The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 39: February 2025
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In a recent online conversation, a friend of mine raised the question as to what love is. This is a perennial issue. Socrates and his friends discussed it during one of their drinking parties in the cultural heyday of Periclean Athens. Half a millennium later, an obscure young prophet preached it to the unconverted in the Roman province of Judea. The philosophers have kept reflecting on it over the ages and the priests have proclaimed its salvific virtues from their sectarian altars. More mundanely – though perhaps it is all mundane – love has been the youthful and blindfolded archer that capriciously smites the hearts of people, causing them to become feverishly infatuated with one another to the point of madness. Caught between the sacred and the profane, at once the wayward god of carnal passion and the ultimate spiritual elixir of the union with the divine, love has played a central but chaotic role in human affairs. That’s why we keep asking the question, for after thousands of years of disquisition, romanticism and ecclesiastical lip service, we are as confused about it as ever.
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When this question was asked, I was reminded of something K had said concerning words. Although outwardly he was the Speaker, a role of such significance that he considered it the very purpose of his physical existence, his teachings came with the health warning that the word is not the thing. That the word ‘door’ was not the door seemed like an obvious truism, but there was a greater subtlety to it, namely that by labeling it ‘door’, we ran the risk of missing the door altogether. The act of naming something, through the intervention of the past as preconception and recognition, could obscure and prevent direct perception. This interference of the past in perception he called the observer, an observer that, as a matter of fact, was blinded by his own memories, associations and projections. So the role of words was rather suspect and it raised the question concerning the nature, when not the very possibility, of communication. One day, however, K surprised us by pointing to a different aspect of words. He suggested we take a word like ‘intelligence’ and hold it, look into it, feel the depth of it. This was new. It suggested that, somehow, words held within them the very thing they stood for and, if we just gave them the right attention, their deeper meaning would be revealed. So maybe we could do the same thing with the word ‘love’.
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We use it in all kinds of contexts and in relation to all sorts of objects. We love people, things and ideas. In general, that kind of affectionate bond implies a quality of harmonious and significant activity or relationship. But our relationships tend to break down with uncanny regularity, throwing a spanner in the works, for where there is conflict there is no love. This suggests that what we call love is no such thing and that examining each of the assumptions we make about it we might discover and discard our mistaken notions so that its true nature can blossom unhindered in every aspect of our lives. In this probing exercise, it is sometimes useful to consider the etymology, which is a sort of archeology of meaning. When I looked up the word ‘love’ on Google, it gave me the following: Old English lufu, of Germanic origin, from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit lubhyati ‘desires’, Latin libet ‘it is pleasing’, libido ‘desire’, also by leave ‘allow or cause to remain’ and lief ‘dear, pleasant’. According to this derivation, ‘love’ signifies desire, pleasure and its continuity. That is certainly one of the connotations we generally associate with it, but it falls rather short of covering the full spectrum or depth of meaning of the word.
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When K asks what love is, he usually takes the negative approach, namely by looking at what it is not in order to clear away the cloud of confusion obscuring its true nature. Although he also indicates some of its ‘positive’ qualities, he generally proceeds by denying that it has anything to do with our assumptions, and one of the first assumptions he discards is precisely that it is desire and its inherent pursuit of pleasure.
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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 plenty of evidence to suggest that love may have dissppeared from this world. One only has to consider the catastrophic panorama of current events to feel that, no matter how much the word ‘love’ may circulate – in pop culture, where it means sex, in political discourse, where it means nationalism, or in liturgical sermons, where it means sectarian belief – the sense of compassion, care and generosity that K places at the heart of it is gone from the globe. Just as organized religious bigotry denies compassion, so does nationalism or any other dogmatic faith or ideological identification. This very bondage denies freedom and for K freedom is indispensable to love. (In fact, etymologically the root meaning of ‘freedom’ is ‘love’. Check it out!) The first freedom, one might venture to postulate, might be from every factor, institutional, conceptual or emotional, that denies love. This includes the notion that pleasure, desire and the remembrance of things past are love. And one way they are not is that they lead to attachment, possessiveness, jealousy, domination, anger and hate. Normally we would say that these things are the opposite of love, but K denies they are its opposites. They are, rather, the consequences of a false notion of love, so that where they are, love is not.
