedom is love.
Questioner: So freedom is not licence?
Krishnamurti: No. Licence is bondage. Love is not hate, nor jealousy, nor ambition, nor the competitive spirit with its fear of failure. It is not the love of god nor the love of man – which again is a division. Love is not of the one or of the many. When there is love it is personal and impersonal, with and without an object. It is like the perfume of a flower; one or many can smell it: what matters is the perfume, not to whom it belongs.
And take what is happening. Love has been identified with sex, love-making, love sexually, you follow, sir?
Questioner: The very construction: love-making, making love.
Krishnamurti: It’s a horrible thing! I feel… It gives me a shock, ‘love-making’ as though that was love. You see, sir, I think this is very important, the western civilisation has put this over the whole of the earth, through cinemas, through books, through pornography, through every kind of advertisements, stories, this sense of love is identification with sex – which is pleasure, basically.
Questioner: The whole glamour industry is based on that.
Krishnamurti: On that.
Questioner: On that.
Krishnamurti: All the cinema, you know, the whole thing.
Questioner: Yes.
Krishnamurti: So can the mind – again we must come back to the point – can the mind understand the nature of pleasure and its relationship to love. Can the mind that is pursuing pleasure, an ambitious mind, a competitive mind, a mind that says, I must get something out of life (laughs), I must reward myself and others, I must compete. Can such a mind love? It can love sexually. But is love of sex, is that the only thing? And why have we made sex such an enormous affair? Volumes are written on it. Unless really one goes into this very, very deeply, the other thing is not possible even to understand. We can talk endlessly about what love is, what love is not, theoretically. But if we use the word ‘love’ as a mirror to see what is happening inwardly, and I inevitably must ask the question whether it is pleasure in its multiple forms. Can a man who is top executive, got to that position through drive, through aggression, through deception through ruthlessness, can he know what love is? And can the priest who talks everlastingly of God, he is ambitious to become a bishop, archbishop or whatever his ambitions are – to sit next to Jesus.
Questioner: Who will sit on the right hand.
Krishnamurti: Right hand. So can that priest who talks about it know what love means?
Questioner: No, he thinks he can with reference to something called a higher love which is based on a denial of a lower one.
Krishnamurti: Yes, I mean that’s just words.
Questioner: So that’s conflict. In that conflict there can be no love.
Krishnamurti: So, then our whole social, moral structure is immoral.
Questioner: Oh, yes.
Krishnamurti: I mean, sir, this is a thing that is appalling. And nobody wants to change that. On the contrary, they say, yes, let’s carry on, put on a lot of coating on it, different colours more pleasant, and let’s carry on. So, I mean if a man is really concerned to come upon this thing called love he must negate this whole thing, which means he must understand the place of pleasure, whether intellectual pleasure, acquisition of knowledge as pleasure, acquisition of a position as power, you follow? The whole thing. And how is a mind that has been trained, conditioned, sustained in this rotten social conditioning, how can it free itself before it talks about love? It must first free itself of that. Otherwise your talk of love, it’s just another word, it has no meaning!
Questioner: We do seem, in western culture particularly, to be very sex-bound. On the one hand we are threatened with unhappiness if we don’t succeed sexually.
Krishnamurti: Sexually, yes. That’s right.
Questioner: Yet on the other hand the whole history of clinical psychology focuses precisely on the pathology of sexuality.
Krishnamurti: Of course.
Questioner: As somehow able in itself as a study to free us. The interrelationship between those two activities, the desire to succeed on the one hand and the necessity to study what’s the matter with the drive on the other, brings about a paralysis.
Krishnamurti: Yes, so you see this thing – sex – has become, I don’t know, of such enormous importance right through the world now. In Asia they cover it up. They don’t talk about it. If you talk about sex it is something wrong. Here you talk endlessly about it. But there you don’t, you know, certain things you don’t talk about. You talk about it in the bedroom, or perhaps not even in the bedroom. But you never… I mean it’s not done. And when I talk in India, I bring it out. (Laughs) They are a little bit shocked because a religious man is not supposed to deal with all that kind of stuff.
Questioner: No, he is supposed to be beyond that.
Krishnamurti: He is supposed to be, but he mustn’t talk about it. That’s one of the things, sir, why has sex become so important? You see, love is, after all, a sense of total absence of the ‘me’, total absence of the me – my ego, my ambitions, my greed, all that, which is me, total negation of all that. Negation, not brutal denial or surgical operation but the understanding of all that. When the ‘me’ is not, the other is. Obviously. It’s so simple!
So when we are enquiring into this question of love we must enquire into pleasure, pleasure in all its varieties, and its relationship to love, enjoyment to love, real joy, this thing which can never be invited, and its relation to love. So we had better begin with pleasure. That is, the world has made sex into an immense thing. And the priests right through the world, have denied it. They won’t look at a woman, though they are burning inside, with lust and all kinds of things. They shut their eyes. And they say, only a man who is a celibate can go to God. Think of the absurdity of such a statement! So anybody who has sex is damned for ever.
Questioner: Then you have to invent some story as to how it was we so-called fell into it.
