Krishnamurti - The Mirror of Relationship: Love, Sex, and Chastity

The Mirror of Relationship: Love, Sex, and Chastity

Copyright 1992 by the Krishnamurti Foundation of America

and the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd.

The Mirror of Relationship:

Love, Sex, and Chastity

A Selection of Passages

From the Teachings of

J. Krishnamurti

Contents

Talking things over together as two friends ...

Discovering what we actually are ... Conditioning ... A new instrument is necessary to solve our human problems ... Relationship is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are ... What actually is our relationship with each other? ... Attachment, security, and pleasure ... Why human beings live by images.

How can two images have any affection or love? ... To have relationship with another is only possible when there is no image ... To look there must be silence ... Why do we have images about ourselves? ... To establish right relationship is to destroy the image ... The moment I am not paying attention, thought takes over and creates the image.

Our minds conform to the pattern of pleasure ... Pleasure is the continuation and the cultivation in thought of a perception ... To understand desire is to be choicelessly aware of its movements ... What is the source of desire? ... It is not that you have no desire, but simply that the mind is capable of looking without describing ... You cannot become alive to desire if you condemn it or compare it ... To be a slave to anything implies desire, and the effort to break away from the pattern also implies desire ... The resistance to pain or the pursuit of pleasureboth give continuity to desire ... Desire would become a thing of flame ... You need not be frightened of the senses ... Leave desire alone, either to let fly or wither away ... Love and desire and passion are the same thing. If you destroy one, you destroy the other.

The act itself can never be a problem but thought about the act creates the problem ... When there is no love in your heart ... Many things are involved in sex, not just the act ... What most people are concerned with is the passion of lust ... When there is love, sex is never a problem ... A man who loves is pure, though he may be sexual ... If you deny sexuality, you must close your eyes and never look at anything ... Lust and passion ... When there is love, the sexual act has quite a different significance.

Why do you separate sex from seeing the beauty of a mountain or the loveliness of a flower? ... Chastity as a means to truth is a denial of truth ... A disciplined heart, a suppressed heart, cannot know what love is ... The effort that has gone into suppression, into control, into this denial of your desire, distorts your mind ... If there is disorder in my life in regard to sex, then the rest of my life is in disorder ... When we see this whole picture, then love, sex, and chastity are one.

What does it mean to be related? ... One has to find out how to live with another without any sense of struggle, adaptation, or adjustment ... When you love your wife, you do not dominate ... Marriage as a habit, as a cultivation of habitual pleasure, is a deteriorating factor ... Is the separative existence of an individual an illusion? ... Can you fall in love and not have a possessive relationship?

Is it possible to be free of jealousy and attachment? Why have a motive? ... Loneliness has forced me to escape ... Can thought realize its own limitations? ... The discovery that loneliness is created by thought ... If there is attachment, there is no love ... Through negation of what is not love, love is.

Love in relationship is a purifying process ... You cannot think about love ... We do not know what love is ... Is love permanent? ... The state of love is not of the past or of the future ... There is no division between man and woman when you love somebody ... Love comes into being when we understand the total process of ourselves ... You flower only in relationship ... The moment I am conscious that I love, self-activity has come into being ... When you love, there is neither the you nor the me ... Can the mind come upon love without thought? ... Is there an approach to the fact without a single motive?

What place has thought in relationship? ... Fragmentation ... The mechanism of building images ... Isolation and self-protection ... Thought demands the continuity of pleasure ... Relationship is always in the living present ... Relationship can exist only when there is total abandonment of the self ... Have you ever really let go of the me?

Foreword

This study book is comprised of excerpts from the public talks, questions and answers, conversations, and writings of J. Krishnamurti on the subject of relationship. Krishnamurti speaks from such a large perspective that his whole vision can be implied by a given passage. To follow the thread of ones own inquiry, and to see how a passage is related to a whole discourse, one can refer to the sources provided at the end of each excerpt (a detailed bibliography can be found at the end of the volume). The intent of the teachings, and of these passages, is to serve as a springboard for further inquiry.

Introduction

Talking things over together as two friends ...

In a few days we are going to have discussions, and we can start those discussions this morning. But if you assert and I assert, if you stick to your opinion, to your dogma, to your experience, to your knowledge, and I stick to mine, then there can be no real discussion because neither of us is free to inquire. To discuss is not to share our experiences with each other. There is no sharing at all; there is only the beauty of truth, which neither you nor I can possess. It is simply there.

To discuss intelligently, there must also be a quality not only of affection but of hesitation. You know, unless you hesitate, you cant inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery. But all this demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity.

By saying that, I hope I have not stopped you from asking questions! You know, this is like talking things over together as two friends. We are neither asserting nor seeking to dominate each other, but each is talking easily, affably, in an atmosphere of friendly companionship, trying to discover. And in that state of mind we do discover, but I assure you, what we discover has very little importance. The important thing is to discover, and after discovering, to keep going. It is detrimental to stay with what you have discovered, for then your mind is closed, finished. But if you die to what you have discovered the moment you have discovered it, then you can flow like the stream, like a river that has an abundance of water.

Saanen, 10th Public Talk, August 1, 1965

Collected Works, Vol. XV , p. 245

I. Life is a Movement in Relationship

We are together having a conversation. We are walking down a lane, wooded, with plenty of shadows and birds singing; we are sitting down together and talking about the whole problem of existence, which is very complex. We are not convincing each other about any subject, we are not trying to persuade each other, we are not trying to overcome the other through arguments or sticking dogmatically to ones own opinions, prejudices, but rather, together we are going to look at the world as it is and the world that is within us.

Many volumes have been written about the world outside of usthe environment, the society, politics, economics, and so on, but very few have gone to the very length of discovering what we actually are. Why human beings are behaving as they are doingkilling each other, constantly in trouble, following some authority or the other, some book, some person, some ideal, and having no right relationship with their friends, with their wives, with their husbands and with their children; why human beings have become, after so many millennia, so vulgar, so brutal, so utterly lacking in care, consideration, attention to others, and denying the whole process of what is considered love. Outwardly, man has lived with wars for thousands and thousands of years. We are now trying to stop nuclear war but we will never stop wars. There has been no demonstration throughout the world to stop wars, but there are demonstrations against particular wars, and these wars have been going onpeople being exploited, oppressed and the oppressor becoming the oppressed. This is the cycle of human existence with sorrow, loneliness, a great sense of depression, the mounting anxiety, the utter lack of security. There is no relationship with society or with ones own intimate persons, a relationship in which there is no row, no conflict, quarrels, oppression, and so on. This is the world we live in, which I am sure you all know.