Phenomenology of Love

October 8, 2014Uncategorized
Rommel Gersava

Many of us are seeking what is the true meaning and essence of love. According to
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, “true love causes pain.” Based on our experience is there
such true love? In this paper we will discover what is the meaning of true love is. Many say
that the word love is the most abuse word. Many people didn’t take this word seriously for
practice. We often say “I Love You” to the person whom we want to express our love. But
the question is how true this love for the other person is. True love means offering the self
for the good of the other even in the midst of pain and suffering. As Jesus says, “there is
no greater love that to offer one’s life for his friend.” Jesus proves this true love to us by
dying on the cross for our salvation.

Let us discover the real meaning of love through the phenomenology of love. How does
the experience of love begin? According to our study in the philosophy of human person
under Mr. Jerome Eslabra says that the experience of love begins from the experience of
loneliness. However, loneliness ends when one finds or found by another in what we call
a loving relationship encounter. Love is a relational encounter of the I and the other. It is
an encounter because it is only through in the encounter that we will experience love.
There are a lot of definitions of love and each person has his own definition of love. Many
people also misunderstood this word. Love is present when there is a mutual relationship.
Love is being mutual means to give and take. There is always an element of sacrifice in
loving the other. To be able to love means one should be able to love and make him or
herself valuable as a gift of self to others. When love in the give and take relationship is
healthy, love becomes fruitful and creative. Why? It is because when the person is in love
to the other we can always hear them saying sweetest word like “you complete my day”, “I
feel I’m in heaven when I am with you”, “you are an angel who gives meaning to my life”.
We always feel special when our live is reciprocated. Let us bear in mind that in every
encounter the making of each other. For example, the priest makes the parishioner
a parishioner and the parishioner makes the priest a priest. In loving encounter we
always make each other and we often say we love each other. It is because we accept
and the reality of the other as other like in the line “mahal kita maging sino ka man”. We
always experience the creativity of love when we are in the loving encounter and our
culture is rich in that. The prof of this is when we are in love with someone we
unbelievably made poems, art work, painting, etc. that we don’t usually do. We always
feel inspired to do things in the name of love. Love is not only creative it is also a union.
Trough love we can be united. The ‘we’ that is created in love is the union of persons and
their worlds. For example in the rite of marriage through love the husband and wife are
made united in the name of love. The union of love makes each of the people to be who
they are by loving each other. This is the paradox in love, the many in one, one in many.
Love is also a gift of self. As describe by Manuel Dy in his phenomenology of love, a gift is
causing another to possess something which hitherto you possess yourself but which the
other has no strict right to own. Often times we always that that giving without expecting a
return is not easy but it is the very essence of love. Like Jesus offering himself for our
salvation without expecting a return. He didn’t forced us love him instead he allow us to
use our freedom to love him. The Phenomenology of Love according to Manuel Dy
suggests that authentic love is the gift of self that does not expect something in return.
That is why Mother Teresa of Calcutta believes that true causes pain. The great proof of
this is Jesus in order to prove his love to us he must suffer and die on the cross for our
salvation. A mother in to prove his love to her child she must suffer for nine months in
order to give birth to the baby. In loving one another we cannot avoid making sacrifice
because it is primarily the essence of true love. True love is a self-giving as a gift without
expecting a return from whom we love. Love is also historical because to love is not only
one moment but rather to love means loving the other constantly and concretely in every
times, places and events even in the midst of pain and suffering. This makes love
historical. It happens in any time and may stay longer within the space and time. It cannot
be easily erased in the mind and heart of people. Even if it happens ago, we still
remember. True love must be equal ant must not be a bondage but a liberation. In love
there must be no superior or inferior. Freedom must be practiced within love. This love
must happen to all of us in order to maintain peace and harmony. Love must be offered
form totality of my being to the totality of others being. Authentic love happens in the total
self-giving to other without expecting a return. It will happen when we say and put to
practice the line “I love you on what you are”. Love is also eternal like the mother’s love
for her child. Love is eternal. It does not bound to be limited on specific time. But this kind
of love is hard to find nowadays. God’s love is also eternal, it doesn’t bound by the limit of
time.

Love is sacred. Love is sealed with trust, intimacy and even sharing of secrets. Love is to
be practice rather than to talk about. True love must be experience rather than to be
enumerated. Always remember that “You are what you do not what you say.”

