Sorrow is an immense subject. Sorrow has been in the minds of men and women from the beginning of time – sorrow which has never ended. If you travel, especially in the Asiatic world, or in Africa, you see immense poverty – immense! And you shed tears or do some social reforming, or give food or clothes, but there is still sorrow. And there is the sorrow for someone whom you have lost. You have their picture on the mantelpiece, or hung on the wall, you look at it and it revives all the memories connected with that picture and you shed tears. One sustains, nourishes, continues in loyalty, through that picture. That picture is not the person; nor are the memories; but we cling to those memories which give us more and more sorrow. There is the sorrow of those people who have very little in their lives, no money and only a few sticks of furniture. They live in ignorance; not the ignorance of something great, but the simple ignorance of their daily lives, of their having nothing inside them – not that the rich people have either; they have it in the bank account, but nothing inside. Then there is the immense sorrow of mankind, which is war. Millions have been killed; you have seen in Europe thousands of crosses, all in straight lines. How many women, men, children, have cried in every community, every country, every state. Throughout historical times there have been wars every year – tribal wars, national wars, ideological wars, religious wars. In the Middle Ages they tortured people considered heretics.
From the beginning of man, sorrow has continued in different forms. Sorrow of poverty, the poverty of not being able to fulfil your desires, the poverty of achievement, for there is always more to be achieved; all of which has brought immense sorrow – not only personal sorrow, but the sorrow of humanity. In the totalitarian states, we read about what is happening, but never shed a tear. We are indifferent to it all, because we are so consumed by our own sorrow, our own loneliness, our own inadequacy. So we ask ourselves, is there an ending to sorrow? Is there an ending to our personal sorrows, with all the implications of that ending? If we are at all seriously involved, committed to find out, is there an end to sorrow? And if there is an end, what is there then? – because we always want a reward: if we end this, we must have that. We never end anything for itself per se.
What is the relationship of sorrow to love? One knows what sorrow is – great pain, grief, loneliness, sense of isolation. One’s sorrow is felt to be entirely different from another’s, and in the very feeling of it one has become isolated. We know, not only verbally, but in depth, in the inward feeling of our very being what the meaning of that sorrow is. And what is the relationship of sorrow to love? What is love? Have you ever asked this question of yourself? Is it sexual sensation, the reading of a lovely poem, looking at these marvellous old trees? Is love pleasure? Please – we must be very honest with ourselves, otherwise there is no fun in this. (Humour is necessary: to be able to laugh, to be able to laugh together at a good joke, not when you are by yourself, but together.) We are asking ourselves, what is love? Is love desire? Is love thought? Is love something that you hold and possess? Is love that which you have when you worship the statue, the image, the symbol? Is that love? The symbol, the statue or the picture, is the result of thought. Your prayers are put together by thought. Is that love? Of course, fear is obviously not love. Have you ever looked at hate? If you hate, you dispel fear. If you really hate somebody, there is no fear. Through complete negation in oneself of what is not love, totally putting aside all that which is not love, then that perfume is there. That perfume can never go once you have put aside completely those things which are not love. Then love, which goes with compassion, has its own intelligence, which is not the intelligence of the scientific brain. When one has that love, that compassion, there is no grief, no pain, no sorrow. That love is there when you negate everything that is not love. If there is love, then you will never kill another – never! You will never kill an animal for your food. (Of course, go on eating meat, I am not telling you not to.) It is an immense thing to come upon it. Nobody can give it to another. Nothing can give it to you. But, if you, in your being, put aside all that which is not love, all that which thought has put together, then you are really renewed, with all your problems totally emptied, then the other thing is. It is the most positive thing, the most practical thing. The most impractical thing in life is to build armaments, to kill people, is it not? That is what your tax money is being spent on. I am not a politician, so do not listen to all this. But see what we are doing, and what we are doing is the society which we have created. Society is not different from us, we have formed it. Love has nothing to do with any organization, or with any person. Like a cool breeze from the ocean, you can shut it out or live with it. When you live with it, it is something totally different. There is no path to it; there is no path to truth – no path whatsoever. One has to live with it. One can only come to it when one has understood the whole psychological nature and structure of oneself.
Tomorrow we ought to talk about death. It is not a morbid subject. It is not something to be avoided. If you have lived the thing that we have been talking about, you will come to all this delicately, gently, quietly, not out of curiosity. You will come to it hesitantly, with great dignity, with inward respect. Like birth, it is a tremendous thing. Death also implies creation – not invention. Scientists are inventing; their invention is born from knowledge. Creation is continuous. It has no beginning and no end. It is not born out of knowledge. And death may be the meaning of creation – not a matter of having a next life with better opportunities, a better house, better refrigerator. It may be a sense of tremendous creation, endlessly, without beginning and end.