Author: Krishnamurti
Date: 2010-05-15T15:43:51+00:00

This Light in Oneself: True Meditation

Copyright © 1999 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, Ltd.

Edited by Ray McCoy

THIS LIGHT

IN ONESELF

True Meditation

J. KRISHNAMURTI

Contents

A New Consciousness

The Miracle of Attention

Living in Goodness

This Light in Oneself

To Inquire into Truth

The Beauty of Virtue

The Summation of All Energy

The Eternally, Timelessly Sacred

What Is Creation?

To Live without the Action of Will

Harmony between the Known and Unknown

A Sacred Life

Observing from a Quiet Mind

Enlightenment Is Not a Fixed Place

The End of Searching

Pure Observation

Light Cannot Be Given by Another

A Dimension Thought Cannot Touch

Sources

Foreword

Approaching the end of what most of the Western world has chosen to call the second millennium amid busy plans for celebration, we look about us and see the astounding advances in science, medicine, technology, access to information, and knowledge—and war, poverty, starvation, political and religious corruption, turmoil, despoliation of the environment, terrorism, and great sorrow even among the most affluent. For thousands of years we have looked outward, to experts who now amass and manipulate information of incredible complexity, and to counselors, therapists, “educators,” and religious leaders to solve our personal and social upheavals. Yet the fundamental problems of fear, conflict, relationship, lives without meaning, remain.

In his many years of discussions with people from all parts of society and in public talks to large audiences all over the world, Krishnamurti spoke of the need to look inward, to know oneself, if we are to understand individual, and therefore society’s, deeply rooted conflicts, for “we are the world”; our individual chaos creates the global disorder.

From previously unpublished talks, the pages that follow offer Krishnamurti’s timeless insights into where the source of humanity’s true freedom, wisdom, and goodness is to be discovered—by each of us.

RAY MCCOY

Krishnamurti Foundation Trust

A New Consciousness

A new consciousness and a totally new morality are necessary to bring about a radical change in the present culture and social structure. This is obvious, yet the Left and the Right and the revolutionary seem to disregard it. Any dogma, any formula, any ideology is part of the old consciousness; they are the fabrications of thought whose activity is fragmentation—the Left, the Right, the center. This activity will inevitably lead to bloodshed of the Right or of the Left or to totalitarianism. This is what is going on around us. One sees the necessity of social, economic, and moral change but the response is from the old consciousness, thought being the principal actor. The mess, the confusion, and the misery that human beings have got into are within the area of the old consciousness, and without changing that profoundly, every human activity—
political, economic or religious—will only bring us to the destruction of each other and of the earth. This is so obvious to the sane.

One has to be a light to oneself; this light is the law. There is no other law.

All the other laws are made by thought and so are fragmentary and contradictory.

To be a light to oneself is not to follow the light of another, however reasonable, logical, historical, and however convincing. You cannot be a light to yourself if you are in the dark shadows of authority, of dogma, of conclusion. Morality is not put together by thought; it is not the outcome of environmental pressure, it is not of yesterday, of tradition. Morality is the child of love and love is not desire and pleasure. Sexual or sensory enjoyment is not love.

Freedom is to be a light to oneself; then it is not an abstraction, a thing conjured up by thought. Actual freedom is freedom from dependency, attachment, from the craving for experience. Freedom from the very structure of thought is to be a light to oneself. In this light all action takes place and thus it is never contradictory. Contradiction exists only when that light is separate from action, when the actor is separate from action. The ideal, the principle, is the barren movement of thought and it cannot coexist with this light; one denies the other. Where the observer is, this light, this love, is not. The structure of the observer is put together by thought, which is never new, never free. There is no

“how,” no system, no practice. There is only the seeing that is the doing. You have to see, not through the eyes of another. This light, this law, is neither yours nor that of another. There is only light. This is love.

The Miracle of Attention

Can we put away all ideas, concepts, and theories and find out for ourselves if there is something sacred—not the word, because the word is not the thing, the description is not the described—to see if there is something real, not an imagination, not something illusory, fanciful, not a myth but a reality that can never be destroyed, a truth that is abiding?

To find that out, to come upon it, all authority of any kind, especially spiritual, must be totally set aside, because authority implies conformity, obedience, acceptance of a certain pattern. A mind must be capable of standing alone, of being a light to itself. Following another, belonging to a group, following methods of meditation laid down by an authority, by tradition, is totally irrelevant to one who investigates into the question of whether there is something eternal, timeless, something that is not measurable by thought, that operates in our daily life. If it does not function as part of our daily life, then meditation is an escape and absolutely useless. All this implies that one must stand alone. There is a difference between isolation and aloneness, between loneliness and being able to stand by yourself clearly, unconfused, uncontaminated.

We are concerned with the whole of life, not one segment of it, one fragment of it, but the whole of what you do, what you think, what you feel, how you behave. As we are concerned with the whole of life, we cannot possibly take a fragment that is thought, and through thought resolve all of our problems.

Thought may give authority to itself to bring all the other fragments together, but thought has created these fragments. We are conditioned to think in terms of progress, of gradual achievement. People believe in psychological evolution, but is there such a thing as the “me” psychologically achieving anything other than the projection of thought?

To find out if there is something that is not projected by thought, that is not an illusion, a myth, we must ask whether thought can be controlled, whether thought can be held in abeyance, whether thought can be suppressed, so that the mind is completely still. Control implies the controller and the controlled, doesn’t it?

Who is the controller? Is that not also created by thought, one of the fragments of thought, which has assumed authority as the controller? If you see the truth of that, then the controller is the controlled, the experiencer is the experienced, the thinker is the thought. They are not separate entities. If you understand that, then there is no necessity to control.

If there is no controller because the controller is the controlled, then what happens? When there is a division between the controller and the controlled, there is conflict, there is a wastage of energy. When the controller is the controlled there is no wastage of energy. Then there is the accumulation of all that energy that had been dissipated in suppression, in resistance, brought about through division as the controller and the controlled. When there is no division, you have all that energy to go beyond that which you thought must be controlled.

In meditation it must be clearly understood that there is no control of thought, no
disciplining of thought, because the one who disciplines thought is a fragment of thought, the one who controls thought is a fragment of thought. If you see the truth of that, then you have all the energy that has been dissipated through comparison, through control, through suppression, to go beyond what actually is.

We are asking whether the mind can be absolutely still, because that which is still has great energy. It is the summation of energy. Can the mind—which is chattering, always in movement; which is thought always looking back, remembering, accumulating knowledge, constantly changing—be completely still? Have you ever tried to find out if thought can be still? How are you going to find out how to bring about this stillness of thought? You see, thought is time and time is movement, time is measurement. In daily life you measure, you compare, both physically and psychologically. That is measurement, comparison means measurement. Can you live without comparison in daily life? Can you cease to compare altogether, not in meditation but in daily life? You do compare when you are choosing from two materials, this cloth or that cloth, when you compare two cars, when you compare parts of knowledge, but psychologically, inwardly we compare ourselves with others. When that comparison ceases, as it must, then can we stand completely alone? That is what is implied when there is no comparison—which doesn’t mean that you vegetate. So, in daily life, can you live without comparison? Do it once and you will find what is implied in that.

Then you throw off a tremendous burden; and when you throw off a burden that is unnecessary you have energy.

Have you ever given attention to something totally? Are you giving attention to what the speaker is saying? Or are you listening with a comparative mind that has already acquired certain knowledge and is comparing what is being said to what you already know? Are you interpreting what is being said according to your own knowledge, your own tendency, your own prejudice? That is not attention, is it? If you give complete attention, with your body, with your nerves, with your eyes, with your ears, with your mind, with your whole being, there is no center from which you are attending, there is only attention. That attention is complete silence.

Please do listen to this. Nobody is going to tell you all these things, unfortunately, so please give your attention to what is being said, so that the very act of listening is a miracle of attention. In that attention there is no border, there is no frontier, and therefore there is no direction. There is only attention, and when there is that attention there is no me and you, there is no duality, there is no observer and the observed. And this is not possible when the mind is moving in a particular direction.

We are educated and conditioned to move according to directions, from here to there. We have an idea, a belief, a concept, a formula that there is a reality, that there is bliss, that there is something beyond thought, and we fix that as a goal, as an ideal, a direction, and walk in that direction. When you walk in a direction there is no space. When you are concentrated and walk or think in a particular direction, you have no space in the mind. You have no space when your mind is crowded with attachments, with fears, with the pursuit of pleasures, with the
desire for power, position. Then the mind is overcrowded, it has no space. Space is necessary, and where there is attention there is no direction, but rather space.

Now, meditation implies no movement at all. That means the mind is totally still, it is not moving in any direction. There is no movement, movement being time, movement being thought. If you see the truth of it—not the verbal description of it but the truth, which cannot be described—then there is that quiet, still mind. And it is necessary to have a quiet mind—but not in order to sleep longer, or to do your job better, or to get more money!

Most people’s lives are empty, poor. Although they may have a great deal of knowledge their lives are poor, contradictory, not whole, unhappy. All that is poverty, and they waste their lives trying to become rich inwardly, cultivating various forms of virtue and all the rest of that silly nonsense. Not that virtue is not necessary; but virtue is order, and order can only be understood when you have gone into the disorder in yourself. We do lead disorderly lives; that is a fact.

Disorder is the contradiction, the confusion, the various assertive desires, saying one thing and doing another, having ideals, and the division between you and the ideals. All that is disorder, and when you are aware of it and give your whole attention to it, out of that attention comes order, which is virtue—a living thing, not a thing contrived, practiced, and made ugly.

Meditation in daily life is the transformation of the mind, a psychological revolution so that we live a daily life—not in theory, not as an ideal, but in every movement of that life—in which there is compassion, love, and the energy to transcend all the pettiness, the narrowness, the shallowness. When the mind is quiet—really still, not made still through desire, through will—then there is a totally different kind of movement that is not of time.

You know, to go into that would be absurd. It would be a verbal description and therefore not real. What is important is the art of meditation. One sense of the word “art” is to put everything in its right place, putting everything in our life, in our daily life, in the right place, so that there is no confusion. And when there is order, righteous behavior, and a mind that is completely quiet in our daily life, then the mind will find out for itself whether there is the immeasurable or not. Until you find that which is the highest form of holiness, life is dull, meaningless. And that is why right meditation is absolutely necessary, so that the mind is made young, fresh, innocent. Innocent means not able to be hurt. All that is implied in meditation that is not divorced from our daily living. In the very understanding of our daily living, meditation is necessary. That is, to attend completely to what you are doing—when you talk to somebody, the way you walk, the way you think, what you think—to give your attention to that is part of meditation.

Meditation is not an escape. It is not something mysterious. Out of meditation comes a life that is holy, a life that is sacred. And therefore you treat all things as sacred.

Living in Goodness

Why has man not been able to change? He only changes a little here and there, and yet he demands that there be a good society. He wants order, not only in himself, in his relationships, however intimate or otherwise, but he also wants some kind of peace in the world; he wants to be left alone to flower, to have some kind of beatitude. This has been mankind’s demand, if you observe, throughout history from ancient days. And yet the more man becomes civilized, the more he is creating disorder, the more wars there are. The earth has not known a period when there have been no wars, man killing man, one religion destroying another religion, one institution dominating and destroying others, one organization suppressing others.

Aware of this everlasting struggle, don’t you ask ever if it is possible to live in this world, not run away from it, not go off into a commune or become a hermit or a monk, but live in this world sanely, happily, intelligently, without all the battle going on inwardly and outwardly? If you do—and I hope you are doing it now because we are thinking together—then you must demand that there be a good society.

To bring about a good society has been the dream of ancient Hindus, the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. And a good society can only exist when mankind is good because being good he creates goodness, brings about goodness in his relationship, in his actions, in his way of life.

Good also means that which is beautiful. Good also means that which is holy; it is related to God, to the highest principles. That word good needs to be very clearly understood. When there is goodness in you, then whatever you do will be good, your relationships, your actions, your way of thinking. One may capture the whole significance of that word, the extraordinary quality of that word, instantly.

Please, let’s carefully think this over together, because if you really go into it very deeply it is going to affect your consciousness, it is going to affect your way of thinking, it is going to affect the way of your life. So please give a little attention to the understanding of that word. The word is not the thing. I may describe a mountain most beautifully, paint it, make a poem, but the word, the description, the poem, is not the actual. We are generally carried away emotionally, irrationally by the description, by the word.

Goodness is not the opposite of that which is bad, goodness is totally unrelated to that which is ugly, evil, bad, to what is not beautiful. Goodness is by itself. If you say the good is the outcome of the bad, the evil, the ugly, then the good has in it the bad, the ugly, the brutal, so the good must be, and is, totally unrelated to that which is not good.

The good cannot possibly exist when there is acceptance of any authority.

Authority is very complex. There is the authority of law that man has put together through many, many centuries. There is the law of nature. There is the law of our own experience that we obey, the law of our own petty reactions that dominate our lives. Then there is the law of institutions, the law of organized
beliefs that are called religions, dogmas. We are saying goodness is totally unrelated to every form of authority.

Examine it, look at it. Goodness is not the pursuit of conformity. If you conform to a belief, to a concept, to an idea, to a principle, that is not good, because it creates conflict. Goodness cannot flower through another, through a religious figure, through dogma, through belief; it can only flower in the soil of total attention in which there is no authority. The essence of goodness is a mind that is not in conflict. And goodness implies great responsibility. You can’t be good and allow wars to take place. So a person who is really good is totally responsible for his whole life.

We are asking if one who has lived in a society with the pressures of institutions, of beliefs, of authoritarian religious people, can be good, because it is only if you are good, if you, as a human being, are totally and absolutely good—absolutely, not partially—that we will create a different society. Is it possible, living in this world, being married, with children, jobs, to be good? We are using the word in the sense that implies great responsibility, care, attention, diligence, love. The word good contains all that. Is that possible for you who care to listen? If it is not possible, then you accept society as it is. To create a different society, a society that is essentially good, in the context in which we are using that word, demands great energy. This demands your attention; that means your energy. Human beings have plenty of energy; when they want to do something, they do it.

What prevents every human being from being utterly good? What is the barrier? What is the block? Why don’t human beings—you—be utterly, sanely good? One who observes realizes what the world is and that he is the world, that the world is not different from him, that he has created that world, that he has created society, that he has created the religions with their innumerable dogmas, beliefs, rituals, with their separations, with their factions. Human beings have created this. Is that what is preventing us from being good? Is it because we believe, or because we are so self-concerned with our own problems of sex, fear, anxiety, loneliness, wanting to fulfil, wanting to identify with something or other? Is that what is preventing a human being from being good? If those things are preventing us, then they have no value. If you see that to bring about this quality of goodness any pressure from any direction—including your own belief, your own principles, your own ideals—utterly prevents that goodness from being, then you will naturally put them aside without any equivocation, any conflict, because they are stupid.

The great chaos and disorder right throughout the world is a danger to life. It is spreading everywhere. So any serious observer of himself and the world must ask these questions. The scientists, the politicians, the philosophers, the psychoanalysts, the gurus—whether they come from India, or from Tibet, or from your own country—have not solved our human problems; they have given all kinds of theories but they haven’t solved the problems. Nobody else will. We have to solve these problems ourselves because we have created the problems.

But unfortunately we are unwilling to look at our own problems and go into them to investigate why we live utterly self-concerned, selfish lives, as we do.

We are asking if we can live with goodness with its beauty, with its holiness?

If we cannot, then we will accept increasing danger of chaos in our own lives, in our children’s lives, and so on down the line.

Are we willing to go into the question of knowing oneself? Because oneself is the world. Human beings right throughout the world—whatever their color, their religion, their nationality, their beliefs—suffer psychologically, inwardly. They go through great anxieties, great loneliness, have an extraordinary sense of despair, depression, a sense of the meaninglessness of living the way we do.

Throughout the world, people are psychologically similar. That’s a reality, that’s truth, that’s an actuality. So you are the world psychologically, and the world is you; and when you understand yourself you are understanding the whole human structure and nature. It is not mere selfish investigation, because when you understand yourself you go beyond yourself, a different dimension comes into being.

What will make us change? More shocks? More catastrophes? Different forms of government? Different images? Different ideals? You have had varieties of these, and yet you have not changed. The more sophisticated our education, the more civilized we become—civilized in the sense of being more removed from nature—the more inhuman we become. So what shall one do? As none of the things outside of me are going to help, including all the gods, then it becomes obvious that I alone have to understand myself. I have to see what I am and change myself radically. Then goodness comes out of that. Then one can create a good society.

This Light in Oneself

One can talk endlessly, piling words upon words, coming to various conclusions, but out of all the verbal confusion, if there is one clear action, that action is worth ten thousand words. Most of us are afraid to act, because we are confused, disorderly, contradictory and miserable. We hope, despite this confusion, this disarray, that some kind of clarity may come into being, a clarity that is not from another, a clarity that can never be clouded over, a clarity that is not given or induced or that can be taken away, a clarity that keeps itself without any effort of will, without any motive, a clarity that has no end and therefore no beginning.

Most of us, if we are at all aware of our inward confusion, do desire this, we want such clarity. Let us see if we can come upon this clarity, so that your mind and your heart are very clear, undisturbed, with no problems and no fear. It would be immensely worthwhile to see if one could be a light to oneself, a light that has no dependence on another and that is completely free. One can explore a problem intellectually, analytically, taking off layer after layer of confusion and disorder, taking many days, many years, perhaps a whole lifetime, and even then perhaps not find it. You can do that analytical process of cause and effect, or perhaps you can sidestep all that completely and come to it directly, without the intermediary of any authority of the intellect.

To do that requires meditation. That word, meditation, has become rather spoilt; like love, it has been besmirched. But it is a lovely word; it has a great deal of meaning. There is a great deal of beauty, not in the word itself but in the meaning behind the word. We are going to see for ourselves if we can come upon the state of mind that is always in meditation. To lay the foundation for that meditation one must understand what living is, living and dying. The understanding of life and the extraordinary meaning of death is meditation. It is not searching out some deep mystical experience, not a constant repetition of a series of words, however hallowed, however ancient. That only makes the mind quiet, but it also makes it rather dull, stupid, mesmerized. You might just as well take a tranquilizer, which is much easier. The repetition of words, self-hypnosis, the following of a system or a method, is not meditation.