References:

Notes in the study of the Philosophy of Human Person

Philosophy of Human (book) by Manuel Dy

The Phenomenology of Love

Joe Duncan

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Mar 2 · 6 min read

Introduction

We need to sometimes be daring in writing: and so, here is an

experimental undertaking, a phenomenological investigation into the
philosophy of love, somewhere in between the sensual world of
poetry and the descriptive world of philosophy, that seeks to find
what love is, through the inner world of the experience of it.
Quite simply, I love her mind. I love her very process of thinking.
Not her methodology or logic, her induction or deduction, or the way
she comes to conclusions — but the process of her existing, her
thinking and feeling actually taking place. Her mind experiences this
world and me, and that is all that is necessary for love. And that’s
what it is to love a woman.

There is a distinction to be made between love and loving. Love is

the sheer enjoyment of someone, adoration and enamoredness with
someone, beyond anything that could ever be considered “average,”
or just mere enjoyment — it is an infatuation…love is when we want
to scream and run through fields of freshly cut grass in the deep
orange sunset, or soak in the mud while charged with an electricity
that could light the sky like a blazing fire at midnight; love is a feeling
— a vulnerability. A power through a vulnerability that
says, “Nothing else will do — it must be you. You bring me to my
knees and make me invincible.”

And there is the process of loving — actions such as commitment,

care, compassion, empathy, understanding, building, trusting, and so
forth. This story is about the former, what it is to love or to be in
love — rather than how to love. This is about those with whom the
our stars seem to align, not what we do with them. This is about the
burning emergency which seeps through our veins and flesh,
bleeding our worlds full of rich color and vibrancy, unadulterated
passion.

The Real of the Ideal

Love is not desire — true love, if it is to be authentically loving
another being, and if it is to escape the perpetual circular feedback of
solipsism — that place where love is self-serving, ever collapsing back
in on itself, and thus self-love always — must be a love for the other’s
sake; that is, the mind must conceive of the actual other as a human
being, it is not enough to love the representation of the other in our
minds, the interpreted object we conclude is the other because it is
the closest we can get to experiencing the actual them, our
appearance and experiences of them. That isn’t experiencing them at
all, that’s experiencing what we’ve imagined. Thus, love cannot be
lust, it cannot be sex, though our bodies may often serve as modes of
communication, attempts at sending ill-fated letters of love in the
form of touch to someone, ultimately, loving someone is not loving
their body. Love cannot be the love of something that
someone gives us.

It is not enough to love someone’s smells, someone’s taste or the way

they look, the way their hair feels against you, their hot breath which
dances upon your flesh as you lay with your faces pressed
together — for all of these perceptions take place solely within our
own minds — certainly they stem from a ‘real world’ somewhere ‘out
there’ but they are our own creations, nonetheless. We may love
these figments of our imagination, but they are, alas, figments of our
imagination. Bold and illusioned we are, proposing to truly know
another because of what we take in of them. Pity, it is, we are so
gullible.

For it is true, that the objects of our love exist perpetually on the
other side of our representations, always locked away tight, with no
way for us to ever truly take them in, experiencing them for the
physical entities they are— like a prisoner in an isolation cell, we find
ourselves forever separated, the senses proving insufficient to
actually ever experience the other; such is the way of the very
idealism that we all know to be true. There is us, there is me as
myself, my mind and it’s experiencing of the world, taking place
every moment which melts casually and carelessly into the
next, and there is a world out there, but I can never experience this
world, this actual reality — I may only ever truly know my sensory
interpretation of it. This is the intimacy we have with ourselves.

I will never experience the sensing of her just like I will never
actually experience a color, but rather, the refraction of certain
portions of the spectrum of visible light, reflecting off of objects of
various densities, one density reflecting light that my brain interprets
as “red” but never will I experience the actual red sheets on my bed,
let alone the redness of the sheets.

The closest I will ever get to you is the dream thing I’ve made up in
my head that I think you look like; I take in your reflections of light, I
generate the feelings of an imagined friction when our bodies collide
in one another embrace; but alas, my nervous system is a closed
system, and never will you actually be inside of me. So where does
that leave us in love?

