Love

You know, a flower that has perfume is not concerned who comes to smell it, or who turns its back

upon it. So is love. Love is not a memory. Love is not a thing of the mind or the intellect. But it

comes into being naturally as compassion when this whole problem of existence—as fear, greed,

envy, despair, hope—has been understood and resolved. An ambitious man cannot love. A man

who is attached to his family has no love. Nor has jealousy anything to do with love. When you

say, ‘I love my wife’, you really do not mean it because the next moment you are jealous of her.

- Jiddu, Bombay, 1965.

I learnt something new today. The above is an excerpt from the closing lines of JK's talk titled Learning About Pleasure. In the talk he asked me to listen. That is how he began. To purely commit the act of listening and nothing else. That was very hard. Every sentence I found myself doing exaclty what he described we do when we claim to be listening but are actually not. I was aware of my sorroundings, yes, which is a very important part of listening but thats not where it ended with every passing word a comparison, an evaluation was in process. I was immediately trying to digest what was being said in contexts so varied that the import of what was said was actually being lost. That is as the speaker JK has an intention for his words which I will learn only if I listen to him with an unbiased mind which is not doing anything else but listening to him speak. But in the process of my conditioned behaviour of processing what he is saying and its applicability, its veracity and so on I have already steppedd out of the role of a good listener. I have overshadowed whatever I have heard with the internal conversations I am having with myself in the form of checks and balances my mind is applying on the input received. Therefore to begin with itself I have already lost much of what I might have learnt because I am, by virtue of my experiences and learnt behaviour, taking sides and judging the information.

Then followed a very decent, succinct definition of what discipline is. I realise that what we understand as discipline is very much an implied meaning rather its true meaning. We associate discipling with conformity rather than a nascent yearning. The latter is the state of the mind when we have put aside conditioning and opened up our senses to experience putting the internal conflict and conversation to rest. This is something I realise is very true and very difficult. Furthermore putting to rest your internal conversation so that the impact of the external sound can actually take course involves resolution not suppression. This is something I need to unlearn. Suppression plays a very important role in my life albeit negative as I am growing to realise. So long as any conflict is suppressed with in me I will never truly learn anything new as all the while the mind is occupied with what is suppressed and the threat of the suppressant resurfacing. My mind is not free.

I want to stop there. Further I write I imitate and regurgitate what I have read rather than understand and learn from my understanding.

At this very moment a lot of internal conflict is ensuing. I suppress a lot of emotion, thought and action in the search for conformity. I want to unlearn that. I want to set my senses free.

Something I read in that talk has made a deep impact on me.

Love implies great freedom—not to do what you like. But love comes only when the mind

is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centred. These are not ideals. If you have no love, do what you will—go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems—you are a dead human being. And without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. And with love, do what you will, there is no risk; there is no conflict. Then love is the essence of virtue.

I need to become that love.

I am a farce. I am a dead human being. I want to come alive.

The ‘being’ is not the ‘becoming’.