Question: The state of total attention and desire without a motive - are they the same?

Krishnamurti; Sirs, desire is a most extraordinary thing, is it not? For us, desire is racked with such torture. We know desire as conflict and therefore we have placed such limitations on it. And our desires are so limited, so narrow, so petty, so mediocre: wanting a car, wanting to be more beautiful, wanting to achieve. Look, how petty it all is! And I wonder if there is a desire without any torture, without any hope and despair! There is. But it cannot be understood while desire breeds conflict. But when there is the total comprehension of desire, of the motives, the tortures, the self-denials, the discipline, the travail that one goes through, when all that is understood, dissolved so that it completely disappears then perhaps desire is something else. It may be love. And love may have its expression. Love has no tomorrow, and it does not think of the past - which means that the brain does not operate on love. I do not know if you have ever watched it: how the brain interferes with love, says that it must be respectable, divides it as divine and sinful, is always shaping it, controlling it, guiding it, making it fit in with the pattern of society or of its own experience.

But there is a state of affection, of love, in which the brain does not interfere; and perhaps that love may be found. But why compare? Why say, 'Is it like this or like that?'

You see, sirs, I do not know if you have ever watched a raindrop as it falls from the heavens. That one drop is of the nature of all the rivers, all the oceans, all the streams and the water that you drink. But that one raindrop is not thinking that it will be the river. It just drops, complete, total. In the same way, when the mind has gone through all this self-knowing, it is complete. In that state there is no comparison. What is creation is not comparative; and because it is destructive there is nothing within it of the old.

So, not verbally or intellectually but actually, one has to go through this process of self-knowing, from now everlastingly, because there is no ending to self-knowing. And having no ending it has no beginning, and therefore it is now.