Like the insane locked away in a sanitarium, we’re destined to to

never experience another human being, never shall our two
consciousnesses play on the level of actual experience, of sensation —
we must transcend to the world of thought to really love. Can you see
outside of the nonexistent windows, the barren brick walls that shut
us in? We must scream within ourselves, hoping that we possess the
power to shake the padded, dense, concrete walls hard enough that
we rattle the walls of the next room just enough that we may touch
someone. And this is the shared experience; the shared situation.

I see her eyes stare into my soul — the way she beckons me from
within, responds to my motions and smiles, with tender flashes and
dilating pupils, we converse without ever even really saying a thing;
in these moments, I know she’s alive. She exists, she thinks, she feels,
and she knows. I know that she knows when she looks at me.
Beyond the thing, somewhere inside of her is an experience; not an
experience for me to experience, and experiencing of the world, of
the refraction of my light, the deep blue as it bounces off of my eye
and into hers — there exists an experiencing thing, a conscious
relationship to the world.

Consciousness is always intentional — she is intention…an intention

interpreting the same world as I, the shared situation when we laugh
and feel the vibrations of those asylum walls, humming with a stifled
low-frequency through the densities of our mechanical designs. Our
burning, passionate desire, just to touch one another, ever-failing,
but never for a moment ceasing to try — if only our consciousnesses
could play together; as the poem tells:

By feint shreds of radiant light

in the pure black darkness betwixt
exploded stars and the world, we sit
in this starlit gulf, our eyes remain fixed
as I stare at what wonder, therein lies
a mind from which beauty itself stems
there’s an infinity of stars behind your
eyes
and I want to touch every single one of
them.

She has hopes, she has dreams — she has worries and fears, and in a
very real way, she is these things. Concepts, emotions, imaginations,
ideas, thoughts, narratives,
discussions-with-herself-inside-of-her-head…these are what she
really is, not merely an expelling of fodder, raw material for my
sensual consumption, but rather, a black hole herself, swallowing
whole the same material of the world and its situation as I. To love
is to love this part of another, even if we may never
actually see it.

So yes, I love her mind. Her as existing agent, her hopes, her dreams,
her happiness, her sadness, her attempts, her goals, her plans, her
worries, her fears — herself as being, as a process that I can never
truly know or touch or feel, but yet, always will know is there and
will forever chase, for I can infer it with my reason, and it is in the
moments when we look, staring deeply into one another, that I know
she experiences me…and thus she is as I, and it is forever our duty
as lovers, to love that thing of pure experience, giving it the best
experience possible indefinitely.

…To love is to love the eternal consuming fire within the

other, the consumption of the raw materials of reality the
other black holes from which no light can escape…

© 2019; Joe Duncan. All Rights Reserved

 What Love is Not

Love is not desire. It is a great thing to find out this for

oneself. And if love is not desire then what is love? Love is
not mere attachment to your baby, love is not attachment in
any form; love is not jealousy, ambition, fulfilment or
becoming; love is not desire or pleasure. The fulfilment of
desire, which is pleasure, is not love. So I have found out
what love is. It is none of these things. Have I understood
these elements and am I free of them? Or I just say, ‘I
understand intellectually, I understand verbally, but help me
to go deeper’? I can’t; you have to do it yourself.

Krishnamurti in Saanen 1979, Discussion 2

Facing the fact that you
do not love
Question: The strongest underlying commandment in all religions is to love
your fellow man. Why is this simple truth so difficult to carry out?
Krishnamurti: Why is it that we are incapable of loving? What does it mean to
love your fellow man? Is it a commandment, or is it a simple fact that if I do not
love you and you do not love me, there can only be hate, violence, and
destruction? What prevents us from seeing the very simple fact that this world is
ours, that this earth is yours and mine to live upon, undivided by nationalities, by
frontiers, to live upon happily, productively, with delight, with affection and
compassion? Why is it that we do not see this? I can give you lots of
explanations, and you can give me lots more, but mere explanations will never
eradicate the fact that we do not love our neighbour. On the contrary, it is
because we are forever giving explanations and causes that we do not face the
fact. You give one cause, I give another, and we fight over causes and
explanations. We are divided as Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, this or that. We
say we do not love because of social conditions, or because it is our karma, or
because somebody has a great deal of money while we have very little. We
offer innumerable explanations, lots of words, and in the net of words we get
caught. The fact is that we do not love our neighbour, and we are afraid to face
that fact, so we indulge in explanations, in words and the description of the
causes; we quote the Gita, the Bible, the Koran, anything to avoid facing the
simple fact.

