Chapter 20 love is the essence of virtue

Love means great freedom, but not doing what you like.Love comes only when the mind is very quiet, selfless, not self-centered...Love is the essence of virtue.A heart without love is not godly at all, only a godly heart is free from problems and knows the beauty of love and truth. In order to understand happiness, we have to learn it, not repress it, not indulge it.Learning is a discipline that requires you to neither indulge nor deny it.Learning begins when you realize that if there is any repression, denial, control, you stop learning, there is no learning.Therefore, to understand all the problems of happiness, you must have clear thinking.For us, happiness is very important.We do things for pleasure.We avoid anything that brings us pain, and we view things on the principle of pleasure.Therefore, happiness plays a very important role in our life, just like a person's ideal, as if a person gave up the so-called worldly life and looked for another life-it is also the basis of happiness.Or when people engage in social reform by saying "I must help the poor," it is still an act of pleasure; they may disguise it by calling service, benevolence, but it is still an activity of the heart, seeking pleasure or escaping Any disturbance that causes so-called "pain".If you watch yourself—and this is what we do all the time in our daily lives—you will find that you like someone because she compliments you, and you dislike someone because he says something true. You don't like to hear things, so you create antagonism with others.So you often live in a situation of struggle.

Therefore, it is very important to understand what is called "happiness".I mean learn by knowing.We have a lot to learn, because all our perceptual responses, all the values ​​and needs we create - so-called self-sacrifice, rejection, acceptance - are based on this marvelous thing - a refined or primal hapiness.We dedicate ourselves to various activities, on this basis, because we think that by identifying with certain activities, beliefs, forms of life, we will have more happiness, we will get greater benefits; and that Value and benefit are based on our identification with a particular form of activity as pleasure.Please observe these carefully.

You don't just have to listen to the words, you have to really listen to find out what I'm saying is true or not.This is your life, this is your everyday life.Most of us are wasting "life".We have lived for forty or sixty years, going to the office every day, engaging in social activities, escaping in different ways, and at the end of our lives we have nothing but an empty, boring and stupid life, wasted life. So understanding happiness is very important if you want to start over.Because suppressing or denying happiness doesn't solve the problem of happiness.The so-called religious lives suppress all forms of pleasure, or at least they try to, so they become boring, hungry people.And such a mind is dry, boring, numb, and it is impossible to understand what is real.

So it is very important to understand the joyful activities.Looking at a beautiful tree is a pleasant thing, very happy - is there anything wrong with that? But looking at a woman's or a man's pleasure - you call it immoral, because for you pleasure always includes Or it is associated with one thing, a woman or a man; or pleasure is escape from pain in relationships, so you seek pleasure elsewhere - in the ideal, in escape, in a certain activity. Pleasure has now created this form of social life.We derive pleasure from ambition, competition, comparison, seeking knowledge, seizing power, seeking status, prestige.And the pursuit of pleasures like ambition, competition, greed, envy, status, domination, power is respectable.It is the respect molded by a monogamous society: you will live a virtuous life, a life worthy of respect.You can be ambitious, you can be greedy, you can be rough, you can be competitive, you can be ruthless, but society accepts you because, the result of your ambition is either a so-called successful person with money, or a loser , that is, the frustrated person.So the morality of society is immoral.

Please listen to this, don't have to agree or disagree, just see the facts.And to see the fact -- that is, to know the fact -- is not to develop an idea about it, not to have an opinion about it.You are learning, and you have to learn with a curious attitude, that is, enthusiastic, eager, and therefore young.Morality is a custom, a habit, as long as you obey it, it is considered worthy of respect.Some people rebel against those forms -- it happens all the time.Defiance is a reaction to this form.This reaction takes many forms—those hippies, the Beatles, British rebel teens, etc.—but they still rebel within the form.True morality is very different.And that is why man must understand the nature of virtue and happiness.The customs, habits, traditions, relationships of our society - all of these are based on pleasure.I'm not using the word "happy" in the narrow sense, I'm using it in the broad sense.Our society is based on pleasure, and all our relationships are based on pleasure.As long as I am in line with what you like, as long as I help you get a better career, I am your friend.Once I criticize you, I am not your friend.How obvious and stupid this is.

You cannot understand love without understanding happiness.Love is not happiness.Love is something completely different.And to know happiness, you have to learn.Right now, sex is a problem for most, or everyone, of us.Why? Listen carefully.Because you can't solve it, you just run away.The dervish escapes it with vows and denials of celibacy.See what happens to such a mind.Suppressing a part of your body by denying it - those glands and so on - you have dried yourself up, and in your body there is always a battle. We think we have only two ways to face any problem, either repress it or run from it.Repression and avoidance are the same thing, and we have a whole network of escape—very complex, intelligent, emotional—that is, a normal, everyday activity.There are various ways of escaping.But we have this problem.The sannyasins escape from a certain aspect, but he doesn't solve it; he suppresses it with vows, and all the problems torment him.He may put on a simple tunic, but it also becomes a very important thing to him, just like an ordinary person.