Krishnamurti: Fell into it, or, the Virgin Mary – you follow? – the whole idea.
Questioner: Yes, the whole thing.
Krishnamurti: Which is a farce. So why have we made it such a fantastic, romantic, sentimental affair, sex? Is it because intellectually we are crippled? We are second-hand people. You follow, sir? I repeat what Plato, Aristotle, Buddha, somebody said, and therefore my mind intellectually is third rate.
Questioner: Exactly.
Krishnamurti: So it is never free. So intellectually I am a slave. Emotionally I become romantic. I become sentimental. And the only escape is sex, where I am free, if the woman or the man agrees, if they are compatible and all the rest of it then it is the only road, only door through which I say, for god’s sake, at least I am free here. In the office I am bullied – you follow, sir? – in the factory I just turn the wheels. So this is the only escape for me. The peasant in India, the poor villager in town or in villages, look at them, that is the only thing they have. And religion is something else: I agree we should be celibate, we should be all the rest of it but for god’s sake, leave us alone with our pleasures, with our sex. So if that is so, and it looks like that, that we are intellectually, morally, spiritually crippled human beings, degenerate, and this is the only thing that gives us some release, some freedom.
In other fields I have no freedom. I have to go to the office everyday. I have to go to the factory every day. I have to – you follow? – cinema once, three times a week, or whatever it is you do, you’ve got… and here at last I am a man, woman. So I have made this thing into an enormous affair. And if I am not sexual I have to find out why I am not sexual. I spend years to find out. You follow, sir? Books are written. It has become a nauseating thing, a stupid thing. And we have to also in relation to that, discover, find out what is celibacy. Because they have all talked about it. Every religion has talked about it: that you must be celibate. And they said, Christian religion said, Jesus was born immaculate. You follow? And the Buddhists, I don’t know if you ever heard of the story that the Buddha – the mother conceived because she – not out of human relationship, but out of – the same thing. They don’t want sex to be associated with a religion. And yet every priest is burning with it. And they said you must be celibate. And they take a vow of celibacy. I told you the story of that poor monk.
Questioner: Oh, yes, yes. A deeply moving story.
Krishnamurti: And what is celibacy? Is it in there, in your heart and your mind? Or just the act?
Questioner: If I have been following you correctly, it seems to me that you pointed to sex here as undergone in a utilitarian way. It’s a means to, and therefore, since…
Krishnamurti: A routine, an insistence, encouragement, you follow?
Questioner: Yes. Always a goal that lies outside the activity. Therefore it can never be caught up to.
Krishnamurti: Quite right, quite right. Therefore conflict.
Questioner: Therefore conflict and repetition.
Krishnamurti: And therefore what is celibacy? Is it the act or the mind that is chaste? You follow, sir?
Questioner: It must be the mind.
Krishnamurti: Chaste – chaste mind. Which means a tremendously austere mind. Not the austerity of severity and ruthless acceptance of a principle and all the rest of it.
Questioner: This goes back to the earlier conversation when we were talking about hurt.
Krishnamurti: That’s right.
Questioner: The chaste mind would never be hurt.
Krishnamurti: Never. And therefore an innocent mind. Which has no picture of the woman or the man or the act. None of that imagination.
Questioner: This is very fundamental. I know in our conversations that I keep bringing up things that I’ve read and studied because that has largely been the occupation of my life. And the thing that moves me so deeply in listening to you is that so many of the things that have been said over the centuries, and written over the centuries, ought to have been understood in the way that you’ve been presenting them. We even have a tradition for instance in Christian theology that what is called the fall of man began at the point of imagination.
Krishnamurti: Right.
Questioner: And yet that hasn’t been properly understood, it seems to me. Otherwise had it been properly understood we would not be in this immense conflict that we are in.
Krishnamurti: Christians have first invented the sin and then all the rest of it. It’s so…
Questioner: It has been the cart before the horse. Yes, I do see what you are saying.
Krishnamurti: So, can the mind be chaste? Not, can the mind take a vow of celibacy and remain, and have burning desires, you follow? And we talked the other day, about desire. We are burning with desire. All our glands are full of it. So chastity means a mind that has no hurt, no image, no sense of pictures of itself, its appetites, all that. Can such a mind exist in this world? Otherwise love is not. I can talk endlessly about love of Jesus, love of this, love of that, but it becomes so shoddy.
Questioner: Because it’s love of.
Krishnamurti: Yes.
Questioner: Yes. Love as an activity is not the same as love undertaken as a means.
Krishnamurti: Yes, sir. So is love pleasure? I can only answer it is not, when I have understood pleasure. And understand not verbally, but deeply, inwardly, see the nature of it, the brutality of it, the divisive process of it. Because pleasure is always divisive. Enjoyment is never divisive. Joy is never dividing. It is only pleasure that is dividing. When you listen to an Arab about the oil, the energy, it is his pride, his – you follow? You see it in his… And you see it in the ministers, in the politicians, this whole sense of arrogance, of power. And at the same time they talk about love.
Sources:
Know Thyself 