With the facing

of that fact there
comes a different
 quality; and it is this
quality that saves the
world.
What happens when you face the fact and know for yourself that you do not love
your neighbour or your son? If you loved your son, you would educate him
entirely differently; you would educate him not to fit into this rotten society, but to
be self-sufficient, to be intelligent, to be aware of all the influences around him in
which he is caught, smothered, and which never allow him to be free. If you
loved your son, who is also your neighbour, there would be no wars because
you would want to protect him, not your property, your petty little belief, your
bank account, your ugly country or your narrow ideology. So you do not love,
and that is a fact.
The Bible, the Gita or the Koran may tell you to love your neighbour, but the fact
is that you do not love. Now, when you face that fact, what happens? What
happens when you are aware that you are not loving, and being aware of that
fact, do not offer explanations or give causes as to why you do not love? It is
very clear. You are left with the naked fact that you do not love, that you feel no
compassion. The contemptuous way you talk to others, the respect you show to
your boss, the deep, reverential salute with which you greet your guru, your
pursuit of power, your identification with a country, your seeking – all this
indicates that you do not love. If you start from there you can do something. If
you are blind and really know it, if you do not imagine you can see, what
happens? You move slowly, you touch, you feel; a new sensitivity comes into
being. Similarly, when I know that I have no love, and do not pretend to love,
when I am aware of the fact that I have no compassion and do not pursue the
ideal, then with the facing of that fact there comes a different quality; and it is
this quality that saves the world, not organized religion or a clever ideology. It is
when the heart is empty that the things of the mind fill it; and the things of the
mind are the explanations of that emptiness, the words that describe its causes.
So, if you really want to stop wars, if you really want to put an end to this conflict
within society, you must face the fact that you do not love. You may go to a
temple and offer flowers to a stone image, but that will not give the heart this
extraordinary quality of compassion and love, which comes only when the mind
is quiet, and not greedy or envious. When you are aware of the fact that you
have no love, and do not run away from it by trying to explain it, or find its cause,
then that very awareness begins to do something; it brings gentleness, a sense
of compassion. Then there is a possibility of creating a world totally different
from this chaotic and brutal existence which we now call life.
Krishnamurti in Bombay 1956, Talk 5
Relationship, if we allow it, can be a process of self-revelation; but since we do
not allow it, relationship becomes merely a gratifying activity. As long as the
mind merely uses relationship for its own security, that relationship is bound to
create confusion and antagonism. Is it possible to live in relationship without
the idea of demand, want or gratification? Which means, is it possible to love
without the interference of the mind? We love with the mind, our hearts are filled
with the things of the mind, but the fabrications of the mind cannot be love. You
cannot think about love. You can think about the person whom you love, but
that thought is not love, and so gradually thought takes the place of love. When
the mind becomes supreme, all-important, obviously there can be no affection.
We have filled our hearts with the things of the mind, and the things of the mind
are essentially ideas – what should be, and what should not be.
Can relationship be based on an idea? If it is, is it not a self-enclosing activity
and therefore inevitable that there should be contention, strife, and misery? But
if the mind does not interfere, it is not erecting a barrier, it is not disciplining
suppressing or sublimating itself. This is extremely difficult, because it is not
through determination, practice or discipline, that the mind can cease to
interfere; the mind will cease to interfere only when there is full comprehension
of its own process. Then only is it possible to have right relationship with the
one and with the many, free of contention and discord.
Krishnamurti in Ojai 1949, Talk 2
Ideas about love
Two young men had come from the town nearby. They came in smiling but
rather shyly, their manner hesitantly respectful. Once seated, they soon forgot
their shyness, and one asked, ‘May I ask a question, sir?’
Of course.
‘What is love? There are so many ideas about what love should be, that it is all
rather confusing.’
What sort of ideas?
‘That love shouldn’t be passionate or lustful; that one should love one’s
neighbour as oneself; that one should love one’s father and mother; that love
should be the impersonal love of God. Everyone gives an opinion according to
their fancy.’
Apart from the opinions of others, what do you think? Have you opinions about
love too?
‘It is difficult to put into words what one feels,’ replied the second one. ‘I think
love must be universal; one must love all, without prejudice. It is prejudice that
destroys love; it is class consciousness that creates barriers and divides people.
The sacred books say that we must love one another and not be personal or
limited in our love, but sometimes we find this very difficult.’
‘To love God is to love all,’ added the first one. ‘There is only divine love; the rest
is carnal, personal. This physical love prevents divine love, and without divine
love, all other love is barter and exchange. Love is not sensation. Sexual
sensation must be checked, disciplined; that is why I’m against birth control.
Physical passion is destructive; through chastity lies the way to God.’
Before we go further, don’t you think we ought to find out if all these opinions
have any validity? Is not one opinion as good as another? Regardless of who
holds it, is not opinion a form of prejudice, a bias created by one’s temperament,
one’s experience, and the way one happens to have been brought up?

