On Love and Loneliness - Jiddu Krishnamurti  ## Metadata - Author: **Jiddu Krishnamurti** - Full Title: On Love and Loneliness - Category: #books - Tags: #metaphysical #rationality #wisdom ## Highlights - If you have no love—do what you will, go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, enter politics, write books, write poems—you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. And with love, do what you will, there is no risk, there is no conflict. Then love is the essence of virtue. (Location 33) - Because relationship is society. The relationship between you and me, between me and another, is the structure of society. That is, relationship is the structure and the nature of society. (Location 60) - Relationship implies responsibility, as freedom does. To be related is to live; that is life; that is existence. (Location 74) - The mind conforms, imitates, because there is more security in conformity, in following a pattern. (Location 86) - The more you understand disorder in relationship, the greater the order. So we have to find out what is our relationship with each other. (Location 99) - Say, yesterday somebody said rather harsh things to me, which are not true. What he said is recorded, and the mind identifies the person with that record and acts according to that record. (Location 112) - The mind that records no insult, no flattery, knows what love is. (Location 123) - A mind that is innocent means a mind that is incapable of being hurt. Because it is incapable of being hurt, it will not hurt another. (Location 130) - A mind that conforms to a pattern of pleasure, or what it thinks is love, can never know what love is. (Location 145) - When we are going to look into the question of what love is, we have to be aware of our traditional, inherited conditioning which brings about various forms of suppression—Victorian and modern—or permissive enjoyment of sex. (Location 167) - Is not one of the factors that in sexual activity there is total freedom? (Location 184) - Tags: #sex - The word innocency means a mind that does not receive hurts—or give hurt; it is incapable of hurting and also incapable of being hurt, but yet is totally vulnerable. (Location 200) - Resistance, which might give you the pleasure of achieving something. (Location 206) - Why does the mind pursue pleasure? Not is it right or wrong, but what is the mechanism of this pleasure principle? (Location 216) - When you see a lovely face—not just a symmetrical face but one with depth in it, beauty, a quality behind it, intelligence, vitality—to see such a face is a marvel and in that perception there is a delight. (Location 222) - So thought is responsible for the pursuing of pleasure. It is not my invention, you can watch it. You see a lovely sunset, and later you say, ‘I wish I could go back there and see it again’. At the moment of seeing that sunset, there was no pleasure. You saw something extraordinary, full of light and colour and depth. When you go away and go back to your life, your mind says, ‘What a marvellous thing that was, I wish that I could have it repeated again’. So thought perpetuates that thing as pleasure. Is that the mechanism? (Location 228) - So when one understands the nature of pleasure and the principle of pleasure, then what is love? Is love jealousy? Is love possessiveness? Is love domination, attachment? You know all the business that goes on in life—the woman dominates the man or the man dominates the woman. The man does something because he wants to pursue it; he is ambitious, greedy, envious; he wants a position, prestige. His wife says, ‘For God’s sake, stop all that tommy-rot and lead a different kind of life’. So there is a division between the two—even though they may sleep together. Can there be love when there is ambition, when each is pursuing his or her own particular private pleasures? (Location 247) - Have you noticed in older people how prejudiced they are? Their minds are fixed, they are not open, they approach everything from a fixed point of view. (Location 273) - Clever people, people who are cunning, do not know what love is. (Location 278) - Avoiding and overcoming loneliness are equally futile; though suppressed or neglected, the pain, the problem, is still there. You may lose yourself in a crowd, and yet be utterly lonely; you may be intensely active, but loneliness silently creeps upon you; put the book down, and it is there. Amusements and drinks cannot drown loneliness; you may temporarily evade it, but when the laughter and the effects of alcohol are over, the fear of loneliness returns. You may be ambitious and successful, you may have vast power over others, you may be rich in knowledge, you may worship and forget yourself in the rigmarole of rituals; but do what you will, the ache of loneliness continues. (Location 809) - The entity who tries to fill or run away from emptiness, incompleteness, loneliness, is not different from that which he is avoiding; he is it. He cannot run away from himself; all that he can do is to understand himself. He is his loneliness, his emptiness; and as long as he regards it as something separate from himself, he will be in illusion and endless conflict. When he directly experiences that he is his own loneliness, then only can there be freedom from fear. (Location 829) - Love and emptiness cannot abide together, when there is the feeling of loneliness, love is not. (Location 836) - We cling to the one we love, we are jealous, we miss him when he is not there and are utterly lost when he dies; and then we seek comfort in some other form, in some belief, in some substitute. Is all this