Part II - Chapter 3 - 5th Public Talk, Ojai, California - 16th April 1977 - ‘Out of negation comes the positive called love’

Throughout the world human beings are always seeking security, both physiological and psychological. Physical security is denied when psychological security – which does not really exist – is sought in various forms of illusion and in divisive beliefs, dogmas, religious sanctions and so on. Where there are these psychological divisions, there must inevitably be physiological division with all its conflicts, wars and the suffering and the tragedy and the inhumanity of man to man. Wherever one goes in the world, it does not matter whether it is in India, Europe, Russia, China or America, human beings, psychologically, are more or less the same; they suffer, they are anxious, uncertain, confused, often in great pain, ambitious, fighting each other everlastingly.

Basically, psychologically, as all human beings are the same one can with reason say that the world is oneself and one is the world. That is an absolute fact, as one can see when one goes into it very deeply. And the content of human consciousness is the whole movement of thought and the desire for power, position, security and the pursuit of pleasure in which there is fear. Fear and pleasure are the two sides of the same coin. Without understanding the whole structure and nature of pleasure, based on desire, one will never understand and live a life in which there is love.

Fear and the pursuit of pleasure are part of consciousness. But is love also a part of consciousness? When there is fear, is there love? When there is the mere pursuit of pleasure, is there love? Is love pleasure and desire, or has it nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure and desire?

One’s brain, through the constant habit of seeking security has become mechanical; mechanical in the sense of following certain definite patterns, repeating these patterns over and over again in the routine of daily life. There is the repetition of pleasure and the burden of fear and the inability to resolve it. So, gradually, the brain, or part of the brain, has become mechanical, repetitive, biologically as well as psychologically; one is caught in certain patterns of belief, dogma, ideology – the American ideology, the Russian ideology, the ideology of India and so on. There is the direction, the pursuit, and the mind and the brain deteriorate.

However pleasant, the life one lives is a life that is repetitive; however desirable, however complex, it is a repetitive life – the same belief from childhood to death, the same rituals, whether it is church or temple, there is the tradition of it, over and over again. There is the repetition of pleasure, sexual pleasure or the pleasure of achievement, the pleasure of possession, the pleasure of attachment, all these cause the brain to deteriorate because they are repetitive. So long as there is the pursuit of pleasure as a repetitive process and the burden of fear which it brings and which man has not resolved – he has run away from it, escaped from it, rationalized it, but still it remains – the brain deteriorates.

What is love? Is it pleasure – pleasure in the repetitive sexual act, which is generally called love? The love of one’s neighbour, the love of one’s wife, in which there is great pleasure, possession and comfort, based on desire – is that love? Where there is possessive attachment to another, there must be jealousy, there must be fear and antagonism. These are obvious facts – nothing extraordinary or ideological – they are facts, “what is”. So is attachment love? And what is the basis of attachment? Why is one attached to something, to property, to an idea, to an ideology, to a person, to a symbol, to a concept which is called God? If one does not fully understand the significance of attachment, then one will never be able to find the truth of love. Is not the basis of attachment the fear of being alone, the fear of being isolated, the emptiness, the sense of insufficiency in oneself?

We are attached to people, to ideas, to symbols, or to concepts, because in them we think there is security. Is there security in any relationship? Is there security – which is really the essence of attachment – in one’s wife, or husband? And if one seeks security in the wife or the husband and so on, then what takes place? One possesses, legally or not legally. And where there is possession there must be fear of losing – therefore jealousy, hatred, divorce and all the rest of it.

Is love attachment? Can there be love when there is attachment; with all the implications of that word which include fear, jealousy, guilt, irritation leading to hatred – all that is implied when one uses the word “attachment”? Where there is attachment can there be love? These are factual, not theoretical, questions. One is dealing with daily life, not with some extraordinary life. One can only go very deeply and very far if one begins very near, which is oneself. If one does not understand oneself one cannot move far. One is delving into problems which are tremendously important in one’s daily life.

Although one has to go into this question logically, rationally, sanely, one has to go beyond it; because logic is not love, reason is not love. The desire to be loved and to love is not love. Out of the negation of what is not love, every moment of one’s life, out of the putting aside of what is not love, comes the positive thing called love.

Thought is fragmentary, limited; thought cannot solve the problem of what love is and thought cannot cultivate love. When one makes an abstraction in thought, one moves away from “what is”. That movement of abstraction becomes a condition according to which one lives, therefore one no longer lives according to facts. This is what one has done all one’s life; but one will never know what love is through abstraction, will not know the enormous beauty, depth and significance of love.

Why does man put up with this suffering? Why worship suffering, which the Christians do, apparently? What is the meaning of suffering? What is it that suffers? When one says “I suffer,” who is it that suffers? What is the centre that says “I am in an agony of jealousy, of fear, of loss”? What is that centre, that “essence”, of a human being who says “I suffer”? Is it the movement of thought, as time, which creates the centre? How does that I come into being, which, having come into being says, “I suffer, I am anxious, I am frightened, I am jealous, I am lonely”. That I is never stationary, it is always moving: “I desire this, I desire that and then I desire something else”, it is in constant movement. That movement is time, that movement is thought.

There is a concept in the Asiatic world that the I is something which is beyond time; and further, the concept that there is a higher I still. In the Western world the I has never been thoroughly examined. Qualities have been attributed to it, Freud and Jung and other psychologists have given attributes to it but have never gone into this question of the nature and the structure of the I which says “I suffer”.

The I, as one observes, says “I must have that”, a few days later it wants something else. There is the constant movement of desire; the constant movement of pleasure; the constant movement of what one wants to be and so on. This movement is thought as psychological time. The I who says “I suffer” is put together by thought. Thought says, “I am John, I am this, I am that”. Thought identifies itself with the name and with the form and is the I in all the content of consciousness; it is the essence of fear, hurt, despair, anxiety, guilt, the pursuit of pleasure, the sense of loneliness, all the content of consciousness. When one says “I suffer”, it is the image that thought has built about itself, the form, the name, that is in sorrow.

The more intense the challenge is, the greater is the energy demanded to meet it. Sorrow is this challenge. To that challenge one has to respond. But if one responds to it by escaping from it, by seeking comfort from it, then one is dissipating the energy that one needs to meet this thing.

There is no escape – there is no escape because if one tries to escape, sorrow is always there, like one’s shadow, like one’s face, it is always with one – so remain with it, without any movement of thought. If one runs away from it, one has not solved it; but if one remains with it, not identifying oneself with it – because one is that suffering – then all your energy is present to meet this extraordinary thing that happens. Out of that suffering comes passion.

There is a solution, there is an ending to sorrow – as there is an ending to fear – completely. Then only is there a possibility to know what love is. One thinks that one will learn something from suffering, that there is a lesson to be learnt from suffering. But when one observes suffering in oneself, not escaping from it, but remaining with it totally, completely, without any movement of thought, without any alleviation, comfort, but just completely holding to it, then one will see a strange psychological transformation take place.

Love is passion, which is compassion. Without that passion and compassion, with its intelligence, one acts in a very limited sense; all one’s actions are limited. Where there is compassion that action is total, complete, irrevocable.