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Love: Beyond Power

"To come upon this thing called love you must understand the place of pleasure. A mind that has been trained, sustained in this rotten social conditioning must first free itself before it can talk about love."
-J. Krishnamurti, from "Love, Sex, and Pleasure"2

What is it, then, that prevents us from experiencing Love in every facet of our daily lives? What "rotten conditioning" is it that Krishnamurti is asking us to become free of, before we can even speak of love as the ordinary yet primary energy of lived experience?

We have already suggested that Fear is one major obstacle to Love. What, then, does Fear draw its power from? The answer I am offering here will only appear circular: fear draws its power from Power. Power is that sense of separation and control that distances us from ourselves, from one another, from Nature, and ultimately from the Source of our being. To the extent that we expel Power and its supporting belief-systems from the psyche, we clear the inner ground in which Love can grow.

There is no such thing as the abuse of powerthere is only the use of power. All use of power, without exception, is abusive. It is not possible to praise God while passing the ammunition, because the touch of that energy we call God retreats the very instant we take the ammunition into our handsthe moment we resort to Power.

But there are times when it seems as if passing the ammunition is our only choice-in both interpersonal relationships and in the conflicts between nations. A popular example of this is World War II: the good war, the holy war, the war of salvation. What's often forgotten about that war is the carnage of the innocent in cities like Dresden, where masses of innocent civilians were bombed into annihilation; or the nuclear genocide in Japan, which was the first and by far the most hideous instance of the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

So is war ever justified? It's not a question that I, or most likely anyone else, can definitively answer. However, based on my experience as a psychotherapist, I can tell you that an individual life lived with as little inner or outer war as possible is most likely to be a successful and fulfilling one.

The most insightful people of human history, it seems, have understood this principle and made it the psychological touchstone of their inner lives. Socrates, Giordano Bruno, and of course Gandhi come to mind; and they are joined by countless others whose stories have not been told in history books.

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