To experience implies a process of recognition. I had an experience yesterday, and it has given me either pleasure or pain. To be entirely with that experience one must recognize it. Recognition is of something that has already happened before, and therefore experience is never new. Truth can never be experienced: that is the beauty of it, it is always new, it is never what happened yesterday. What happened yesterday, the incident of yesterday, must be completely forgotten or gone through, finished with, yesterday. To carry that over as an experience to be measured in terms of achievement, or to convey that extraordinary something to impress or convince others, seems utterly silly. One must be very cautious, guarded, about the word experience, because you can only remember an experience when it has already happened to you. That means there must be a center, a thinker, an observer who retains, holds the thing that is over.

You cannot possibly experience truth. As long as there is a center of recollection
as the “me,” as the thinker, then truth is not. And when another says that he has an experience of the real, distrust him: don’t accept his authority.

We all want to accept somebody who promises something, because we have no light in ourselves. But nobody can give you that light: no guru, no teacher, no savior, no one. We have accepted many authorities in the past, we have put our faith in others, and they have either exploited us or utterly failed. So one must distrust, deny all spiritual authority. Nobody can give us the light that never dies.

To follow another is to imitate. To follow implies not only denying one’s own clarity, one’s own investigation, one’s integrity and honesty, but it also implies that in following, your motive is a reward. Truth is not a reward! If one is to understand truth, every form of reward and punishment must be totally set aside.

Authority implies fear, and to discipline oneself for fear of not gaining what an exploiter says in the name of truth or experience is to deny one’s own clarity and honesty. If you say that you must meditate, that you must follow a certain path, a certain system, obviously you are conditioning yourself according to that system or method. Perhaps you will get what the method promises, but it will be nothing but ashes, for the motive is achievement, success; and at the root of that is fear.

Between yourself and myself there is no authority. The speaker has no authority whatsoever. He is not trying to convince you of anything or asking you to follow. When you follow somebody, you destroy that person. The disciple destroys the master and the master destroys the disciple. You can see this happening historically and in daily life: when the wife or the husband dominate each other they destroy each other. In that there is no freedom, there is no beauty, there is no love.

If we do not lay the right foundation, a foundation of order, of clear line and depth, then thought must inevitably become tortuous, deceptive, unreal, and therefore valueless. The laying of this foundation, this order, is the beginning of meditation. Our life, the daily life that we lead from the moment we are born until we die, through marriage, children, jobs, achievements, is a battlefield, not only within ourselves but also outwardly, in the family, in the office, in the group, in the community. Our life is a constant struggle. That is what we call living. Pain, fear, despair, anxiety, with enormous sorrow constantly our shadow, that is our life. Perhaps a small minority can observe this disorder without finding external excuses for this confusion, although there are external causes.

Perhaps a small minority can observe the disorder, know it, look at it not only at the conscious level but also at a deeper level, and neither accept nor deny that disorder, confusion, the frightening mess in ourselves and the world. It is always the small minority that bring about a vital change.

A great deal has been written about the unconscious mind, especially in the West. Extraordinary significance has been given to it. But it is as trivial, as shallow as the conscious mind. You can observe it yourself. If you observe you will see that what is called the unconscious is the residue of the race, of the culture, of the family, of your own motives and appetites. It is there, hidden. And the conscious mind is occupied with the daily routine of life, going to the office, sex, and so on. To give importance to the one or to the other seems utterly sterile.

Both have very little meaning, except that the conscious mind has to have technological knowledge in order to earn a livelihood.

This constant battle, both within, at the deeper level, as well as at the superficial level, is the way of our life. It is a way of disorder, a way of disarray, contradiction, misery, and for a mind caught in that to try to meditate is meaningless, infantile. To meditate is to bring about order in this confusion; and not through effort, because every effort distorts the mind. To see truth the mind must be absolutely clear, without any distortion, without any compulsion, without any direction.

So the foundation must be laid. That is, there must be virtue. Order is virtue.

This virtue has nothing whatever to do with the social morality that we accept.

Society has imposed a certain morality on us, but society is the product of every human being. Society with its morality says that you can be greedy; that you can kill another in the name of God, in the name of your country, in the name of an ideal; that you can be competitive, envious, within the law. Such morality is no morality at all. You must totally deny that morality within yourself in order to be virtuous. That is the beauty of virtue; virtue is not a habit, it is not something that you practice day after day. That is mechanical, a routine, without meaning, but to be virtuous means to know what disorder is, the disorder that is the contradiction within ourselves, the tyranny of various pleasures and desires and ambitions, greed, envy, fear. Those are the causes of disorder, within ourselves and outwardly. To be aware of that is to be in contact with disorder. And you can only be in contact with it when you don’t deny it, when you don’t find excuses for it, when you don’t blame others for it.

Order isn’t a thing that you establish—in the denial of disorder there is order.

Virtue, which is order, comes out of knowing the whole nature and structure of disorder. This is fairly simple if we observe in ourselves how utterly disorderly and contradictory we are: we hate, and we think we love—that is the beginning of disorder, of duality; and virtue is not the outcome of duality. Virtue is a living thing, to be picked up daily; it is not the repetition of something that you called virtue yesterday. That is mechanical, worthless. So there must be order. And that is part of meditation.

Order means beauty; and there is so little beauty in our life. Beauty is not man-made; it is not in a picture, however modern or ancient; it is not in a building, in a statue, in a cloud, in a leaf, or on the water. Beauty is where there is order—a mind that is not confused, that is absolutely orderly. And there can be order only where there is total self-denial, when the “me” has no importance whatsoever. The ending of the “me” is part of meditation; that is the only meditation.

You have lived in thought. You have given tremendous importance to thinking, but thinking is old, thinking is never new, thinking is the continuation of memory. If you have lived there, obviously there is some kind of continuity.

And it is a continuity that is dead, over, finished. It is something old, but only that which ends can have something new. So dying is very important to understand. To die to everything that one knows. Have you ever tried it? To be free from the known, to be free from your memory, even for a few days; to be
free from your pleasure, without any argument, without any fear; to die to your family, to your house, to your name; to become completely anonymous. It is only the person who is completely anonymous who is in a state of nonviolence, who has no violence. So die every day, not as an idea, but actually. Do do it sometime.

One has collected so much, not only books, houses, the bank account, but inwardly: the memories of insults, the memories of flattery, the memories of your own particular experiences, neurotic achievements which give you a position. To die to all that without argument, without discussion, without any fear, just to give it up; do it some time and you will see. To do it psychologically—not giving up your wife, your clothes, your husband, your children or your house, but inwardly—is not to be attached to anything. In that there is great beauty. After all, that is love, isn’t it? Love is not attachment. When there is attachment there is fear. And fear inevitably becomes authoritarian, possessive, oppressive, dominating.

Meditation is the understanding of life, which is to bring about order. Order is virtue, which is light. This light is not to be lit by another, however experienced, however clever, however erudite, however spiritual. Nobody on earth or in heaven can light that, except yourself, in your own understanding and meditation.

To die to everything within oneself! For love is innocent and fresh, young and clear. Then, if one has established this order, this virtue, this beauty, this light in oneself, one can go beyond. This means that the mind, having laid order, which is not of thought, then becomes utterly quiet, silent—naturally, without any force, without any discipline. And in the light of that silence all action can take place, living daily from that silence.

And if one were lucky enough to have gone that far, then in that silence there is quite a different movement, which is not of time, which is not of words, which is not measurable by thought, because it is always new. It is that immeasurable something that man has everlastingly sought. But you have to come upon it, it cannot be given to you. It is not the word, not the symbol. Those are destructive.

But for it to come, you must have complete order, beauty, love. Therefore you must die to every thing that you know psychologically, so that your mind is clear, not tortured, so that it sees things as they are, both outwardly and inwardly.

To Inquire into Truth

Is there anything sacred in life, not invented by thought? From immeasurable time, man has asked this question. Is there something beyond all the confusion, misery, darkness, illusions, beyond the institutions and reforms? Is there something really true, something beyond time, something so immense that thought cannot come to it? Man has inquired into this, and, apparently, only an extremely few people have been free to enter into that world. From ancient days, the priest has come between the seeker and what the seeker hopes to find. The priest interprets; he becomes the man who knows, or thinks he knows, and the seeker is sidetracked, diverted, lost.

Thought, whatever it does, is not sacred. It is a material process, as we also are matter. Thought has divided people into religions, into nationalities. Thought is born of knowledge, and knowledge is never total about anything, therefore thought is always limited and separative. Where there is separative action, there must be conflict: communist and capitalist, Arab and Jew, Hindu and Moslem.

These divisions are all from the processes of thought, and where there is division there must be conflict. That is a law. Nothing that thought has put together, whether in books, in the churches, in the temples or in the mosques, is sacred. No symbol is sacred; that is not religion, it is merely a form of thought, a superficial reaction to what is called sacred.

To inquire into truth one must gather all energy. One must have the capacity to be diligent so as not to act according to a pattern but observe one’s thoughts, feelings, antagonisms, fears, and go far beyond them so that the mind is completely free. To inquire into what is most holy, nameless, timeless, one must obviously belong to no group, no religion, have no belief, no faith, because belief and faith accept as true something that may not exist. It is the nature of belief to accept something to be true without finding out through one’s own inquiry, one’s own vitality, one’s own energy. You believe because in belief there is some form of security, comfort, but a person who is seeking merely psychological comfort will never come upon that which is beyond time. So there must be total freedom.

Is it possible to be free from all our psychological conditioning? Biological conditioning is natural, but the psychological conditioning—the hates, the antagonisms, the pride, all the things that bring about confusion—are the very nature of the self which is thought.

To find out, there must be attention—not concentration. To meditate is really important, because a mind that is merely mechanical, as thought is, can never come upon that which is total, supreme order, and therefore complete freedom.

The universe is in total order. The human mind is in disorder, and one has to have an extraordinarily orderly mind, a mind that has understood disorder and is free of contradiction, imitation, conformity. Such a mind is an attentive mind. It is completely attentive to whatever it does, to all its actions in relationship.

Attention is not concentration. Concentration is restricted, narrow, limited, whereas attention is limitless. In attention there is the quality of silence—not the silence invented by thought, not the silence that comes about after noise, not the
silence of one thought waiting for another thought. There must be that silence that is not put together by desire, by will, by thought. And in that meditation there is no controller. In all the systems invented by groups there is always effort, control, discipline. But discipline means to learn—not to conform but to learn—
so that your mind becomes more and more subtle. Learning is a constant movement; it is not based on knowledge. Meditation is freedom from the known, which is measure. And in that meditation, there is absolute silence.

Then, in that silence alone, that which is nameless is.

The Beauty of Virtue

Thought is movement between “what is” and “what should be.” Thought is the time to cover that space, and as long as there is division between this and that psychologically, the movement is the time of thought. So thought is time as movement. Is there time as movement, as thought, when there is only observation of “what is”? That is, not observation as the observer and the observed, but only observation without the movement of going beyond “what is.” It is very important for the mind to understand this, because thought can create most marvelous images of what is sacred and holy, which all religions have done. All religions are based on thought. All religions are the organization of thought, in belief, in dogma, in rituals. So unless there is complete understanding of thought as time and movement, the mind cannot possibly go beyond itself.

We are trained, educated, drilled to change “what is” into “what should be,”

the ideal, and that takes time. That whole movement of thought to cover the space between “what is” and “what should be” is the time to change “what is”

into “what should be”—but the observer is the observed, therefore there is nothing to change, there is only “what is.” The observer doesn’t know what to do with “what is,” therefore he tries various methods to change “what is,” controls

“what is,” tries to suppress “what is.” But the observer is the observed: the “what is” is the observer. Anger, jealousy, are also the observer; there isn’t jealousy separate from the observer—both are one. When there is no movement as thought in time to change “what is,” when thought perceives that there is no possibility of changing “what is,” then that which is—“what is”—ceases entirely, because the observer is the observed.

Go into this very deeply and you will see for yourself. It is really quite simple. If I dislike someone, the dislike is not different from the “me” or the

“you.” The entity that dislikes is dislike itself; it is not separate. And when thought says, “I must get over my dislike,” then it is movement in time to get over that which actually is, which is created by thought. So the observer—the entity—and the thing called “dislike” are the same. Therefore there is complete immobility. It is not the immobility of being static, it is complete motionlessness and therefore complete silence. So time as movement, time as thought achieving a result, has come totally to an end, and therefore action is instantaneous. So the mind has laid the foundation and is free from disorder; and therefore there is the flowering and the beauty of virtue. In that foundation is the basis of relationship between you and another. In that relationship there is no activity of image; there is only relationship, not one image adjusting itself to the other image. There is only “what is” and not the changing of “what is.” The changing of “what is,” or transforming of “what is,” is the movement of thought in time.

When you have come to that point, the mind and the brain cells also become totally still. The brain which holds memories, experience, knowledge, can and must function in the field of the known. But now that mind, that brain, is free from the activity of time and thought. Then the mind is completely still. All this
takes place without effort. All this must take place without any sense of discipline, control, which belong to disorder.

You know, what we are saying is totally different from what the gurus, the

“masters,” the Zen philosophers say, because in this there is no authority, there is no following another. If you follow somebody, you are not only destroying yourself but also the other. A religious mind has no authority whatsoever. But it has intelligence and it applies that intelligence. In the world of action there is the authority of the scientist, the doctor, the man who teaches you how to drive, but otherwise there is no authority, there is no guru.

So, if you have gone as deeply as that, then the mind has established order in relationship, and understands the whole complex disorder of our daily lives. Out of the comprehension of that disorder, out of the awareness of it, in which there is no choice, comes the beauty of virtue, which is not cultivated, which is not brought about by thought. That virtue is love, order, and if the mind has established that with deep roots, it is immovable, unchangeable. And then you can inquire into the whole movement of time. Then the mind is completely still.

There is no observer, there is no experiencer, there is no thinker.

There are various forms of sensory and extrasensory perception.

Clairvoyance, healing, all kinds of things take place, but they are all secondary, and a mind that is really concerned with the discovery of what is truth, what is sacred, will never touch them.

The mind then is free to observe. Then there is that which man has sought through centuries, the unnameable, the timeless. And there is no verbal expression of it. The image that is created by thought completely and utterly ceases because there is no entity that wants to express it in words. Your mind can only discover it, or come upon it, when you have this strange thing called love, compassion, not only for your neighbor, but for the animals, the trees, for everything.

Then such a mind itself becomes sacred.

The Summation of All Energy

Thought is limited because knowledge is limited, and whatever action thought does, whatever it invents, must be limited. One must have a clear mind and a clear heart to understand what a religious mind is. To find out what a religious mind is, one must totally negate all the rituals and symbols invented by thought.

If you deny, negate, that which is false, then you find what is true. You negate all the systems of meditation because you yourself see that these systems are invented by thought. They are put together by man. Because life is so shoddy, so uncertain, we want to have some deep satisfaction, some love, something that is stable, permanent, everlasting. We want something that is immutable, nonchanging, and we think we will get it if we do certain things. Those things are invented by thought and thought in itself is contradictory, so any form of structure in meditation put together by thought is not meditation. This means a total denial, total negation of everything that man has invented psychologically.

Not technologically, you can’t deny that, but it is negation of all the things that man has created and written about in search of truth. Wanting to escape from our weariness, sorrow, and agony, we fall into that trap. So one must totally deny all postures, all breathing exercises, all activities of thought.

When all that is negated, then the question arises: Can thought come to an end? That is, thought as time, can time have a stop? Not the external time, but the time that is becoming—becoming enlightened, becoming nonviolent, a vain man trying to become humble. This whole pattern of becoming psychologically is time. Time is also thought. Can thought come to an end? Not through discipline, not through control, because who is that entity who disciplines? There is always in us this sense of duality: the controller and the controlled, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experienced, the thinker and the thought. There is always this divisive duality in us. Probably it is brought over from physical observation. There, there is duality: light and shade, dark and light, man, woman, and so on. We have probably brought that over into the field of the psyche. So is there a controller that is different from the controlled? Please go into this very carefully.

In classical, ordinary meditation, the gurus who propagate it are concerned with the controller and the controlled. They say to control your thoughts because thereby you will end thought, or have only one thought. But we are inquiring into who the controller is. You might say, “It is the higher self,” “It is the witness,”

“It is something that is not thought,” but the controller is part of thought.

Obviously. So the controller is the controlled. Thought has divided itself as the controller and that which it is going to control, but it is still the activity of thought. It is a strange phenomenon that thought invents gods and then it worships them. That is self worship.

So when one understands that the whole movement of the controller is the controlled, then there is no control at all. This is a dangerous thing to say to people who have not understood it. We are not advocating no control. We are saying that where there is the observation that the controller is the controlled, that
the thinker is the thought, and if you remain with that whole truth, with that reality, without any further interference of thought, then you have a totally different kind of energy.

Meditation is the summation of all energy. Not the energy created by thought through friction, but the energy of a state of mind in which all conflict has completely ceased. The word religion probably means gathering together all your energy so that you can act diligently. A religious mind acts diligently, that is, caring, watching, observing. In that observation there is affection, compassion.

Concentration is another invention of thought. In school you are told to concentrate on the book. You learn to concentrate, trying to exclude other thoughts, trying to prevent yourself from looking out of the window. In concentration there is resistance, narrowing down the enormous energy of life to a certain point. Whereas in attention, which is a form of awareness in which there is no choice, a choiceless awareness, all your energy is there. When you have such attention there is no center from which you are attending, whereas in concentration there is always a center from which you are attending.

We ought also to talk together about space. The way we live in the modern world, one apartment on top of another, we have no space physically. There is no space outwardly, and inwardly we have no space at all because our brains are constantly chattering. Meditation is to understand or come upon the space that is not put together by thought, the space that is not space as the “me” and the “not me.” That space is not invented space, the idea of space, but actual space; that is, vast distance, limitless distance, unhindered observation, perpetual movement without any barrier. That is vast space, and in that vast space there is no time, time as thought has stopped long ago, because of the observation that while thought has its own space, it has not that other vast space. When we want to learn a technique, thought as knowledge, time, needs space.

Memory is necessary at a certain level, but not at the psychological level.

When there is always the awareness that cleanses the brain of any accumulation as memory, then the “me” progressing, the “me” achieving, the “me” in conflict, comes to an end because you have put your house in order. The brain has its own rhythm, but that rhythm has been distorted by our extravagance, by our ill-treating the brain through drugs, through faith, through belief, through drink, smoking. It has lost its pristine vitality.

