Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ilovebdt]

[kermo]

Whoops, I forgot the most important thing. C.S. Lewis (Oxford scholar and of course frequent Oprah guest and self-help guru extraordinaire) also wrote about how love can be corrupted.

"Love begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god."

[doggyji]

Intriguing thread. I've been wondering about this exact issue lately. For some reason, it'd be kinda scary to read a book that analyzes the acts of love in terms of chemicals.

[endofthewor1d]

love is panicking when someone takes you off of their ilchon list and ranting and raving about it on an internet discussion forum.

obsession is... hmmm... i don't think obsession really exists.

[The Bobster]

[merkurix]

[jajdude]

J. Krishnamurti on Love

The demand to be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity. Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path?

We are not loved because we don't know how to love. What is love? The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it. Everybody talks of love - every magazine and newspaper and every missionary talks everlastingly of love. I love my country, I love my king, I love some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure, I love my wife, I love God. Is love an idea? If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished, cherished, pushed around, twisted in any way you like. When you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble and holy; so to say, `I love God', is absolute nonsense. When you worship God you are worshipping yourself - and that is not love.

Because we cannot solve this human thing called love we run away into abstractions. Love may be the ultimate solution to all man's difficulties, problems and travails, so how are we going to find out what love is? By merely defining it? The church has defined it one way, society another, and there are all sorts of deviations and perversions. Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the emotional exchange, the companionship - is that what we mean by love? That has been the norm, the pattern, and it has become so tremendously personal, sensuous, and limited that religions have declared that love is something much more than this. In what they call human love they see there is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire to possess, to hold, to control and to interfere with another's thinking, and knowing the complexity of all this they say there must be another kind of love, divine, beautiful, untouched, uncorrupted.

Throughout the world, so-called holy men have maintained that to look at a woman is something totally wrong: they say you cannot come near to God if you indulge in sex, therefore they push it aside although they are eaten up with it. But by denying sexuality they put out their eyes and cut out their tongues for they deny the whole beauty of the earth. They have starved their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty because beauty is associated with woman.

Can love be divided into the sacred and the profane, the human and the divine, or is there only love? Is love of the one and not of the many? If I say,`I love you', does that exclude the love of the other? Is love personal or impersonal? Moral or immoral? Family or non-family? If you love mankind can you love the particular? Is love sentiment? Is love emotion? Is love pleasure and desire? All these questions indicate, don't they, that we have ideas about love, ideas about what it should or should not be, a pattern or a code developed by the culture in which we live.
So to go into the question of what love is we must first ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.

Now how am I going to find out what this flame is which we call love - not how to express it to another but what it means in itself? I will first reject what the church, what society, what my parents and friends, what every person and every book has said about it because I want to find out for myself what it is. Here is an enormous problem that involves the whole of mankind, there have been a thousand ways of defining it and I myself am caught in some pattern or other according to what I like or enjoy at the moment - so shouldn't I, in order to understand it, first free myself from my own inclinations and prejudices? I am confused, torn by my own desires, so I say to myself, `First clear up your own confusion. Perhaps you may be able to discover what love is through what it is not.'

The government says, `Go and kill for the love of your country'. Is that love? Religion says, `Give up sex for the love of God'. Is that love? Is love desire? Don't say no. For most of us it is � desire with pleasure, the pleasure that is derived through the senses, through sexual attachment and fulfilment. I am not against sex, but see what is involved in it. What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self. You say you love your wife. In that love is involved sexual pleasure, the pleasure of having someone in the house to look after your children, to cook. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don't like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence. So what you are really saying is, `As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don't I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don't like you.' So there is antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate from another there is no love. But if you can live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps - perhaps - you will know what love is. Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas if you depend on her for all your pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves there must be freedom, not only from the other person but from oneself.

This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on another - in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt, and so long as there is fear there is no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is; sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. And so love is not to do with pleasure and desire.

Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active present. It is not `I will love' or `I have loved'. If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect. Don't you know what it means really to love somebody - to love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing - don't you know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally abandon yourself to that love there is not the other.

Does love have responsibility and duty, and will it use those words? When you do something out of duty is there any love in it? In duty there is no love. The structure of duty in which the human being is caught is destroying him. So long as you are compelled to do something because it is your duty you don't love what you are doing. When there is love there is no duty and no responsibility.

