Saturday, February 1, 2020

on passion






In a state of passion without a cause, there is intensity free of all attachment;
but when passion has a cause, there is attachment , and attachment
 is the beginning of sorrow.  Most of us are attached; we cling to a person,
 to a country , to a belief, to an idea, and when the object of our attachment 
is taken away or otherwise loses its significance, we find ourselves empty,
 insufficient.  This emptiness we try to fill by clinging to something else, 
which again becomes the object of our passion.

When passion has a cause, it becomes lust.  When there is a passion for something
 - for a person, for an idea, for some kind of fulfillment - then out of the passion
 there comes contradiction, conflict, effort.  You strive to achieve or maintain
 a particular state, or to recapture one that has been and is gone. 
 But the passion of which I am speaking goes not give rise to contradiction, conflict. 
 It is totally unrelated to a cause, and therefore it is not an effect.

There can be passion only when there is total self-abandonment.  
One is never passionate unless there is a complete absence of what we call thought. 
 What we call thought is the response of the various patterns and experiences of memory, 
and where this conditioned response exists, there is no passion, there is no intensity. 
 There can be intensity only when there is a complete absence of the 'me'.

You will find out what love is, and what sorrow is, only when your mind
 has rejected all explanations and is no longer imagining, no longer seeking 
the cause, no longer indulging in words or going back in memory 
to its own pleasures and pains.  Your mind must be completely quiet, 
without a word, without a symbol, without an idea.  And then you will discover
 - or there will come into being - that state in which what we have called love, 
and what we have called sorrow and what we have called death are the same.  
 There is no longer any division between love and sorrow and death;  
and there being no division, there is beauty.  But to comprehend, to be in this state
 of ecstasy, there must be that passion which comes with the
 total abandonment of oneself.







~ J. Krishnamurti
from a talk in Saanen, Aug. 5th 1962
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