The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 33: August 2024
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The current situation in the world is rather alarming. The radial right with its nationalistic, racist, authoritarian and regressive policies is gaining ground and threatening the very cohesion and solidarity of the EU. The dictators are doing their best to suppress freedom and oppress people. The demagogues are catering to the prejudices of the masses to get into office and do their mischief. The imperialists carry on with their nefarious practices. The war in Ukraine has become a destructive habit. The war in the Middle East is escalating and threatens to engulf the whole region and the rest of the world in an apocalyptic Armageddon. In the meantime, the devastating ecological crisis and climate change keep up their relentless progress. The usual suspects are up to their usual business. There seems to be violence, confusion and disorder everywhere. So what can we do? Well, since we human beings are responsible for all these problems, the solution is to stop creating them. Simple, right? More easily said than done, apparently. The crisis, as K never tired of saying, is not out there but in consciousness and the way of self-knowledge seems to be subtler and more demanding than the most sophisticated of technical enterprises. So consciousness is stuck in a repeating mode that we seem unable to transcend, and the world keeps thrashing about in a desperate attempt to find solutions that are not to be found anywhere except in ourselves. That might sound like the usual navel-gazing attitude that ends up becoming another form of escape, but that is avoided when we realize that self-understanding does not happen in isolation but in the mirroring world of relationship. It is in this interface of the inner and the outer that insight can take place. But for that we need to allow relationship to reveal the ways of the self.
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Love in relationship is a purifying process as it reveals the ways of the self. Without this revelation, relationship has little significance. But how we struggle against this revelation! The struggle takes many forms: dominance or subservience, fear or hope, jealousy or acceptance, and so on and on. The difficulty is that we do not love; and if we do love we want it to function in a particular way, we do not give it freedom. We love with our minds and not with our hearts. Mind can modify itself, but love cannot. Mind can make itself invulnerable, but love cannot; mind can always withdraw, be exclusive, become personal or impersonal. Love is not to be compared and hedged about. Our difficulty lies in that which we call love, which is really of the mind. We fill our hearts with the things of the mind and so keep our hearts ever empty and expectant. It is the mind that clings, that is envious, that holds and destroys. Our life is dominated by the physical centers and by the mind. We do not love and let it alone but crave to be loved; we give in order to receive, which is the generosity of the mind and not of the heart. The mind is ever seeking certainty, security; and can love be made certain by the mind? Can the mind, whose very essence is of time, catch love, which is its own eternity?
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Commentaries on Living, First Series, pg. 41
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Love is a process of self-revelation that gives depth and meaning to relationship. Relationship necessarily brings out what we are and as such offers us a mirror in which to see ourselves. The problem, it seems, is that we resist this revelation. Most of us suffer from some kind of split in our personalities and the last thing we want is for our disowned selves to be exposed. So relationship becomes a game of hide and seek, a masked ball in which the dancers are constantly having to guess who their partner is. No matter how physically intimate or how closely bound and interdependent in our existence, as human beings we keep passing each other like ships in the night. We could simply say that this is the inevitable result of the dancers holding on to their separate interests instead of to each other. But K goes further and attributes this lack of love to our hearts being filled with the things of the mind. This implies that the heart is not able to feel authentically but is instead governed by mental considerations. In this way the mind, being driven by gain, turns love into a form of trade. Intent on security, it catches love in the net of possessiveness, depriving it of its native freedom. And fearing to lose it, there is jealousy and domination. This being the general state of affairs in the private sphere, and judging by the violent history of humanity and the traumatic events currently unfolding in the world, it would not be too farfetched to suspect that love might be almost gone from the world.
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Probably love has totally disappeared from this world. Love implies generosity, care, not to hurt another, not to make another feel guilty, to be generous, courteous, and behave in such a manner that your words and thoughts are born out of compassion. Of course you cannot be compassionate if you belong to organized religious institutions – large, powerful, traditional, dogmatic, that insist on faith. There must be freedom to love. That love is not pleasure, desire, a remembrance of things that have gone. Love is not the opposite of jealousy, hate and anger.
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Krishnamurti to Himself, pg. 95
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There is so much in this short paragraphs from K’s last journal. K lists a series of qualities such as generosity, consideration, behaving in such a way that our words and thoughts are born of compassion so that we don’t hurt another or make them feel guilty. Doing just that would go a long way. But do our words, thoughts, feelings and actions spring from compassion? This is a crucial aspect that places the birth of love at the center of our being. But all kinds of things stand in the way of compassion, such as belonging to a religious organization with its hierarchies, dogmatic beliefs and superstitions. We could say the same about political, nationalistic and racist ideologies. These bind us and fill our hearts with prejudice, which divides people and leads to conflict and war. Such identifications deny love and freedom. (Etymologically the root meaning of freedom is ‘love’.) K goes on to deny that love has anything to do with desire, pleasure or the remembrance of things past or that it is the opposite of anger, jealousy and hate.
