What love is not

A Dialogue With Oneself
by Jiddu Krishnamurti


I realize that love cannot exist when there is jealousy; love cannot exist when there is attachment. Now, is it possible for me to be free of jealousy and attachment? I realize that I do not love. That is a fact. I am not going to deceive myself; I am not going to pretend to my wife that I love her. I do not know what love is. But I do know that I am jealous and I do know that I am terribly attached to her and that in attachment there is fear, there is jealousy, anxiety; there is a sense of dependence. I do not like to depend but I depend because I am lonely; I am shoved around in the office, in the factory and I come home and I want to feel comfort and companionship, to escape from myself.

When I am really detached from her my relationship to her may change. She might be attached to me and I might not be attached to her or to any other woman.

I do not know what love is, but I see very clearly, definitely, without any doubt, that attachment to my wife means jealousy, possession, fear, anxiety and I want freedom from all that.

I suddenly realize that motive gives direction and that direction will dictate my freedom. Why have a motive? What is motive? A motive is a hope, or a desire, to achieve something. I see that I am attached to a motive. Not only my wife, not only my idea, the method, but my motive has become my attachment! So I am all the time functioning within the field of attachment - the wife, the method and the motive to achieve something in the future.

So I am interested in understanding why I am lonely, for I see it is that which makes me attached. That loneliness has forced me to escape through attachment to this or to that and I see that as long as I am lonely the sequence will always be this. What does it mean to be lonely? How does it come about? Is it instinctual, inherited, or is it brought about by my daily activity? If it is an instinct, if it is inherited, it is part of my lot I am not to blame. But as I do not accept this, I question it and remain with the question. I am watching and I am not trying to find an intellectual answer.

I started out having a dialogue with myself. I asked myself what is this strange thing called love; everybody talks about it, writes about it - all the romantic poems, pictures, sex and all other areas of it? I ask: is there such a thing as love? I see it does not exist when there is jealousy, hatred, fear. So I am not concerned with love anymore; I am concerned with `what is', my fear, my attachment. Why am I attached? I see that one of the reasons - I do not say it is the whole reason - is that I am desperately lonely, isolated.

I have rejected theories as to instinct and inheritance and I am asking: is the mind, the brain itself, bringing about this loneliness, this total isolation? Is the movement of thought doing this? Is the thought in my daily life creating this sense of isolation? In the office I am isolating myself because I want to become the top executive, therefore thought is working all the time isolating itself. I see that thought is aIl the time operating to make itself superior, the mind is working itself towards this isolation.

So I am asking myself: has thought realized its own limitations? Or is pretending to be something extraordinary, noble, divine? - which is nonsense because thought is based on memory. I see that there must be clarity about this point: that there is no outside influence imposing on thought saying it is limited.

So there has been in my conversation with myself the discovery that loneliness is created by thought. Thought has now realized of itself that it is limited and so cannot solve the problem of loneliness. As it cannot solve the problem of loneliness, does loneliness exist? Thought has created this sense of loneliness, this emptiness, because it is limited, fragmentary, divided and when it realizes this, loneliness is not, therefore there is freedom from attachment. I have done nothing; I have watched the attachment, what is implied in it, greed, fear, loneliness, all that and by tracing it, observing it, not analysing it, but just looking, looking and looking, there is the discovery that thought has done all this.

In love there is no attachment; if there is attachment there is no love.
I know what it means in my daily life: no remembrance of anything my wife, my girl friend, or my neighbour did to hurt me; no attachment to any image thought has created about her; how she has bullied me, how she has given me comfort, how I have had pleasure sexually, all the different things of which the movement of thought has created images; attachment to those images has gone.

So, through negation of what is not love, love is. I do not have to ask what love is. I do not have to run after it. If I run after it, it is not love, it is a reward. So I have negated, I have ended, in that enquiry, slowly, carefully, without distortion, without illusion, everything that it is not - the other is.