Chapter 24 Loneliness, Loneliness and Love

Love arises when the mind is naturally quiet.It is not that others want it to be quiet, but when it sees that what is wrong is wrong and what is true is true, it will naturally be quiet.When the mind is at peace, whatever happens is an act of love, not knowledge.Knowledge is just experience, and experience is not love.Experience cannot understand love.Love arises when we understand the whole process of self, and self-understanding is the beginning of wisdom. Q: We've all experienced loneliness, we know the grief it brings, and we see its cause, its root.But what is loneliness? Is it different from loneliness?

K: Loneliness is pain, the pain of being alone, a state of isolation.When you are not compatible with anything, with the group, with the country, with your wife, with your children, with your husband, you have cut off the relationship.You know the situation.Now, do you understand loneliness? You take your loneliness for granted.but are you lonely Solitude is different from loneliness, but if you don't understand loneliness you cannot understand it.Are you going to be lonely? You are secretly noticing it, looking at it, not liking it.In order to understand it, you must communicate with it, with no barriers between it and you, without conclusions, prejudices, or speculations.You must approach it with freedom, without fear.In order to understand loneliness you have to approach it without any fear.If you approach loneliness and say you already know its cause, its root, then you cannot understand it.Do you know its roots? You know them by external speculation.Do you know the content of loneliness? You just describe it, and what you say is not reality, not truth.In order to understand it, you must approach it without avoiding it.Wanting to escape loneliness is itself an expression of inner dissatisfaction.Isn’t most of our activities an escape? When you’re lonely, you turn on the light and listen to the radio, you meditate, you learn from a guru, you gossip with people, you go to the movies, you go to a race, etc.Every day you live is to escape from yourself, so those escapes become very important, and you are torn between escape, whether to drink, or to worship God.Escape is the point, although you may have various ways of evading.You may have done a great deal of psychological damage to your psyche by means of escape that you respect, and I have done so much damage to my social dimension by worldly escapes; but in order to understand loneliness, all escapes must come to an end, not by reality. Do it, or force it, but by seeing the error of avoidance, and then you will be directly confronted with "what is", and those real problems begin to arise.

What is loneliness? To understand it you cannot give it a name.Just because of the naming, brings the thought of other related memories, reinforcing the feeling of loneliness.You can try it and you will understand.When you stop avoiding, until you understand what loneliness is, you will know that what you are doing is just another form of avoiding.Only by knowing loneliness can you go beyond it. The problem of loneliness is quite different.We are never alone, we are always with people. "Maybe" except when we're walking alone.We are the result of our economic, social, climatic and other circumstances, and as long as we are affected, we are not alone.As long as there is a process of accumulation and experience, there will be no loneliness.You can imagine that by isolating yourself into narrow entities, in individual activities, you are alone, but that is not loneliness.There is loneliness only when there is no influence.Solitude is an action that is not the result of a reaction, not a response to a challenge or stimulus.Loneliness is a matter of isolation, and we look for isolation in our relationships, and that is the very nature of the ego, "I" -- my work, my personality, my responsibilities, my possessions, my relationships.It is the process of thought that leads to isolation, and thought is the result of all the thoughts and influences of a person.Knowing loneliness is not a bourgeois act, you cannot know it as long as you have the pain of unseen dissatisfaction in you, the dissatisfaction that comes from emptiness and frustration.Loneliness is not isolation, it is not the opposite of loneliness.It is a state of being when all experience and knowledge is absent.

Q: You talk about exploiting other people's relationships for your own gratification, and you often imply a state called love.what do you mean by love K: We know what our relationship is like - mutual fulfillment and utilization, although we call it love.In use, we should treat and protect the things we use gently.We protect our lines, our books, our property.Likewise, we are careful to protect our wives, our families, our groups, because without them we would feel alone and lost.Parents feel lonely without children.What you hope you can't do, the child will, so the child becomes an instrument of your vanity.We know the relationship between need and utilization.We need the postman and he needs us, but we don't say we love the postman.But we do say that we love wives and children, even when we use them for our personal gratification, and gladly sacrifice them for what may be called patriotic vanity.We know this process very well, and it's clear that it can't be love.To take advantage of, to exploit, and then to feel sorry for, that can't be love, because love is not a thing in the mind.

Now, let's experiment and find out what love is, not just with words, but with actual experience.When you regard me as a master and I regard you as a disciple, there is a relationship of mutual use between us.In the same way, when you use your wife, your children, in order to improve yourself, there is mutual exploitation between you.And definitely, that's not love.When there is use, there must be possession.Possession necessarily brings fear, and with fear comes envy, envy, suspicion.When there is utilization there cannot be love, because love is not something of the mind.Thinking about someone is not loving that person.You only think about that person when he's not there, when he dies, when he runs away, or when he doesn't give you what you want.The insufficiency within you sets the course of how the mind works.When that person is around you, you don't think about him; when he's near you, you think about him, and you're disturbed, so you take him for granted—he's there.Habits are a way to forget and keep your peace undisturbed.So exploitation must lead to invulnerability, and that is not love.

What is the state of being when one is exploiting another - Exploitation is a thought process used to cover up inner insufficiency, either positively or negatively - isn't it? What is the situation when there is dissatisfaction ? Seeking satisfaction is the essence of the mind.Sex is a feeling created by the mind, pictured, and then the mind acts or does not act.Feeling is the process of thought, that is not love.When the heart predominates and the thought process becomes important, there is no love.The process of using, thinking, imagining, mastering, covering up, and rejecting is all a smoke screen. When this smoke screen is gone, the flame of love will appear.Sometimes we do have flames, rich, full, complete; but this smoke screen comes back, because we cannot keep the flame for long, and then there is no intimacy, whether it is one person or many people, whether personal or not. personal.Sometimes most of us know the aroma of love, and how vulnerable it can be, but the smokescreen of exploitation, habit, jealousy, possession, making and breaking contracts—these become important to us, so the flame of love no longer exists.When there is a smoke screen, there is no flame; but when we understand the truth of exploitation, the flame exists.We use others because we are poor, inadequate, insignificant, small, lonely, and we hope that by using others we can escape.Likewise, we use God as a means of escape.Love of God is not love of truth.You cannot love truth, love of truth is only a means by which you get what you know, so there is always a personal fear that you will lose what you know.

You will understand what love is when the mind is very still, no longer seeking gratification and escaping.First, your mind must be completely stopped.The mind is the result of thought, and thought is only a channel, a means to an end.How can there be love when life is just a passage for something? Love arises when the mind is naturally quiet.It is not that others want it to be quiet, but when it sees that what is wrong is wrong and what is true is true, it will naturally be quiet.When the mind is at peace, whatever happens is an act of love, not knowledge.Knowledge is just experience, and experience is not love.Experience cannot understand love.Love arises when we understand the whole process of self, and self-understanding is the beginning of wisdom.

Madras February 5, 1950