Most parents unfortunately think they are responsible for their children and their sense of responsibility takes the form of telling them what they should do and what they should not do, what they should become and what they should not become. The parents want their children to have a secure position in society. What they call responsibility is part of that respectability they worship; and it seems to me that where there is respectability there is no order; they are concerned only with becoming a perfect bourgeois. When they prepare their children to fit into society they are perpetuating war, conflict and brutality. Do you call that care and love? Really to care is to care as you would for a tree or a plant, watering it, studying its needs, the best soil for it, looking after it with gentleness and tenderness - but when you prepare your childrren to fit into society you are preparing them to be killed. If you loved your children you would have no war. When you lose someone you love you shed tears - are your tears for yourself or for the one who is dead? Are you crying for yourself or for another? Have you ever cried for another? Have you ever cried for your son who is killed on the battlefield? You have cried, but do those tears come out of self-pity or have you cried because a human being has been killed? If you cry out of self-pity your tears have no meaning because you are concerned about yourself. If you are crying because you are bereft of one in whom you have invested a great deal of affection, it was not really affection. When you cry for your brother who dies cry for him. It is very easy to cry for yourself because he is gone. Apparently you are crying because your heart is touched, but it is not touched for him, it is only touched by self- pity and self-pity makes you hard, encloses you, makes you dull and stupid.

When you cry for yourself, is it love - crying because you are lonely, because you have been left, because you are no longer powerful - complaining of your lot, your environmment - always you in tears? If you understand this, which means to come in contact with it as directly as you would touch a tree or a pillar or a hand, then you will see that sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time. I had my brother three years ago, now he is dead, now I am lonely, aching, there is no one to whom I can look for comfort or companionship, and it brings tears to my eyes. You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it. You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called `me', my tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion - all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow. Sorrow and love cannot go together, but in the Christian world they have idealized suffering, put it on a cross and worshipped it, implying that you can never escape from suffering except through that one particular door, and this is the whole structure of an exploiting religious society.
So when you ask what love is, you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not love your wife or husband or children - do you? - you may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple.

But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity. So if you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower which man always hungers after. If you have not got love - not just in little drops but in abundance if you are not filled with it - the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love? Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, `I will practise love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practise being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others?'

Do you mean to say that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out of the window. By practising some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of non-violence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love.

In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. Beauty is not something you see - not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind. But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems. So we reach the point: can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader - come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive - passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can come into being only when there is total self-abandonment. A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it - to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and therefore it is sharing with everybody.

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent. To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict. You may ask, `If I find such a love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They must have security.' When you put such a question you have never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no thought and therefore no time. You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time - which means going beyond sorrow - is to be aware that there is a different dimension called love. But you don't know how to come to this extraordinary fount - so what do you do? If you don't know what to do, you do nothing, don't you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all. Then there is love.

-1980

[jajdude]

Here's another interesting one, long though:





Two young men had come from the town nearby. The bus had brought them to the corner, and they had walked the rest of the way. They worked in an office, they said, and so couldn't come any earlier. They had put on fresh clothes, which the old bus hadn't soiled, and they came in smiling but rather shyly, their manner hesitantly respectful. Once seated, they soon forgot their shyness, but they still weren't quite sure how to put their thoughts into words.

What sort of work do you do?

"We are both employed in the same office; I am a stenographer, and my friend keeps accounts. Neither of us has been to college, because we couldn't afford it, and neither of us is married. We don't get much pay, but as we have no family responsibilities, it's enough for our needs. If either of us ever gets married, it will be quite another matter."

"We are not very well-educated," added the second one, "and though we read a certain amount of serious literature, our reading isn't intensive. We spend a great deal of time together, and on holidays we go back to our families. There are very few in the office who are interested in serious things. A mutual friend brought us to your talk the other day, and we asked if we could see you. May I as you a question, sir?"

Of course.

"What is love?"

Do you want a definition of it? Don't you know what that word means?

"There are so many ideas about what love should be, that it's all rather confusing," said the first one.

What sort of ideas?

"That love shouldn't be passionate, lustful; that one should love one's neighbor as oneself; that one should love one's father and mother; that love should be the impersonal love of God, and so on. Every man gives an opinion according to his fancy."

Apart from the opinions of others, what do you think? Have you opinions about love too?

"It's difficult to put into words what one feels," replied the second one. "I think love must be universal; one must love all, without prejudice. It's prejudice that destroys love; it's class consciousness that creates barriers and divides people. The sacred books say that we must love one another, and not be personal or limited in our love, but sometimes we find this very difficult."

