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Krishnamurti on Love, Sex and Marriage~
Mon, December 3, 2007 - 6:12 PM
Krishnamurti : To ask a question is easy, but the difficulty is to look very carefully into the problem itself, which contains the answer. To understand this problem, we must see its enormous implications. That is difficult, because our time is very limited and I shall have to be brief; and if you don't follow very closely, you may not be able to understand. Let us investigate the problem, not the answer, because the answer is in the problem, not away from it. The more I understand the problem, the clearer I see the answer. If you merely look for an answer, you will not find one, because you will be seeking an answer away from the problem. Let us look at marriage, but not theoretically or as an ideal, which is rather absurd; don't let us idealize marriage, let us look at it as it is, for then we can do something about it. If you make it rosy, then you can't act; but if you look at it and see it exactly as it is, then perhaps you will be able to act.
Now, what actually takes place? When one is young, the biological, sexual urge is very strong, and in order to set a limit to it you have the institution called marriage. There is the biological urge on both sides, so you marry and have children. You tie yourself to a man or to a woman for the rest of your life, and in doing so you have a permanent source of pleasure, a guaranteed security, with the result that you begin to disintegrate; you live in a cycle of habit, and habit is disintegration. To understand this biological, this sexual urge, requires a great deal of intelligence, but we are not educated to be intelligent. We merely get on with a man or a woman with whom we have to live. I marry at 20 or 25, and I have to live for the rest of my life with a woman whom I have not known. I have-not known a thing about her, and yet you ask me to live with her for the rest of my life. Do you call that marriage?
As I grow and observe, I find her to be completely different from me, her interests are different from mine; she is interested in clubs, I am interested in being very serious, or vice versa. And yet we have children - that is the most extraordinary thing. Sirs, don't look at the ladies and smile; it is your problem. So, I have established a relationship the significance of which I do not know, I have neither discovered it nor understood it.
It is only for the very, very few who love that the married relationship has significance, and then it is unbreakable, then it is not mere habit or convenience, nor is it based on biological, sexual need. In that love which is unconditional the identities are fused, and in such a relationship there is a remedy, there is hope. But for most of you, the married relationship is not fused. To fuse the separate identities, you have to know yourself, and she has to know herself. That means to love. But there is no love - which is am obvious fact. Love is fresh, new, not mere gratification, not mere habit. It is unconditional. You don't treat your husband or wife that way, do you? You live in your isolation, and she lives in her isolation, and you have established your habits of assured sexual pleasure. What happens to a man who has an assured income? Surely, he deteriorates. Have you not noticed it? Watch a man who has an assured income and you will soon see how rapidly his mind is withering away. He may have a big position, a reputation for cunning, but the full joy of life is gone out of him...
Mon, December 3, 2007 - 6:12 PM -
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Mon, December 3, 2007 - 6:13 PM
Similarly, you have a marriage in which you have a permanent source of pleasure, a habit without understanding, without love, and you are forced to live in that state. I am not saying what you should do; but look at the problem first. Do you think that is right? It does not mean that you must throw off your wife and pursue somebody else. What does this relationship mean? Surely, to love is to be in communion with somebody; but are you in communion with your wife, except physically? Do you know her, except physically? Does she know you? Are you not both isolated, each pursuing his or her own interests, ambitions and needs, each seeking from the other gratification, economic or psychological security? Such a relationship is not a relationship at all: it is a mutually self-enclosing process of psychological, biological and economic necessity, and the obvious result is conflict, misery, nagging, possessive fear, jealousy, and so on. Do you think such a relationship is productive of anything except ugly babies and an ugly civilization? Therefore, the important thing is to see the whole process, not as something ugly, but as an actual fact which is taking place under your very nose; and realizing that, what are you going to do? You cannot just leave it at that; but because you do not want to look into it, you take to drink, to politics, to a lady around the corner, to anything that takes you away from the house and from that nagging wife or husband - and you think you have solved the problem. That is your life, is it not? Therefore, you have to do something about it, which means you have to face it, and that means, if necessary, breaking up; because, when a father and mother are constantly nagging and quarrelling with each other, do you think that has not an effect on the children? And we have already considered, in the previous question, the education of children. So, marriage as a habit, as a cultivation of habitual pleasure, is a deteriorating factor, because there is no love in habit. Love is not habitual; love is something joyous, creative, new. Therefore, habit is the contrary of love; but you are caught in habit, and naturally your habitual relationship with another is dead. So, we come back again to the fundamental issue, which is that the reformation of society depends on you, not on legislation. Legislation can only make for further habit or conformity. Therefore, you as a responsible individual in relationship have to do something, you have to act, and you can act only when there is an awakening of your mind and heart. I see some of you nodding your heads in agreement with me, but the obvious fact is that you don't want to take the responsibility for transformation, for change; you don't want to face the upheaval of finding out how to live rightly. And so the problem continues, you quarrel and carry on, and finally you die; and when you die somebody weeps, not for the other fellow, but for his or her own loneliness. You carry on unchanged and you think you are human beings capable of legislation, of occupying high positions, talking about God, finding a way to stop wars, and so on. None of these things mean anything, because you have not solved any of the fundamental issues... |
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Mon, December 3, 2007 - 6:15 PM
Why has sex become a problem?