Understand why we
have opinions, ideas
and conclusions about
love.
‘Do you think it is wrong to hold an opinion?’ asked the second one.
To say that it is wrong or right would merely be another opinion, wouldn’t it? But
if one begins to observe and understand how opinions are formed, then
perhaps one may be able to perceive the actual significance of opinion,
judgment, agreement. Thought is the result of influence, isn’t it? Your thinking
and your opinions are dictated by the way you have been brought up. You say,
‘This is right, that is wrong,’ according to the moral pattern of your particular
conditioning. We are not for the moment concerned with what is true beyond all
influence, or whether there is such truth. We are trying to see the significance of
opinions, beliefs, assertions, whether they be collective or personal. Opinion,
belief, agreement or disagreement, are responses according to one’s
background narrow or wide. Isn’t that so?
‘Yes, but is that wrong?’
Again, if you say it is right or wrong, you are still in the field of opinions. Truth is
not a matter of opinion; a fact does not depend on agreement or belief. You and
I may agree to call this object a watch, but by any other name it would still be
what it is. Your belief or opinion is something that has been given to you by the
society in which you live. In revolting against it, as a reaction, you may form a
different opinion, another belief; but you are still on the same level, aren’t you?
‘I am sorry but I don’t understand what you are getting at,” replied the second
one.
You have certain ideas and opinions about love, haven’t you?
‘Yes.’
How did you get them?
‘I have read what the saints and the great religious teachers have said about
love, and having thought it over I have formed my own conclusions.’
Which are shaped by your likes and dislikes, are they not? You like or you don’t
like what others have said about love, and you decide which statement is right
and which is wrong according to your own predilection.
‘I choose that which I consider to be true.’
On what is your choice based?
‘On my own knowledge and discernment.’
What do you mean by knowledge? I am not trying to trip or corner you but
together we are trying to understand why we have opinions, ideas and
conclusions about love. If once we understand this, we can go very much more
deeply into the matter. So, what do you mean by knowledge?
‘By knowledge I mean what I have learnt from the teachings of the sacred
books.’
‘Knowledge embraces also the techniques of modern science, and all the
information that has been gathered by man from ancient days up to the present
time,’ added the other.
So knowledge is a process of accumulation, is it not? It is the cultivation of
memory. The knowledge that we have accumulated as scientists, musicians,
scholars, engineers, makes us technical in various departments of life. When
we have to build a bridge, we think as engineers, and this knowledge is part of
the tradition, part of the background or conditioning that influences all our
thinking. Living, which includes the capacity to build a bridge, is a total action,
not a separate, partial activity; yet our thinking about life and love is shaped by
opinions, conclusions, tradition. If you were brought up in a culture which
maintained that love is only physical, and that divine love is all nonsense, you
would, in the same way, repeat what you had been taught, wouldn’t you?
‘Not always,’ replied the second one. ‘I admit it is rare, but some of us do rebel
and think for ourselves.’
Thought may rebel against the established pattern, but this very revolt is
generally the outcome of another pattern; the mind is still caught in the process
of knowledge and tradition. It is like rebelling within the walls of a prison for
more conveniences, better food and so on. So your mind is conditioned by
opinions, tradition, knowledge, and by your ideas about love, which make you
act in a certain way. That is clear, isn’t it?
‘Yes sir, that is clear enough,’ answered the first one. ‘But then what is love?’
If you want a definition you can look in any dictionary, but the words which
define love are not love. Merely to seek an explanation of what love is, is still to
be caught in words and opinions, which are accepted or rejected according to
your conditioning.
‘Aren’t you making it impossible to inquire into what love is?’ asked the second
one.
Is it possible to inquire through a series of opinions or conclusions? To inquire
rightly, thought must be freed from conclusion, from the security of knowledge