"To love God is to love all," added the first one. "There's only divine love; the rest is carnal, personal. This physical love prevents divine love; and without divine love, all other love is mere barter and exchange. Love is not sensation. Sexual sensation must be checked, disciplined; that's why I'm against birth control. Physical passion is destructive; through chastity lies the way to God."

Before we go further, don't you think we ought to find out if all these opinions have any validity? Is not one opinion as good as another? Regardless of who holds it, is not opinion a form of prejudice, a bias created by one's temperament, one's experience, and the way one happens to have been brought up?

"Do you think it is wrong to hold an opinion?" asked the second one.

To say that it is wrong or right would merely be another opinion, wouldn't it? But if one begins to observe and understand how opinions are formed, then perhaps one may be able to perceive the actual significance of opinion, judgment, agreement.

"Would you kindly explain?"

Thought is the result of influence, isn't it? Your thinking and your opinions are dictated by the way you have been brought up. You say, "This is right, and that is wrong," according to the moral pattern of your particular conditioning. We are not for the moment concerned with what is true beyond all influence, or whether there is such truth. We are trying to see the significance of opinions, beliefs, assertions, whether they be collective or personal. Opinion, belief, agreement or disagreement, are responses according to one's background, narrow or wide. Isn't that so?

"Yes, but is that wrong?"

Again, if you say it's right or wrong, you are still in the field of opinions. Truth is not a matter of opinion; a fact does not depend on agreement or belief. You and I man agree to call this object a watch, but by any other name it would still be what it is. Your belief or opinion is something that has been given to you by the society in which you live. In revolting against it, as a reaction, you may form a different opinion, another belief; but you are still on the same level, aren't you?

"I am sorry, sir, but I don't understand what you are getting at," replied the second one.

You have certain ideas and opinions about love, haven't you?

"Yes."

How did you get them?

"I have read what the saints and the great religious teachers have said about love, and having thought it over, I have formed my own conclusions."

Which are shaped by your likes and dislikes, are they not? You like or you don't like what others have said about love, and you decide which statement is right and which is wrong according to your own predilection. Isn't this what you do?

"I choose that which I consider to be true."

On what is your choice based?

"On my own knowledge and discernment."

What do you mean by knowledge? I'm not trying to trip or corner you, but together we are trying to understand why one has opinions, ideas, conclusions, about love. If once we understand this, we can go very much more deeply into the matter. So, what do you mean by knowledge?

"By knowledge I mean what I have learnt from the teachings of the sacred books."

"Knowledge embraces also the techniques of modern science, and all the information that has been gathered by man from ancient days up to the present time," added the other.

So knowledge is a process of accumulation, is it not? It is the cultivation of memory. The knowledge that we have accumulated as scientists, musicians, type-setters, scholars, engineers, makes us technicians in various departments of life. When we have to build a bridge, we think as engineers, and this knowledge is part of the tradition, part of the background, or conditioning, that influences all our thinking. Living, which includes the capacity to build a bridge, is a total action, not a separate, partial activity; yet our thinking about life, about love, is shaped by opinions, conclusions, tradition. If you were brought up in a culture which maintained that love is only physical, and that divine love is all nonsense, you would, in the same way, repeat what you had been taught, wouldn't you?"

"Not always," replied the second one. "I admit it's rare, but some of us do rebel and think for ourselves."

Thought may rebel against the established pattern, but this very revolt is generally the outcome of another pattern; the mind is still caught in the process of knowledge, tradition. It is like rebelling within the walls of a prison for more conveniences, better food, and so on.

So your mind is conditioned by opinions, tradition, knowledge, and by your ideas about love, which make you act in a certain way. That is clear, isn't it?

"Yes, sir, that is clear enough," answered the first one. "But then what is love?"

If you want a definition, you can look in any dictionary; but the words which define love are not love, are they? Merely to seek an explanation of what love is, is still to be caught in words, in opinions, which are accepted or rejected according to your conditioning.

"Aren't you making it impossible to inquire into what love is?" asked the second one.

Is it possible to inquire through a series of opinions, conclusions? To inquire rightly, thought must be freed from conclusion, from the security of knowledge, tradition. The mind may free itself from one series of conclusions, and form another, which is again only a modified continuity of the old.

Now, isn't thought itself a movement from one result to another, from one influence to another? Do you see what I mean?

"I'm not at all sure that I do," said the first one.

"I don't understand it at all," said the second.