Then, the other part of the problem is sex, and why sex has become so important. Why has this urge taken such a hold on you? Have you ever thought it out? You have not thought it out, because you have just indulged; you have not searched out why there is this problem. Sirs, why is there this problem? And what happens when you deal with it by suppressing it completely - you know, the ideal of Brahmacharya, and so on? What happens? It is still there. You resent anybody who talks about a woman, and you think that you can succeed in completely suppressing the sexual urge in yourself and solve your problem that way; but you are haunted by it. It is like living in a house and putting all your ugly things in one room; but they are still there. So, discipline is not going to solve this problem - discipline being sublimation, suppression, substitution - , because you have tried it, and that is not the way out. So, what is the way out? The way out is to understand the problem, and to understand is not to condemn or justify. Let us look at it, then, in that way. Why has sex become so important a problem in your life? Is not the sexual act, the feeling, a way of self-forgetfulness? Do you understand what I mean? In that act there is complete fusion; at that moment there is complete cessation of all conflict, you feel supremely happy because you no longer feel the need as a separate entity and you are not consumed with fear. That is, for a moment there is an ending of self-consciousness, and you feel the clarity of self-forgetfulness, the joy of self abnegation. So, sex has become important because in every other direction you are living a life of conflict, of self-aggrandizement and frustration. Sirs, look at your lives, political, social, religious: you are striving to become something. Politically, you want to be somebody, powerful, to have position, prestige. Don't look at somebody else, don't look at the ministers. If you were given all that, you would do the same thing. So, politically, you are striving to become somebody, you are expanding yourself, are you not? Therefore, you are creating conflict, there is no denial, there is no abnegation of the `me'. On the contrary, there is accentuation of the `me'. The same process goes on in your relationship with things, which is ownership of property, and again in the religion that you follow. There is no meaning in what you are doing, in your religious practices. You just believe, you cling to labels, words. If you observe, you will see that there too there is no freedom from the consciousness of the `me' as the centre. Though your religion says, `Forget yourself', your very process is the assertion of yourself, you are still the important entity. You may read the Gita or the Bible, but you are still the minister, you are still the exploiter, sucking the people and building temples. So, in every field, in every activity, you are indulging and emphasizing yourself, your importance, your prestige, your security. Therefore, there is only one source of self-forgetfulness, which is sex, and that is why the woman or the man becomes all-important to you, and why you must possess. So, you build a society which enforces that possession, guarantees you that possession; and naturally sex becomes the all-important problem when everywhere else the self is the important thing. And do you think, Sirs, that one can live in that state without contradiction, without misery, without frustration? But when there is honestly and sincerely no self-emphasis, whether in religion or in social activity, then sex has very little meaning. It is because you are afraid to be as nothing, politically, socially, religiously, that sex becomes a problem; but if in all these things you allowed yourself to diminish, to be the less, you would see that sex becomes no problem at all. There is chastity only when there is love. When there is love, the problem of sex ceases; and without love, to pursue the ideal of Brahmacharya is an absurdity, because the ideal is unreal. The real is that which you are; and if you don't understand your own mind, the workings of your own mind, you will not understand sex, because sex is a thing of the mind. The problem is not simple. It needs, not mere habit-forming practices, but tremendous thought and enquiry into your relationship with people, with property and with ideas. Sir, it means you have to undergo strenuous searching of your heart and mind, thereby bringing a transformation within yourself. Love is chaste; and when there is love, and not the mere idea of chastity created by the mind, then sex has lost its problem and has quite a different meaning. |
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Mon, December 3, 2007 - 6:16 PM
www.katinkahesselink.net/kr/k_...rriage |
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Sat, December 8, 2007 - 4:09 PM
You're welcome Kay O-- nice to know someone actually took the time to read it! :-) |
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Sun, February 24, 2008 - 3:13 PM
Sacred Love?