Meditation is the sense of total comprehension of the whole of life, and from that there is right action. Meditation is absolute silence of the mind. Not relative silence or the silence that thought has projected and structured, but the silence of order, which is freedom. Only in that total, complete, unadulterated silence is that which is truth, which is from everlasting to everlasting.

This is meditation.

The Eternally, Timelessly Sacred

The brain, which is so very old, which is extraordinarily capable, which has infinite capacities, has evolved through time, acquiring a great deal of experience, knowledge. Can that brain that is so heavily conditioned and constantly wearing itself out rejuvenate itself? Can your brain unburden itself of continuity, end continuity, to begin totally anew? Can the brain become totally innocent? I am using the word innocent in the sense of not capable of being hurt; that is, a brain that is not only not able to hurt others, but also not capable of being hurt.

Your brain, which is the brain of all human beings, evolved through immemorial time, conditioned by cultures, by religions, by economic and social pressures. That brain has had a timeless continuity till now, and in that duration it has found a sense of being safe. That is why you accept tradition, because in tradition there is safety, in imitation there is safety, in conformity there is safety.

And there is also safety in an illusion. Obviously all your gods are illusions put up by thought. A belief or a faith is an illusion. There is no need for belief or faith, but having a belief—in God, in Jesus, in Krishna, or whatever you like—
gives a sense of being protected, being in the womb of God; but it is an illusion.

We are asking if the brain can discover an ending of the continuity of time.

That continuity, based on the continuity of knowledge, is considered advancement, progress, evolution, and we are challenging that. When the brain seeks continuity it becomes mechanical. All thought is mechanical because all thought is based on memory, which is the response of knowledge. So there is no new thought.

The “I,” the “me,” is a continuity. The “I” has been handed down for millennia, generation after generation; it is a continuity, and that which is continuous is mechanical, there is nothing new in it. It is marvelous if you see this.

Please listen quietly; don’t agree, just listen. As long as the brain is registering hurts, pain, that gives it continuity. That gives the idea that “I” am continuing. As long as the brain registers, like a computer, it is mechanical.

When you are insulted or praised, it is registering, as it has done for millennia after millennia. That is our conditioning, that is our whole progressive movement. Now we are asking if it is possible to register only what is relevant and nothing else? Why should you register when you are hurt? Why should you register when somebody insults or flatters you? When you register—when the brain registers—that registration prevents the observation of the other who has insulted. That is, you observe the person who has insulted you or praised you, with the mind, the brain that has registered, so you never actually see the other person. The registration is a continuity and in that continuity there is safety. The brain says, “I have been hurt once and therefore I’ll register it, keep it, and so avoid being hurt in the future.” This may be relevant physically, but is it relevant psychologically? One has been hurt because hurt is the movement in time of the building up of the image you have about yourself, and when that image is
pricked, you are hurt. As long as you have that image you are always going to be hurt. So is it possible not to have the image and therefore have no registration?

We are laying the foundation to discover what meditation is.

Is it possible not to register psychologically, but to register only what is necessary and relevant? When you have established order—when there is order—in your life, there is freedom. It is only the disordered mind that seeks freedom. When there is total order, then that very order is freedom.

To go into this very deeply, you need to understand the nature of your consciousness. Your consciousness is its content: without its content it is not.

The content makes up our consciousness. The content is our tradition, our anxiety, our name, our position. That is the content and that is our consciousness.

Can this whole consciousness, including the brain and the mind, with all its content, realize its content, realize its duration, and take one part of that consciousness, such as attachment, and end it voluntarily? That means you are breaking continuity. We are asking if it is possible to register only what is necessary, relevant, and nothing else. Understand the beauty of that question, the implications of that question, the depth of that question. I say it is possible. I’ll explain, but the explanation is not the fact. Don’t be caught up in the explanation, but through the explanation come to the fact. Then the explanation is no longer important.

The movement of time, the movement of thought, the movement of knowledge from the past, modifying itself in the present and proceeding, is continuity. That is the whole movement of registration of the brain, otherwise we could not have knowledge. Knowledge is continuity and the brain has found safety in this continuity and therefore it must register. That movement has taken over the psychological field. But knowledge is always limited. There is no omnipotent knowledge, but the brain, having found security in the movement of knowledge, clings to it, and translates every incident and accident according to the past. Therefore, the past has tremendous importance for the brain, because the brain itself is the past.

But your own intellect, logically, sees very clearly that what has continuity has nothing new. There is no new perfume; there is no new heaven; there is no new earth. And so the intellect says, “Is there an ending of continuity without bringing danger to the brain, because without continuity it gets lost?” It says, “If I end continuity, what then?” The brain demands to be secure, so what then? The brain has said that it can only function in security, whether it is false or true security, and the continuity of the registration process has given it security. And you say to the brain, “Register only what is necessary, relevant, and don’t register anything else.” So the brain is suddenly at a loss. Because it is functioning out of need for security it says, “Give me security and I will go after it.”

There is security, but not that kind of security. It is to put knowledge, thought, in its right place. The very orderliness of life is possible only when the brain has understood that it is living in disorder, which it calls security. When it realizes that security implies putting everything in order, which is registering everything relevant and nothing irrelevant, then the brain says, “I have understood this, I
have got it, I have an insight into this whole movement of continuity.” It has an insight. That insight is the outcome of complete order, which is when the brain has put everything in its right place. Then there is total insight into the whole movement of consciousness. And therefore the brain will register only what is necessary and nothing else. In that is implied that the activity of the brain undergoes a change, the very structure of the brain undergoes a change, because seeing something new for the first time brings a new function to operate. When the brain sees something new, there is a new function, a new organism being born. It is wholly necessary for a mind, for a brain, to become very young, fresh, innocent, alive, youthful, and that is when there is no psychological registration at all.

Is love within this consciousness? Has love a continuity? We said consciousness is continuity, tradition. Is love part of this field or is it entirely outside the field? I am asking, I am challenging. I don’t say it is or it is not. If it is within the field of our consciousness, isn’t it still part of thought? The content of our consciousness is put together by thought. Beliefs, gods, superstitions, traditions, fear, are all part of thought. And is love part of thought, part of this consciousness? That means, is love desire, is love pleasure, sex? Is love part of the thought process? Is love a remembrance?

Love cannot possibly exist or come into being like the fresh morning dew if the intellect is supreme. And our civilization has worshipped the intellect because it has created theories about God, because it has created principles, ideals. So is love part of this stream, this consciousness? Can love exist when there is jealousy? Can love exist when there is attachment to a wife, to a husband, to children? Can love exist when there is the memory of sexual attraction, a remembrance, a picture? Has love a continuity? Please go into it and find out, because that thing does not exist in your heart and that is why the world is in such a mess.

To come upon this love, the whole stream of consciousness must come to an end: your jealousy, your antagonism, your ambition, your desire for position, your desire to become better, nobler, or your seeking power—whether it is the power to levitate or the power of business, position, politics, religion, or power over your wife, over your husband, over your children. Where there is any sense of egotism, the other is not. And the essence of egotism is the process of registration. The ending of sorrow is the beginning of compassion, but we have used sorrow as a means of advancement, becoming better. On the contrary, in the ending something infinitely new takes place.

There must be space, not physical space only, but space within the mind, which means not being occupied. Our minds are always occupied: “How shall I stop chattering?” “I must have space.” “I must be silent.” A housewife is occupied with her cooking, with her children; a devotee is occupied with his God; a man is occupied with his profession, with sex, with his job, with his ambition, with his position. The mind is wholly occupied, and so there is no space in it.

We establish order in our life that is not the order of discipline, control. We have seen intelligently that order can come only out of the understanding of
disorder. We bring about order in our life, order in our relationship, which is very important, because life is relationship, a movement, an action in relationship. If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbor—whether that neighbor is near or very far away—forget about meditation. Without order in your life, if you try to meditate you will fall into the trap of illusions. If you have been serious, and you have order—not temporary order, but absolute order—that order can look to the cosmic order, that order has relationship with the cosmic order. Cosmic order is the setting of the sun, the rising of the moon, the marvelous sky of the evening with all its beauty. Merely examining the cosmos, the universe through a telescope, is not order. If there is order here, in our life, then that order has an extraordinary relationship with the universe.

When a mind is occupied, there is no order, there is no space. When the mind is full of problems, how can it have space? To have space, every problem must be immediately solved as it arises. That is part of meditation—not to carry problems over day after day. Is it possible not to be occupied, which does not mean irresponsibility? On the contrary, when you are not occupied you give your attention to responsibility. It is only the occupied mind that is confused and therefore responsibility becomes ugly, responsibility then has the possibility of guilt. Please don’t ask how not to be occupied, for then you will be occupied with a system, a method, with slogans. But if you see, if you have an insight, that an occupied mind is a destructive mind, is not a free mind, that it has no space, it happens.

Then we can look at attention. Are you attending now? What does to attend mean? If you are really deeply attending, there is no center from which you are attending. And that attention cannot continue, as you would like it to. The continuity is inattention. When you are attending, which means listening, in that attention there is no center that says, “I am learning, I am hearing, I am seeing.”

There is only the enormous sense of wholeness, which is watching, listening, learning. In that attention there is no movement of thought. That attention cannot be sustained. When thought says it must find out how to arrive at or achieve attention, the movement of wanting to capture attention is inattention, is lack of attention. To be aware of the movement away from attention is to be attentive.

Have you captured it?

The mind must have great space, limitless space, and that can only take place when there is no chattering, when there is no problem because all problems have been resolved as they arose. You can have great space only when there is no center. The moment you have a center, there must be circumference, there must be diameter, a movement from the center to the periphery. Space implies no center; therefore it is absolutely limitless. Attention implies giving all your energy to listen, to see, and in that there is no center. Then comes a mind that has understood order and is free of fear, that has ended sorrow, has understood the nature of pleasure and given it its right place.

Then the question is: What is the quality of a mind that is completely silent?

Not how to achieve silence, how to have peace of mind—we are speaking of the quality of a mind that is absolutely, timelessly silent.

There is silence between two notes; there is silence between two thoughts, between two movements; there is the silence between two wars; there is silence between husband and wife before they begin to quarrel. We are not talking of that quality of silence, because they are temporary, they go away. We are speaking of a silence that is not produced by thought, that is not cultivable, that comes only when you have understood the whole movement of existence. In that there is silence, there is no question and answer, there is no challenge, there is no search, everything has ended. In that silence, there is a great sense of space and beauty and extraordinary sense of energy. Then there comes that which is eternally, timelessly sacred, which is not the product of civilization, the product of thought.

That is the whole movement of meditation.

What Is Creation?

What is the origin of all existence, from the minutest cell to the most complex brain? Was there a beginning at all, and is there an end to all this? What is creation? To probe into something totally unknown, not preconceived, and not be caught in any sentimental, romantic illusion, there must be a quality of brain that is completely free from all its conditioning, from all its programming, from every kind of influence, and therefore highly sensitive and tremendously active. Is that possible? Is it possible to have a mind, a brain, that is extraordinarily alive, not caught in any form of routine, not mechanical? Do we have a brain in which there is no fear, no self-interest, no self-centered activity? Otherwise it is living in its own shadow all the time, it is living in its own tribal, limited environment, like an animal tied to a stake.

A brain must have space. Space is not only a distance between here and there, space implies being without a center. If you have a center and you move away from the center to the periphery, however far the periphery is, it is still limited.

So, space indicates no center and no periphery, no boundary. Have we a brain that doesn’t belong to anything, is not attached to anything—to experience, conclusions, hopes, ideals—so that it is really, completely free? If you are burdened, you can’t walk very far. If the brain is crude, vulgar, self-centered, it cannot have measureless space. And space indicates—one is using the word very, very carefully—emptiness.

We are trying to find out if it is possible to live in this world without any fear, without any conflict, with a tremendous sense of compassion, which demands a great deal of intelligence. You cannot have compassion without intelligence. And that intelligence is not the activity of thought. One cannot be compassionate if one is attached to a particular ideology, to a particular narrow tribalism, or to any religious concept, for those limit. And compassion can only come—be there—
when there is the ending of sorrow, which is the ending of self-centered movement.

So space indicates emptiness, nothingness. And because there is not a thing put there by thought, that space has tremendous energy. So the brain must have the quality of complete freedom and space. That is, one must be nothing. We are all something: analysts, psychotherapists, doctors. That is all right, but when we are therapists, biologists, technicians, those very identifications limit the wholeness of the brain.

Only when there is freedom and space can we ask what meditation is. Only when one has laid the foundation of order in life can one ask what true meditation is. There cannot be order if there is fear. There cannot be order if there is any kind of conflict. Our inward house must be in complete order, so there is great stability, with no waffling around. There is great strength in that stability. If the house is not in order, your meditation has very little meaning.

You can invent any kind of illusion, any kind of enlightenment, any kind of daily discipline, it will still be limited, illusory, because it is born out of disorder. This is all logical, sane, rational; it is not something the speaker has invented for you
to accept. May I use the words undisciplined order? Unless there is order that is not disciplined order, meditation becomes very shallow and meaningless.

What is order? Thought cannot create psychological order because thought itself is disorder, because thought is based on knowledge, which is based on experience. All knowledge is limited, and so thought is also limited, and when thought tries to create order it brings about disorder. Thought has created disorder through the conflict between “what is” and “what should be,” the actual and the theoretical. But there is only the actual and not the theoretical. Thought looks at the actual from a limited point of view, and therefore its action must inevitably create disorder. Do we see this as a truth, as a law, or just as an idea?

Suppose I am greedy, envious; that is what is; the opposite is not. But the opposite has been created by human beings, by thought, as a means of understanding “what is” and also as a means of escaping from “what is.” But there is only “what is,” and when you perceive “what is” without its opposite, then that very perception brings order.

Our house must be in order, and this order cannot be brought about by thought. Thought creates its own discipline: do this, don’t do that; follow this, don’t follow that; be traditional, don’t be traditional. Thought is the guide through which one hopes to bring about order, but thought itself is limited, therefore it is bound to create disorder. If I keep on repeating that I am British, or that I am French, or that I am a Hindu, or a Buddhist, that tribalism is very limited, that tribalism causes great havoc in the world. We don’t go to the root of it to end tribalism; we try to create better wars. Order can come into being only when thought, which is necessary in certain areas, has no place in the psychological world. The world itself is in order when thought is absent.

It is necessary to have a brain that is absolutely quiet. The brain has its own rhythm, is endlessly active, chattering from one subject to another, from one thought to another, from one association to another, from one state to another. It is constantly occupied. One is not aware of it generally, but when one is aware without any choice, choicelessly aware of this movement, then that very awareness, that very attention, ends the chattering. Please do it, and you will see how simple it all is.

The brain must be free, have space and psychological silence. You and I are talking to each other. Thought is being employed because we are speaking a language. But to speak out of silence... There must be freedom from the word.

Then the brain is utterly quiet, though it has its own rhythm.

Then what is creation, what is the beginning of all this? We are inquiring into the origin of all life, not only our life, but the life of every living thing: the whales in the depths, the dolphins, the little fish, the minute cells, vast nature, the beauty of a tiger. From the most minute cell to the most complex human—with all his inventions, with all his illusions, with his superstitions, with his quarrels, with his wars, with his arrogance, vulgarity, with his tremendous aspirations and his great depressions—what is the origin of all this?

Now, meditation is to come upon this. It is not that you come upon it. In that silence, in that quietness, in that absolute tranquillity, is there a beginning? And if there is a beginning, there must be an ending. That which has a cause must end.

Wherever there is a cause, there must be an end. That is a law, that is natural. So is there a causation at all for the creation of man, the creation of all the way of life? Is there a beginning of all this? How are we going to find out?

What is creation? Not of the painter, nor the poet, nor the man who makes something out of marble; those are all things manifested. Is there something that is not manifested? Is there something that, because it is not manifested, has no beginning and no end? That which is manifested has a beginning, has an end. We are manifestations. Not of divine something or other, we are the result of thousands of years of so-called evolution, growth, development, and we also come to an end. That which is manifested can always be destroyed, but that which is not, has no time.

We are asking if there is something beyond all time. It has been the inquiry of philosophers, scientists, and religious people to find that which is beyond the measure of man, which is beyond time. Because if one can discover that, or see that, that is immortality. That is beyond death. Man has sought this, in various ways, in different parts of the world, through different beliefs, because when one discovers, realizes that, then life has no beginning and no end. It is beyond all concepts, beyond all hope. It is something immense.

Now, to come back to earth. You see, we never look at life, our own life, as a tremendous movement with a great depth, a vastness. We have reduced our life to such a shoddy little affair. And life is really the most sacred thing in existence.

To kill somebody is the most irreligious horror, or to get angry, to be violent with somebody.

We never see the world as a whole because we are so fragmented, so terribly limited, so petty. We never have the feeling of wholeness, where the things of the sea, the things of the earth, nature, the sky, the universe, are part of us. Not imagined—you can go off into some kind of fancy and imagine that you are the universe, and then you become cuckoo. But break down this small, self-centered interest, have nothing of that, and from there you can move infinitely.

And meditation is this, not sitting cross-legged, or standing on your head, or doing whatever one does, but having the feeling of the complete wholeness and unity of life. And that can come only when there is love and compassion.

One of our difficulties is that we have associated love with pleasure, with sex, and for most of us love also means jealousy, anxiety, possessiveness, attachment.

That is what we call love. Is love attachment? Is love pleasure? Is love desire? Is love the opposite of hate? If it is the opposite of hate, then it is not love. All opposites contain their own opposites. When I try to become courageous, that courage is born out of fear. Love cannot have an opposite. Love cannot be where there is jealousy, ambition, aggressiveness.

And where there is the quality of love, from that arises compassion. Where there is that compassion, there is intelligence—but it is not the intelligence of self-interest, or the intelligence of thought, or the intelligence of a great deal of knowledge. Compassion has nothing to do with knowledge.

Only with compassion is there that intelligence that gives humanity security, stability, a vast sense of strength.

To Live without the Action of Will

Meditation is not something that you do. Meditation is a movement into the whole question of our living: how we live, how we behave, whether we have fears, anxieties, sorrows; whether we are everlastingly pursuing pleasure; and whether we have built images about ourselves and about others. That is all part of our life, and in the understanding of that life and the various issues involved in life, and actually being free from them, we inquire into meditation.

We must put complete order in our house. Our house is our self. That order is established, not according to a pattern, but when there is complete understanding of what disorder is, what confusion is, why we are in contradiction in ourselves, why there is this constant struggle between the opposites, and so on. The very placing of things in their proper place is the beginning of meditation. If we have not done that—actually, not theoretically, in daily life, every movement of our lives—then meditation becomes another form of illusion, another form of prayer, another form of wanting something.

