love and emptiness

Love and emptiness cannot abide together, when there is the feeling of loneliness, love is not.  You may hide emptiness under the word love, but when the object of your love is no longer there or does not respond, then you are aware of emptiness, you are frustrated.  We use the word love as a means of escaping from ourselves, from our own insufficiency.  We cling to the one we love, we are jealous, we miss him when he is not there and are utterly lost when he dies; and then we seek comfort in some other form, in some belief, in some substitute.  Is all this love?  Love is not an idea, the result of association; love is not something to be used as an escape from our own wretchedness, and when we do so use it, we make problems which have no solutions.  Love is not an abstraction, but its reality can be experienced only when idea, mind, is no longer the supreme factor.

So I see this emptiness, I see how it has come into being, I am aware that will or any other activity exerted to dispel the creator of this emptiness is only another form of self-centered activity.  So I realize that I cannot do anything, that the more I try to do something about it, the more I am creating and building walls of isolation.  Before, I used energy to fill this emptiness, wandered all over the place, and now I see the absurdity of it -  Thought becomes quiet; the mind becomes completely still; there is silence.  In that silence there is no loneliness.  When there is that silence, that complete silence of the mind, there is beauty and love.  

 

J. Krishnamurti  

from On Love and Loneliness

art by Van Gogh