BENGALURU: In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty.
Beauty is not something you see-not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building, or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your heart and mind. But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order.
If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.
Love is not sorrow nor is it made up of jealousy but it is dangerous for it destroys. It destroys everything that man has built around himself except bricks. It cannot build temples nor reform the rotting society; it can do nothing, but without it nothing can be done, do what you will. Every computer and automation can alter the shape of things and give man leisure which will become another problem when there are already so many problems.
Love has no problem and that is why it is so destructive and dangerous. Man lives by problems, those unresolved and continuous things; without them, he wouldn’t know what to do; he would be lost and in the losing gain nothing. So problems multiply endlessly; in the resolving of the one there is another, but death, of course, is destruction; it is not love. Death is old age, disease and the problems which no computer can solve.
It is not the destruction that love brings; it is not the death that love brings. It is the ashes of a fire that has been carefully built up and it is the noise of automatic machines that go on working without interruption. Love, death, creation are inseparable; you cannot have one and deny the others; you cannot buy it on the market or in any church; these are the last places where you would find it.
The image you have about a person, the image you have about your politicians, the prime minister, your god, your wife, your children - that image is what we are looking at. And that image has been created through your relationship, or through your fears, or through your hopes. The sexual and other pleasures you have had with your wife or your husband - the anger, the flattery, the comfort and all the things that your family life brings - have created an image about them. With that image you look. Similarly, your wife or husband has an image about you.
So the relationship between you and your wife or husband, between you and the politician, is really the relationship between these two images. Right? That is a fact. How can two images, which are the result of thought, of pleasure and so on, have any affection or love?
So the relationship between two individuals, very close together or very far, is a relationship of images, symbols, memories. And in that, how can there be real love?