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Jiddu Krishnamurti on Sexual Desire

Question: How can I permanently get rid of sexual desire?
Jiddu Krishnamurti : Why do we want to get permanently rid of a desire? You call it sexual, somebody else calls it attachment, fear, and so on. Why do we want to get rid of any desire permanently? Because that particular desire is disturbing to us, and we don't want to be disturbed. That is our whole process of thinking, is it not? We want to be self-enclosed, without any disturbance, that is, we want to be isolated; but nothing can live in isolation.

In his search for God, the so-called religious person is really seeking complete isolation in which he will never be disturbed, but such a person is not really religious, is he? The truly religious are those who understand relationship completely, fully, and therefore have no problems, no conflict. Not that they are not disturbed, but because they are not seeking certainty, they understand disturbance, and therefore there is no self-enclosing process created by the desire for security.

Now, this question requires a great deal of understanding because we are dealing with sensation, which is thought. To most people, sex has become an extraordinarily important problem. Being uncreative, afraid, enclosed, cut off in all other directions, sex is the only thing through which most people can find a release, the one act in which the self is momentarily absent. In that brief state of abnegation when the self, the 'me', with all its troubles, confusions, and worries, is absent, there is great happiness.

Through self-forgetfulness there is a sense of quietness, a release, and because we are uncreative religiously, economically, and in every other direction, sex becomes an overwhelmingly important problem. In daily life we are mere gramophone records, repeating phrases that we have learned; religiously we are automatons, mechanically following the priest; economically and socially we are bound, strangled, by environmental influences.

Is there a release for us in any of that? Obviously not; and where there is no release, there must be frustration. That is why the sexual act, in which there is a release, has become such a vital problem for most of us. And society encourages and stimulates it through advertisements, magazines, the cinema, and all the rest of it.

Now, as long as the mind, which is the result, the focal point of sensation, regards sex as a means of its release, sex must be a problem, and that problem will continue as long as we are incapable of being creative comprehensively, totally, and not merely in one particular direction.

Creativeness has nothing to do with sensation. Sex is of the mind, and creation is not of the mind. Creation is never a product of the mind, a product of thought, and in that sense, sex, which is sensation, can never be creative. It may produce babies, but that is obviously not creativeness. As long as we depend for release on sensation, on stimulation in any form, there must be frustration, because the mind becomes incapable of realizing what creativeness is.

This problem cannot be resolved by any discipline, by any taboos, by any social edicts or sanctions. It can be resolved only when we understand the whole process of the mind because it is the mind that is sexual. It is the mind's images, fancies, and pictures that stimulate it to be sexual, and as the mind is the result of sensation, it can only become more and more sensuous.

Such a mind can never be creative because creation is not sensation. It is only when the mind does not seek stimuli in any form, whether outward or inward, that it can be completely quiet, free, and only in that freedom is there creation. We have made sex into something ugly because it is the only private sensation that we have; all other sensations are public, open. But as long as we use sensation in any form as a means of release, it will only increase the problems, the confusion and trouble, because release can never come into being through seeking a result.

The questioner wants to end sexual desire permanently because he has an idea that then he will be in a state in which all disturbances have disappeared; that is why he is seeking it, striving towards it. The very striving towards that state is preventing him from being free to understand the process of the mind. As long as the mind is merely seeking a permanent state in which it will have no disturbance of any kind, it is closed, and therefore it can never be creative. It is only when the mind is free of the desire to become something, to achieve a result, and hence free of fear, that it can be utterly quiet; and only then is there a possibility of that creativeness which is reality.