An interesting and timly topic, but it would seem so
few are willing or able to grasp this meaning. Out- side of the temporal matrix of the mundane we are all One. In Spirit tl |
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Mon, February 25, 2008 - 6:55 AM
Making a New Agreement
"Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance. "
William Blake Movement and stillness knowledge and action spirit and potential substance and function waxing and waning expansion and contraction correcting oneself openness and calm understanding the time eternity and images of change the accomplisments of sages Where Do We Go From Here? A Word About Death What does it mean when we are told that 'We must learn to die defore we die.'? Simply that the Tao operates outside the scope of our liner existence. That is what it means to be awake / to 'wake up'. Knowing without knowing - being without thinking. According to J. Krishnamurti, who begs the question: "What does it mean to die? To give up everything. Death cuts you off like a very, very, very sharp razor from your attachments, from your god, from your superstitions, from your desire for comfort - next life so on. I am going to find out what death means be- cause it is as important as living. So how can I find out, actually, not theoretically, what it means to die? I actually want to find out, as you want to find out. I am speaking for you so don't fall asleep. What does it mean to die. Put that question to yourself. While we are young, or when we are very old, this question is always there. It means to be totally free, to be total- ly unattached to everything that man has put together, or what you have put together - totally free. No attach- ments, no gods, no future, no past. You don't see the beauty of it, the greatness of it, the extraordinary strength of it - while living to be dying. You under- stand what that means? While you are living, every moment you are dying, so that throughout life you are not attached to 'anything'. That is what death is." "So living is dying. You understand? Living means that every day you are abandoning everything that you are attached to. Can you do this? A very simple fact, but it has got tremendous implications. So that each day is a new day. Each day you are dying and incarnating. There is tremendous vitality, energy there because there is nothing you are affraid of. There is nothing that can hurt you. Being hurt doesn't exist." "All the things that man has put together have to be to- tally abandoned. That's what it means to die. So can you do it? Will you try? Will you experiment with it? Not for just a day; every day. No, sir, you cann't do it; your brains are not trained for this. Your brains have been conditioned so heavily, by your education, by your tradition, by your books, by your professors. It requires finding out what love is. Love and death go together. Death says be free, nonattached, you can carry nothing with you. And love says, love says - there is no word for it. Love can exist only when there is freedom, not from your wife, from a new girl, or a new husband, but the feeling, the enormous strength, the vitality, the energy of complete freedom." from; The Future is Now "Only when practioners of the Tao have the capacity to contain mountains, as it were, can they sustain the heavenly practice and cultivate the heavenly Tao. Being inaccessible without hiding, they are near to invulnerability." "Outward sameness means going by worldly laws; in- ward difference is practicing the principle of the Tao. This is what is ment by the saying 'In cultivating prac- tice, one conforms and harmonizes, adapting to each individual situation as it is; nobody can fathom such changes, or see how one acts or lies hidden.'" "The Taoist I Ching" Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair. Blake |
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Tue, February 26, 2008 - 10:02 AM
Living means that every day you are abandoning everything that you are attached to. Can you do this? |
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Tue, February 26, 2008 - 2:54 PM
Great Rivers
We do what we can along the mindful way yet mindlessness is the state we revere. Are we a slave to our thoughts, or do we know the freedom of transformation? And once attained what then would we do but to chop wood and carry water? Yet I know there are innumerable other ways that promise great rewards within the context of a great awakening sometime tomorrow. As you no doubt are all to well aware, there are many paths that may lead one into the light. But what if this really is as good as it is going to get? And if you awakened tomorrow and died to everything you knew, what then? Awakening is not a childs game, those who unplug from the temporal matrix had better understand two things. First no body still trapped in the mundane is capable of such higher comprehension and second, they have only just now begun the process of re-education. Because it is only within the dragon's pool or tiger's den that the truth of our character will be tested. So yes i do know a little of that which i speak. There are no material attachments nor need of desires for those of us who have once stood in the light. But it is not what you think and there is no one who can tell you then what to do. Some might call this a spiritual emergency and it does not matter so much the nature