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Normally one would say that since hate, jealousy and anger deny love, they are its opposites. So why does K say they are not? One way to understand it might be that the opposites are the product of thought and as such they are related to one another, whereas love has no relationship with hate, which K generally expresses by saying that where the one is, the other is not. This would deserve a closer examination, but maybe we can leave it there for now. K’s denial that love is pleasure and desire also runs counter to our general assumptions. He denies it because he finds that desire is a process whereby sensation is registered as a memory which becomes the imaginative substance of thought in the pursuit of pleasure. Inherent to this pursuit is the compulsion to repeat, which leads to habit. This self-referential, self-centered movement of thought as desire is an isolating process that reduces relationship to use and convenience. Such mutual usage, however gratifying, comes with its own pain and becomes its own problem. There is no real relationship, for each is a means to an end for the other.
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Love is not sensation. Sensations give birth to thought through words and symbols. Sensations and thought replace love; they become the substitute for love. Sensations are of the mind, as sexual appetites are. The mind breeds the appetite, the passion, through remembrance, from which it derives gratifying sensations. The mind is composed of different and conflicting interests or desires, with their exclusive sensations; and they clash when one or other begins to predominate, thus creating a problem. Sensations are both pleasant and unpleasant, and the mind holds to the pleasant, thus becoming a slave to them. This bondage becomes a problem because the mind is the repository of contradictory sensations. The avoidance of the painful is also a bondage, with its own illusions and problems. The mind is the maker of problems, and so cannot resolve them. Love is not of the mind; but when the mind takes over there is sensation, which it then calls love. It is this love of the mind that can be thought about, that can be clothed and identified. The mind can recall or anticipate pleasurable sensations, and this process is appetite, no matter at what level it is placed. Within the field of the mind, love cannot be. Mind is the area of fear and calculation, envy and domination, comparison and denial, and so love is not. Jealousy, like pride, is of the mind; but it is not love. Love and the processes of the mind cannot be bridged over, cannot be made one. When sensations predominate, there is no space for love; so the things of the mind fill the heart.
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Commentaries on Living, First Series, pg. 102
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Just as an image is a substitute for the real thing, the feedback loop of sensation and thought is a substitute for love. It is like a menu cart on a restaurant window to a hungry beggar. The heart is starved by feeding on the pleasurable sensations produced by thought through words and images or by the desperate escape from its own emptiness through the cultivation of ever greater and more varied sensations. As the calculating instrument that it is, the mind entangles the heart in a web of envy, jealousy, domination and fear from which it finds it hard to extricate itself. It gets trapped in a habitual appetite for imaginary passions to which it becomes attached. Because there is nothing secure about it, attachment breeds pain, jealousy, hatred and violence. If we were to see the danger of attachment, we might drop it instantly. But, as K points out, it has its deeper roots in the fear of loneliness and not being from which it tries to escape through identification with things, people and ideas. This identification gives us a sense of reality, of being something or someone. When that identity is threatened, we react violently in its defense, which would explain a great deal of the tragic goings-on in the world.
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The current panorama of conflict and disorder points to a pervasive state of fragmentation and a near-total lack of compassion. The predominance of self-interest and the consequent reduction of relationship to a movement of use and convenience alienate love. Such a general state of affairs points to the absence of love not only out there in the global stage but in our personal lives. While we might expect love to be kindled from outside by something or someone, we know that love is a deeply inward matter that concerns not only our relationship with others but the relationship between the mind, the heart and the senses. In other words, the question of love involves the harmonious quality of our own being. And just as outward conflict signifies the denial of love, so does our inward fragmentation. So it is in the healing of this fragmentation, inwardly and outwardly, that love can come into being. This healing involves seeing through and dissolving the mistaken assumptions informing our psychological structures. We have assumed that love is desire, pleasure and attachment. When examined, this whole movement turns out to be the result of thought projecting the remembrance of things past into the future. The heart and senses are overshadowed by the past and the self-referential movement of desire. This not only distorts perception and feeling but makes for isolation, division and conflict, breaks down relationship, leads to loneliness and begins a new round of escape through attachment that keeps love at bay. Can this vicious circle be broken? K says it can if we stay with what is and don’t escape from it. He has pointed out what is. Can we now stay with it? Can we stay with our inner conflict, loneliness and lack of love?
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Take care, amigos, and let’s stay with whatever we are, for that may be the key to love,
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1 & 2 Sunset, Het Bovenwater, Lelystad, The Netherlands.
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