Love and Desire

Why is it that you do not really love, and you know it?

Why is it that so often you have to pretend to love those you love?

Love is giving of yourself.

Your possessions are not of yourself so to give those is not love. Your house, food, money are not of yourself so to give those is not love. If you have lots of money you can give lots of things, but if you have no money you can give none. The homeless pauper must be able to love too.

When you give advice, that is of your experience. When you give your opinions that is of your pride. When you say ‘I love you’ that is of your breath. When you work for others, feed them, house them, educate them, you work for yourself first. When you give of your time you must take it from something else and taking can never come into giving.

You just give your love, you say?

No you do not. The hen and the sow do as much for their own. You have no love to give and that is why you know you do not love.

Yet you can love . . .

But only in the moment.

Love is ever-moving, like everything else, and yet it is constant.

Man imagines he contains love and makes a static thing of it, like honesty. Then he is shocked when he sees he does not love. This makes him lie to those he ‘loves’, and worse, to himself.

Man’s love is desire. To desire is to want to receive. Man imagines his love is something he gives, but this cannot be.

When men and women love each other it is expressed as the desire to be together, to live together. Their desire gives them no peace until they are together. They imagine that as soon as they are together it will be the fulfilment of the desire. Despite their later denials they imagine that fulfilment will carry with it a continuing state of happiness or contentment. Otherwise they would not love or desire each other. But desire wants to receive and this means they are taking, not giving.

Both of them are receiving the beautiful feeling of love. But where is it coming from?

Love itself is giving.

Love is a power, a mighty principle that exists in its own right independent of any individual. Man changes, but the principle of love does not and cannot.

Love does not leave men and women. Men and women leave love.

Man’s desire for his loved one is doomed to disappear in the very delight of its fulfilment. The desire to be together, the desire to know the other, to experience everything about the other, is the basis of man’s and woman’s love. But when you know everything about something, you contain it, are one with it and begin to lose interest in it. So to continue to desire another with the same freshness as when you first fell in love, the beloved has to have a quality of timelessness, of the unknowable.

Whenever you desire anything, you desire knowledge. This is because you cannot add anything to yourself except knowledge. It does not matter what you possess, you cannot add it to yourself. All you add is the knowledge that you possess it and can experience it or use it at any time, This knowledge is the fulfilment of the desire for an object.

Your body needs air. You desire the knowledge that the air is there. Once you have that knowledge the desire, for you, is fulfilled. Otherwise you would worry and try to organise a continual supply of air for the future.

You desire to read a book. You do not desire the book as an object, or if you do, you want only the knowledge that the book is in your possession so that you can experience it at any time. When your desire is fulfilled you do not read the book again — the knowledge is already yours and there is no desire.

You desire power. The only way you know your desire is being fulfilled is by seeing or hearing others obey you. If you were in a prison cell and kept sending out orders without knowing they were being obeyed, your desire for power would not be fulfilled and you would probably be called mad.

The fact of human love is that man or woman desires to live with the loved one so that he or she can absorb the other entirely, possess them by knowing everything about them. This desire contains its own destruction.

The period of fulfilment, of knowing each other, does not usually last very long; because there is not much to know and not much worth knowing in men and women unless they love God or the truth. Truth and God are depthless and timeless and those who love them develop the same qualities. But usually what you get to know is mostly personality; and personality is an act. You cannot act all the time. As each sees the truth of what the other is, the masks are left off more and more. The painted faces are brightly displayed for others to see; but there is little mystique between the former lovers. The partnership is mechanical and predictable.

To begin with, love is longing, the separation of a desire from its fulfilment — plus the brief period of fulfilment. Then it is sex, expectation, fear, compatibility, familiarity and habit. If the desires or interests of the two people are similar, their union usually results in a kind of oneness. If most desires can be fulfilled as a partnership reasonable peace remains; if not, there is conflict.

Love is all around you like the air and is the very breath of your being. But you cannot know it, feel its unfeeling touch, until you pause in your busy-ness, are still and poised and empty of your wanting and desiring.

When at rest the air is easily offended and will flee even from the fanning of a leaf, as love flees from the first thought. But when the air or love moves of its own accord it is a hurricane that drives all before it.

The understanding of love comes with the knowledge that you are nothing. The greatest purity is nothing or nothingness — no thinking, no desiring, no imagining. You are then one with the moment and the great movement of life so nothing can happen that is not right. Every moment is perfect and everything that happens is eternally just.