One of the people who helped me enormously delved deeply into the area of love and sexual relations. There’s no intention of doing so here: go visit there for elucidation.
But the confusion between love and sex is such that it must be addressed, and it constitutes an important clue, and yet another asymmetry.
Men say love, we mean sex
The word ‘love’ is used as a stand-in, a euphemism for ‘sex’ so frequently that the sense of what love is, is obscured.
As a man, it is possible to say clearly that sex is man’s obsession. Is there anyone surprised to hear this?
As an older man, it is possible to say that a lot of the driving force of the obsession fades with time and experience. But it doesn’t go. Oh no. As long as there is a beating heart in a man, there’ll be residual sex in him.
Women and men are the gendered animal bodies of the species, and are pulled together by the force of sex in the bodies, whatever they may want to do; just like all the other species are. But in the other species it does not seem to create so many problems.
It’s not that woman is uninterested in sex — but usually it’s not her only goal, as it so often is with man, who will tell any lie to further his lust.
Woman, as she has told me, wants to be loved.
‘Love me’. Then, I could not.
Is there any love in man? Has she any hope of getting what she needs?
Love is not sex-ual…
Love is not personal. Love does not want something — does not want anything. Love is a flow of good. It is without condition. It has no self in it. It enjoys love, enjoys all, enjoins love.
Human-being humans cannot love; they can desire, form attachments, lust, covet… and call it love.
Once they start to love then this is no longer human behaviour, for the self is out of them. They are now beings, and do not consider any self.
An area where this has frequently been noted is in parental love, and most especially maternal love. The mother throughout much of the species is noted to be prepared to sacrifice herself, even her life, to save that of her offspring. It’s even moderately commonly observed among male parents. So — yes, males can do it.
Acts of love without self are almost universally admired.
There’s attempts to describe the impersonal and unconditioned nature of universal love in traditional literatures. For example, in lovely old English:
…for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust…
Yet sex is love…
Sex is in fact also totally impersonal. It pulls the individual bodies together willy-nilly, will-he-won’t-she. It is no respecter of persons or proprieties, place or position. It is a power of nature, irresistible.
It is the universal physical form of love, the creator of all the bodies…
Why is sex a problem?
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…naturally it becomes all-important… 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…there is the constant longing for more of that self-free state.
J Krishnamurti
Where’s the problem then?
If love is impersonal, and sex is impersonal, then where is the problem? The problem is the self, when it gets in the way. And this too is where the asymmetry is seen: there’s these powers of love and sex, naturally aligned, without ill in them, and all going just one way.
And then there’s the force of self and selfishness put in the bodies from the self and its mind, its thinking, seeking its self-centred sexual self-satisfaction, its exclusive exclusivity, spoiling the purity of the powers with its forcing of its transient desires — and all of this most especially in men.
Putting it together
Re-unifying love and sex is putting back together what goes together, love and love. But the self has to be expunged. And that can’t be done, until it is done for you. You can start out to clear the space, though…
