So what is love? Don’t form an opinion about it, don’t have a formula; then
you have already stopped learning. Now we are going to find out. You must find
out, not just say, “Well, I have learned verbally what it means”; that is not love at
all. The urge to find out must be boiling in you. What is love? Is it pleasure, is it
desire, is it the product of thought, is it the love of God and the hate of man?
That’s what you do, don’t you, you love God, and you kick your fellow man.
You love the politician—oh, not the politician, perhaps—but you love your boss,
you love your wife. Do you really love your wife? What does that mean? When
you love something, you care for it. Do you love your children? Which means
what? That you care for them, not only when they are little babies but as they
grow older; you see that they have right education. When you love them you will
see that you are not concerned merely that they should have a safe job, get
married, and settle down to follow your generation. What is your generation?
What have you produced? What have you made of this world?
Love is not jealousy, is it? An ambitious man can never understand what love
is, can he? Can an aggressive man? Can a violent man understand what love is?
And you are violent, aggressive, ambitious, competitive. That’s a fact, isn’t it? So
what you call love is pleasure. And your family is a deadly thing. No? You say
you love your family. Do you know what it means to love somebody? It means
no division. Your family is a deadly, exclusive, corrupt thing, because that family
is against everybody else. How can you love your wife or your children when
you are ambitious, when you cheat in business, want bigger positions, play up to
the big man? If you are violent, how can you love?
To find out what love is, approach it negatively. Negatively means don’t be
ambitious. Go into it. You say that if you are not ambitious you will be destroyed
by this world. Be destroyed by this world. It’s a stupid world anyhow; it’s a
monstrous, immoral world. If you really want to find out the beauty, the real
quality of love, you must deny all the virtue which man has cultivated. What you
have cultivated is ambition, is greed, is envy, is competition, holding on to your
little self and your little family. Your family is yourself and therefore you love
that family. You have identified yourself with the family, which means you love
yourself, not the family, not your children. If you really loved your children, the
world would be different tomorrow. You would have no wars, sirs.
So to find out what love is you must put aside what it is not. You won’t, will
you? Will you do it? You will do anything but that. You will go to the temples,
you will go to the gurus, you will read endless sacred books, repeat mantras, play
tricks upon yourselves, and you will talk about love of God, your devotion to
your guru, all that tommyrot. But you won’t do one thing to find out what it
means to love.
Find out for yourself what it means to be aggressive. In the family you are
aggressive, dominating, possessive, all very subtly done. You know the games
you all play. So, a man who has, not love but the things made by thought in his
heart, will make a monstrous world, will construct, put together a society that is
totally immoral. That’s what you have done. So to find out, you must undo
everything that you have done. Not through time, not gradually. That’s another
trick of your mind—you say it’s your karma. When you really understand how
michael s
(Michael S)
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