As long as one is escaping from loneliness, there is no essential difference between the worship of God and addiction to alcohol. Socially, there may be a difference; but psychologically, the man who runs away from himself, from his own emptiness, whose escape is his search for God, is on the same level as the drunkard.
When the mother and father love their children, they do not compare them, they do not compare their child with another child; it is their child and they love their child. But you want to compare yourself with something better, with something nobler, with something richer, so you create in yourself a lack of love.
You will know love when the mind is very still and free from its search for gratification and escapes. First, the mind must come entirely to an end. Mind is the result of thought, and thought is merely a passage, a means to an end. When life is merely a passage to something, how can there be love ? Love comes into being when the mind is naturally quiet, not made quiet, when it sees the false as false and the true as true. When the mind is quiet, then whatever happens is the action of love, it is not the action of knowledge. Knowledge is mere experience, and experience is not love. Experience cannot know love. Love comes into being when we understand the total process of ourselves, and the understanding of ourselves is the beginning of wisdom.
So as long as the mind is comparing, there is no love, and the mind is always judging, comparing, weighing, looking to find out where the weakness is. So where there is comparison, there is no love.
Words entangle. But if one can understand the whole significance of the ways of one's thought, the ways of our desires and their pursuits and ambitions, then there is a possibility of having or understanding that which is love. But that requires an extraordinary understanding of oneself.
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Love is not a sentiment, not romanticism, not dependent on something, and that state is extremely arduous and difficult to understand, or to be in—because our minds are always interfering, limiting, encroaching upon its functioning. Therefore it is important to understand first the mind and its ways; otherwise we shall be caught in illusions, caught in words and sensations that have very little significance.
The idea is not love. The idea, the word is not love. But only when you have seen the whole movement of desire, attachment, pleasure, then out of that depth of perception comes this strange flower with its extraordinary perfume. That is love.
It is only when I look at you without comparative judgment that I can understand you. But when I compare you with somebody else, then I judge you and I say, ‘Oh, he is a very stupid man’. So stupidity arises when there is comparison. I compare you with somebody else, and that very comparison brings about a lack of human dignity. When I look at you without comparing, I am only concerned with you, not with someone else. The very concern about you, not comparatively, brings about human dignity.
You compare yourself with somebody, compare yourself with an example, with the ultimate ideal. Comparative judgment makes the mind dull; it does not sharpen the mind, it does not make the mind comprehensive, inclusive, because, when you are all the time comparing, what has happened? You see the sunset, and you immediately compare that sunset with the previous sunset.
can we find a way of living in which we don’t use another, psychologically, emotionally, not depend on another, not use another as a means of escape from our own tortures, from our own despairs, from our own loneliness? To
So love is not a thing of the mind. It is only when the mind is really quiet, when it is no longer expecting, asking, demanding, seeking, possessing, being jealous, fearful, anxious—when the mind is really silent, only then is there a possibility of love.
When you are comparing, you are really not looking at the sunset which is there, but you are looking at it in order to compare it with something else. So comparison prevents you from looking fully.
Can we think about love ? When you love, is thought functioning ? Love and thought are not in opposition; do not let us divide them as opposites. When one loves, is there a sense of seperateness, of bringing people together, or disbanding them, pushing them away ? Surely that state of love can be experienced only when the process of thought is not functioning—which does not mean that one must become crazy, unbalanced. On the contrary. It requires the highest form of thought to go beyond.
Your mind must be completely quiet, without a word, without a symbol, without an idea. And then you will discover—or there will come into being—that state in which what we have called love and what we have called sorrow and what we have called death are the same.
