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Jiddu Krishnamurti - Is marriage
necessary for women
Questioner: Is marriage necessary for women?
Jiddu Krishnamurti: In marriage, sexual relationship, companionship,
communion, love are implied. Without love, marriage becomes, for man or
for woman, a source of gratification, of conflict, of fear and pain.
Love comes into being only when the self is absent. Without love,
relationship is sorrow, however physically exciting it might be; such
relationship breeds contention and frustration, habit and routine.
Without love there can be no chastity, and sex becomes an all-consuming
problem. Without love, the ideal of chastity is an escape from the
conflict of desire, and without understanding craving, the ideal leads
to illusion and pain. The licentious and the ideal both deny love. The
pursuit of the ideal and indulgence give importance to craving, to the
'me', and when the 'me' is emphasized, love is not.
There are other problems involved in this question. One of them is
fulfillment. The woman or the man seeks fulfillment in the child. When
the woman is deprived of this, she is starved, as she is starved when
there is no love. Men seek fulfillment, when deprived of love, either in
things or in children or in activity, which are all distractions.
So things and action and children become all-important, leading to
further confusion and further misery. Man also seeks to escape through
fulfilling himself in activity, in distractions and addictions of every
kind, from amusement to worship. So man and woman seek to fulfill them
through things or property, through family or name, through ideas or
beliefs, and so they become all-important, thus giving to them false or
wrong importance, which causes inward and so outward conflict and
misery.
Now, is there fulfillment? The craving to become can only lead to
frustration, to conflict; in this becoming there is always fear and the
conflict of its opposite. The craving for fulfillment, for continuity,
is only when there is frustration. Being empty, there is a craving for
fulfillment. Without understanding what is, which is emptiness,
frustration, we pursue fulfillment, the covering up of what is. Only in
understanding what is, which is the emptiness, the shallowness, the
pettiness, can there be radical transformation.
This transformation is true revolution. But to merely pursue fulfillment
is moral and social chaos. A man who is happy, creative, is not seeking
fulfillment through property, through marriage, or through ideation; he
is not escaping through passion nor is he seeking fulfillment. We cease
to be creative, happy, when we are imitative or merely functioning
according to the responses of memory.
The response of memory is
generally considered thinking; such thinking is merely the response of
the frame of reference. These responses are not right thinking. Right
thinking comes into being only when there is no response to memory. In
this passively alert awareness there is creative being. In this state,
the life of becoming, with its fulfillment and conflict, fades away.
This state is love. Because our hearts are dry, we fill them with the
things of the mind, which give rise to multiple problems.
Love is not a thing to be learned; it comes into being when you, the
problem, cease. Have you not found yourself to be happy without a
conscious or unconscious cause? Then you are in communion with all
nature and man. But unfortunately you are so occupied with your own
thoughts and problems, envies and fears, that you are incommunicado;
this isolating process prevents you from knowing your wife or your
husband and child; you are sheltering behind a wall of your own making,
and without breaking down these walls there can be no communion, no
love. Without love, to become chaste, to become a celibate is unchaste.
Where there is love there is chastity, there is incorruptibility.
Source - Jiddu Krishnamurti Eleventh Talk in Madras, 1947
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