Relationships
Part of the “here-and-now” of Krishnamurti concerns our relationships in the world—especially our relationships with other people. Relationships provide the pathway to authentic and direct knowledge of self (Krishnamurti, 1956, p. 47): “Self-knowledge is to be discovered in the action of relationship; and all action is relationship. Self-knowledge does not come about through self-isolation, through withdrawal.”
He offers the following reflections on the challenges and opportunities associated with relationships Krishnamurti, 1956, p. 41):
“Relationship is complex and difficult, and few can come out of it unscathed. Though we would like it to be static, enduring, continuous, relationship is a movement, a process which must be deeply and fully understood and not made to conform to an inner or outer pattern. Conformity, which is the social structure, loses its weight and authority only when there is love. Love in relationship is a purifying process as it reveals the ways of the self. Without this revelation, relationship has little significance.”
Krishnamurti (1956, p. 41) identifies some of the challenges associated with the forming of relationships:
“. . . [H]ow we struggle against this revelation [about love]! The struggle takes many forms : dominance or subservience, fear or hope, jealousy or acceptance, and so on and on. The difficulty is that we do not love; and if we do love we want it to function in a particular way, we do not give it freedom. We love with our minds and not with our hearts. Mind can modify itself, but love cannot. Mind can make itself invulnerable, but love cannot; mind can always withdraw, be exclusive, become personal or impersonal. Love is not to be compared and hedged about. Our difficulty lies in that which we call love, which is really of the mind. We fill our hearts with the things of the mind and so keep our hearts ever empty and expectant. It is the mind that clings, that is envious, that holds and destroys. Our life is dominated by the physical centres and by the mind. We do not love and let it alone, but crave to be loved; we give in order to receive, which is the generosity of the mind and not of the heart. The mind is ever seeking certainty, security; and can love be made certain by the mind? Can the mind, whose very essence is of time, catch love, which is its own eternity?”
It is as if our mind and love live in two different realms (like our inner self and our environment). The integration of me and you, according to Krishnamurti (1956, p. 42) “comes into being only when the mind is utterly silent, having reached the end of its own tether. Only then is there no pain in relations” and only then is there a shared sense of being—perhaps resembling what Martin Buber (1958) calls “I/Thou” and what I have identified as the ingredients found in enduring relationships (Bergquist, 2023).
Ironically, it would seem according to Krishnamurti (156, p. 17) that we are positioned to love without possessiveness or mind-based love only when we also are willing to be alone in a particular way:
“[This is an aloneness that is] not aching, fearsome loneliness. It is the aloneness of being; it is uncorrupted, rich, complete. . . . One can truly communicate only when there is aloneness. Being alone is not the outcome of denial, of self-enclosure. Aloneness is the purgation of all motives, of all pursuits of desire, of all ends. . . . Aloneness is indivisible and loneliness is separation. That which is alone is pliable and so enduring. Only the alone can commune with that which is causeless, the immeasurable. To the alone, life is eternal.”