What is the movement of meditation? We must understand the importance of the senses. Most of us react or act according to the urges, demands, the insistence of our senses. Those senses never act as a whole; all our senses never function, operate, as a whole, holistically. If you observe yourself and watch your senses you will see that one or the other of the senses becomes dominant, one or the other of the senses takes a greater part in our daily living. So there is always imbalance in our senses.

What we are seeing now is part of meditation.

Is it possible for the senses to operate as a whole? Is it possible for you to look at the movement of the sea, the bright waters, the eternally restless waters, to watch those waters completely, with all your senses? Or to observe, to look at a tree, or a person, or a bird in flight, a sheet of water, the setting sun, or the rising moon, with all your senses fully awakened? If you do, then you discover—
for yourself, not from me—that there is no center from which the senses are moving.

Are you doing this as we are talking?

Look at your girl, or your husband, or your wife, or a tree, with all the senses highly active. Then in that there is no limitation. You do it and you will find out for yourself. Most of us operate on partial or particular senses, we never move or live with all our senses fully awakened, flowering. To give the senses their right place does not mean suppressing them, controlling them, running away from them. This is important because, if one wants to go into meditation very deeply, unless one is aware of the senses, they create different forms of neuroses, different forms of illusions; they dominate our emotions. When the senses are fully awakened, flowering, then the body becomes extraordinarily quiet. Have you noticed this? Most of us force our bodies to sit still, not to fidget, not to move about, but if all the senses are functioning healthily, normally, vitally, then the body relaxes and becomes very, very quiet. Do it as we are talking.

Is it possible to live life—daily, not just occasionally—without any form of control? That doesn’t mean permissive activity, doing what one likes, rejecting tradition. Please consider seriously whether it is possible to live a life without any form of control, because when there is control there is the action of will.

What is will? “I will do this; I must not do that”; isn’t will the essence of desire?

Please look at it; don’t reject it or accept it, inquire into it. We are asking if it is possible to live a life in which there is not a shadow of control, in which there is not a shadow of the operation of will. Will is the very movement of desire. From perception, contact, sensation, arise desire and thought with its image.

Is it possible to live without the action of will? Most of us live a life of restraint, control, suppression, escape, but when you say, “I must control myself, my anger, my jealousy, my laziness, my indolence,” who is the controller? Is the controller different from that which he controls? Or are they both the same? The controller is the controlled. The controller is the essence of desire, and he is trying to control his activities, his thoughts, his wishes. Realizing all that, can one live a life that is not promiscuous, that is not just doing what one likes, but a life without any form of control? Very few people have gone into this question. I object to any system, any form of control, because the mind then is never free; it is always subjugating itself to a pattern, whether that pattern is established by another or by oneself.

Then, can time come to an end? Please see why this is important. Our brains are conditioned to time. Our brains are the result of a million years and more, immemorial centuries upon centuries, of conditioning. The brain has evolved, grown, flowered, but it is a very, very ancient brain. As it has evolved through time, it functions in time. The moment you say, “I will,” it is in time. When you say, “I must do that,” it is also in time. Everything that we do involves time and our brains are conditioned not only to chronological time, but also to psychological time. The brain has evolved through millennia and the very idea, the very question of whether it can end time is a paralyzing process. It is a shock to it.

Part of meditation is to find out for oneself whether time can stop. You can’t do this by saying, “Time must stop”; it has no meaning. Is it possible for the brain to realize that it has no future? We live either in despair or in hope. Part of time is the destructive nature of hope: “I am miserable, unhappy, uncertain; I hope to be happy”; or faith, the invention of the priests throughout the world:

“You suffer but have faith in God and everything will be all right.” Faith in something involves time. Can you tolerate that there is no tomorrow, psychologically? It is part of meditation to find out that psychologically there is no tomorrow. The hope for something, the pleasure of looking forward to it, is involved in time. Which doesn’t mean that you discard hope, it means that you understand the movement of time. If you discard hope, then you become bitter, then you say, “Why should I live, what is the purpose of life?” And then all the nonsense begins of depression, agony, living without anything in the future.

We are asking whether thought as time can stop. Thought is important in its right place, but it has no importance whatsoever psychologically. Thought is the reaction of memory, it is born from memory. Memory is experience as
knowledge stored up in the brain cells. You can watch your own brain, you don’t have to become a specialist. The brain cells hold memory; it is a material process, there is nothing sacred, nothing holy about it. And thought has created everything that we have done: going to the moon and planting a silly flag up there; going to the depths of the sea and living there; all the complicated technology and its machinery. Thought has been responsible for all this. Thought has also been responsible for all wars. It is so obvious that you don’t even have to question it. Your thoughts have divided the world into Britain, France, Russia, and so on. And thought has created the psychological structure of the “me.” That

“me” is not holy, something divine. It is just thought putting together the anxieties, the fears, the pleasures, the sorrows, the pains, the attachments, the fear of death. It has put together the “me,” which is consciousness. Consciousness is what it contains; your consciousness is what you are: your anxieties, your fears, your struggles, your moods, your despairs, pleasures, and so on. It is very simple.

And that is the result of time. I have been hurt yesterday psychologically; you said something brutal to me and it has wounded me and is part of my consciousness. So consciousness is the result of time. When we ask if time can end, it implies the total emptying of this consciousness with its content. Whether you can do it or not is a different matter, but it implies that.

We are inquiring into time, and the immovable layers of consciousness—
sensation, desire, the whole structure of it—to see whether that consciousness, which is a result of time, can empty itself completely, so that time ends psychologically. You are aware of your consciousness, aren’t you? You know what you are, if you have gone into it sufficiently. If you have gone into it, you see that all the travail, all the struggle, all the misery, uncertainty, are part of you, part of consciousness. Your ambitions, your greed, your aggressiveness, your anger, your bitterness, are all part of this consciousness, which is the accumulation from a thousand yesterdays to today. And we are asking whether that consciousness, which is the result of time, psychological as well as physiological, can empty itself so that time comes to an end.

We are going to find out if it is possible. If you say it isn’t possible, then you have closed the door. And if you say it is possible, you have also closed the door.

But if you say, “Let’s find out,” then you are open to it, you are eager to find out.

If you are serious enough to go into it, the question now is whether it is possible to empty totally the whole content of our selves, the content of our consciousness, this consciousness which has been built through time. Is it not possible to end one of the contents of your consciousness—your hurts, your psychological wounds? Most of us have been hurt psychologically from childhood. That is part of your consciousness. Can you end that hurt completely, totally wipe it out without leaving a mark? You can, can’t you? If you pay attention to the wound, then you know what has caused it: it is the image you have about yourself that has been wounded. You can end that image that is wounded if you go into it very deeply. Or if you are attached to somebody, your wife or your husband, or are attached to a belief, to a country, to a sect, to a group of people, to Jesus, can you not completely logically, sanely, rationally end it? Because, you see, attachment implies jealousy, anxiety, fear, pain; and, having
pain, you become more and more and more attached. Seeing the nature of attachment is the flowering of intelligence. That intelligence sees how stupid it is to be attached, and it is finished.

So go into it. You have a particular psychological habit, say, always thinking in a certain direction. That is part of your consciousness. Can thought move away from that groove, from that rut? Of course it can. It is possible to empty the content completely. Now if you do it one thing at a time—your attachments, your hurts, your anxieties, and so on—it will take infinite time. So we are caught in time again. Is it possible to empty it instantly without involving time, as a whole, not in parts? When you do it part by part, you are still involved in time. If you really see the truth of it, then naturally you won’t do it partially.

Consciousness is not mine; it is not my particular consciousness, it is the universal consciousness. My consciousness is like your consciousness, or anybody else’s consciousness: we both suffer, we both go through agonies, and so on. There may be a few who have flowered, are out of it, and gone beyond, but that is irrelevant.

Is it possible to observe the thing in its entirety, wholly, and in the very observation of that totality, see the ending of it? Is it possible to observe your hurt or your anxiety or your guilt, totally? Suppose I feel guilty. Can I look at that guilt, see how it arose and what was the reason for it, see how I am dreading more of it, see the entire structure of guilt, and observe it wholly? Of course I can, but I can observe it wholly only when I am aware of the nature of being hurt.

I can be aware of it if there is no direction or motive involved in that awareness.

I will go into it more. Suppose I am attached to something or somebody.

Can’t I observe the consequences of attachment, what is involved in attachment, how that attachment arose? Can’t I observe the whole nature of it instantly? I am attached because I am lonely, I want comfort, I want to depend on somebody because I can’t stand by myself, I need companionship, I need somebody to tell me, “You are doing very well, old boy.” I need somebody to hold my hand; I am depressed and anxious. So I depend on somebody, and out of that dependence arises attachment, and from that attachment arise fear, jealousy, anxiety. Can’t I observe the whole nature of it instantly? Of course I can if I am aware, if I am deeply interested to find out.

We are saying that, instead of doing it piecemeal, it is possible to see the whole nature and the structure and the movement of consciousness with all its content. The content makes up consciousness, and to see it entirely is possible.

And when you see the entirety of it, it disintegrates. To have a complete insight into the whole nature of consciousness implies having no motive, no remembrance, just instant perception of the nature of consciousness. And that very insight dissolves the problem.

Our whole technological development is based on measure; if we had no measurement, there could be no technological advance. Knowledge is movement in measure: I know, I shall know. It is all measurement, and that measurement has moved into the psychological field. If you watch yourself, you can see very easily how it works. We are always comparing psychologically. Now can you end comparison—which is also the ending of time? Measure means measuring
myself against somebody and wanting to be like that, or not to be like that. The positive and the negative process of comparison are a part of measurement.

Is it possible to live a daily life without any kind of comparison? You do compare two materials, one color of corduroy against another. But psychologically, inwardly, can you be free of comparison completely, which means be free of measurement? Measurement is the movement of thought. So can thought come to an end? You see, most of us try to stop thinking, which is impossible. You may for a second say, “I have stopped thinking,” but it is forced, it is compelled, it is a form of saying, “I have measured a second when I was not thinking.” All those who went into this question deeply have asked if thought can come to an end. Thought is born from the known. Knowledge is the known, which is the past. Can that thought come to an end? Can there be freedom from the known? We are always functioning from the known, and we have become extraordinarily capable and imitative, comparing. We have a constant endeavor to be something. So can thought come to an end?

We have talked about measurement, control, the importance of the senses and their right place. All this is part of meditation.

Can the brain, which is millions of years old, which is so heavily conditioned, so full of all that man has collected through centuries, the brain that is acting mechanically all the time, can that brain be free from the known, and can that brain never, never get old physically? Don’t you ask sometimes whether this brain can lose its burden and be free and never deteriorate? That means never psychologically to register anything, never to register flattery, insult, impositions, pressures, but to keep the tape completely fresh. Then it is young. Innocence means a brain that has never been wounded. Innocence knows no misery, conflict, sorrow, pain. When they are all registered in the brain, it is always limited, old as it grows physically older. Whereas, if there is no recording whatsoever psychologically, then the brain becomes extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily fresh. This is not a hope, this is not a reward. Either you do it and discover it, or you just accept words and say, “How marvelous that must be; I wish I could experience that.” Because of insight, the brain cells undergo a change. They are no longer holding on to memories. The brain is no longer the house of vast collected antiquity.

Then, also, we must ask the question: Is there anything sacred in life? Is there anything that is holy, untouched by thought? We have put what we call holy, sacred, in the churches as symbols—the Virgin Mary, Christ on the cross. In India, they have their particular images, as do Buddhist countries, and those have become sacred: the name, the sculpture, the image, the symbol. But is there anything sacred in life? Sacred being that which is deathless, timeless, from eternity to eternity, that which has no beginning and no end. You can’t find it out, nobody can find it out—it may come when you have discarded all the things that thought has made sacred. When the churches with their pictures, their music and their beliefs, their rituals, their dogmas, are all understood and discarded completely, when there is no priest, no guru, no follower, then in that tremendous quality of silence there may come something that is not touched by thought, because that silence is not created by thought.

One has to go into the whole nature of silence. There is silence between two noises. There is silence between two thoughts. There is silence between two notes in music. There is silence after noise. There is silence when thought says,

“I must be silent,” and creates artificial silence, thinking it is real silence. There is silence when you sit quietly and force your mind to be silent. All those are artificial silences; they are not real, deep, uncultivated, unpremeditated silence.

Silence can only come psychologically when there is no registration whatsoever.

Then the mind, the brain itself, is utterly without movement. In that great depth of silence that is not induced, not cultivated, not practiced, there may come that extraordinary sense of something immeasurable, nameless.

The whole movement from the beginning to the end of this talk is part of meditation.

Harmony between the

Known and the Unknown

How can the mind know if it has found what it calls the ultimate, the immeasurable, the nameless, the most sublime? As it cannot possibly know that which is limitless, unknowable, that which cannot possibly be experienced, all the mind can do is to free itself from all categories of pain, anxiety, fear, and the desire that ultimately creates illusion. The “me” with all its images is the center which divides all relationship and therefore brings about conflict. If the mind has not brought about right relationship with another, mere inquiry into or seeking reality has no meaning whatsoever, because life is relationship. Life is action in relationship, and if that is not deeply, fully understood and established, you cannot go very far. Without that, merely to seek becomes a form of escape from the reality of relationship. Until the mind is deeply established in behavior that is righteous, order that is virtue, search or inquiry into what is real has no meaning, because a mind that is not free from conflict can only escape into what it considers to be real.

How can the mind—which is so conditioned, which is shaped by the environment, by the culture in which we are born—find that which is not conditioned? How can a mind that is always in conflict within itself find that which has never been in conflict? So in inquiring, the search has no meaning.

What has meaning and significance is whether the mind can be free, free from fear, free from all its petty little egotistic struggles, free from violence, and so on.

Can the mind—your mind—be free of that? That is the real inquiry. And when the mind is really free, then only is it capable without any delusion of asking if there is, or if there is not, something that is absolutely true, that is timeless, immeasurable.

You know, it is really quite important to find this out for yourself, because you have to be a light to yourself, you cannot possibly take the light of another, or be illumined by another. You have to find out for yourself this whole movement of life with all its ugliness and beauty and the pleasures and the misery and the confusion, and step out of that stream. And if you have, and I hope you have, then what is religion? All organized religions are a matter of thought building a structure, a legend round a person or an idea or a conclusion.

That is not religion at all. Religion is a life that is lived integrally, wholly, not fragmented.

Most minds are broken up, fragmented, and what is fragmented is corrupt. So what is the mind, the brain, that can function in the world in the field of knowledge, and also live in freedom from the known? These two must go together in harmony. Inquiring into this deeply, one asks: What is meditation?

Let us find out for ourselves if it has any meaning whatsoever. To do that you must completely discard what everybody has said about meditation. Can you? Or are you caught in a net, a trap of other people’s ideas about meditation? If you are caught in that, you are merely entertaining yourself, or trying to find the light
of another through some practice. When you practice, you are making the mind conform to a pattern set by another. Don’t follow anybody—including the speaker. Don’t accept what anybody says, because you have to be a light to yourself. You have to stand completely by yourself, and to do that, because you are the world and the world is you, you have to be free of the things of the world, which is to be free of the “me,” the ego and all its aggression, vanities, stupidities, ambition.

So what is meditation? How do you find out? It is obvious that to see anything very, very clearly the mind must be quiet. If I want to listen to what is being said, I must give attention to it, and that attention has the quality of silence.

To find out not only the meaning of words, but beyond, I must listen very, very carefully. In that listening I am not interpreting what you are saying, I am not judging, I am not evaluating, I am actually listening to the word and what lies behind the word, knowing that the word is not the thing, that the description is not the described. So I am listening to you with total attention. In that attention there is no “me” as the listener, the “me” that separates itself from you who are talking, that divides the “me” and the “you.” So the mind that is capable of listening completely to what is being said and going behind the word, must give total attention. You do that when you are looking at a tree with total attention, or when you are listening to music, or when you are listening to somebody who is telling you something most urgent, serious. That state of attention in which the

“me” is totally absent is meditation. Because in that state there is no direction, there are no frontiers which thought has built around attention.

Attention implies a mind that has no desire to acquire, attain, arrive, or be something. Otherwise, conflict comes into being. So attention is the total absence of any conflict, a state of mind in which direction, will, has no place whatsoever.

And that takes place when I am listening to you, when I am listening to the sound of a bird, or when I am looking at the marvelous mountains. So in that state of attention there is no division as the observer and the observed. When there is that division, then there is conflict.

Now that is only the beginning of meditation. And if a mind is really serious in its inquiry, this meditation is necessary because then the way we live, which has lost all its meaning, becomes meaningful. Life becomes a movement, a harmony between the known and the unknown.

Meditation is a daily life in which there is no control whatsoever. Our life is wasted in the enormous energy that is dissipated in controlling. We spend our days controlling: “I must” and “I must not,” “I should” and “I should not.”

Suppressing, expanding, holding, withdrawing, being attached and breaking away from attachment, exercising will to achieve, to struggle, to build—in this there is always a direction, and where there is direction there must be control. We spend our days in controlling, and we do not know how to live a life completely free of control. It demands tremendous inquiry, great seriousness to find out a way of living in which there is not a shadow of control.

Why do we control at all, and when we control, who is the controller? And what is he controlling, that is, withholding, directing, shaping, conforming, imitating? One observes in oneself the contradictory desires: wanting and not
wanting, doing this and not doing that, the oppositions of duality. Now is there duality at all, the opposite? I am not talking of the opposite of man and woman, dark and light; but inwardly, psychologically, are there opposites at all or only

“what is”? The opposite exists only when I do not know what to do with “what is.” If I know what to do with “what is,” if the mind is capable of dealing with

“what is” and going beyond, the opposite is not necessary. That is, if you are violent, as most people are, the practicing of its opposite, nonviolence, has no meaning, because there is an interval of time, and during that interval you are being violent. What has meaning is to be concerned to go beyond violence, not to the opposite but to be free of it. I am always translating the new in terms of the old, and therefore I never meet the new with a fresh mind. I translate the new reaction, the new feeling I have, as violence, because I am looking at it with the ideas, conclusions, words, meanings of the past. So the past creates the opposite of “what is.” But if the mind can observe “what is” without naming it, without categorizing it, putting it into a frame, or wasting energy to escape from it, if it can look at it without the observer, which is the past, look at it without the eyes of the past, then you are totally free of it. Do it and you will see.