How do you fix this? You have to fix it.That is an act of joy.You must understand.How do you fix it? If you don't fix it, then you're just stuck in a habit.That means a routine, and your mind becomes dull, stupid and heavy, and that's the only thing you have.So you have to fix that.First, when you are about to learn, don't condemn it first.Please study first.This is why we discuss learning.You are suppressed intellectually, emotionally; you have only the mind to do it repeatedly.You copy, you imitate what other people have done, you go on quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, or the Upanishads, or some holy book, but intellectually you are hungry, empty, uninteresting.In the office, you imitate intellectually, copying day after day, doing the same thing in the office, in the factory, at home -- repeating all the time.So the mind, which should be alive, clear, rational, healthy, free, has been suppressed.There is no way out, no creative activity.Emotionally, or aesthetically, you are hungry, because you have denied emotional sensitivity, denied beauty, denied the beauty of the night, refused to admire a tree or communicate intimately with nature. .So, what are you left with? You have only one thing in life, which is yourself, and it becomes a serious problem.

So the mind that understands this problem has to solve it immediately, because day by day this problem dulls your spirit, your heart.Have you ever noticed what happens to a mind that has problems and cannot solve it? It either flees into other problems, or it represses it, so it becomes neurotic—the so-called sane neurotic, but it still Be neurotic.So every problem, no matter what it is - emotional, intellectual, physical - must be solved immediately and not left until tomorrow, because tomorrow you will have other problems. Therefore you have to learn.But if you haven't solved today's problems, you can't learn, you just save them for tomorrow.So every problem, no matter how complex, difficult, or demanding, has to be solved that day, it has to be solved in the present moment.Notice how important this is.The mind is stuck in problems because it cannot solve problems, because it has no capacity, because it has no intensity, because it has no drive to learn - you can see such minds in the world - so it becomes tense, fearful, Ugly, self-care, self-centered and brutal.

So the problem of so-called sex has to be solved.And to deal with it intelligently—without running away, without repressing, without making some idiotic vows, or wallowing in it—one must understand the problem of happiness.People must also understand another situation, that is, most people live in a second-hand world.You can quote Bhagavad Gita, but you are still a person living in a second-hand world.You don't have the most original stuff.You have nothing natural and real, whether intellectually, aesthetically or morally.And only one thing remains - hunger and thirst, desire for food and sex, with compulsion to eat and compulsion to have sex.You can watch how people eat, how they gobble it up - and it's the same with sex.

So, to understand this very complex issue - because it includes beauty, emotion, love - you have to understand happiness, you have to break through this uncreative mind that just repeats what other people said centuries or decades ago.quote What other people say is a good escape, and quoting the Bhagavad Gita - as if you already know it - is a good escape.You have to live, and to live there can be no problems. To understand the question of sex, you must set the heart, the intellect, free so that it can observe, understand and act; and also emotionally, aesthetically, you must appreciate those trees, those mountains, those rivers, the dirty streets; Get to know your children, how they were raised, how they dress, how you treat them, how you speak to them.You have to see the beauty of the roads, the buildings, the mountains, the beauty of the faces.These are releases of energy - not through repression, not through identification with certain beliefs, but in all directions - so your mind is active, aesthetically, intellectually, rationally able to see things .The beauty of a tree, a bird on a branch, light and shadow on water, and many things in life - when you don't know, of course that's all you have.

Society thinks you have to have morals, and morality is family.When the family is confined to the family, the family gradually disintegrates; that is to say, the family becomes the individual, who is opposed to the majority, the whole, and society, and begins the process of destroying it all.So virtue has nothing to do with being respected.Virtue is something like a flower blooming, that is not what you have achieved.You know kindness, but you cannot be kind, you cannot be humble.Only the vain will try to be humble.You are either kind or you are not.It's a question of "is", not "become".You cannot be kind, you cannot be humble.The same is true of virtue.The moral structure of society is based on imitation, fear, personal ugly needs and ambitions, greed, envy, not virtue - so it is immoral.Virtue is a natural expression of love - natural, not planned, cultivated something called "virtue."It must flow naturally, otherwise it is not a virtue.How can it be a virtue if it is planned, if it is learned, if it is a mechanized matter? So you have to understand happiness, and you have to understand the nature and importance of happiness and sorrow.And you also have to know virtue and love. And love cannot be cultivated.You can't say, "I'll learn, I'll learn to love." Most idealists, most people, escape from themselves with various forms of intellectual, emotional activities, such people are not loving. of.They may be great social reformers, good politicians - if there is such a thing as "good politicians" - but they have no love at all.Love is something completely different from happiness.But you cannot love without knowing the depth of passion -- not denying it, not running from it, but understanding it.There is great joy in the beauty of joy. So love is not cultivated.Love cannot be divided into divine love and carnal love, it is just love.And it's not that you love many people or just one, that's another ridiculous question - "Do you love all people?" You know, a scented flower doesn't care who comes to smell it, or who turns and walks away.So it is the same with love.Love is not memory.Love is not a matter of the heart, of knowledge.When all the problems of existence - such as fear, greed, envy, despair, hope - are understood and resolved, it will naturally take on the face of compassion.A man who is ambitious cannot love; a man who is attached to a family cannot love; a man who is jealous cannot love.When you say "I love my wife," that's not what you really mean, because the next moment, you're going to be jealous of her. Love means great freedom, but not doing what you like.Love comes only when the mind is very quiet, selfless, not self-centered.These are not ideal.If you don't have love -- you do whatever you want, you worship all the gods, you take part in all kinds of social activities, you reform the poor, you go into politics, you write books, you write poetry -- you're still a dead person.Without love your problems will multiply without end; with love, do what you have to do, there is no danger, there is no conflict.Love is the essence of virtue.A heart without love is not godly at all, only a godly heart is free from problems and knows the beauty of love and truth. Bombay, February 21, 1965