Krishnamurti almost never defines love directly. His method is negation. We can’t know what love is, he says, but we can see clearly what it is not. The seeing is not a step towards love. In the seeing, something else is there. So most of what he says about love is careful dismantling. (as Claude holds forth)
What it is not. It is not attachment, possession, jealousy, dependence or fear of loss. He is blunt that most of what people call love, whether of a spouse, a child, a country or God, is largely made of these. Where there is jealousy there is no love, however intense the feeling.
It is also not pleasure or desire, and this distinction is central for him. Pleasure is the work of thought: thought goes back to an experience, records it and wants it again. Love is not a product of thought, so it can’t be remembered or reproduced.
It is not emotion or sentiment either, since those can turn into cruelty or into their opposite. A love that can become hate was never love.
And it is not devotion to an ideal, a deity or a guru. He saw that as the self projecting its own image and worshipping it.
The problem of images. He argues that most relationships are between images, not persons. I have a picture of you built from years of pleasure and hurt, and you have one of me. The images meet; the people don’t. Love can exist only when that image-making stops, which means meeting the other freshly, without the past.
The positive pointer. Everything love is not turns out to be a movement of the “me”: its insecurity, its search for gratification, its continuity through memory. So when he does point at something positive, he says love is where the self is not. When there is love, there is no “you.”
This is why, for him, love cannot be cultivated. Any practice for becoming more loving is the self working towards a better version of itself, which keeps alive the very centre that blocks love. If love comes, it comes through seeing the self’s operations without choosing or condemning, and that seeing is itself their ending.
In his later talks he treated love, compassion and intelligence as one movement. Intelligence here means something born of compassion, not the cleverness of thought. He also said love is neither personal nor impersonal. His image in Freedom from the Known is the scent of a flower: there for anyone who comes near, not aimed at one person and withheld from another. He doesn’t mean vague universal goodwill. He insists love shows up concretely as attention, care and responsibility in daily life.
Where it meets and departs from Advaita. The structure is close to Yajnavalkya telling Maitreyi that the husband is dear not for the husband’s sake but for the sake of the Self. In both, love is the dissolving of separateness. But the grounding differs, and the difference matters.
- Advaita gives love an ontological basis. The other is loved because, finally, there is no other, only Atman-Brahman, whose nature is ananda.
- Krishnamurti refuses any such basis. He treats the Atman or higher Self as another construction of thought, the “me” promoted to the divine. Love is not the discovery of a deeper self but the absence of any self-centre. He gives no metaphysical account of what remains.
- He also rejects the supporting framework. No sadhana, no guru, no scripture, no gradual path. All of these involve time, and for him time is thought.
An honest difficulty. Critics and many sympathetic readers point to a practical bind. If every effort towards love is the self at work, then “see without effort” can quietly become the next goal. Krishnamurti’s reply was that the bind exists only for someone treating his words as a programme. Whether that reply dissolves the problem or just restates it has been argued about for decades.