Have you noticed in yourself there is always the observer and the observed?

There is you looking at the thing, so there is a division between you and the thing you observe. You observe a tree, and the observer, the past, says, “That’s an oak tree.” When it says, “That is an oak tree,” that knowledge is the past and that past is the observer. So the observer is different from the tree. Obviously, that must be so. But when we are dealing with psychological facts, is the observer different from the thing observed? When I say, “I am violent,” is the observer, the see-er who says, “I am violent,” different from that which it calls violent? Obviously not. So when it separates itself from the fact as the observer, it creates a duality, a conflict, and it tries to escape from that conflict through various means, so the observer is not capable of meeting that fact of violence. You work it out to understand this movement of division as the observer and the observed that creates conflict and therefore has no direct relationship with another.

In meditation, life is a total movement, not fragmented, not broken up as the

“me” and the “you.” In that there is no me to experience. Do you see that the mind is incapable of experiencing something that it does not know? The mind cannot possibly experience the immeasurable. You can give a significance to that word and say, “I will experience that state of the immeasurable,” higher consciousness and all that business, but who is the experiencer? The experiencer is the past and he can only recognize the experience in terms of the past, therefore he must know it already. Therefore in meditation there is no experiencing. Ah, if you do this you will climb to the highest heaven.

You have not only to understand this whole movement of daily living, which is part of meditation, and in that have no control whatsoever so that there is no conflict, no direction, but you also have to have a life that is immensely energetic, active, real, creative. In meditation, the mind becomes completely quiet, silent. You know, silence has space—and the mind has no space. It is too crowded with the knowledge that we have acquired and it is eternally occupied with itself—what it must do, what it must not do, what it must achieve, what it
must gain, what others are thinking about it. It is full of knowledge of other people, conclusions and ideas and opinions. So we have very little space in our minds. And one of the factors of violence is the lack of space. In ourselves we have very little space, and one must have space. It is part of meditation to come upon the space not invented by thought, because when you have space the mind can function totally. A brain that is completely in order—absolute order, not relative order—has no conflict and therefore it can move in space.

Silence is really an extreme form of the highest order. So silence is not something you contrive, that you try to practice, or try to become aware of. The moment you are aware that you are silent, it is not silence. Silence is the highest mathematical order, and in that silence the other parts of the brain that have not been occupied, that have not been active, become totally active. The brain, not being in conflict, has great space, not created by thought as space but an actual sense of space, and that space has no border. Thought has no place in this whatsoever. As we are describing this, we are employing thought, using the words that thought uses to communicate, but the description is not the described.

So the mind with its brain becomes totally silent and therefore of the greatest order. Where there is order there is vast space.

And what lies in this vast space nobody can tell you because it is absolutely indescribable. Anybody—it doesn’t matter who it is—who describes it or tries to achieve it through repeating words and all that kind of silly nonsense, is desecrating something holy, sacred.

And this is meditation. And this is part of our daily living; it isn’t something you do at odd moments, it is there all the time, bringing order in everything that it is doing. And in this there is great beauty. Not the beauty that is in the hills and the trees and in the pictures in the museums, or in music, because it is the thing that is beauty and therefore love.

A Sacred Life

Where there is the activity of the self, meditation is not possible. This is very important to understand, not verbally but actually. Meditation is a process of emptying the mind of all the activity of the self, of all the activity of the “me.” If you do not understand the activity of the self, then your meditation only leads to illusion, your meditation then only leads to self-deception, your meditation then will only lead to further distortion. So to understand what meditation is, you must understand the activity of the self.

The self has had a thousand worldly, sensuous, or intellectual experiences, but it is bored with them because they have no meaning. The desire to have wider, more expansive, transcendental experiences is part of the “me,” the self.

When you have such experiences, or visions, you must be able to recognize those experiences, or those visions, but when you can recognize them, they are not new, they are projections of your background, of your conditioning, in which the mind delights as though they are something new. Don’t agree, but see the truth of it, then it is yours.

One of the demands, urges, desires of the mind, the self, is to change “what is” into “what should be.” It doesn’t know what to do with “what is” because it cannot resolve “what is,” therefore it projects an idea of “what should be,” which is the ideal. This projection is the antithesis of “what is,” and therefore there is a conflict between “what is” and “what should be.” That very conflict is the blood and the breath of the self.

Another activity of the self is the will—the will to become, the will to change.

Will is a form of resistance in which we have been educated from childhood.

Will has become extraordinarily important to us, economically, socially, and religiously. Will is a form of ambition, and from will arises the desire to control—to control one thought by another thought, one activity of thought by another activity of thought. “I must control my desire”: the “I” is put together by thought, a verbal statement as the “me” with its memories, experiences. That thought wants to control, shape, deny, another thought.

One of the activities of the self is to separate itself as the “me,” as the observer. The observer is the past, all the accumulated knowledge, experience, memories. So the “I,” the “me,” separates itself as the observer from the “you,”

the observed. “We” and “they.” We the Germans, the communists, the Catholics, the Hindus, and they the heathens, and so on, and so on. As long as the activities of the self—as long as the “me” as the observer, as the controller, as will; the self demanding, desiring experience—exist, meditation becomes a means of self-hypnosis, an escape from daily life, an escape from all the misery and problems.

As long as those activities exist, there must be deception. See the reality, not verbally, but actually, that a person who is inquiring into meditation, who wants to see what takes place, must understand all the activities of the self.

Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the activity of the self. And you cannot empty the mind of the activity of the self by any practice, by any method, or by saying “Tell me what to do.” Therefore, if you are really interested in this,
you have to find out for yourself your own activity of the self—the habits, the verbal statements, the gestures, the deceptions, the guilt that you cultivate and hold on to as though it were some precious thing instead of throwing it away, the punishments—all the activities of the self. And that demands awareness.

Now, what is being aware? Awareness implies an observation in which there is no choice whatsoever, just observing without interpretation, translation, distortion. And that will not take place as long as there is an observer who is trying to be aware. Can you be aware, attentive, so that in that attention there is only observation and not the observer?

Now listen to this. You have read that statement: awareness is a state of mind in which the observer with its choice is not. You hear that statement. You immediately want to put it into practice, into action. You say, “What am I to do?

How am I to be aware without the observer?” You want an immediate activity—
which means you have not really listened to that statement. You are more concerned with putting that statement into action than with listening to the statement. It is like looking at a flower and smelling the flower. The flower is there, the beauty, the color, the loveliness of it. You look at it and pick it up and begin to tear it to pieces. And you do the same when you listen to the statement that in awareness, in attention, there is no observer, that if the observer is, then you have the problem of choice, conflict. You hear that statement and the immediate reaction of the mind is, “How am I to do it?” So you are more concerned with the action of what to do about that statement than with actually listening to it. If you listen to it completely, then you are breathing the perfume, the truth of it. And the perfume, the truth, acts, not the “me” that is struggling to act rightly. Have you got it?

So, to find out the beauty and the depth of meditation, you have to inquire into the activities of the self, which is put together by time. So you have to understand time.

Please listen to this. Listen, don’t do anything about it, just listen. Find out if it is false or true. Just observe. Listen with your heart, not with your beastly little mind.

Time is movement, both physically and psychologically. Physically to move from here to there needs time. Psychologically, the movement of time is to change “what is” into “what should be.” So thought, which is time, can never be still because thought is movement, and this movement is part of the self. We are saying thought is the movement of time. Thought is the movement of time because it is the response of knowledge, experience, memory, which is time. So thought can never be still. Thought can never be new. Thought can never bring about freedom.

When one is aware of the movement of the self in all its activities—as ambition, seeking fulfilment, in relationship—out of that comes a mind that is completely still. Not thought is still—you understand the difference? Most people are trying to control their thoughts, hoping thereby to bring quietness to the mind. I have seen dozens of people who have practiced for years trying to control their thoughts, hoping to have a mind that is really quiet. But they don’t see that thought is a movement. You may divide that movement as the observer
and the observed, or the thinker and the thought, or the controller and the controlled, but it is still movement. And thought can never be still: if it is still it dies, therefore it cannot afford to be still.

If you have gone deeply into all this, into yourself, then you will see that the mind becomes completely still—not enforced, not controlled, not hypnotized.

And it must be still because it is only in that stillness that a totally new, unrecognizable thing can take place. If I force my mind to be still through various tricks and practices, shocks, then it is the stillness of a mind that has struggled with thought, controlled thought, suppressed thought. That is entirely different from a mind that has seen the activity of the self, seen the movement of thought as time. The very attention to all that movement brings about the quality of mind that is completely still, in which something totally new can take place.

Meditation is the emptying of the mind of all the activity of the self. Now, will it take time? Will the emptying, or rather—I won’t use that word emptying, you will get frightened—can this process of the self come to an end, through time, through days, through years? Or has it to end instantly? Is that possible? All this is part of your meditation. When you say to yourself, “I will gradually get rid of the self,” that is part of your conditioning, and you enjoy yourself in the meantime. When you introduce the word gradually, that involves time, a period, and during that period you enjoy yourself—all the pleasures, all the feelings of guilt which you cherish, which you hold on to, and the anxiety which also gives you a certain sense of living. And to be free of all that you say, “It will take time.” That is part of our culture, part of our evolutionary conditioning. Now will psychologically putting an end to the activities of the self take time? Or does it not take time at all, but rather the release of a new kind of energy that will put all that aside instantly?

Does the mind actually see the falseness of the proposition that it needs time to dissolve the activities of the self? Do I see clearly the falseness of it? Or do I see intellectually that it isn’t quite right, and therefore I go on with it! If I see the falseness of it actually, then it has gone, hasn’t it? Time is not involved at all.

Time is needed only when there is analysis, when there is inspection or examination of each broken piece that constitutes the “me.” When I see the whole movement of this as thought, it has no validity, though man has accepted it as inevitable. Then because the mind sees the falseness of it, it ends. You don’t go too close to the edge of a precipice unless you are rather unbalanced, insane, and then you go over; if you are sane, healthy, you stay away from it. The movement away from it doesn’t take time, it is an instant action because you see what would happen if you fell. So in the same way, if you see the falseness of all the movement of thought, of analysis, of the acceptance of time, and so on, then there is the instant action of thought as the “me” ending itself.

So a religious life is a life of meditation, in which the activities of the self are not. And one can live such a life in this world every day. That is, one can live a life as a human being in which there is constant alertness, watchfulness, awareness, an attentive mind that is watching the movement of the self. And the watching is watching from silence, not from a conclusion. Because the mind has observed the activities of the self and sees the falseness of it and therefore the
mind has become extraordinarily sensitive, and silent. And from that silence it acts. In daily life.

Have you got it? Have we shared this together? Because it is your life, not my life. It is your life of sorrow, of tragedy, of confusion, guilt, reward, punishment.

All that is your life. If you are serious you have tried to untangle all this. You have read some book, or followed a teacher, or listened to somebody, but the problems remain. These problems will exist as long as the human mind moves within the field of the activity of the self; that activity of the self must create more and more and more problems. When you observe, when you become extraordinarily aware of this activity of the self, then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet, sane, healthy, holy. And from that silence our life in everyday activity is transformed.

Religion is the cessation of the “me,” and action born of that silence. That life is a sacred life full of meaning.

Observing from a Quiet Mind

To discover what it means to love, mustn’t one be free of possession, attachment, jealousy, anger, hatred, anxiety, fear? Free of attachment—let’s take that for the moment. When you are attached, what are you attached to? Suppose one is attached to a table, what does that attachment imply? Pleasure, a sense of possession, appreciation of the utility of it, the feeling that it is a marvelous table, and so on, and so on. When a human being is attached to another, what is going on? When someone is attached to you, what is the feeling of the other who is attached to you? In that attachment there is pride of possession, a sense of domination, fear of losing that person, therefore jealousy, and therefore greater attachment, greater possessiveness, anxiety. Now, if there is no attachment, does it mean no love, no responsibility? For most of us love means this terrible conflict between human beings, and so relationship becomes a perpetual anxiety.

You know all this, I don’t have to tell you. And that, we call love. And to escape from this terrible strain of what we call love, we have all kinds of entertainment—from television to religion. We quarrel and go off to church, or to the temple, and come back and begin again. This is going on all the time.

Can a man or woman be free of all this, or is that impossible? If it is not possible, then our life is a perpetual state of anxiety, and from that all kinds of neurotic attitudes, beliefs, actions, take place. Is it possible to be free of attachment? That implies a great deal. Is it possible for a human being to be free of attachment and yet feel responsible?

Now to be free of attachment doesn’t mean its opposite, detachment. It is very important to understand this. When we are attached, we know the pain of attachment, the anxiety of it, and we say, “For God’s sake, I must detach myself from all this horror.” So the battle of detachment begins, the conflict. If you are aware of the word and the fact—the word attachment and freedom from that word, which is the feeling—then you observe that feeling without any judgement. Then you will see that out of that total observation there is quite a different movement taking place, which is neither attachment or detachment. Are you doing it as we are talking, or are you just listening to a lot of words? You know you are tremendously attached to a house, to a belief, to a prejudice, to a conclusion, to a person, to some ideal. Attachment gives great security, which is an illusion, isn’t it? It is an illusion to be attached to something because that something may go away. So what you are attached to is the image that you have built about the thing. Can you be free of attachment so that there is a responsibility that is not a duty?

Then what is love when there is no attachment? If you are attached to a nationality, you worship the isolation of nationality, which is a form of glorified tribalism. What does that do? It separates, doesn’t it? If I am tremendously attached to my nationality as a Hindu, and you are attached to Germany, France, Italy, England, we are separate—and the wars, and all the complexity of all that goes on. Now if you have no attachment, what takes place? Is that love?

So attachment separates. I am attached to my belief, and you are attached to your belief, therefore there is separation. Just see the consequences of it, the implications of it. Where there is attachment there is separation, and therefore there is conflict. Where there is conflict there cannot possibly be love. And what is the relationship of one person to another when there is freedom from attachment and all the implications of it? Is that the beginning—I am just using the word beginning, don’t jump on it—is that the beginning of compassion?

When there is no nationality and there is no attachment to any belief whatsoever, to any conclusion, to any ideal, then a human being is a free human being, and his relationship with another is out of freedom, out of love, out of compassion.

You see, all this is a part of awareness. Now, must you analyze as we have done to see what attachment means, with all the implications of it, or can you observe the totality of it instantly and then analyze? Not the other way round. We are used to analysis, part of our education is to analyze, and so we spend a lot of time on that. We are proposing something quite different: to observe, see the totality, and then analyze. Then it becomes very simple. But if you analyze and try to reach the totality, you may go wrong; you generally do. But to observe the totality of something, which means having no direction, then analysis becomes either important or unimportant, you can analyze or not analyze.

Now I would like to go into something else from this. Is there something sacred in life, which is part of all this? Is there something sacred in your life, holy? Remove the word, separate the word, the image, the symbol—which is very dangerous—and when you do that, ask yourself, “Is there anything really sacred in my life, or is everything superficial, is everything put together by thought?” Thought is not sacred, is it? Do you think thought and the things that thought has put together are sacred? We have been conditioned to that; as a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, we are conditioned to worship, adore, pray to things that thought has put together. And that we call sacred.

One has to find out, because if you do not find out if there is something really sacred that is not put together by thought, life becomes more and more superficial, more and more mechanical, and the end of one’s life is utterly meaningless. You know, we are so attached to thinking and the whole process of thinking, and we worship the things that thought has put together. An image, a symbol, a sculpture, whether made by the hand or by the mind, is the process of thought. And thought is memory, experience, knowledge, which is past. And the past becomes the tradition, and the tradition becomes the most sacred thing. So are we worshipping the tradition? Is there something that has nothing to do with thought and tradition, with rituals, with all the circus that goes on? One has to find out.

How do you find out? Not a method; when I use the word how, I am not suggesting a method. Is there something sacred in life? There is a whole bloc of humanity that says, “There is absolutely nothing. You are the result of environment, and you can change the environment, so never talk about anything sacred. You will be a mechanical, happy individual.” But, if one is very, very serious about this matter—and one has to be really profoundly serious—you don’t belong to a materialist bloc or a religious one, which is also based on
thought. Then you have to find out. You don’t assert anything. Then you begin to inquire.

Now what does it mean to inquire into oneself so as to find out if there is anything deeply sacred, holy, in one’s life—in life, not in one’s life—in living?

Is there something marvelously, supremely, sacred? Or is there nothing at all?

It is necessary to have a very quiet mind, because it is only in that freedom that you can find out. There must be freedom to look, but if you say, “Well, I like my belief, I’ll stick to that,” you are not free. Or if you say, “Everything is materialistic,” which is a movement of thought, then also you are not free. So to observe there must be freedom from the imposition of civilizations, personal desires, personal hopes, prejudices, longings, fears. You can only observe when the mind is completely still. Can the mind be completely without movement?

Because if there is movement there is distortion. One finds it terribly difficult, because thought comes in immediately, so one says, “I must control thought.”

But the controller is the controlled. When you see that, that the thinker is the thought, the controller is the controlled, the observer is the observed, then there is no movement. One realizes anger is part of the observer who says, “I am angry,”

so anger and the observer are the same. That is clear, that is simple. In the same way, the thinker who wants to control thought is still thought. When one realizes that, the movement of thought stops.

When there is no movement of any kind in the mind, then naturally the mind is still, without effort, without compulsion, without will. It is naturally still; it is not cultivated stillness because that is mechanical, which is not stillness but just an illusion of stillness. So there is freedom. Freedom implies all that we have talked about, and in that freedom there is silence, which means no movement.

Then you can observe—then there is observation, then there is only observation, not the observer observing. So there is only observation out of total silence, complete stillness of mind. Then what takes place?

If you have gone that far—which is freedom from one’s conditioning, and therefore no movement, and complete silence, quietness—then there is the operation of intelligence, isn’t there? To see the nature of attachment and all its implications, to have an insight into it, is intelligence. Only when you come to that point, which is to be free, with the operation of intelligence going with it, do you have a quiet, healthy, sane mind. And in that quietness you will find out if there is something really sacred, or nothing at all.

Enlightenment Is Not a Fixed Place

We ought to consider the relationship of religion to daily life, and whether there is, or is not, something unnameable, a timeless state of mind. One can call it enlightenment, a realization of the absolute truth. Can the human mind ever come upon something that is incorruptible, that is not put together by that human mind with its thought, something that must exist, which will give a perfume, a beauty, a loveliness to life?

