The Need of Love

Why can’t I find happiness? Why are there quarrels, greed, murder, suicides, wars? Why can’t people live together in harmony? Why am I never really content, no matter what I acquire, whether it be man or woman, gold or power?’

It is quite simple. You do not know your need, and you will never know it unless you know yourself. You see all needs through the eyes of the ephemeral robot, not understanding that the purpose of need is the need of life to experience itself as a totality beyond the apparent individual needs of men and things. So there is the mystery of death and destruction and birth and life; a structural justice, an integrity of opposites, a being of all things called immortal life.

You still imagine another’s need like a do-gooder (and that includes all of us at some time) or the professional reformers who will reform anything except themselves. Do-gooders and professional reformers never solve anything. They work on the outside — on what appears to be a need. They deal in appearances, not understanding that every appearance is an expression of a cause beyond itself. They relieve a pocket of poverty in the mighty garment of the world, but only for a moment in the majesty of its years. When they discover a more needy cause everything they touch falls back to what it was. They sometimes leave bitterness and misery behind, for those they fed will hunger again and those they saved will fall again. They have given of their time, perhaps of their possessions, but not of themselves. 

You cannot give what you do not know, or you are not the giver. And what is it to give of your possessions? One day you may lose them and have nothing to give.

Love is beyond description; but not beyond demonstrating. For the moment you must forget anything you ever thought you knew about love. If you look through the screen of the old you cannot understand and you will not be listening.

You cannot love a person, a thing or an event. But you can be in the state of love in relation to it. Then you are the object’s need or it is your need, and your love will continue; but only as long as the need lasts.

If the object does not or cannot know itself, it might not consciously recognise its love. An example of this is the air you breathe. It is in a state of love in relation to you. It is your need and without it you will die. You are not consciously in a state of love with it. But when you know yourself, you will be. For you to know your love (air) someone has to put a pillow over your head. When the pillow is removed you go back to sleep, which you call living, oblivious of the delight of knowing this love.

You are alive according to your knowledge of love.

Love is choiceless, just as the air has no choice but to support your life and you have no choice but to breathe it. In the state of love you have to be creative: you have no choice and you want none. A real reformer is a person in love. He has no choice: he acts because he cannot do otherwise.

Love is beyond the mind because it is always new. The mind draws only on the past, on your experience and on the experience of others which is stored in memory, books or records of some kind. Any product of the mind is a reaction of the past, a synthesis of what is old. So the mind is a modifier, a reactor, a renovator, but it cannot create the new.

The composer of a new melody creates no new notes on the piano. The new combination of notes was already there in the potential of the keyboard. When the most gifted composers and writers, the leading architects and most original designers create, their minds are in a state of stillness or meditation on their love. And out of the silence, the beyond, into the silent waiting mind comes the fulfilment of the need, the fact, the refreshing new that sets the rest of the poor, mediocre, thinking world agog with its brilliance and genius.

The mind cannot know love. Where there is thought, love is not. When the fantasizing mind is active it thinks all the time and is the master. When the fantasizing mind is mastered, undisciplined thinking ceases and is replaced by awareness.

Awareness can know love. You can only experience the new when you are aware, when you are without thought. However we are seldom still enough to know what we love, especially in relation to the work we do.

Even if we knew we would probably choose the career that seemed to promise success and money. Thus in our jobs we are mostly unhappy or only reasonably happy (which means dissatisfied) and we are mostly mediocre and uncreative in them.

Man’s needs are ever being filled, therefore ever changing. When a need is filled there is no longer any need. That is why love as we know it never seems to last. But it is not the love that changes; it is the need.

It is the action of the mind to cling to what it has known even though the fact is that there is no need. The mind has read and heard that love is for ever; and imagines it is. It wants so much to be creative, but never can be.

Love is for ever, invariable and changeless, but not in relation to any object. For all things have a need and when that need is satisfied the love that provided it must change and appear as another need.

The final need is love itself. So if you loved something as your one remaining need you would have to die. Not ‘die for’, which is the robot mind’s imagination of the ultimate in love, but ‘die into’. Then you would be one — no lover, no beloved.

Love’s movement is always towards union. It is the unifier of creation, the destroyer of division.