Haven't you ever asked yourself why it is that human beings lack this thing? They beget children, they have sex, tenderness, a quality of sharing something together in companionship, in friendship, in fellowship, but this thing - why is they haven't got it?

Haven't you ever wondered lazily on occasion when you are walking by yourself in a filthy street or sitting in a bus or are in holiday by the seaside or walking in a wood with a lot of birds, trees, streams and wild animals - hasn' t it ever come upon you to ask why it is that man, who has lived for millions and millions of years, has not got this thing, this extraordinary unfading flower?

Why is it that you, as a human being, who are so capable, so clever, so cunning, so competitive, who have such marvellous technology, who go to the skies and under the earth and beneath the sea, and invent extraordinary electronic brains - why is it that you haven't got this one thing which matters? I don' t know whether you have ever seriously faced this issue or why your heart is empty.

What would your answer be ir you put the question to yourself - your direct answer without any equivocation or cunningness? Your answer would be in accordance with your intensity in asking the question and the urgency of it. But you are neither intense nor urgent, and that is because you haven't got energy, energy being passion - and you cannot find any truth without passion - passion with a fury behind it, passion in which there is no hidden want.

Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don' t know where it will take you.

So is fear perhaps the reason why you have not got the energy of that passion to find out for yourself why this quality of love is missing in you, where there is not this flame in your heart? If you have examined your own mind and heart very closely, you will know why you haven't got it.

If you are passionate in your discovery to find why you haven't got it, you will

know it is there. Through complete negation alone, which is the highest form of passion, that thing which is love, comes into being. Like humility you cannot cultivate love.

Humility comes into being when there is a total ending of conceit - then you will never know what is to be humble. A man who knows what it is to have humility is a vain man. In the same way when you give your mind and your heart, your nerves, your eyes, your whole being to find out the way of life, to see what actually is and go beyond it, and deny completely, totally, the life you live now - in that very denial of the ugly, the brutal, the other comes into being. And you will never know it either. A man who knows that he is silent, who knows that he loves, does not know what love is or what silence its.

Freedom from the known

Jiddu Krishnamurti