the tyranny of dominating your wife, or husband, or your children? When you are
seeking power, is there a possibility of love?
So in negating what is not love, there is love. You have to negate everything
that is not love: no ambition, no competition, no aggression, no violence either in
speech, in act, or in thought. Now when you negate that which is not love, then
you will know what love is. And love is something that is intense, that you feel
very strongly. Love is not pleasure; therefore one must understand pleasure, not
aim to love somebody.
So when you see what your life is, in which there is no love, no beauty, no
freedom, you ought to shed tears. You see actually how barren your life is; and
this barren life is the result of your culture, of your sacred books, that say not to
look at the sky because there is beauty and that beauty might be transferred to a
woman; that say that if you are to be a religious man you must withdraw from the
world, deny the world; that the world is an illusion, so escape from it. And your
life shows that you have escaped from it.
So if you can observe your life, you will find out for yourself what love is; in
that lies great passion. Not love, passion; the word passion comes from sorrow.
The root meaning of that word passion is sorrow. Do you know what it means to
suffer? Not how to escape from suffering, or what to do about suffering, but to
suffer, to have great pain inwardly. When there is no movement of escape from
that sorrow, out of that comes great passion, which is compassion.
And we must also find out what death is—not at the last minute, not when
you are sick, unconscious, diseased, incapable of observing with clarity. Old age,
disease, and death happen to everybody, so find out while you are young, fresh,
active, alive what death means. The organism does wear out; old age is natural.
The organism can last longer depending on the kind of life one leads; if your life
is a battlefield from the moment you are born till you die, then your body is worn
out quicker; through emotional tension the heart becomes weaker. This is an
established fact. To find out the meaning and significance of death when one is
active, there must be no fear. Most of us are frightened of death, frightened of
leaving the things that we have known, frightened of leaving our family,
frightened of leaving the things that we have accumulated, of letting go of our
knowledge, our books, our office, all that we have collected. Not knowing what
is going to happen when you die, the mind, which is thought, says that there must
be a different kind of life, that your individual lives must continue somehow.
Then you have the whole structure of belief. You speak of reincarnation, but
have you ever looked at what is going to incarnate in a next life? What is it that is
to be reborn in a next life? All your accumulations of your knowledge, right? All
your thoughts, all the activities, all the goodness or the evil or the ugly things that
you have done. Because you think that what you do now is going to react in a
next life. You all believe that most hopefully, don’t you? If you really believe it,
then what matters is what you do now, how you behave now, what your conduct
is now, because in the next life you are going to pay for it. That is if you believe
in karma. So, if you are really caught in the network of this belief, then you must
pay complete attention to your life now: what you do, what you think, how you
michael s
(Michael S)
#1