[lbo-talk] RE: arranged marriage

joanna bujes jbujes at covad.net
Thu Dec 11 17:00:36 PST 2003


Kelly writes: "he goes on to point out how sex, love, and marriage can also be understood as the enactment of rituals between the couple and the couple and the rest of the world and how these are not unlike those found in religious institutions (as we conventionally define them)."

I don't know about "rituals"...but here's a possibility ...

"Most of us do not have love, we do not know what it means. We know pleasure, we know pain. And we know the pleasure of sex and the pleasure of achieving fame, position, prestige, and the pleasure of having tremendous control over one's own body as the ascetics do, keeping a record--we know all these. We are everlastingly talking about love, but we do not know what it means, because we have not understood desire, which is the beginning of love.

Without love there is no morality--there is conformity to a pattern, a social or a so-called religious pattern. Without love there is no virtue. Love is something spontaneous, real, alive. And virtue is not a thing that you beget by constant practice; it is something spontaneous, akin to love. Virtue is not a memory according to which you function as a virtuous human being. If you have no love, you are not virtuous. You may go to the temple, you may lead a most respectable family life, but you are not virtuous becasue your heart is barren, empty, dull, stupid, because you have not understood desire.

A man who would understand desire has to listen to every prompting of the mind and the heart, to every mood, to every change of thought and feeling, has to watch it; he has to become sensitive, become alive to it. You cannot become alive to desire if you condemn it or compare it...Out of this listening, watching, comes passion, this passion which is akin to love.

Love is not divine love or married love or brotherly love--you know all the labels. Love is just love, without giving it a meaning of your own. The man who has suppressed his senses and made himself insensitive does not know what love is; therefore though he meditate for the next ten thousand years, he will not find God. It is only when your whole being is made sensitive to everything -- to the depth of your feelings, to all the extraordinary intricacies of your mind--and not just to what you call God, that desire ceases to be contradictory. Then there is an altogether different process taking place, which is not a process of desire. Love is its own eternity, and it has its own action."

(from The Mirror of Relationship: Love, Sex, and Chastity) J Krishnamurti)

Could we perhaps consider the idea that what makes love religious (or real) does not depend on who officiates at our wedding, or even on whether there is a wedding, but on the quality of the feeling and on our capacity to live it.

Joanna



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