Man, if you observe throughout history, has been seeking in so many different ways something beyond ordinary life, beyond this world. He has done everything possible—fasted, tortured himself, engaged in every form of neurotic behavior, worshipped legends and their heroes, accepted the authority of others who said, “I know the way, follow me.” Man, whether he is in the West or in the East, has always inquired into this question. The intellectuals, the philosophers, the psychologists, and the analysts see it as neurotic inquiry that has no value whatsoever. To them it is some form of hysteria, some form of make-believe, something to be totally avoided. Because they see around them absurdities in the name of religion, incredible behavior without reason, without any substance behind it, they prefer to deal with human beings who will conform to the pattern that is already established, or the pattern that they think is right. You must have observed all this in different ways.

But the intellect is only part of life. It has its normal place, but human beings throughout the world have given extraordinary importance to the intellect, the capacity to reason, to pursue something logically, to establish an activity based on reason and logic. Human beings are not merely intellectual entities, they are whole complex beings.

Man, you must have observed, wants to find something that is both rational and has depth, a full meaning, not invented by the intellect; and he has always, from ancient days, sought it out. Religion that is organized is a business affair, a vast machinery, to condition the human mind according to certain beliefs, dogmas, rituals, and superstitions. It is a very profitable business, and we accept it because our life is so empty. Life lacks beauty, so we want romantic, mystical legends. And we worship legends, the myths, but all the edifices man has built, physically as well as psychologically, have nothing whatsoever to do with reality.

What is a mind that is free from all the human endeavor, that has really put aside everything that man has created in his search for this thing called reality?

You know, this is one of the most difficult things to put into words. Words must be used but communication is not only verbal but nonverbal. That is, both you and the speaker must inquire at the same time, at the same level, with the same intensity. Then communion is possible between you and the speaker. We are trying to commune not only nonverbally but also verbally about this extraordinarily complex question, which needs clear, objective thinking, and also going beyond all thought.

Meditation is not for the immature. The immature can play with it as they do now, sitting cross-legged, breathing in a certain way, standing on their heads,
taking drugs, in order to experience something original. Through drugs, through fasting, through any system, you can never find or come upon that which is eternal, timeless. There is no short cut to all this. One has to work hard; one has to become very aware of what one is doing, what one is thinking, without any distortion. And all that requires great maturity, not of age but maturity of the mind to be capable of observation, seeing the false as the false, the true in the false, and truth as truth. That is maturity, whether in the political scene, in the business world, or in your relationship.

You have probably heard the word meditation or read something about it, or you may have followed some guru who tells you what to do. I wish you had never heard that word, then your mind would be fresh to inquire. Some people have been to India, but I don’t know why they go there: truth isn’t there; there is romance, but romance is not truth. Truth is where you are. It is not in some foreign country, it is where you are. Truth is what you are doing, how you are behaving. It is there, not in shaving your head or in all those stupid things that man has done.

Why should you meditate? The meaning of that word is to ponder, to think over, to look, to perceive, to see clearly. To see clearly, to observe without distortion, there must be an awareness of your background, of your conditioning.

Just to be aware of it, not to change it, not to alter it, not to transform it or be free of it, but just to observe. In that observation to see clearly without distortion the whole content of consciousness is the beginning and the ending of meditation.

The first step is the last step.

Why should one meditate and what is meditation? You know, if you looked out of your window in the morning and saw the extraordinary beauty of the morning light, distant mountains, and the light on the water, and if you observed without the word, without saying to yourself, “How beautiful that is,” if you observed completely and were totally attentive in that observation, your mind must have been completely quiet. Otherwise you cannot observe, otherwise you cannot listen. So meditation is the quality of mind that is completely attentive and silent. It is only then that you can see the flower, the beauty of it, the color of it, the shape of it, and it is only then that the distance between you and the flower ceases. Not that you identify yourself with the flower, but the time element that exists between you and that, the distance, disappears. And you can only observe very clearly when there is nonverbal, nonpersonal but attentive observation in which there is no center as the “me.” That is meditation.

Now, to see whether you can observe nonverbally, without distortion, without the “me” as memory interfering, requires a great deal of inquiry. That implies that thought must not interfere in observation. That is to observe without the image in relationship with another, to observe another without the images you have built about the other. I do not know if you have tried it. The image is “you,”

the “you” that has accumulated various impressions, various reactions about another; that forms the image and so divides you from the other. And this division brings conflict. But when there is no image you can observe the other with a total sense of attention in which there is love, compassion, and therefore no conflict. That is observation without the observer. In the same way to observe
a flower, everything about one, without division, for division implies conflict, and this division exists as long as thought becomes all important. And for most of us thought and the movement of thought, the activity of thought, is important.

And so the question arises: Can thought be controlled? Do you have to control thought so as not to let it interfere, but allow it to function in its proper place? Control implies suppression, direction, following a pattern, imitation, conformity. You have been trained to control from childhood, and in reaction to that the modern world says, “I won’t control, I’ll do anything I want.” We are not talking about doing what one wants, that is absurd. And this whole system of control is also absurd. Control exists only when there is no understanding. When you see something very clearly, there is no need for control. If my mind sees very clearly how thought interferes, how thought always separates, sees that the function of thought is always in the field of the known, then that very observation prevents all control of thought.

The word discipline means to learn, but not mechanically conforming, as it is accepted now. We are talking about a mind that is free from control and is capable of learning. Where there is learning there is no necessity at all for any kind of control. That is, as you are learning you are acting. A mind that is inquiring into the nature of meditation must always be learning, and learning brings its own order. Order is necessary in life. Order is virtue. Order in behavior is righteousness. Order is not the order that is imposed by society, by a culture, by environment, by compulsion or obedience. Order is not a blueprint; it comes into being when you understand disorder, not only outside you but in yourself.

Through the negation of disorder is order. Therefore we must look at the disorder of our life, the contradictions in ourselves, the opposing desires, saying one thing and doing, thinking another. In understanding, in looking at disorder, being attentive, aware choicelessly of disorder, order comes naturally, easily, without any effort. And such order is necessary.

Meditation is a process of life in which relationship with each other is clear, without any conflict. Meditation is the understanding of fear, of pleasure.

Meditation is the thing called love, and the freedom from death, the freedom to stand completely alone. That is one of the greatest things in life, because if you cannot stand alone inwardly, psychologically, you are not free. That aloneness is not isolation, a withdrawal from the world. That aloneness comes into being when you totally negate, actually—not verbally but actually with your life—all the things that man has put together in his fear, in his pleasure, in his searching for something that is beyond the daily routine of life.

If you have gone that far, then you will see that it is only the mind that has no illusions, that is not following anybody and therefore is free of all sense of authority, that can open the door. It is only such a mind that can see if there is, or if there is not, a timeless quality.

It is important to understand the question of time, not daily chronological time, that is fairly simple and clear, but psychological time, the time of tomorrow—“I will be something,” or “I will attain, I will succeed.” Is the whole idea of progress, of time being from here to there, an invention of thought? There is obviously progress from the bullock cart to the jet, but is there psychological
progress, the “me” becoming better, nobler, wiser? Can the “me,” which is the past, the “me” that has accumulated so many things—the insults, flatteries, pain, knowledge, suffering—can that progress to a better state? To advance from here to the better, time is necessary. To become something, time is necessary. But is there such a thing as becoming something? Will you become something better—
better in the sense of a better me, a more noble me with less conflict? That “me”

is the entity that separates into the “me” and the “not me,” the “we” and “they,”

the “me” as the American and the “me” as the Hindu, or the Russian, or whatever it is. So can the “me” ever become better? Or does the “me” have to cease completely and never think in terms of the better or of becoming something more? When you admit the more, the better, you are denying the good.

Meditation is the total negation of the “me,” so that the mind is never in conflict. A mind not in conflict is not in that state of peace that is just the interval between two conflicts, it is totally free from conflict. And that is part of meditation.

When you have understood psychological time, then the mind has space.

Have you noticed how little space we have, both physically and inwardly? Living in large cities, in cupboards, in narrow spaces, we become more violent, because we need space physically. Have you noticed also how little space we have inwardly, psychologically? Our minds are crowded with imagination, with all the things that we have learned, with various forms of conditioning, influences, propaganda. We are full of all the things that man has thought about, invented, our own desires, pursuits and ambitions, fears, and so on, and therefore there is very little space. Meditation, if you go into it very deeply, is the negation of all this, so that, in that state of attention, there is vast space without boundary. Then the mind is silent.

You may have learned from others that you must go through a system of meditation, that you must practice so that the mind becomes silent, that you must attain silence in order to become enlightened. That is called meditation, but that kind of meditation is sheer nonsense because when you practice there is the entity that practices, becoming more and more mechanical, therefore limited, insensitive, dull. And why should you practice? Why should you allow another to come between you and your inquiry? Why should the priests, or your guru, or your book come between you and what you want to find out? Is it fear? Is it that you want somebody to encourage you? Is it that you lean on somebody when you are yourself uncertain? And when you are uncertain and you lean on somebody for certainty you may be quite sure that you are choosing somebody who is equally uncertain. And therefore the person on whom you lean maintains that he is very certain. He says, “I know, I have achieved, I am the way, follow me.” So beware of a man who says he knows.

Enlightenment is not a fixed place. There is no fixed place. All one has to do is understand the chaos, the disorder in which we live. In the understanding of that we have order and there comes clarity, there comes certainty. And that certainty is not the invention of thought. That certainty is intelligence. And when you have all this, when the mind sees all this very clearly, then the door opens.

What lies beyond is not nameable. It cannot be described, and anyone who
describes it has never seen it. It cannot be put into words because the word is not the thing, the description is not the described. All that one can do is to be totally attentive in relationship, to see that attention is not possible when there is image, to understand the whole nature of pleasure and fear, and to see that pleasure is not love, and desire is not love.

And you have to find out everything for yourself; nobody can tell you. Every religion has said, don’t kill. To you those are just words, but if you are serious you have to find out what it means for yourself. What has been said in the past may be true, but that truth is not yours. You have to find out, you have to learn what it means never to kill. Then it is your truth and it is a living truth. In the same way—not through another, not through practice of a system invented by another, not through the acceptance of a guru, a teacher, or a savior—you yourself in your freedom have to see what is truth, what is false, and find out for yourself completely how to live a life in which there is no strife whatsoever.

The whole of this is meditation.

The End of Searching

Is there something that is not produced by thought? That means, is there something that is beyond time? We are accustomed to the idea of physical growth. One must have time to learn, to understand, so we are used to the idea of change through time. There is physical time; time is necessary physically to cover the distance from one point to another. But we have taken that concept, that conclusion, into the psychological: “I don’t know myself, so I need time to know myself.” Psychological time is put there by thought. Do you actually need time to be free of greed? I am taking that as an example. Do you actually need several days’ time to be free of jealousy, anxiety, greed, envy? You are used to thinking that you do. When I say, “I will get over it,” the “will” is time. It is our habit, our tradition, our way of living to say, “I will get over my anger, my jealousy, my sense of inadequacy.” So the mind has become accustomed to the idea of psychological time—tomorrow, or many tomorrows. Now we are questioning that. We are saying that is not necessary. Time is not necessary to be free of greed. That is, if you are free of time, and you are greedy, there is no tomorrow; you attack it, you act, you do something immediately. Thought has invented psychological time as a means of avoiding, as a means of postponing, as a means of indulging in that which it already has. Thought has invented psychological time out of laziness.

Can you be free of the idea of tomorrow, psychologically? Please do go into it, look at it. Take your own anxiety, or whatever it is, your sexual indulgence. If you think that through certain sensory activity you will reach whatever you want to reach, the reaching is the movement of time. Can you see the truth of this, and that the very perception ends it? Are you doing it as we are talking? Or is it just an idea for you?

When the mind has inquired into time and found that the concept that tomorrow is a means to an end, psychologically, is illusory, then there is only perception and action without the interval of time. For example, when one sees the dangers of nationalism—wars, and so on—that very perception is the action of the ending of the feeling of being attached to a particular group. Are you doing it? Every evening, television in Britain says, “British, British, British” or, in France, “French, French, French.” When you see that this division brings disaster, and when you see the error of asking for time to be free from the conditioning of being British that you have had from childhood, that is the action that ends conflict. To see this demands a very serious mind, a mind that says, “I want to find out.”

Meditation is the ending of time. That is what we have done just now; we have meditated. We have meditated to find out the nature of time. Time is actual, necessary, to go from here to there, but psychologically time doesn’t exist. To discover that is a tremendous truth, a tremendous fact, because we have broken away from all the traditions. Tradition says to take time, to wait, and, if you do this or that, you will reach God. This also means the ending of hope. Hope implies the future. Hope is time. When someone is depressed, anxious, with a
hopeless sense of inadequacy, he hopes to advance, to learn to be free. When you see that there is psychologically no future, then you are dealing with facts, not with hopes.

What we have done in the inquiry into time is the beginning of meditation. It is part of meditation.

To find out if there is something beyond time, we mustn’t carry any problems with us. We are burdened with problems: personal problems, collective problems, international problems. Why do we have problems? Please ask yourself why you have problems: sexual problems, imaginary problems, the problem of not having a job, problems of inadequacy, the problem of saying, “I want to reach heaven and I can’t.” Is it possible to live a life without a single problem? This means that as each issue arises you dissolve it instantly, not carry it over. Carrying it over is the movement of time; that creates the problem. What is a problem? A problem is something that you have not understood, resolved, finished with; you worry over it, you are concerned about it, you cannot understand it and you struggle with it day after day after day. The mind is crippled by this process. But if there is no time, there is no problem. Do you actually see this in your heart—not in your mind, but in your heart? Do you see that the man or the woman who has problems is caught in time, and that, as an issue arises, if the mind is free of time, it deals with it instantly? The moment you have the idea of time, saying, “I will take time to resolve it,” you move away from the fact; and that is the problem. If we are to inquire into this, there must be no problem whatsoever. The mind must be free to look.

In inquiring into something beyond time, there must be a complete sense of relationship that can only come about when there is love. Love is not pleasure.

Obviously. Love is not desire. Love is not the fulfillment of your own sensory demands. Without that quality of love—do what you will: stand on your head, put on fancy robes and sit cross-legged in meditation for the rest of your life—
there is nothing. To find something beyond time, there must be right relationship and this quality of great affection, love, which is not the result of thought; which must be so that no problems exist.

In meditation, which is to bring about a mind that is absolutely quiet, any form of effort is futile. To make an effort to meditate means time, means struggle, means trying to achieve something that you have projected. So can there be an observation without effort, without control? I am using the word control with a great deal of hesitation, because we live in a permissive society—
one does what one likes, the more idiotic the better: drugs, sex, putting on clothes that are meaningless. The speaker is using the word control in the sense that when there is pure observation there is no need to control. Don’t deceive yourself by saying, “I am observing purely; therefore I need have no control,” and indulge yourself. That becomes nonsensical. When a mind is “under control,” that control is brought about by thought. Thought is limited, and out of its limitation it desires something, so it says, “I must control.” Such a mind has become a slave to an idea, not a fact; to a concept, to a conclusion, like a person who believes in some religion very strongly and is incapable of thinking freely.

A mind that is in conflict, that has problems; a mind that has not resolved relationship and therefore has no love, is incapable of going beyond. It can only go to what it thinks is beyond within its own circle. It might invent that it is going beyond, but it is not. If we are serious and have come to this point where all the things that man has been caught in are put aside, then in the mind, all the senses, the brain, there is a tremendous sense of love, with its intelligence. Then we can proceed to find out.

A mind that is quiet is not only physically quiet. Quietness is not necessarily sitting in a certain position. You can lie down, do what you like, but the body must be absolutely quiet. It must be uncontrolled, because if you impose anything there is conflict. The mind, being free and therefore absolutely quiet, can observe. It is not, “I am observing,” there is only observation without the “I.”

If there is “I” observing, there is duality, there is separation. The “I” is “me”—
that is, “you”—and it is made up of many things, past remembrances, past experiences, past problems, present problems, anxiety. If we have gone that far, the “I” is now absent. It is not “I” who am observing. There is only observation.

Then what takes place? What we have done now is real meditation: the sense of inquiry into the self, self-awareness, knowing all its problems, knowing all the desires, pressures, conflicts, sorrow. That awareness can come into existence only when you are observing your reactions in relationship. You can’t observe yourself just by going off and sitting under a tree; you can somewhat, but it is only in relationship that all your reactions arise. The mind is now in a state where there is no problem, no effort, no control, and essentially no will, because will is the essence of desire. “I will,” “I want,” “I must,” are all desire demanding something that is in time. To achieve something I must exercise will to gain it. So the mind is free of all that.

If you have gone that far, then what is there? Man has sought something sacred, something holy, something imperishable, incorruptible, timeless. He says,

“I have understood my life completely, now what is there? What more is there beyond?” All search must end too, because if you are seeking God, or truth, or whatever it is, it may be your own pleasure, it may be your own sexual urges, it may be your own ending of certain problems. To search implies that when you find what you seek you must recognize it; and it must satisfy you, otherwise you will throw it out. It must answer all your problems—and it won’t, because the problems are created by yourself. So the person who says, “I am seeking,” is really quite unbalanced, because he is playing tricks upon himself. So when all that is totally finished, then the mind is absolutely quiet in pure observation.

Anything beyond that is merely a description, is merely putting together words to convey something that is incommunicable.

All one can do is not to describe that but to meet another with the same capacity, with the same intensity, at the same level. So, what is love? It is to meet another with the same intensity, at the same level, at the same time. Isn’t it? That is love. I am not talking of physical love, I am talking of love that is not desire, that is not pleasure. To meet somebody with the same intensity, with the same sense of time, and with the same passion—that is love.

If there is that love, and you have this quality of mind that is silent, there is communication without words. That is a communication that is really communion, complete sharing of something that cannot be put into words. The moment you put it into words it is gone, because the word is not the thing.

So where are we? Where are you with regard to what you have heard, what you have learned, what you have seen for yourself? Is it just mere words for you to carry? Or is there a deep fundamental change so that you are free of all your problems, free of fear, and there is that perfume that can never die, which is love?

And out of that come intelligence and action.

Pure Observation

Do we listen to what we say to each other? You are talking to yourself most of the time, and someone comes along and wants to tell you something, but you haven’t the time or the inclination or the intention to listen. There is constant deafness, no sense of space but deafness, so that we never listen to each other.

