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.