Living

We consider living to be a positive action. Doing, thinking, the everlasting bustle, conflict, fear, sorrow, guilt, ambition, competition, lusting after pleasure with all its pain, the desire to be successful-all this is what we call LIVING. That is our life with an occasional joy, with its moments of compassion without any motive, and generosity without any strings attached to it. There are rare moments of ecstasy, of a bliss that has no past nor future. But going to office, anger, hatred, contempt, enmity, are what we call everyday living, and we consider it extraordinarily positive.

The negation of positive in the only true positive. To negate this so-called living, which is ugly, lonely, fearful, brutal and violent, without knowledge of the other, is the most positive action. Are we communicating with each other? You know, to deny conventional morality completely is to be highly moral, because what we call social morality, the morality of respectability, is utterly immoral; we are competitive, greedy, envious, seeking our own way- you know how to behave. We call this social morality; religious people talk about different kinds of morality, but their life, their whole attitude, the hierarchical structure of religious organisation and belief, is immoral. To deny that is not to react, because when you react, this is another form of dissenting through one’s own resistance. But when you deny because you understand it, there is the highest form of reality.

In the same way, to negate social morality, to negate the way we are living- our petty lives, our shallow thinking and existence, the satisfaction at a superficial level with our accumulated things- to deny all that, not as a reaction but seeing the utter stupidity and the destructive nature of this way of living- to negate all that is to live. To see the false as the false- this seeing is the true.

Love

Is it possible to be responsible for the whole mankind, and therefore responsible for nature? That is, is it possible to answer adequately, totally to your children, to your neighbour, for all the movement that man has created in his endeavour to live rightly. And to feel that immense responsibility, not only intellectually or verbally, but very deeply, to be able to answer to the whole human struggle of pain, brutality, violence and despair? To respond totally to that, one must know what it means to LOVE.

That word love has been so misused, so spoilt, so trodden upon, but we will have to use that word and give to it a totally different kind of meaning. To be able answer to the whole there must be love. And to understand that quality, that compassion, that extraordinary sense of energy, which is not created by thought, we must understand suffering. When we use the word understand, it is not verbal or intellectual communication of words, but the communication or communion that lies behind the word. We must understand and be able to go beyond suffering; otherwise we cannot possibly understand the responsibility for the whole, which is real love.

So to understand this responsibility for the whole, and therefore that strange quality of love, one must go beyond suffering. What is suffering? Why do human beings suffer? This has been one of the great problems of life for millions of years. Apparently very few have gone beyond suffering, and they become either heroes or saviours, or some kind of neurotic leaders, and there they remain. But ordinary human beings like you and me never seem to go beyond it. We seem to be caught in it. And now we are asking whether it is possible for you to be really free of suffering.

To be sensitive is to Love. The word love is not love. And love is not to be divided as the love of God and the love of man, nor is it to be measured as the love of the one and of the many. Love gives itself abundantly as a flower gives its perfume; but we are always measuring love in our relationship and thereby destroying it. Love is not a commodity of the reformer of the social worker; it is not a political instrument with which to create action. When the politician or the reformer speak of love, they are using the word and do not touch the reality of it; for love cannot be employed as a means to an end, whether in the immediate or the far-off future. Love is of the whole earth and not of a particular field or forest. The love of reality is not encompassed by any religion; and when organised religions use it, it ceases to be. Societies, religions and authoritative governments, sedulous in their various activities, unknowingly destroy the love that becomes a passion in action… Love is not sentimentality, nor is it devotion. It is as strong as death. Love cannot be bought through knowledge; and a mind that is pursuing knowledge without love is a mind that deals in ruthlessness and aims merely at efficiency.