Perhaps you will, as we go along. Let me put it this way: is thinking the instrument of inquiry? Will thinking help one to understand what love is?

"How am I to find out what love is if I'm not allowed to think?" asked the second one rather sharply.

Please be a little more patient. You have thought about love, haven't you?

"Yes. My friend and I have thought a great deal about it."

If one may ask, what do you mean when you say you have thought about love?

"I have read about it, discussed it with my friends, and drawn my own conclusions."

Has it helped you to find out what love is? You have read, exchanged opinions with each other, and come to certain conclusions about love, all of which is called thinking. You have positively or negatively described what love is, sometimes adding to, and sometimes taking away from, what you have previously learnt. Isn't that so?

"Yes, that's exactly what we have been doing, and our thinking has helped to clarify our minds."

Has it? Or have you become more and more entrenched in an opinion? Surely, what you call clarification is a process of coming to a definite verbal or intellectual conclusion.

"That's right; we are not as confused as we were."

In other words, one or two ideas stand out clearly in this jumble of teachings and contradictory opinions about love. Isn't that it?

"Yes; the more we have gone over this whole question of what love is, the clearer it has become."

Is it love that has become clear, or what you think about it?

Let us go a little further into this, shall we? A certain ingenious mechanism is called a watch because we have all agreed to use this word to indicate that particular thing; but the word 'watch' is obviously not the mechanism itself. Similarly, there is a feeling or a state which we have all agreed to call love; but the word is not the actual feeling, is it? And the word 'love' means so many different things. At one time you use it to describe a sexual feeling, at another time you talk about divine or impersonal love, or you assert what love should or should not be, and so on.

"If I may interrupt, sir, could it be that all these feelings are just varying forms of the same thing?" asked the first one.

How does it appear to you?

"I'm not sure. There are moments when love seems to be one thing, but at other moments it appears to be something quite different. It's all very confusing. One doesn't know where one is."

That's just it. We want to be sure of love, to peg it down, so that it won't elude us; we reach conclusions, make agreements about it; we call it by various names, with their special meanings; we talk about 'my love', just as we talk about 'my property,' 'my family,' 'my virtue,' and we hope to lock it safely away, so that we can turn to other things and make sure of them too; but somehow it's always slipping away when we least expect it.

"I don't quite follow all this," said the second one, rather puzzled.

As we have seen, the feeling itself is different from what the books say about it; the feeling is not the description, it is not the word. That much is clear, isn't it?

"Yes."

Now, can you separate the feeling from the word, and from your preconceptions of what it should and should not be?

"What do you mean, 'separate'?" asked the first one.

There is the feeling, and the word or words which describe that feeling, either approvingly or disapprovingly. Can you separate the feeling from the verbal description of it? It's comparatively easy to separate an objective thing, like this watch, from the word which describes it; but to dissociate the feeling itself from the word 'love', with all its implications, is far more arduous and requires a great deal of attention.

"What good will that do?" asked the second one.

We always want to get a result in return for doing something. This desire for a result, which is another form of conclusion-seeking, prevents understanding. When you ask, "What good will it do me if I dissociate the feeling from the word 'love'?", you are thinking of a result; therefore you are not really inquiring to find out what that feeling is, are you?

"I do want to find out, but I also want to know what will be the outcome of dissociating the feeling from the word. Isn't this perfectly natural?"

Perhaps; but if you want to understand, you will have to give your attention, and there's no attention when one part of your mind is concerned with results, and the other with understanding. In this way you get neither, and so you become more and more confused, bitter and miserable. If we don't dissociate the word, which is memory and all its reactions, from the feeling, then that word destroys the feeling; and then the word, or memory, is the ash without the fire. Isn't this what has happened to you both? You have so entangled yourselves in a net of words, of speculations, that the feeling itself, which is the only thing that has deep and vital significance, is lost.

"I am beginning to see what you mean," said the first one slowly. "We are not simple; we don't discover anything for ourselves, but just repeat what we have been told. Even when we revolt, we form new conclusions, which again have to be broken down. We really don't know what love is, but merely have opinions about it. Is that it?"

Don't you think so? Surely, to know love, truth, God, there must be no opinions, no beliefs, no speculations with regard to it. If you have an opinion about a fact, the opinion becomes important, not the fact. If you want to know the truth or the falseness of the fact, then you must not live in the word, in the intellect. You may have a lot of knowledge, information, about the fact, but the actual fact is entirely different. Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don't be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love is and what it is not. No authority knows; and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding.

[kermo]

[Bigs]