P: We know that pleasure is not love. Pleasure may be one manifestation of love,
but it is not love. Both sorrow and love emerge from the same source.
K: I asked: What is the relationship between sorrow and love? Can there be love
if there is sorrow?—sorrow being all the things that we have talked about.
P: I would say yes.
K: In sorrow there is a factor of separation, of fragmentation. Is there not also a
great deal of self-pity in sorrow? What is the relationship of all this to love? Has
love dependency? Has love the quality of the ‘me’ and the ‘you’?
P: But you talked of passion—
K: When there is no movement of escape from sorrow, then love is. Passion is
the flame of sorrow, and that flame can only be awakened when there is no
escape, no resistance—which means, sorrow has in it no quality of division.
P: In that sense, is that state of sorrow any different from the state of love?
Sorrow is pain. You say that when one is in pain, and there is no resistance, no
movement away from pain, the flame of passion emerges. Strangely, in the
ancient texts kāma (love), agni (fire) and yama (death) are said to be the same.
They are placed on the same level; they create, purify and destroy to create again.
There has to be an ending.
K: You see, that is just it. What is the quality of a mind that has understood
sorrow and, therefore, the ending of sorrow? What is the quality of the mind that
is no longer afraid of ending, of death?
When energy is not dissipated through escape, then that energy becomes the
flame of passion. Compassion means passion for all. Compassion is passion for
all.
New Delhi
12 December, 1970http://www.ebook3000.com