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Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

We have to understand desire; and it is very difficult to understand something which is so vital, so demanding, so urgent because in the very fulfillment of desire passion is engendered, with the pleasure and the pain of it. And if one is to understand desire, obviously, there must be no choice. You cannot judge desire as being good or bad, noble or ignoble, or say, “I will keep this desire and deny that one.” All that must be set aside if we are to find out the truth of desire—the beauty of it, the ugliness or whatever it may be.
Through identification with a group, with a particular idea,
with a particular country, we can never bring about co-operation.
Love cannot come to those who have a desire to hold on to
it, or who like to become identified with it. Surely such things come when the mind does not seek, when the mind is completely quiet, no longer creating movements and beliefs upon which it can depend, or from which it derives a certain strength, which is an indication of self-deception. It is only
when the mind understands this whole process of desire that it can be still. Only then is the mind not in movement to be or not to be; then only is there the possibility of a state in which there is no deception of any kind.
Let us go on to consider desire. We know, do we not, the desire which contradicts itself, which is tortured, pulling in different directions; the pain, the turmoil, the anxiety of desire, and the disciplining, the controlling. And in the everlasting battle with it we twist it out of all shape and recognition; but it is there, constantly watching, waiting, pushing.

Do what you will, sublimate it, escape from it, deny it or accept it, give it full rein—it is always there. And we know how the religious teachers and others have said that we should be desireless, cultivate detachment, be free from desire—which is really absurd, because desire has to be understood, not destroyed. If you destroy desire, you may destroy life itself. If you pervert desire, shape it, control it, dominate it, suppress it, you may be destroying something extraordinarily beautiful.
Sex is a problem because it would seem that in that act there is complete absence of the self. In that moment you are happy, because there is the cessation of self-consciousness, of the “me”; and desiring more of it—more of the abnegation of the self in which there is complete happiness, without the past or the future demanding that complete happiness through full fusion, integration—naturally it becomes all- important. Isn’t that so?

Because it is something that gives me unadulterated joy, complete self forgetfulness, I want more and more of it. Now, why do I want more of it? Because, everywhere else I am in conflict, everywhere else, at all the different levels of existence, there is the strengthening of the self. Economically, socially, religiously, there is the constant thickening of self-consciousness, which is conflict. After all, you are self-conscious only when there is conflict. Self-consciousness is in its very nature the result of conflict...

So, the problem is not sex, surely, but how to be free from the self. You have tasted that state of being in which the self is not, if only for a few seconds, if only for a day, or what you will; and where the self is, there is conflict, there is misery, there is strife. So, there is the constant longing for more of that self- free state.

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