To love is to be chaste
BENGALURU : When there is love, there is no duty. When you love your wife, you share everything with her—your property, your trouble, your anxiety, and your joy. You do not dominate. You are not the man and she the woman to be used and thrown aside, nor is she a sort of breeding machine to carry on your name. When there is love, the word ‘duty’ disappears. It is the man with no love in his heart who talks of rights and duties, and in this country, duties and rights have taken the place of love. Regulations have become more important than the warmth of affection.
When there is love, the problem is simple; when there is no love, the problem becomes complex. When a man loves his wife and his children, he can never possibly think in terms of duty and rights. Sirs, examine your own hearts and minds. I know you laugh it off—that is one of the tricks of the thoughtless, to laugh at something and push it aside.
Your wife does not share your responsibility, your wife does not share your property, she does not have the half of everything that you have because you consider the woman less than yourself, something to be kept and to be used sexually at your convenience when your appetite demands it. So you have invented the words rights and duty; and when the woman rebels, you throw at her these words. It is a static society, a deteriorating society, that talks of duty and rights. If you really examine your hearts and minds, you will find that you have no love.
This problem of sex is not simple and it cannot be solved on its own level. To try to solve it purely biologically is absurd; and to approach it through religion or to try to solve it as though it were a mere matter of physical adjustment, of glandular action, or to hedge it in with taboos and condemnations is all too immature, childish, and stupid. It requires intelligence of the highest order.
To understand ourselves in our relationship with another requires intelligence far more swift and subtle than to understand nature. But we seek to understand without intelligence; we want immediate action, an immediate solution, and the problem becomes more and more important. ... Love is not mere thought; thoughts are only the external action of the brain. Love is much deeper, much more profound, and the profundity of life can be discovered only in love.
Without love, life has no meaning and that is the sad part of our existence. We grow old while still immature; our bodies become old, fat, and ugly, and we remain thoughtless. Though we read and talk about it, we have never known the perfume of life. Mere reading and verbalising indicates an utter lack of the warmth of heart that enriches life; and without that quality of love, do what you will, join any society, bring about any law, you will not solve this problem. To love is to be chaste. Mere intellect is not chastity. The man who tries to be chaste in thought, is unchaste, because he has no love. Only the man who loves is chaste, pure, incorruptible.