of one's beliefs so much as it does the intensity of intention. No waking up is not all it's cut out to be, yet it is the most liberating experience. hurddled through space and time what is it that is change but remains changeless? the unchanging is the eternally real the path of striving returns from effort to spontaneity like a woman marrying a man not seeking quick success true yin and true yang naturally coupled thoroughly investigate truth changes the artificial into the real firmness within openness using flexibility with firmness solidity and openness combined to arrive at the meaning of life everyone can attain the Tao today i get Sameness With People lines 1, 2, 4 and 5 changes to correcting degeneration which is not found in empty tranquility without action but working in the midst of great danger and difficulty beneficial to cross great rivers to act in the dragon's pool and tiger's lair once you recover your potential it is as though it was always there this is the study of working on the fundamental to go back to the root and return to life... getting rid of falsehood and returning to reality secret of the active process Great rivers are most dangerous and hard to cross "The crossing of great rivers is that whereby inner nurturance and outer effectiveness is accomplished." Taoist I Ching What does it mean to accomplish the will of God and achieve good works in the world? "Distinquish midnight and noon within unmarked time, determine Heaven and Earth in lineless signs." "You should know that you may need a raft to cross a river, but you do not need a boat when you get to the other shore; when you have caught the fish forget the net, when you have caught the rabit, forget the trap." "I say the those born knowing realize on their own without seeking, hit the mark without trying - they do not need inductive teachings, so the hightest type of spirtual alchemy does not use signs or lines." Li Daoqun "Spirit is essence, energy is life; when spirit does not run outside, energy is naturally stable." "Unify your energy and make it flexible, and the spirit will be permanently stabilized." "This is not done in a day and a night. This is our original reality, not a technique." Liu Cao |
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Wed, February 27, 2008 - 1:00 PM
And if you awakened tomorrow and died
to everything you knew, what then? --what a blessing that would be...If I were ready, I would surely be willing to die the ultimate death, while still living... "Awakening is not a childs game, those who unplug from the temporal matrix had better understand two things. First no body still trapped in the mundane is capable of such higher comprehension and second, they have only just now begun the process of re-education... Because it is only within the dragon's pool or tiger's den that the truth of our character will be tested. So yes i do know a little of that which i speak. There are no material attachments nor need of desires for those of us who have once stood in the light." ----Yes, this is true...I've been there, or at least I was at the tip of the opening...too fearful of the unknown, I withdrew back into this world...grasping onto the few attachments I held so dear... |
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Thu, February 28, 2008 - 6:15 AM
illumination...
Onced awakened is as though one was always
originally thus... Enlightenment is not the goal yet it enables us to strength of character to do what is truly rare in this world. Do not allow anyone to rob you of the truth of your own awakening. Being joyful in this practice is the key. Progressing gradually enduring long, harmonious and content resting in the ultimate good. What is the boundary of primordial and temporal yin and yang? this science of working on the fundamental... Perhaps the whole crux of the problem is this misdirection and slight of hand, illumination is the key but it is the guest for powers and abilities that compel most people expecting awakening to give the power of authority without humility will never succeed but in creating greater harm. "To illumine meas to make manifest; the quality os enlightenment is the spiritual nature of innate knowledge and innate capacity that is fundamental to humankind. This nature is originally truly open, subtly existing, radiantly bright, without obscurity; but once it is mixed with acquired temperment, it goes from clarity to obscurity and loses its basic nature." "But as unclarity comes from oneself, so also does clarity come from oneself; it is all a matter of whether one illumines this nature by oneself or not. If one actually knows how to illumine enlightenment, then one can illumineit; one should set right to work to cultivate it, clearing away all accumulated blockage, shed all kinds of feeeling about things, and work on the ground of reality." The question is how many truly want to know this truth within themselves? It is said that few are they who seek the freedom of transformation 'nipping insidious inroads of conditioning in the bud, the human mentality disappears of itself and the mind of Tao manifests of itself. Temperment spontaniously sublimates, and the real nature spontaniously is revealed. This the is the original open awareness without obscurity..." this is the image of advance unfortunately there are far to many false teachings which do not encourage such independence. |