BENGALURU: Is it possible to love without thinking? What do you mean by thinking? Thinking is a response to memories of pain or pleasure. There is no thinking without the residue which incomplete experience leaves. Love is different from emotion and feeling. Love cannot be brought into the field of thought; whereas feeling and emotion can be brought. Love is a flame without smoke, ever fresh, creative, joyous. Such love is dangerous to society, to relationship. So, thought steps in, modifies, guides it, legalizes it, puts it out of danger; then one can live with it. Do you not know that when you love someone, you love the whole of mankind? Do you not know how dangerous it is to love man? Then, there is no barrier, no nationality; then, there is no craving for power and position, and things assume their values. Such a man is a danger to society.
For the being of love, the process of memory must come to an end. Memory comes into being only when experience is not fully, completely understood. Memory is only the residue of experience; it is the result of a challenge which is not fully comprehended. Life is a process of challenge and response. Challenge is always new but the response is ever old. This response, which is conditioning, which is the result of the past, must be understood and not disciplined or condemned away. It means living each day anew, fully and completely. This complete living is possible only when there is love, when your heart is full, not with the words nor with the things made by the mind. Only where there is love, memory ceases; then every movement is a rebirth.
Really you have no love. You have pleasure, you have sensation, you have sexual attachments, such as the family, the wife, the husband, the attachment to a nation. But attachment is not love. And love is not something divine and profane: it has no division. Love means something to care for: to care for the tree, for your neighbour, for the child—to see that the child has the right education, not just put him in a school and disappear; the right education not just technological education—and to see that the children have the right teachers, right food, that they understand life, that they understand sex.
Teaching children merely geography, mathematics, or a technical thing which will give them a job—that is not love. And without love you cannot be moral—you may be respectable; that is, you may conform to society; that you will not steal, that you will not chase your neighbour’s wife, that you will not do this and you will not do that. But that is not morality, that is not virtue, that is merely the conformity of respectability. Respectability is the most terrible, disgusting thing on earth, because it covers so many ugly things. Whereas when there is love, there is morality.
Do what you will, it is moral, if there is love.
We are all so crazy about desire, we want to fulfil ourselves through desire. But we do not see what havoc it creates in the world—the desire for individual security, for individual attainment, success, power, prestige. We do not feel that we are totally responsible for everything we do. If one understands desire, the nature of it, then what place has it? Has it any place where there is love?