Hearing is not only with the ear but also listening to the meaning of the word, the significance of the word and the sound of the word. The sound is very important; when there is sound there is space, otherwise there is no sound. It is only in space that sound can take place. So the art of listening, if one may point out most respectfully, is not only hearing with the ear but also listening to the sound of the word. The word has a sound and to listen to that sound there must be space. But if you listen while all the time translating what is being said into your own prejudices and your own pleasurable or unpleasurable processes, then you are not listening at all.

Can you listen not only to what the speaker is saying but also to your own reaction to what is being said, and not correct your reaction to conform to what is being said? Then there is a process going on: the speaker is saying something that you are listening to, and you are also listening to your reactions to what is being said, and you give space to the sound of your own reactions and also to what is being said. It means tremendous attention, not just getting into a kind of trance and going off. If you listen, in that listening there is a miracle. The miracle is that you are completely with the fact of what is being said and listening to that, and listening also to your own responses. It is a simultaneous process. You listen to what is being said and your reaction to what is being said, which is instantaneous, and you listen to the whole sound of it, which means having space. So you are giving your whole attention to listening. This is an art that is not to be learned by going to a college, passing some degrees, but by listening to everything—to a river going by, to the birds, to an aeroplane, to your wife or your husband—which is much more difficult because you have become used to each other. You almost know what she is going to say, and she knows very well what you are going to say, after ten days, after ten years; so you have shut off your hearing altogether.

Can you learn—not tomorrow, but now as you are sitting there—the art of listening? That is, to listen to, to be aware of, your own responses and allow space to the sound of your own rhythm, and also to listen outside. It is a total process, a unitary movement of listening. This is an art that demands your highest attention; because when you so attend there is no listener, there is only seeing the fact, the reality of the fact or the falseness of the fact. If you really want to probe into the nature of a brain that is religious and meditative, you have to listen very, very attentively to everything. It is like a tremendous river moving.

Is religion in the structure of thought; or is it beyond thought? Thought, which is always based on experience and knowledge and memory, is very limited. To examine what is beyond thought, but not have thought examining, that is the difficulty. I see that the activity of thought is completely limited in any
direction, whether it is in the technological world or psychologically. Thought, with all its activity, is limited, and therefore there must be conflict. That is understood. When that is understood, then what is the instrument that can probe into something that is not the activity of thought? Is that possible? Thought can investigate its own activity, its own limitation, its own process of putting things together, destroying one thing and creating something else. Thought, in its own confusion, can bring about a certain order, but that order is limited order.

Therefore it is not supreme order. Order means the whole business of existence.

Perhaps “to probe” is wrong, “to investigate” is wrong, because you cannot investigate into something that is beyond thought. To understand whether it is possible to observe without any movement of thought, to observe the tree, to listen to the stream, without any interference of the word, just to observe without any movement of past remembrances entering into your observation, requires complete freedom from the past as the observer.

Can you observe without the word, without all the remembrances and associations the word contains? Can you look at your wife—or your girlfriend, or your husband—without the word wife, without all the remembrances that word contains? See the importance of this: that you look at her, or him, or the river, as though for the first time. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you look out of your window and see mountains and valleys and trees, and green fields, it is an astonishing sight when you look at it as though you were just born.

Which means to observe without any bias, to observe without any conclusion, prejudice. You cannot do this if you are half awake. If you see what is implied, you do it easily. If I look at my wife from all the images, incidents, memories, and hurts, I never look at her. I am always looking at her through the images of past memories. Can you look at your girlfriend, or your wife, or your husband as though for the first time without all the images, memories?

To observe the nature of a religious brain, not contaminated by thought, demands your greatest attention. That means you are totally free from any commitment to a guru, to a church, to your ideas, to your traditions of the past—
completely free to observe. When you so observe, what has taken place in the very nature of the brain?

I have always looked at the tree, at the river, at the sky, at the beauty of a cloud, at my wife, my children, my husband, my daughter, with a remembrance, with an image. That is my conditioning. And you come along and tell me to look without the word, without the image, without all the past remembrances. And I say I can’t do it. My immediate response is that I can’t do it. Which means I am not actually listening to what you are saying. The response is instantaneous, and I say, “I can’t do it.” Now, be attentive, be aware that to say, “I can’t do it,” is a form of resistance, because I am so committed to a particular guru, or to some form of religious doctrine, that I am afraid to let go. I must pay attention to that response, and also listen to what you are saying—that to observe there must be complete freedom from the word, from the content of the word—and listen to both.

So, be aware of this movement—the resistance and the listening, wanting to listen and knowing you cannot listen if you are resisting—and don’t move from
that. Don’t say, “I must understand.” Just watch it, so that you bring about total attention.

Pure observation is without the movement of the self. The word is the self.

The word, the remembrances, the accumulated hurts, fears, anxieties, pain, sorrow, and all the travail of human existence, are the self, which is my consciousness. And when you observe, all that is gone. All that doesn’t enter into the observation. There is no “me” observing. Then in that observation in daily life there is perfect order. There is no contradiction. Contradiction is disorder, and that very contradiction with its disorder has its own, peculiar, limited order.

Then we can ask what meditation is—not how to meditate. When you ask

“how,” there is somebody to tell you what to do. If you don’t ask “how,” and ask what meditation is, then you have to exert your own capacity, your own experience, however limited; you have to think. Meditation is to ponder over, think over, to be concerned, to be dedicated, not to something but to have the spirit of dedication. I hope you are listening to find out for yourself, for nobody, nobody, can teach you what meditation is, however long-bearded the gentleman may be, or whatever strange garments he may wear. Find out for yourself and stand by what you find out for yourself, and do not depend on anybody.

One must understand very carefully the meaning of the word meditation, which basically is “to measure.” What does that imply? From the ancient Greeks to modern times, the whole technological world is based on measurement. You cannot possibly put together a bridge, or build a marvelous hundred-storey-high building without measurement. We are also always measuring inwardly: “I have been, I will be”; “I am this, I have been this, I must be that.” Which is not only measurement but comparison. Measurement is comparison: you are tall, I am short; I am light and you are brown. Understand the meaning of measurement and the words better and more and never use them inwardly. Are you doing it now as we are talking together?

When the brain is free of measurement, the very brain cells that have been used to measurement, have been conditioned by measurement, have suddenly awakened to the truth that measurement is destructive psychologically. Therefore the very brain cells have undergone a mutation. Your brain has been accustomed to go in a certain direction, and you think that is the only way to whatever there is at the end of it. What is at the end of it is what you invent, naturally. When some man comes along and tells you that direction will lead you nowhere, you resist, saying, “No, you are wrong, all the traditions, all the great writers, all the great saints say you are wrong.” Which means you really haven’t investigated, you are quoting somebody else, which means you are resisting. So the man says,

“Don’t resist, listen to what I am saying; listen to what you are thinking, what your reaction is, and also to what I am saying.” So listen to both. And to listen to both you must give attention, which means space.

So find out whether you can live—not at moments of peculiar meditation, but live a daily life—without measurement. To live a life without any sense of measurement is meditation. Meditation implies a sense of deep understanding of that very word; and the very understanding and perception of, insight into, that word is the action that is to end psychological measurement. Are we doing this?

What is next in meditation? We have understood the nature of attention, complete listening, that to listen there must be space and there must be sound in that space. And we are asking if there is something sacred, something holy. We are not saying there is or there is not. Is there something never touched by thought? Not that I have reached something beyond thought, that is silly nonsense. Is there something that is beyond thought? Which is not matter?

Thought is a material process, so anything that is put together by thought is limited and therefore it isn’t complete, it isn’t the whole. Is there something that is completely out of the world of thought? We are inquiring together. We are not saying that there is or that there is not. We are inquiring, giving attention, listening—which means all the activity of thought has ended—except in the physical world where I have to do certain things. I have to go from here to there; I have to write a letter; I have to drive a car; I have to eat; I have to cook; I have to wash dishes. There I have to use thought, however limited, however routine.

But inwardly, that is psychologically, there can be no further activity unless thought has completely come to an end. Obviously. To observe anything beyond thought, thought must come to an end. It is childish, immature to ask: “What is the method to end thought; is it concentration, control?” Who is the controller?

To inquire, to have further insight, to observe if there is something beyond, not put together by thought, thought must completely end. The very necessity to find out ends thought. If I want to climb a mountain, I have to train, I have to work day after day, climbing more and more and more. I have to put all my energy into that. So the very necessity to find out if there is something more than thought creates the energy that then ends thought. The very importance of ending thought to observe further brings about the ending of thought. It is as simple as that. Don’t complicate it. If I want to swim, I have to learn. The intention to swim is stronger than the fear of swimming.

This is important, because thought, being limited, the limitation there has its own space, its own order. When there is the cessation of the activity of the limited thought then there is space, not only space in the brain, but space. Not the space that the self creates around itself, but the space that has no limit. Thought is limited and whatever it does will always be limited because in its very nature it is conditioned. When thought discovers for itself its limitation, and sees that its limitation is creating havoc in the world, then that very observation brings thought to an end, to discover something new. Then there is space, and silence.

That is, meditation is the understanding of and the ending of measurement, psychologically. It is the ending of becoming, and the seeing that thought is everlastingly limited. It may think of the limitless, but it is still born of the limited. So thought comes to an end. So the brain, which has been chattering along, muddled, limited, has suddenly become silent, without any compulsion, without any discipline, because it sees the fact, the truth. And the fact and the truth are beyond time.

Thought comes to an end. Then there is that sense of absolute silence in the brain. All the movement of thought has ended. It has ended but it can be brought into activity when there is necessity in the physical world. Now, it is quiet. It is silent. And where there is silence there must be space, immense space, because
there is no self. The self has its own limited space, it creates its own little space.

But when the self is not, which means when the activity of thought is not, then there is vast silence in the brain because it is now free from all its conditioning.

And it is only where there is space and silence that something new can be that is untouched by time/thought. That may be the most holy, the most sacred— may be. You cannot give it a name. It is perhaps the unnameable. And when there is that, then there is intelligence and compassion and love. So life is not fragmented. It is a whole unitary process, moving, living.

And death is as important as life, as living. They go together. Living means dying. To end all the trouble, the pain, anxiety, is dying. It is like two rivers moving together with tremendous volume of water. And all this, from the very beginning of our talk until now, is part of meditation. We have gone into the human nature, and nobody can bring about a radical mutation in that except you yourself.

Light Cannot Be Given by Another

One must be free to be completely a light to oneself. A light to oneself! This light cannot be given by another, nor can you light it at the candle of another. If you light it at the candle of another, it is just a candle, it can be blown out. The very investigation to find out what it means to be a light to oneself is part of meditation. We are going together to investigate what it means to be a light to oneself, and see how extraordinarily important it is to have this light.

Our conditioning is to accept authority—the authority of the priest, the authority of a book, the authority of a guru, the authority of someone who says he knows. In all spiritual matters, if one may use that word, spiritual, there must be no authority whatsoever; otherwise you cannot be free to investigate, to find out for yourself what meditation means. To go into the question of meditation, you must be wholly, inwardly free from all authority, from all comparison, including the authority of the speaker, especially that of the speaker—that is, of me—
because if you follow what he says it is finished. You must be aware of the importance of the authority of the doctor, the scientist, and understand the total unimportance of authority inwardly, whether it is the authority of another, or the authority of your own experience, knowledge, conclusions, prejudices. One’s own experiences, one’s own understanding, also become one’s own authority: “I understand, therefore I am right.” All those are forms of authority to be aware of.

Otherwise you can never be a light to yourself. When you are a light to yourself you are a light to the world, because the world is you, and you are the world.

So there is no one to guide you, no one to tell you that you are progressing, no one to encourage you. You have to stand completely alone in meditation. And this light to yourself can only come when you investigate into yourself what you are. That is self-awareness, to know what you are. Not according to psychologists, not according to some philosophers, not according to the speaker, but to know, to be aware of your own nature, of your own thinking, feeling, to find out the whole structure of it. Self-knowing is extraordinarily important. Not the description given by another, but actually “what is,” what you are; not what you think you are, or what you think you should be, but what actually is going on.

Have you ever tried it? Do you know how difficult it is to be aware of what is actually taking place inside the skin, as it were? Because we observe through the knowledge of the past, and if you inquire with the knowledge that you have acquired as an experience, or have gathered from another, then you are examining yourself from the background of the past. Therefore you are not actually observing “what is.” There must be freedom to observe, and then in that observation the whole structure and the nature of oneself begins to unroll. Very few people will tell you all this because they have self-interest, they want to form organizations, groups, the whole structure of that business. So please, if you don’t mind, give your complete attention to what is being said.

To understand oneself there must be observation, and that observation can only take place now. And it is not the movement of the past observing the now.

When I observe the now from my past conclusions, prejudices, hopes, fears, that is an observation of the present from the past. I think I am observing the now, but the observation of the now can take place only when there is no observer who is the past. Observation of the now is extraordinarily important. The movement of the past meeting the present must end there; that is the now. But if you allow it to go on, then the now becomes the future, or the past, but never the actual now.

Observation can only take place in the very doing of it—when you are angry, when you are greedy, to observe it as it is. Which means not to condemn it, not to judge it, but to watch it and let it flower and disappear. Do you understand the beauty of it?

Traditionally we are educated to suppress, or to move in a certain direction.

What we are saying is: observe your anger, your greed, your sexual demands, whatever it is, and observe without the past so that the anger flowers and disappears, withers away. When you do that you will never be angry again. Have you ever done this? Do it some time and you will discover it for yourself. Allow observation in which there is no choice: just observe your greed, your envy, your jealousy, whatever it may be, and in the very observation of it, it flowers and undergoes a radical change. The very observation without the background brings about a change.

To be aware of oneself without any choice and to see what is actually happening in the now is to allow the whole movement of the self, the “me,” to flower. And it undergoes a radical transformation, if there is no background, if there is no observer who is the background. In doing that, obviously, authority has no place. There is no intermediary between your observation and truth. In doing that, one becomes a light to oneself. Then you don’t ask anybody at any time how to do something. In the very doing, which is the observing, there is the act, there is the change. Go at it!

So freedom to observe, and therefore no authority of any kind, is essential.

Then the search for experience, which we all want, must come to an end. I will show you why. Every day we have various kinds of experiences. The recording of it becomes a memory, and that memory distorts observation. If, for instance, you are a Christian, you have been conditioned for two thousand years in all your ideologies, beliefs, dogmas, rituals, the savior, and you want to experience that which you call—whatever it is. You will experience whatever it is because that is your conditioning. In India they have hundreds of gods and they are conditioned to that and so they have visions of them, because they see according to their conditioning. When we are bored with all the physical experiences, we want some other kind of experience, the spiritual experience, to find out if there is a God, to have visions. You will have visions, experiences, according to your background, obviously, because your mind is conditioned that way. Be aware of that, and see what is implied in experiences.

What is implied in experiences? There must be an experiencer to experience.

The experiencer is all that he craves for, all that he has been told, his conditioning. And he wants to experience something that he calls God, or nirvana, or whatever it is. So he will experience it. But the word experience implies recognition, and recognition implies that you already know. Therefore it
is not something new. So a mind that demands experience is really living in the past, and therefore can never possibly understand something totally new, original. So there must be freedom from that urge for experience.

It is tremendously arduous to go into this kind of meditation, because we all want a rather easy, comfortable, happy, easygoing life. And so when something difficult comes, which demands your attention, your energy, you say, “Well that is not for me, I’ll go another way.”

Then, observe your fears, your pleasures, the sorrows and all the complexities of daily living in relationship. Observe all that very carefully. To observe implies that there is no observer, therefore there is no question of suppressing, denying, accepting, but merely observing your fear. When there is fear, it always distorts perception. When you are pursuing pleasure, that is a distorting factor. Or when there is sorrow, that is a burden. So the mind that is learning what meditation is must be free of this, and understand daily, everyday relationship. That is much more arduous, because our relationship with each other is based on our images of each other. As long as there is an image-maker, that image-maker prevents actual relationship with each other. It is essential to understand this before one can go very deeply into the subject of meditation, and that is why very few people meditate properly, rightly.

All systems of meditation, practicing a method day after day, assert that thought must be controlled, because thought is the disturbing factor for a still mind. Now when you look into it, who is the controller? You see the importance of controlling your thought, and you say, “I will try to control it,” but all the time it slips away. You spend forty years controlling and every moment it is slipping away. So you have to ask who the controller is. And why is it so important to make such tremendous efforts to control? That means conflict between the thought that moves away and another thought that says, “I must control it.” It is a battle all the time, a struggle, a conflict. So we must ask who is the controller. Is not the controller another thought? So one thought, which assumes dominance, says, “I must control the other thought.” One fragment is trying to control another fragment.

What is important is to find out that there is only thinking, and not the thinker and the thought and so the thinker controlling thought. There is only thinking.

We are concerned then not with how to control thought, but with the whole process of thinking. Why should it stop? If there is only thinking, why should it stop? Thinking is a movement, isn’t it? Thinking is a movement in time, from here to there. Can that time come to an end? That is the question, not how to stop thinking. In meditation, the gurus have laid emphasis on control, but where there is control there must be effort, there must be conflict, there must be suppression.

And where there is suppression there are all kinds of neurotic behavior.

Is it possible to live without any control? That doesn’t mean to do what you like, be completely permissive. In your daily life, psychologically, can you live without any control whatsoever? You can. We don’t know a life in which there is no shadow of control. We all know only control. Control exists where there is comparison. I compare myself with you and I want to be like you, because you are more intelligent, more bright, more spiritual. I want to be like you, so I make
an effort to be like you. If there is no comparison whatsoever psychologically, what takes place? I am what I am. I don’t know what I am but I am that. There is no movement towards something which I think is more. When there is no comparison, what has taken place? Am I dull because I have compared myself with you who are clever, bright, or does the very word dull make me dull?

When you go to a museum you look at various pictures, you compare them, saying one is better than another. We are traditionally trained that way. In school, we say we must be better than another, and to beat the other. The whole movement of examinations is comparison, making effort. We are saying that when you understand the movement of measurement, and when you see the unreality of it, psychologically, then you have “what is.” You have exactly “what is.” You can only meet “what is” when you have energy. That energy had been dissipated in comparison, but now you have that energy to observe “what is,” to observe the now. Therefore “what is” undergoes a radical transformation.

So thought has divided itself as the controller and the controlled. But there is only thinking; there is no controller or the controlled, but only the act of thinking.

