第一最好不相见70 - On Love克里希那穆提英文著作

2021年1月18日发(作者：两种悲剧歌词)

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.