Notes from reading: On Love and Loneliness by J Krishnamurti

Continuing with my quest of reading more on J Krishnamurti  I picked up On Love and Loneliness.  It is his series of discourse recorded as a book.

These are some of my kindle notes:

  1. Love comes into being when the mind is naturally quiet, not made quiet, when it sees the false as false and the true as true.
  2. This process of usage, thinking, imagining, holding, enclosing, rejecting, is all smoke, and when the smoke is not, the flame of love is.
  3. Sensation is a process of thought, which is not love. When the mind is dominant and the thought process is important, there is no love.
  4. Sex is sensation which is created, pictured by the mind, and then the mind acts or does not act.
  5. Love that uses, exploits, and then feels sorry cannot be love, because love is not a thing of the mind.
  6. The very thought of getting away from loneliness is in itself a form of inward insufficiency.
  7. Love is not pleasure. Love is not the pursuit or the avoidance of fear. Love is not attachment. Love has no suffering.
  8. as long as a human mind is hurt and therefore insensitive, it will never know what beauty is —in the things man has made, in the line of a building, and in the mountain, in the beautiful tree.
  9. A gesture, a word, a look, is enough to hurt.
  10. Wisdom comes in the understanding of suffering and all the implications of suffering, not only the personal, but also the human suffering that man has created.
  11. ONE OF THE causes of suffering is attachment. In attachment there is fear, jealousy, anxiety, suffering.
  12. Psychologically, suffering comes through attachment—to an idea, to ideals, to opinions, to beliefs, to persons, to concepts.
  13. The world is the mirror in which you are looking that shows the operations of your own mind.
  14. Another cause of suffering is a great sense of loss, loss of prestige, loss of power, loss of so many things, and the loss of somebody whom you think you love—and there is death, the ultimate suffering.
  15. One of the major reasons for suffering is the sense of isolation, the feeling of total loneliness.
  16. To end sorrow completely is a most difficult thing to do, for sorrow is always with us in one form or another.
  17. Sorrow ends only when we face the fact of sorrow, when we understand and go beyond both the cause and the effect.
  18. Love has now almost become synonymous with sex & its expression & all that is involved in it—self-forgetfulness and so on.
  19. when the intense pleasure is sustained by thought, then there is the counteraction which is aggression, reprisal, anger, hate, born out of the feeling of not getting that pleasure which you are after, and therefore fear, which is again fairly obvious if you observe it.
  20. Love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centred.
  21. Where there is dependence, there is fear, and where there is fear, there is authority, there is no love.
  22. Self-expression and self-fulfilment is a form of pleasure; and when that pleasure is thwarted, blocked, there is fear, and out of that fear there is aggression.
  23. Most people are afraid to stand alone; they are afraid to think things out for themselves, afraid to feel deeply, to explore and discover the whole meaning of life.
  24. When there is love, there is beauty. Love and compassion with their intelligence is the endless truth.
  25. Compassion means passion for all. Compassion cannot exist, nor love, if you belong to any sect, any group, or to any organized religion.
  26. Without love, life is like a shallow pool.
  27. When there is the ending of suffering there is passion. And with the ending of suffering there is love.
  28. Anger is not different from me; I am anger. I am greed. I am frightened. I am all that. But thought says, ‘I must control, I must escape from fear’, so thought then creates the observer as different from the observed, and in that state there is conflict.
  29. The idea is not love. The idea, the word is not love. But only when you have seen the whole movement of desire, attachment, pleasure, then out of that depth of perception comes this strange flower with its extraordinary perfume.
  30. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry.