Jiddu Krishnamurti : Love alone can transform insanity, confusion

Questioner: What do you mean by love?

Jiddu Krishnamurti : Love is the unknowable. It can be realized only when the known is understood and transcended. Only when the mind is free of the known, then only there will be love. So, we must approach love negatively and not positively.

What is love to most of us? With us, when we love, in it there is possessiveness, dominance, or subservience. From this possession arises jealousy and fear of loss, and we legalize this possessive instinct. From possessiveness there arises jealousy and the innumerable conflicts with which each one is familiar. Possessiveness, then, is not love. Nor is it sentimental. To be sentimental, to be emotional, excludes love. Sensitivity and emotions are merely sensations. A so-called religious person, who weeps over the object of his adoration, is indulging in sensation. Sensation and emotion are the process of thought, and thought is not love. Sentimentality as emotion is a form of self-expansion. Emotions are cruel; in them are like and dislike. An emotional person can be stirred to hatred and to war.

Mercy and pity, forgiveness and respect are not emotions. There is love when sentimentality and emotion and devotion cease. Devotion is not love; devotion is a form of self-expansion. Respect is not for the few, but for man, whether he is low or high. Generosity and mercy have no reward.

Love alone can transform insanity, confusion, and strife. No system, no theory of the left or of the right can bring peace and happiness to man. Where there is love, there is no possessiveness, no envy; there is mercy and compassion, not in theory, but actually to your wife and to your children, to your neighbor and to your servant. When you are respectful to your servant as well as to your guru, then you will know love. Love alone can transform the world. Love alone can bring about mercy and beauty, order and peace. There is love with its blessing when 'you' cease to be.