How do we live our lives? What have we made of the world in which we are living today, and what are we going to leave behind for our next generations when we are gone?

We are riddled by innumerable problems, both inwardly and outwardly. The wars, the environment, the political fantasies of leaders of states, the agonies of relationships, aging, death, loneliness, fear and all the rest. A close look, however, will show that all these complex social problems are rooted in the very essence of our relationship: the way we ‘think about and behave towards’ the world of nature, towards other human beings, and also towards our own feelings and emotions which we constantly try to re-shape as they suit us. In this gamut of relationship, we often mention that love could fix all our social or psychological problems. But have we ever asked inwardly – ‘What is love’? Do we have love within us? Can love be invited, experienced, and nourished so that our problems begin to dissolve? What is the mystery about love, and does it have anything to do with sensual pleasures, sex, and romantic emotions, or even with the highest mental faculty of human mind – thinking?

How do we learn about it? How do we get a feel of it in our typically shoddy life?

Krishnamurti once asked, “Shall we first see what it is not, and then perhaps we may be able to see what it is? Through negation we may come upon the positive, but merely to pursue the positive leads to assumptions and conclusions which bring about division. You are asking what love is. We are saying we may come upon it when we know what it is not. Anything that brings about a division, a separation, is not love, for in that there is conflict, strife and brutality.” (The Urgency of Change)

To try a negative approach to reach at the positive is a real challenge to the mind, which is heavily conditioned by norms of acceptance and repetition. Although some ancient spiritual teachings have discussed this approach conceptually, it has been lost to the modern man. So, the challenge arises before us now is to discover, without going back to tradition, what love is by observing our own responses to it and going along negatively about it. Krishnamurti points out that negative thinking is the only real thinking and asks, “Can there be thinking if thinking is positive? Is not the highest form of thinking negative?” (Commentaries of Living III, Ch 1).

So, is it possible to discover love in such a negative way which is ‘not the opposite of positive thinking’ – but an observation which is ‘unrelated to the positive’.

In this retreat, we will take up the subject of love and observe it, without giving it a direction, without breaking it up by our long-held ideas, beliefs, or objectives. Along with love, we shall also consider sex and chastity, which are traditionally taken to be antithetical, and discover their relationship to love. Through a series of slowly paced dialogues and sessions of questioning and listening activities, we will interact with other participants. Excerpts of Krishnamurti’s videos/audios and/or readings from his teachings will be used to facilitate the sessions.

This retreat is open to all and is ideal for those who are passionate about enquiring first hand, how sex, chastity, and love can exist in harmony without triggering larger social and psychological problems. In this context, the following excerpt comes handy –

“How do we enquire? What is the state of the mind that enquires? You cannot possibly enquire if you are not free, that is, if you are not free from saying `love is not this or that’, or `love should be this and should not be that’. To examine, explore, anything, there must be the quality of freedom from all your prejudices, conditioning and so on, even from your own experience; only then can you begin to explore, to enquire, to find out. Otherwise, you are merely examining from your own conditioning and you can’t go very far. And the word love is heavily loaded: we say “Love is divine and not profane”, “It is sacred”, “It is this, it is that”, love of God, love of country, love of the flag, “I love my family”, “I love my wife, my husband”. And we say, when there is love, we must love everybody, and not one, the particular.” (Talk 3, New Delhi, 26 November, 1967)

Facilitator Nandini Patnaik has been associated with the work of J. Krishnamurti for more than four decades. A longtime teacher of English language and literature, Nandini has authored four books on Krishnamurti in English, including two biographical works: J. Krishnamurti – The Making of a World Teacher, Beyond the Pathless – Anecdotes from the Life of J. Krishnamurti, Living Is Not a Choice: You, Me, and Krishnamurti, and Awareness in Daily Living. Her latest book, Living Is Not a Choice is a collection of short stories that are seamlessly appended by excerpts from Krishnamurti literature. Nandini has also written several books in Odia (an Indian language) including a biography of Krishnamurti. A member of KFI, Cuttack Centre, Nandini has contributed to the dissemination of the Teaching by translating into Odia a total of twenty-five publications of Krishnamurti. She is passionate about bringing the Teaching to people in self learning by offering the opportunity to ‘try it’, ‘do it’, and ‘see it’. Currently, she is engaged in actively participating in online and in-person K dialogues, where it is possible, she believes, to lay the foundation of righteous living. She is also developing a series of workable models that can be used in Krishnamurti Study Centers to let people experiment the teaching.