and tradition. The mind may free itself from one series of conclusions and form
another, which is again only a modified continuity of the old. Now, isn’t thought
itself a movement from one result to another, from one influence to another? Do
you see what I mean?
‘I’m not at all sure that I do,’ said the first one. ‘I don’t understand it at all,’ said
the second.
Perhaps you will, as we go along. Let me put it this way: is thinking the
instrument of inquiry? Will thinking help one to understand what love is?
‘How am I to find out what love is if I am not allowed to think?’ asked the second
one rather sharply.
Please be a little more patient. You have thought about love, haven’t you?
‘Yes. My friend and I have thought a great deal about it.’
If one may ask, what do you mean when you say you have thought about love?
‘I have read about it, discussed it with my friends, and drawn my own
conclusions.’
Has it helped you to find out what love is? You have read, exchanged opinions
with each other and come to certain conclusions about love, all of which is
called thinking. You have positively or negatively described what love is,
sometimes adding to, and sometimes taking away from, what you have
previously learnt. Isn’t that so?
‘Yes, that’s exactly what we have been doing, and our thinking has helped to
clarify our minds.’
Has it? Or have you become more and more entrenched in an opinion? Surely
what you call clarification is a process of coming to a definite verbal or
intellectual conclusion.
‘That’s right; we are not as confused as we were.’
In other words, one or two ideas stand out clearly in this jumble of teachings and
contradictory opinions about love. Isn’t that it?
‘Yes, the more we have gone over this whole question of what love is, the
clearer it has become.’
Is it love that has become clear, or what you think about it? Let us go a little
further into this, shall we? A certain ingenious mechanism is called a watch
because we have all agreed to use this word to indicate that particular thing, but
the word watch is obviously not the mechanism itself. Similarly, there is a
feeling or a state which we have all agreed to call love, but the word is not the
actual feeling. And the word love means so many different things. At one time
you use it to describe a sexual feeling, at another time you talk about divine or
impersonal love, or you assert what love should or should not be, and so on.
‘If I may interrupt, sir, could it be that all these feelings are just varying forms of
the same thing?’ asked the first one. ‘There are moments when love seems to
be one thing, but at other moments it appears to be something quite different.
It’s all very confusing. One doesn’t know where one is.’
That’s just it. We want to be sure of love, to peg it down so that it won’t elude us.
We reach a conclusion, make agreements about it. We call it by various names,
with their special meanings. We talk about “my love”, just as we talk about “my
property”, “my family” or “my virtue”, and we hope to lock it safely away so that
we can turn to other things and make sure of them too. But somehow it’s always
slipping away when we least expect it.
‘I don’t quite follow all this,’ said the second one, rather puzzled.
As we have seen, the feeling itself is different from what the books say about it;
the feeling is not the description, it is not the word. That much is clear, isn’t it?
Now, can you separate the feeling from the word, and from your preconceptions
of what it should and should not be?
‘What do you mean “separate”?’ asked the first one.
There is the feeling, and the word or words which describe that feeling, either
approvingly or disapprovingly. Can you separate the feeling from the verbal
description of it? It is comparatively easy to separate an objective thing, like this
watch, from the word which describes it, but to dissociate the feeling itself from
the word love, with all its implications, is far more arduous and requires a great
deal of attention.
‘What good will that do?’ asked the second one.
We always want to get a result in return for doing something. This desire for a
result, which is another form of conclusion seeking, prevents understanding.
When you ask, ‘What good will it do me if I dissociate the feeling from the
word love?’ you are thinking of a result, therefore you are not really inquiring to
find out what that feeling is.
‘I do want to find out, but I also want to know what will be the outcome of
dissociating the feeling from the word. Isn’t this perfectly natural?’

