Thots on affection, love and sentiment

from LA - Wednesday, November 27, 2002
accessed 1953 times

I read a book from Krishnamurti, which inspired me to write the following article.

Sentiment is a feeling, emotionalism. „I feel I should do this, I feel I am a great man, I feel anger“-that is a sentiment. „I love children“: in that there is a great deal of sentiment because I don’t want to do things which may hurt them. Sentiment implies a feeling. Sentiment can become hard. Sentiment can become efficient but cruel. We can all be sentimental, go into a kind of ecstatic nothingness over music, over painting, sex... etc. Sentiment is one thing and affection is another. With sentiment you can say „I love nature“ and the next minute hit someone on the head because he thwarts you. If there’s affection... you will talk things over first. Idealism is sentimentality and therefore breeds hypocrisy. Because it has moods. Sentimentality is a second-hand emotion. Mostly put on. When you become attached sentimentality creeps in.
Affection literally means to move towards somebody, to be affected by something. Love is not sentiment or sentimentality. Love is something very hard, if I may use that word. Not hard in the sense of brutal, it has no hypocrisy, no sentimentality, it has no clothing around it.
Can it disappear? Or was it sentimentality and therefore it has gone? Can affection or love go away or is it sentimentality that can wither? If it is real love or affection I don’t see how it can disolve.
To say „I love you“ that feeling must come naturally not be forced or stimulated. Love and affection can not be destroyed by anger, jealousy, misunderstandings. You can’t distort it, you can’t destroy it. You can not cultivate it. You can recognize it when it takes place. Everyone tries to capture it... and yet it can not be captured.
Affection and love is non-dependency. People would like to feel love and affection. It makes one feel comfortable and happy, you feel you can blossom. It is only when your own spring of affection and love is not functioning deeply that you want someone else to give it to you. Because if you really feel a deep love or affection in yourself will you really think „I wish someone would show me love or affection“? Isn’t it only when there is emptiness inside you that you want others to be with you? When there is no affection/love in oneself you want it from others. That is translated as sex, relationship and when that emptiness within seeks a relationship through sex and through a constant companionship, then you become jealous, fearful, angry...etc. Sex isn’t the problem... don’t get me wrong here. The problem is to have an intelligent mind and in the very observing of all this it becomes highly intelligent and this intelligence will deal with love, affection, sentimentality and sex.
To live intelligently in this way becomes an extraorinary, a tremendous thing, an art. There is real enjoyment... no pain. Which is why I am still of the opinion that to say the words „I love you“ and really mean them should happen... once in our life... if we are lucky to find that love. But to force ourselves or to „cultivate“ a feeling of love for another person... will never last. That is sentiment „put on“, „false“, „a mask“-trying to feel love will never work unlike our up-bringing taught us-love all. Love is often an overused and abused word. To care for someone or to have a crush is one thing... Love... if ist there its eternal everlasting...
I have a great love for reading, learning and in a way a great love for myself. I have thought once in my life to truely love. Where I have used the words „I love you“ and though I meant it. 2 years later... I still feel this feeling of love. How do I know if its real or not? Time will tell! But to use the words so frivously as I have heard time and time again... makes love seem like a fickle, shallow thing. Therefore it looses its beauty and importance in life.