love? Love is not an idea, the result of association; love is not something to be used as an escape from our own wretchedness, and when we do so use it, we make problems which have no solutions. Love is not an abstraction, but its reality can be experienced only when idea, mind, is no longer the supreme factor. (Location 839) - To love somebody means no thought. (Location 852) - Just see what takes place without thought. I have a relationship with my brother or my wife, and that relationship is not based on thought but basically, deeply, on love. In that love, in that strange feeling, why should I think at all? Love is comprehensive; but when thought comes into it, it is divisive, and it destroys the quality, the beauty of it. (Location 858) - Isn’t that love is aware that we are all one. It’s like a perfume. You can’t dissect the perfume, or analyse the perfume. It is marvellous perfume; and the moment you analyse it, you dissipate it. (Location 870) - To be related means not to be dependent on each other, not to escape from your loneliness through another, not to try to find comfort, companionship, through another. When you seek comfort through another, are dependent, and so on, can there be any kind of relationship? Aren’t you then using each other? (Location 973) - the older we grow, the more lonely we become, (Location 977) - And to see together one must be free to observe, one must be free to listen. That means to have no prejudice. Then only, with that quality of love, is there sharing. (Location 1039) - do you love anybody? That means not asking anything in return, not asking anything from that person you love, not being dependent on that person at all. (Location 1058) - Now, first of all, I don’t know what love is. But I do know that I am jealous; I do know that I am terribly attached to someone, and that in that attachment there is fear, there is jealousy, there is anxiety, there is a sense of dependency. I don’t like to depend, but I depend because I am lonely and I’m shoved around by society, in the office, in the factory, and I come home and I want to feel comfort, companionship, to escape from myself. So I am dependent, attached to that person. Now, I am asking myself how I am to be free of this attachment, not knowing what love is. I won’t pretend I have love of God, love of Jesus, love of Krishna; I throw out all that nonsense. How am I to be free of this attachment? (Location 1070) - So I must investigate why I am lonely. What does it mean to be lonely? How does it come about? Is loneliness instinctual, inbred, hereditary, or is it my daily activity that is bringing this about? (Location 1102) - The problem then is: Can thought realize that it is limited, and that therefore whatever it does is limited and therefore fragmentary and therefore isolating? (Location 1146) - In my conversation with myself, there has been a discovery that loneliness is created by thought. And thought has now realized itself that it is limited and that it cannot solve the problem of loneliness. As it cannot solve the problem of loneliness, does loneliness exist? Thought has made this sense of loneliness. Thought realizes that it is limited, and that because it is limited, fragmentary, divided, it has created this emptiness, loneliness. Therefore when it realizes this, loneliness is not. (Location 1165) - if there is love, there is no attachment, and if there is attachment, there is no love. (Location 1173) - This constant measurement between ‘what has been’ or ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’, this constant evaluation brings conflict. That is one of the basic reasons of disorder. (Location 1207) - Our whole life is based on attachment, attachment to property, attachment to a person, attachment to a belief, to a dogma, to Christ, to Buddha. Is that love? In attachment there is pain, there is fear, there is jealousy, anxiety. (Location 1296) - But the trouble begins when thought says, ‘How beautiful this is, I must keep it, I must remember it, I must worship it, I hope to have more of it’. Then the whole movement of pleasure comes into operation. And that pleasure we call love. (Location 1309) - You know the ascetics, the sannyasis in India, the monks in Europe and all over the world have said, ‘No desire, no sex, don’t look at a beautiful woman. If you do, think of her as your sister or your mother. Or, if you do look, concentrate on the divine’. And they are burning inside! They deny outwardly, but are inwardly burning. And that is what they call a religious life; which means they have no love. They have an idea of what love is. The idea is not love. The idea, the word is not love. But only when you have seen the whole movement of desire, attachment, pleasure, then out of that depth of perception comes this strange flower with its extraordinary perfume. That is love. (Location 1318) - Tags: #wisdom - WHAT ARE WE? Apart from a name, a form, perhaps if you are lucky a bank account, perhaps a skill, apart from all that, what are we? Are we not suffering? Or does suffering not exist in your life? Is there fear? Is there anxiety, greed, envy? Do we worship some image which thought has created? Frightened of death, are we clinging to some concept? Aren’t we in contradiction, saying one thing and doing another? We are all that. Our habits, our inanities, the endless chatter that goes on in the mind, all that is what we are. (Location 1325) - Passion is not lust. Lust is sensual, sexual, it is full of desire, pictures, pursuits of pleasure, and so on. Passion is not. You must have passion to create—not babies—to bring about a different world, different