Thinking is a movement in time as measure. Can that naturally, easily, without any control, come to an end? When I make an effort to bring it to an end, thinking is still in operation. I am deceiving myself by saying that the thinker is different from the thought. So there is only thinking. The thinker is the thought.

There is no thinker if there is no thought. Can this thinking, which is a movement in time, come to an end? That is, can time have a stop?

Time is the past. There is no future time, the future is only the past meeting the present, modifying it and moving on. Time is a movement from the past, modified but still moving on. That movement, which is the whole movement of knowledge, which is the whole movement of that which has been known, must stop. Unless you are free from that movement, there is no observation of the new.

That movement must stop, but you can’t stop it by will, which is to control. You can’t stop it by desire, which is part of your sensation, thought, image. So how is this movement to come to an end, naturally, easily, happily, without your knowing?

Have you ever given up something that gives you great pleasure— at the moment—dropped it instantly? Have you ever done it? You can do it with pain and sorrow, I am not talking of that, because you want to forget that, put it away.

But something that gives you immense pleasure. Have you ever done it? To drop it instantly without any effort. Have you? The past is always our background. We live in the past—someone has hurt me, someone has told me—our whole life is spent in the past. The incident of now is transformed into memory, and memory becomes the past. So we live in the past. Can that movement of the past stop?

The past is a movement, modified through the present, to the future. That is the movement of time. The past is a movement, always going forward, meeting the present and moving. The now is nonmovement, because you don’t know what the now is, you only know movement. You see, the immovable is the now. The now is the past meeting the present, and ending there. That is the now. So the movement of the past meets the now, which is immovable, and stops. So thought,
which is a movement of the past, meets the present completely, and ends there.

This has to be meditated over, thought over. You go into it.

The next thing is the mind, which is not only matter, the brain, it is also sensation and all the things that thought has put into that mind. It is consciousness, and in that consciousness there are all the various unconscious demands. Can that totality of consciousness be observed as a whole? Not fragment by fragment, because if we examine fragment by fragment it will be endless. It is only when there is an observation of the totality of consciousness that there is an ending of it, or the possibility of something else. So can this totality of consciousness be observed as a whole? It can if you will do it. When you look at a map with the desire to go to a certain place, there is a direction. To observe the whole map is to have no direction. That is simple. See how simple it is, don’t make it complex. So in the same way, to look at this whole consciousness is to have no direction, which means to have no motive. When you can observe anything totally, yourself or your consciousness, there is no motive and therefore no direction.

So to observe your consciousness wholly there must be no motive, no direction. Is that possible when you have been trained to do everything with a motive? Action with a motive is what we are trained to do, educated for. All our religions say, everything says, you must have a motive. But the moment you have a motive, which is either pleasure or pain, reward or punishment, that gives you a direction and therefore you can never see the whole. If you understand that, see that actually, then you have no motive. You don’t ask, “How am I to get rid of my motive?” You can only see something totally when there is no direction, when there is no center from which a direction can take place. The center is the motive. If there is no motive, there is no center and therefore no direction. All this is part of meditation.

What then?

Now the mind is prepared to observe without any movement. Have you got it? Because you have understood authority and all the rest, you stand completely alone to be a light to yourself. Therefore there is no impingement; the mind, the brain is not registering. So the mind now is without a single movement.

Therefore it is silent; not with an imposed silence, not a cultivated silence, which has no meaning, but a silence that is not the result of stopping something, stopping noise. It is a natural outcome of daily living. And daily living has its beauty. Beauty is part of the nonmovement.

What is beauty? Is it the description? Is it the thing that you see, the proportions, the heights, the depths, the shadows, a painting or a sculpture by Michelangelo? What is beauty? Is it in the eye? Or is it out there? Or is it neither in your eye or out there? We say that a beautiful thing, beautiful architecture, a marvelous cathedral, or a lovely painting is out there. Or is it in the eye because it has been trained to observe, to see that what is ugly is not proportionate, has no depth, no style? Is beauty out there, or is it in the eye, or has it nothing to do with the eye or with the outside?

Beauty is when you are not. When you look, it is you who are looking, you who are judging, you who are saying, “That is a marvelous proportion,” “That is
so still, it has depth, it has such grandeur.” It is all you looking, you giving it importance. But when you are not there, that is beauty. We want to express because that is self-fulfillment, but when that beauty is there, the expression of it may never take place. Beauty may be when you as a human being, with all your travail, your anxieties, pain, sorrow, are not there. Then there is beauty.

So the mind now is still, without a movement. Then what is there when movement stops?

Is compassion a movement? One thinks one is compassionate when one goes and does something for another, goes to some Indian village and helps the people. But all that is various forms of sentimentality, affection, and so on. We are asking something much more important, which is, when there is no movement then what takes place, what is there? Is it compassion? Or is it beyond all that? That is, is there something that is totally original and therefore sacred?

We don’t know what is sacred. We think our images in a church, a temple, or a mosque are sacred, but the images are put together by thought. And thought is a material process, movement. When there is no movement, is there something totally original, totally untouched by humanity, untouched by all the movement of thought? That may be that which is original and therefore most holy.

This is real meditation. To start from the very beginning not knowing. Please, if you start with knowing, you end up in doubt. If you start with not knowing, you end up with absolute truth, which is certainty. I wonder if you capture this.

We began by saying we must investigate into ourselves, and ourselves is the known, therefore empty the known. So from that emptiness all the rest of it flows naturally.

Where there is something most holy, which is the whole movement of meditation, then life has a totally different meaning. It is never superficial, never.

If you have this, nothing matters.

A Dimension Thought Cannot Touch

Wherever one goes in different parts of the world, one observes, from the crudest form to the most subtle, the endeavors of the mind to find something that is sacred, that is really holy. Wherever one goes there is constant inquiry of the human mind into whether there is something really sacred, divine, something that is not corruptible. To search for that, the priests throughout the world have said you must have faith in something that man has called “God.” But can one find out about it and learn whether or not it exists at the behest of any particular religion or particular belief? Or is that merely the invention of a mind that is frightened, that sees everything in flux, sees everything is transient, and seeks something that is permanent, that is beyond time? One must be interested in it whether one believes or doesn’t believe, because unless one comes upon it, learns about it, life will always be superficial. One may be moral—in the right sense of that word, without any compulsion, without any interference from society, from the culture—leading a life that is fairly harmonious, sane, balanced, not contradictory, not frightened, but unless one finds that thing that humanity has been seeking, however moral one may be, however socially active one is, trying to do good, and so on, life is shallow. To be truly moral, virtuous, is to be deeply within the area of order.

If one is at all serious, really concerned with the whole phenomenon of existence, it is important to learn for oneself whether there is something unnameable, beyond time, not put together by thought, and which is not an illusion of the human mind, craving beyond experience. One must learn about it, because that gives an astonishing depth to life—not only a significance but great beauty—in which there is no conflict, but a great sense of wholeness, a completeness, total sufficiency. If a mind would learn about that thing, naturally it must set aside the things that man has put together, which he calls divine, with all the religious rituals, beliefs, dogmas, in which he is conditioned.

I hope we are communicating with each other, and I hope you have actually set those aside, not merely verbally but deeply inwardly, so that you are completely capable of standing alone and not depending on anything, psychologically. Doubt is a good thing; however, doubt must be kept on a leash.

To hold doubt intelligently on a leash is to inquire, but to doubt everything has no meaning. If you have inquired intelligently and seen for yourself all the implications of the structure that man has put together in his endeavor to find out if there is—or if there is not—an immortality, a state of mind that is timeless, that is not perishable, then you can begin to learn.

Thought can never find that state, because thought is not only time and measure but also the whole content of the past, conscious or unconscious. When thought says it is going to search for something real, it can project what it considers to be real, but that becomes an illusion. When thought sets out to practice a discipline in order to find, it is doing what most saints, religions, doctrines do. Various gurus will tell you to train your thought, control it, discipline it, force it to the patterns that they give you so that you will ultimately
come upon the real thing. But one sees that thought can never find it because thought is essentially not free. Thought can never be new, and to find that which must be something totally unperceived, unknowable, unrecognizable, thought must be completely quiet.

Can thought be quiet—without any effort, without being controlled? Because the moment you control it, there is a controller that is also the invention of thought. Then the controller begins to control its thoughts, and there is conflict.

Wherever there is conflict there must be the activity of thought. The mind is the result of time, evolution; it is the storehouse of great knowledge, which is the result of a great many influences, experiences, which are the very essence of thought. Can that mind be quiet, without control, without discipline, without any form of effort? When there is an effort there must be distortion. If you and I learn this, then we will be able to function sanely, normally, healthily in everyday life, and at the same time there will be an extraordinary sense of freedom from thought.

Now, how is this to take place? This is what humanity has been seeking. We know very well that thought is a transient thing, that thought can be changed, modified, enlarged, and that thought cannot really penetrate into something that is not perceivable by any process of thought. Mankind asks how thought can be controlled because we see very clearly that only when the mind is completely still can we listen, that only when the mind is completely still can we hear or see something clearly.

Can the whole brain, mind, be completely still? Have you ever asked that question? If you have, and have found an answer, the answer must be according to your thinking. Can thought naturally realize its own limitation and, realizing its own limitation, be quiet? If you have observed your own brain operating, you have seen that the brain cells themselves are the content of the past. Every cell in the brain holds the memory of yesterday because the memory of yesterday gives great security to the brain; tomorrow is uncertainty and in the past there is certainty, in knowledge there is certainty. So the brain is the past, and therefore the brain is time. It can only think in terms of time: yesterday, today and tomorrow. Tomorrow is uncertain, but the past, through the present, makes tomorrow more certain. Can that brain, which has been trained, educated through millennia, be completely still? Please understand the problem first, because when we understand the problem with all its implications, clearly, wisely, intelligently, the answer is in the problem, not outside of it. All problems, if you examine them, have their answers in themselves, not beyond themselves.

So the question then is: Can the brain, the mind, the whole organic structure, be utterly still? You know, there are different kinds of stillness. There is the stillness between two noises; between two verbal statements there is a silence; there is a silence that can be induced; there is a silence that comes about through tremendous discipline, control. And all such silences are sterile. They are not silence. They are the products of thought that wishes to be silent, and therefore they are still within the area of thought.

How is the mind—which is the whole thing—to be quiet without a motive? If it has a motive, it is still the operation of thought. If you don’t know what the
answer is, I’m glad, because this requires tremendous honesty. To find out if there is really something not of this dimension but of a totally different dimension requires great honesty, in which there is no deception, therefore no wanting. The moment the mind desires to find that state, it will invent, it will be caught in an illusion, in a vision. That vision, that experience, is the projection of the past, and however enchanting, however pleasurable, however great it may be, it is still of the past.

If all that is very clear, not only verbally but actually, then the question is: Can the content of consciousness, which makes up consciousness, be completely emptied?

The whole inward content of our daily consciousness is the unconscious, and the conscious: what it has thought, what it has accumulated, what it has received through tradition, through culture, through struggle, through pain, through sorrow, through deception. The whole of that is my consciousness and yours. To find out if there is really something not of this dimension, but of a totally different dimension, requires great honesty. Without the content, what is consciousness? I only know my consciousness because of its content. I am a Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Catholic, communist, socialist, an artist, a scientist, a philosopher. I am attached to a house, to my wife, to my friend. The conclusions, remembrances, the images that I have built through fifty, a hundred, or ten thousand years are the content. The content is my consciousness, as yours is, and that area of consciousness is time because it is the area of thought, it is the area of measurement, comparing, evaluating, judging. Within that area of consciousness are all my thoughts, unconscious and conscious. And any movement within that area is within the movement of consciousness with its content. Therefore space in consciousness with its content is very limited.

If we learn this together, it will be yours, not mine. When you are free of all leaders, free of all teachings, your mind will be learning. Therefore there is energy, you will be passionate to find out. But if you are following somebody, then you lose all energy.

Within the area of consciousness with its content, which is time, space is very small. You can expand the space by imagination, by contriving, by various processes of stretching it out, thinking more and more subtly, more deliberately, but it is still within the limited space of consciousness with its content. Any movement to go beyond itself is still within the content. When you take drugs, the result is still the activity of thought within that consciousness, and when you think you are going beyond it you are still within it because it is only an idea, or you experience the content more deeply. So one sees the content, which is the

“me,” which is the ego, which is the person, the so-called individual. Within that consciousness, however expanded, time and limited space must always exist. So for that consciously to make an effort to reach something beyond itself invites illusion. To set out to seek truth is absurd. To be told by a “master,” a guru, that you will find it merely by practicing in order to get something, without understanding all the content and emptying it, is like the blind leading the blind.

Mind is its content. The brain is the past, and from that past thought functions. Thought is never free and never new. So the question arises: How can
that content be emptied? Not as a method, because the moment you practice a method somebody has given to you, or that you invent yourself, that becomes mechanical, and therefore it is still within the field of time and limited space. Can the mind see its own limitation, and can the very perception of that limitation be the ending of that limitation? Can it not ask how to empty the mind, but see totally the content that makes up consciousness, and perceive, listen to, all the movement of that consciousness, so that the very perception of it is the ending of it? If I see something false, the very perception of the false is the true. The very perception of my telling a lie is the truth. The very perception of my envy is freedom from envy. That is, you can only see very clearly, observe very clearly, when there is no observer. The observer is the past, the image, the conclusion, the opinion, the judgement.

So can the mind see its content clearly without any effort, see the limitation, the lack of space, and the time-binding quality of consciousness with its content?

Can you see this? You can only see the totality of it—the unconscious content as well as the conscious content—when you can look silently, when the observer is totally silent. That means there must be attention, and in that attention there is energy. Whereas, when you make an effort to be attentive, that effort is a wastage of energy. When you try to control, that is a wastage of energy. Control implies conformity, comparison, suppression, and all that is a wastage of energy. When there is perception there is attention, which is total energy in which there is not a breath of wastage of energy.

Now, when you look with energy at the whole conscious and unconscious content, the mind then is empty. This is not my illusion. This isn’t what I think, or a conclusion I have come to. If I have a conclusion, if I think this is right, then I am in illusion. And knowing it to be an illusion, I wouldn’t talk, because that is like the blind leading the blind. You can see for yourself the logic of it, the sanity of it, if you are listening, if you are paying attention, if you really want to find out.

How is it possible for the unconscious with its content to expose its whole depth? First see the question and then we can proceed from there. As we divide everything else in life, we have divided consciousness into the conscious and the unconscious. This division, this fragmentation, is induced by our culture, by our education. The unconscious has its motives, its racial inheritance, its experience.

Can that be exposed to the light of intelligence, to the light of perception? If you ask this question, are you asking it as an analyzer who is going to analyze the content and therefore have division, contradiction, conflict, sorrow? Or are you asking this question not knowing the answer? This is important. If you are asking honestly, seriously, how to expose this whole hidden structure of consciousness, really not knowing, you are going to learn; but if you have any kind of conclusion, opinion, then you are approaching with a mind that has already assumed the answer, or that there is no answer. You may know of it according to some philosopher, some psychologist, some analyst, but it is not your knowing. It is their knowing and your interpreting and trying to understand them, not what is actual.

For a mind that says, “I do not know”—which is the truth, which is honest—
what is there then? When you say, “I do not know,” the content has no importance whatsoever, because the mind then is a fresh mind. It is the new mind that says, “I don’t know.” Therefore, when you say it, not just verbally for amusement, but with depth, with meaning, with honesty, that state of mind that does not know is empty of its consciousness, is empty of its content. It is the knowing that is the content. Do you see it? When the mind can never say it knows, it is always new, living, acting; therefore it has no anchorage. It is only when it is anchored that it gathers opinions, conclusions, and separation.

This is meditation. That is, meditation is to perceive the truth each second—
not the truth ultimately—to perceive the truth and the false each second. To perceive the truth that content is consciousness—that is the truth. To see the truth that I do not know how to deal with this thing—that is the truth, not knowing.

Therefore not knowing is the state in which there is no content.

It is so terribly simple. You may object to that because you want something clever, complicated, put together. You object to seeing something extraordinarily simple, and therefore extraordinarily beautiful.

Can the mind, which is the brain, see its own limitation, the limitation of time, which is the bondage of time, and the limitation of space? As long as one lives within that limited space and time-binding movement, there must be suffering, there must be psychological despair, hope, and all the anxiety that follows. When the mind has perceived the truth of this, then what is time? Then is there a different dimension that thought cannot touch, and therefore cannot describe? We said thought is measure and therefore time. We live by measurement; all our structure of thinking is based on measurement, which is comparison. And thought as measurement tries to go beyond itself and discover for itself if there is something that is not measurable. To see the falseness of that is the truth. The truth is to see the false, and the false is when thought seeks that which is not measurable, which is not of time, which is not of the space of the content of consciousness.

When you put all these questions and inquire, when you learn as you go along, then your mind and your brain become extraordinarily quiet. There is no need for any discipline, any teacher, any guru, any system to make you quiet.

There are various kinds of meditation in the world at the present time. Man is too greedy, too eager to experience something that he doesn’t know anything about. A fashionable thing now is yoga; it has been brought to the Western world to make people healthy, happy, young, to help them to find God—everything is involved in it now. Also now there is the pursuit of the occult, because it is so exciting. To the mind of someone who is pursuing truth, who is trying to understand life totally, who sees the false as the false, and the truth in the false, occult things are fairly obvious, and such a mind will not touch them. It is totally unimportant whether I can read your thoughts, or you can read my thoughts, whether I can see angels, fairies, have visions. We want something mysterious but we don’t see the immense mystery in living, in the love of living. We don’t see that, so we spend ourselves in things that don’t matter.

When you have finished with all this, there is the central question: Is there something that is not describable? If you describe it, it is not the described. Is there something that is not of time, that is space without borders, that has immense space? When your space is limited, you become vicious; where there is no space you become violent, you want to break things. You want space, but the mind, thought, cannot give that space. Only when thought is quiet is there the space that has no frontier. And it is only the completely silent mind that knows—
that is aware, not knows—is aware whether there is or there is not something that is beyond all measurement.

And that is the only thing that is sacred—not the images, the rituals, the saviors, the gurus, the visions. Only that thing is sacred, which mind has come upon without asking because in itself it is totally empty. Only in that which has emptiness can a new thing take place.

SOURCES

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Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, Ltd.

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1975/1998 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, Ltd.

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Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, Ltd.

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1968/1998 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, Ltd.

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1973/1998 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, Ltd.

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1982/1998 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, Ltd.

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