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“What is desire? Desire comes through seeing, contact – touching – and then sensation. First the seeing, of a woman or a man, or seeing a flower and smelling it, then wanting it. That is, seeing, contact, sensation. Then what happens? You see a car, there is the sensation, the contact. Then thought comes in and says, ‘How nice to be in it, driving it, feeling the power of it.’ That is, seeing, contact, sensation, and thought creating the image. And the moment thought creates the image, desire comes into being. You see a woman or a man, and you know all the reactions. Seeing, contact, sensation; then thought creates the image, the symbol, whatever it is. Then from that image which thought has created bursts desire.”
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The Seed of a Million Years, pp. 64-65
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This description lays out the various steps through which desire comes into being, beginning with sensation, the capturing of it in mental images and the pursuit of that pleasant sensation by thought. Desire is naturally connected with what is needful, like the desire for food, clothes and shelter, involving the sensations of hunger, cold, safety, etc. You could say that the satisfaction of such needs is pleasure. K admitted that it was natural to respond to sensation, but he felt that the moment thought creates an image and feeds its hunger for sensation on it, the trouble begins. First, the image is not the real thing but the self-generated object of memory. The sensation no longer originates in the senses but in imagination. The pursuit of pleasure is therefore a self-centred activity making for isolation and reducing relationship to use and convenience, which denies love. That’s what leads K to say that love is not of the mind.
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“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. Thus love becomes the unknown, to be pursued and worshiped; it is made into an ideal, to be used and believed in, and ideals are always self-projected. So the mind takes over completely, and love becomes a word, a sensation. Then love is made comparative, ‘I love more and you love less.’ But love is neither personal nor impersonal; love is a state of being in which sensation as thought is wholly absent.”
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Commentaries on Living, First Series, pg. 102
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Love and mind (in the sense K is using it here, namely memory and thought) seem to be antithetical. The mind is the field of recalled and anticipated sensations, the process of appetite. It is the area of fear and calculation, envy and domination, jealousy and pride, all of which deny love. The gap between them is so wide that it cannot be bridged. As he says, when the things of the mind fill the heart, what we feel is not love but desire. It is not coming from the heart, but the heart is made to feel what the mind projects upon it. Since this is all-too habitual and mundane, we fancy a more sublime or ideal love, which is another projection of desire. Love is then sensation, physical or psychological, subject to comparative measurement, whereas it is neither yours nor mine, but a state of being totally devoid of the sensations produced by thought.
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“In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love… We do not know what love is, for in the space made by thought around itself as the me, love is the conflict of the me and the not-me. This conflict, this torture, is not love. Thought is the very denial of love, and it cannot enter into that space where the me is not. In that space is the benediction which man seeks and cannot find. He seeks it within the frontiers of thought, and thought destroys the ecstasy of this benediction.”
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Freedom, Love, and Action, pp. 77-78
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This is a tremendous diagnosis which, if true – and there is little evidence to the contrary –, would explain why there is no love in the world, for the world is the outer expression of this inner spacial structure created by thought around the centre of the me, which thought has put together. We seek security, happiness and fulfilment within its bounds, whereas this psychological construct is the central factor of separation and conflict that destroys love. But there is a space beyond the frontiers of self-centred thought, the space we seek but cannot find because what we seek is an image and the image is the product of thought. The inquiry into what love is thus involves a denial of the whole movement of desire and the pursuit of pleasure, of attachment to things, people and ideas, of the very space of self-centred thought, of the time-bound content of consciousness and the operation of mind as the field of the known. All of these things separate the me from the not-me and the battle begins. To discover that love is not of this consciousness nor of the world it has created comes as something of a shock, because love means utter self-abandonment, the total ending of the me and the mine.
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Take care, amigos, and let’s see if we can free our hearts from the things of the mind,
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1. Hollandse Hout, Lelystad; 2. Het Bovenwater, Lelystad, NL.
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