human beings in the world, to change the society in which you live. Without that tremendous passion, one becomes mediocre, soft, unclear, lacking integrity. (Location 1361) - Without love, life is like a shallow pool. In a deep river, there is richness and many fish can live; but the shallow pool is soon dried up by the strong sun, and nothing remains except mud and dirt. (Location 1423) - Without someone to lean on, to give them a sense of comfort and security, they feel lonely. They feel lost. This dependency on another is called love; but if you observe it very closely, you will see that dependency is fear, it is not love. (Location 1436) - Most people are afraid to stand alone; they are afraid to think things out for themselves, afraid to feel deeply, to explore and discover the whole meaning of life. Therefore they say they love God, and they depend on what they call God; but it is not God, the unknown, it is a thing created by the mind. (Location 1438) - We do the same with an ideal or a belief. I believe in something, or I hold on to an ideal, and that gives me great comfort; but remove the ideal, remove the belief, and I am lost. It is the same thing with a guru. I depend because I want to receive, so there is the ache of fear. Again, it is the same when you depend on your parents or teachers. It is natural and right that you should do so when you are young; but if you keep on depending when you have grown to maturity, that will make you incapable of thinking, of being free. Where there is dependence, there is fear, and where there is fear, there is authority, there is no love. (Location 1441) - There is no love in your heart when you depend on society, in the sense that you accept the structure of society as it is, without question. (Location 1446) - Listening is an action of attention in which there is no interpretation, in which there is no comparison—remembering things which you have read and comparing, or comparing your own experience, to what is being said. (Location 1881) - The key is to be aware of the physical, physiological, biological pain, and in that awareness not get involved with it psychologically. Being aware of the physical pain—and the psychological involvement with it which intensifies the pain and brings about anxiety, fear—and keeping the psychological factor entirely out requires a great deal of awareness, a certain quality of aloofness, a certain quality of unattached observation. (Location 1894) - And being hurt we resist, we build a wall around ourselves never to be hurt again. And when you build a wall around yourself in order not to be hurt, you are going to be hurt much more. From childhood, through comparison, through imitation and conformity, we have stored up these great many hurts and, not being aware of them, all our activity is responses based on these hurts. (Location 1906) - If you don’t resolve those hurts, you will go through life wanting to hurt others, or becoming violent, or withdrawing from life, from every relationship, in order never to be hurt again. (Location 1914) - A mind that is never hurt, and can never be hurt again, is really an innocent mind. (Location 1917) - One can describe it, one can put it into words, into the most poetic language, using very beautiful words, but words are not love. (Location 1959) - One of the major reasons for suffering is the sense of isolation, the feeling of total loneliness. That is, to feel that you have nothing to depend upon, that you have no relationship with anyone, that you are totally isolated. You have had this feeling, I am quite sure. You may be with your family, in a bus, or at a party, and you have moments of an extraordinary sense of isolation, an extraordinary sense of lack, of total nothingness. (Location 2023) - Can I be aware of loneliness without rationalizing, without trying to find the cause of it, just observe, and in that observation discover that escape is through attachment to an idea, to a concept, to a belief. Can I be aware of that belief and how it is an escape? When I observe it quietly, the escape and the belief disappear without any effort. The moment I introduce effort, then there is the observer and the observed, and therefore conflict, but when I am aware of all the implications of loneliness, then there is no observer, there is only the fact of this feeling of being utterly isolated. (Location 2037) - This isolation takes place also through our daily activity—my ambition, my greed, my envy, concern with my own desire to fulfil, to become somebody, to improve myself. I am so concerned with my beastly little self, and that is part of my loneliness. (Location 2041) - If I am attached to you, I am thinking about you, I am worrying about you. I am concerned about you in my self-centred way because I don’t want to lose you, I don’t want you to be free, I don’t want you to do something which disturbs my attachment. In that attachment I feel somewhat secure. So in attachment there is fear, jealousy, anxiety, suffering. (Location 2051) - When you are attached to a person or an idea, you dominate that person, you want to control that person, you deny freedom to that person. (Location 2055) - Wisdom comes in the understanding of suffering and all the implications of suffering, not only the personal, but also the human suffering that man has created. It is only when you go beyond it that wisdom comes into being. (Location 2077) - You can still enjoy the mountains, the trees, and the rivers, the nice faces and the beauty of the land; but when that beauty of the land becomes the pursuit of pleasure, it ceases to be beauty. (Location 2129)