Love is a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes that ranges from interpersonal affection . It can refer to an emotion of a strong attraction and personal attachment. It can also be a virtue representing human kindness,compassion, and affection—"the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another". It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one's self or animals.
Love Is Dangerous
How can man live without love? We can only exist, and existence without love is control, confusion, and pain -and that is what most of us are creating. We organize for existence and we accept conflict as inevitable because our existence is a ceaseless demand for power. Surely, when we love, organization has its own place, its right place; but without love, organization becomes a nightmare, merely mechanical and efficient, like the army; but as modern society is based on mere efficiency, we have to have armies and the purpose of an army is to create war. Even in so-called peace, the more intellectually efficient we are, the more ruthless, the more brutal, the more callous we become. That is why there is confusion in the world, why bureaucracy is more and more powerful, why more and more governments are becoming totalitarian. We submit to all this as being inevitable because we live in our brains and not in our hearts, and therefore love does not exist. Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind. A man who loves is dangerous, and we do not want to live dangerously; we want to live efficiently, we want to live merely in the framework of organization because we think organizations are going to bring order and peace in the world. Organizations have never brought order and peace. Only love, only goodwill, only mercy can bring order and peace, ultimately and therefore now.
How can a system create love?
If you will not misunderstand, I would say that their teachings become valueless because the human mind, being so subtle, so cunning in its desire for self protection, twists the teachings to suit its own purposes and creates systems and ideals as a means of escape, out of which grow petrified churches and exploiting priests. Religions throughout the world, through their systems and the trickery of their organized exploitation, seek to teach man to love, to think, to live sanely, intelligently; but how can a system create love or teach you to think selflessly? As you do not want to do this, as you are unwilling to live completely, integrally, with vulnerable mind and heart, you have created a system which has become your master, a system that is contrary to and destructive of thought and love. So it is utterly useless to multiply systems. If the mind frees itself from the illusion of its own self-protective demands and cravings, then there will be love, intelligence; then there will not be this division created by religions and beliefs; man will not be against man.
What Do You Mean by Love?
Love is the unknowable. It can be realized only when the known is understood and transcended. Only when the mind is free of the known, then only there will be love. So, we must approach love negatively, not positively.
What is love to most of us? With us, when we love, in it there is possessiveness, dominance, or subservience. From this possession arises jealously and fear of loss, and we legalize this possessive instinct. From possessiveness arise jealousy and the innumerable conflicts with which each one is familiar. Possessiveness, then, is not love. Nor is love sentimental. To be sentimental, to be emotional, excludes love.Sensitivity and emotions are merely sensations.
. . . Love alone can transform insanity, confusion, and strife. No system, no theory of the left or of the right can bring peace and happiness to man. Where there is love, there is no possessiveness, no envy; there is mercy and compassion, not in theory, but actually for your wife and for your children, for your neighbor and for your servant. . . . Love alone can bring about mercy and beauty, order and peace. There is love with its blessing when "you" cease to be.
Look and be simple
Surely, since you have burnt yourself in politics, your problem is not only to break away from society, but to come totally to life again, to love and to be simple. Without love, do what you may, you will not know the total action which alone can save man. "That is true, sir: we don't love, we aren't really simple." Why? Because you are concerned with reforms, with duties, with respectability, with becoming something, with breaking through to the other side. In the name of another, you are concerned with yourself; you are caught in your own cockleshell. You think you are the center of this beautiful earth. You never pause to look at a tree, at a flower, at the flowing river; and if by chance you do look, your eyes are filled with the things of the mind, and not with beauty and love. "Again, that is true; but what is one to do?" Look and be simple.
Is forgiveness love?
Is forgiveness love? What is implied in forgiveness? You insult me and I resent it, remember it; then, either through compulsion or through repentance, I say, "I forgive you." First I retain and then I reject. Which means what? I am still the central figure; it is I who am forgiving somebody. As long as there is the attitude of forgiving it is I who am important, not the man who is supposed to have insulted me. So when I accumulate resentment and then deny that resentment, which you call forgiveness, it is notlove. A man who loves obviously has no enmity and to all these things he is indifferent. Sympathy, forgiveness, the relationship of possessiveness, jealousy and fear all these things are not love. They are all of the mind, are they not?
There is no loss of energy in being in love
Is it possible for a man and a woman to live together, to have sex and children, without all the turmoil, bitterness and conflict inherent in such a relationship? Is it possible for there to be freedom on both sides? I don't mean by freedom that the husband or wife should constantly be having affairs with someone else. People usually come together and get married because they fall in love, and in that there is desire, choice, pleasure, possessiveness and tremendous drive. The very nature of this in-loveness is from the start filled with the seeds of conflict.
Krishnamurti: Is it? Need it be? I very much question that. Can't you fall in love and not have a possessive relationship? I love someone and she loves me and we get married - that is all perfectly straightforward and simple, in that there is no conflict at all. (When I say we get married I might just as well say we decide to live together - don't let's get caught up in words.) Can't one have that without the other, without the tail as it were, necessarily following? Can't two people be in love and both be so intelligent and so sensitive that there is freedom and absence of a center that makes for conflict? Conflict is not in the feeling of being in love. The feeling of being in love is utterly without conflict. There is no loss of energy in being in love. The loss of energy is in the tail, in everything that follows - jealousy, possessiveness, suspicion, doubt, the fear of losing that love, the constant demand for reassurance and security. Surely it must be possible to function in a sexual relationship with someone you love without the nightmare which usually follows. Of course it is.
Love does not obey
Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active present. It is not 'I will love' or 'I have loved'. If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect.
When there is love there is no duty and no responsibility
Does love have responsibility and duty, and will it use those words? When you do something out of duty is there any love in it? In duty there is no love. The structure of duty in which the human being is caught is destroying him. So long as you are compelled to do something because it is your duty you don't love what you are doing. When there is love there is no duty and no responsibility.
Love cannot be put together by the mind
Love is something that knows no measure, that cannot be put together by the mind, cannot be cultivated, something which is not sentimental, which has nothing to do with emotionalism and nothing whatsoever to do with good works, the village reform and so on. When you have that feeling then everything in life is important, significant; therefore you will do that which is good. But without knowing the beauty, the depth, the vigor of it we are trying to reduce love into something which the mind can capture and make respectable. And the same applies to action, which we are now trying to understand.
Action is an endless movement which has no beginning and no end and which is not controlled by cause and effect. Action is of everything - the action of the sea, of the mango seed becoming the mango tree, and so on. But the human mind is not a seed and therefore, through its action it becomes only a modified reproduction of what it was. In our life there is the constant pressure of circumstances, and although the circumstances are always changing, they are ever shaping our lives. What was, is not; what is, can be broken. So can we not sense, feel, this enormous action of life which ranges from the movement of the little worm in the earth to the sweep of the infinite heavens? If you really want to know what this extraordinary thing is, this action, then you must go through it, you must break through the barrier of this action in time. Then you will know it, then with that feeling you can act, you can go to your job and do all the things that are recognizable within the field of time. But from within the recognizable field of time you cannot find the other. Do what you will, through the petty you will never find the immeasurable.
Love is not a habit
It is the quality of freshness, of newness, that is essential, or otherwise life becomes a routine, a habit; and love is not a habit, a boring thing. Most people have lost all sense of wonderment. They take everything for granted; this sense of security destroys freedom and the wonderment of uncertainty.
