A Key To End Sorrow

The demand to be safe in a relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. The seeking for security invites 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 where is 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.

In relationships, too often what we say 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." If you depend on another for all your pleasure, you are a slave to that person. So when one loves, there must be freedom, not only from another but from oneself.

This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on another- in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, guilt, and jealousy, and so long as there is fear there can be 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 always active present. If you know love, you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect. Do you know what it means to love somebody- to love without hate, jealousy, fear, anger, or wanting to interfere with what one is doing or thinking, without condemning or comparing?

Does love have responsibility and duty, and will it use these 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 we are all caught eventually destroys us. 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.

Have you ever cried for another? If you cry out of self-pity, your tears have no meaning because you are only concerned about yourself. If you cry because you are bereft of someone in whom you have invested a great deal of affection, it was not really affection. Sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time.

You can see all this happening inside yourself if you really watch it. You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not to 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’s 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.

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by J. Krishnamurti, excerpted from here.