When you love,

everything will come
right. Love has its own
action.
Perhaps, but if you want to understand you will have to give your attention, and
there is no attention when one part of your mind is concerned with results and
the other with understanding. In this way you get neither and so you become
more and more confused, bitter and miserable. If we don’t dissociate the word,
which is memory and all its reactions, from the feeling, then that word destroys
the feeling, and then the word, or memory, is the ash without the fire. Isn’t this
what has happened to you both? You have so entangled yourselves in a net of
words and speculations that the feeling itself, which is the only thing that has
deep and vital significance, is lost.
‘I am beginning to see what you mean,’ said the first one slowly. ‘We are not
simple; we don’t discover anything for ourselves but just repeat what we have
been told. Even when we revolt we form new conclusions, which again have to
be broken down. We really don’t know what love is, but merely have opinions
about it. Is that it?’
Don’t you think so? Surely, to know love, truth, God, there must be no opinions,
no beliefs, no speculations with regard to it. If you have an opinion about a fact,
the opinion becomes important, not the fact. If you want to know the truth or the
falseness of the fact, then you must not live in the word, in the intellect. You may
have a lot of knowledge and information about the fact, but the actual fact is
entirely different. Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority,
and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don’t be caught in opinions
and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come
right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep
away from the authority who tells you what love is and what it is not. No
authority knows; and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is
understanding.
From the book Commentaries on Living III, by J. Krishnamurti

Love is a flame without smoke

Question: I cannot conceive of a love which is neither felt nor thought of. You
are probably using the word love to indicate something else. Is it not so?
Krishnamurti: When we say love, what do we mean by it? Actually, not
theoretically, what do we mean? It is a process of sensation and thought, is it
not? That is what we mean by love: a process of thought, a process of
sensation.
Is thought, love? When I think of you, is that love? When I say that love must be
impersonal or universal, is that love? Surely, thought is the result of a feeling, of
sensation, and as long as love is held within the field of sensation and thought,
obviously there must be conflict in that process. And must we not find out if
there is something beyond the field of thought?

We don’t know how to

love, we only know
 how to think about
love.
We know what love is in the ordinary sense: a process of thought and sensation.
If we do not think of a person, we think we do not love them; if we do not feel, we
think there is no love. But is that all? Or is love something beyond? And to find
out, must not thought as sensation come to an end? After all, when we love
somebody, we think about them, we have a picture of them. That is, what we
call love is a thinking process, a sensation, which is memory: the memory of
what we did or did not do with him or her. So memory, which is the result of
sensation, which becomes verbalized thought, is what we call love. And even
when we say that love is impersonal, cosmic, or what you will, it is still a process
of thought.
Now, is love a process of thought? Can we think about love? We can think
about the person, or think of memories with regard to that person, but is that
love? Surely, love is a flame without smoke. The smoke is that with which we
are familiar – the smoke of jealousy, of anger, of dependence, of calling it
personal or impersonal, the smoke of attachment. We have not the flame, but
we are fully acquainted with the smoke; and it is possible to have that flame only
when the smoke is not. Therefore our concern is not with love, whether it is
something beyond the mind or beyond sensation, but to be free of the smoke:
the smoke of jealousy, of envy, the smoke of separation, of sorrow and pain.
Only when the smoke is not shall we know that which is the flame. And the
flame is neither personal nor impersonal, neither universal nor particular – it is
just a flame; and there is the reality of that flame only when the mind, the whole
process of thought, has been understood. So, there can be love only when the
smoke of conflict of competition, struggle, envy, comes to an end, because that
process breeds opposition, in which there is fear. As long as there is fear, there
is no communion, for one cannot commune through the screen of smoke.
So, it is clear that love is possible only without the smoke; and as we are
acquainted with the smoke, let us go into it completely, understand it fully, so as
to be free of it. Then only shall we know that flame which is neither personal
nor impersonal and which has no name. That which is new cannot be given a
name. Our question is not what love is, but what are the things that are
preventing the fullness of that flame? We don’t know how to love, we only know
how to think about love. In the very process of thinking we create the smoke of
the “me” and the “mine”, and in that we are caught. Only when we are capable
of freeing ourselves from the process of thinking about love and all the
complications that arise out of it, is there a possibility of having that flame.
Krishnamurti in Paris 1950, Talk 4