Talks in Europe 1968

So, is it possible to look, to observe oneself - not analytically, but just to observe - because `oneself' is the human being, oneself is the social structure, oneself is the entity that has brought about this social disorder, so that when you observe without any choice, then you begin to understand the total nature of this structure. In that understanding there is action which is not based on a formula, it is a total action. And that is the state of maturity. We are not mature, we are more or less unbalanced people. After all, the extreme form of imbalance is that a man believes he is something he is not, or has so identified himself with an ideal, he is not capable of living. And if I may say so most of us - probably ninety- nine point nine per cent - are rather unbalanced, because we are pursuing ideals that have no value at all, we are idealists, we are violent. You belong to one group, which believes in certain ideals, and another to another and there is war. So when one is aware in the sense that there is no choice whatsoever, then out of that action comes what is not fragmentary. You don't love and hate; then there is only a quality of life that is not touched by hate, anger, jealousy, envy. And to come upon that one has to have great energy.

In the denial of that disorder there is order. Order isn't a thing that you establish; virtue which is order comes out of disorder, to know the whole nature and structure of disorder. This is fairly simple if you observe in yourself how utterly disorderly and contradictory we are. We hate, yet we think we love. There is the beginning of disorder, of this 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 which you called virtue yesterday. That becomes 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 the picture, however modern, however ancient it is; it is not in the building, in the statue, nor in the cloud, the leaf or on the water. Beauty is where there is order - a mind that is unconfused, 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 major, the only meditation.

First of all, to end it one must understand the nature of time, because we accept time as a way of overcoming things, of resolving things. There is sorrow and we say: gradually, through the process of time we will somehow put it away from us. Does sorrow end through time - psychological time, and also chronological time? Through chronological time one may get used to it, gradually day after day put up with it. But psychologically, inwardly, we say to ourselves, I will get rid of it, slowly, or try to forget it, rationalize it, escape from it. Surely there is only one way to end sorrow, not through analysis, not through escape, not through rationalization, but to meet it, to look at it, to be in complete communion with it, to be utterly related to it.

Not that we are opposed to pleasure - that would be absurd - but we have to understand the nature and the structure of pleasure. That is really very important, because pleasure does bring about this breaking up of life, as the religious life and the social life and so on. When you see a leaf fluttering in the wind - and there is a great deal of wind in Holland - you see the beauty of that leaf rejoicing, dancing in the wind; that is a great delight, a great pleasure. When you see a sunset, full of light and glory, or when you see a beautiful flower, a lovely face, there is an enjoyment. You cannot deny or suppress or transmute that pleasure; it is there, one has to accept it as one accepts the blue sky, the green earth, the desert, the mountain. But when it becomes the dominating demand of life, as it is with most of us, an insistent conscious or unconscious demand, then there is this constant breaking up of life into compartments, into fragments.

And that's why it is very important to understand the nature and the structure of thought. What is thought? What is thinking? Don't wait for me, for the speaker, to answer it. Here is a challenge - do please listen to it - what is thought? What is thinking? What is the origin of thought? That's a challenge which is something new; and how do you respond to it? Do you begin to search for an answer, wait for someone to tell you the answer, or do you say, I don't know? And in the very saying `I don't know' are you waiting to find out and say: `I do know the answer now'? Or when you meet such an immense challenge, what happens? If the challenge is really vital, important, then the mind becomes quiet, doesn't it? Thought is in abeyance, because it has no answer. But we, wanting an answer, wanting to find a way out of this mechanical way of life, we use thought to find out. And so we reduce the new challenge to the old, and challenges are always new if they're vital - and they are vital. Our houses are burning, our morality, our churches, our society is in disintegration, corrupt. There is an immense challenge, which we have to meet - the challenge of the computer and the relation of man to it.

If you wait for the specialist to answer that question, then you are back again, caught. So the question is, how to bring a change, a mutation that will solve all our problems? I think the root of our problems - of fear, violence, the immense sorrow of life, the everlasting search for pleasure - the root cause, the core of all this problem, is thought. And is it possible to put a stop to time, time which is thought. You know, we are used to the idea, to the tradition, that eventually, gradually, slowly, day after day, we will be different, there will be a mutation of the mind through evolution, so that we shall have human beings who have a totally different mind. When you admit that `eventually' - that eventually you will have a new mind, a totally different quality in the structure and nature of the mind - when you admit that, you're still living in a world of mechanical existence. And this generation will be responsible for the next, through education and all the rest of it, so there is no `eventual' change at all. We are becoming more and more mechanical, not less.

As one observes within oneself, not according to any philosopher, any analyst or any specialist (for when you do observe according to another, then you are not observing yourself, you are observing yourself according to some specialist, then what he says becomes far more important than what actually you are), but if you put aside all the specialists and assertions, you can see for yourself the innumerable contradictory states, the anxiety, the guilt, the sense of loneliness, despair, routine, the way of life which becomes mechanical. Thought breeds this. So one asks oneself whether thought - which has its place, thought being mechanical, thought being old, thought which is the result of experience, memory, knowledge that must operate when you do mechanical things, like remembering one's address, like remembering a technological activity, otherwise we couldn't possibly live or do anything - whether thought has any place other than that. Because as we have said, thought breeds fear - fear not only of our neighbour, fear of life, fear of ourselves, fear of so many things! And as one observes oneself, within oneself, as a human being, one can see very well how fear has come into existence. Is it possible to be completely free of fear? Which means really the whole investigation of the structure and nature of thought.

Thought is always seeking something lasting in all relationships. Thought in its search for security must seek pleasure and in pleasure there is always pain and hence there is always fear. Do observe this in yourselves and you will see how simple it is, how thought comes about and how fear is bred out of thought. And so we never meet fear. Do we know actually what fear is? Or do we know it only through the recognition of what was called fear, which happened yesterday? That is, do I know fear actually the moment it happens? Or do I know it only when it has gone and then I recognize it? We are talking of psychological fears for the moment. And to understand the nature of fear one has to look also at the structure of thought, because thought does create fear. Thought says: `I don't know what death is. I'll put it as far away as possible until the last minute. I don't have to look at it, I don't have to understand it.' Put it away, escape from it, build various beliefs, dogmas, comforting theories, as long as I don't have to face it and come directly into contact with it. So thought creates a division between the living and the thing called `death'. You are living - this is the `known' - and the thing `unknown' is death.

So what we are going to talk about needs a great deal of penetration, not verbally, but actually, because the word is never the actual, the thing itself. When we say the `door', the word `door' isn't actually the door, one has to touch the door to feel its substance, its grain, and the word can never convey that. And a word like `suffering' isn't the actual agony, misery, anxiety and fear involved in that word. To go beyond sorrow and the ending of sorrow is one of our major problems, perhaps one of our most essential problems; for a mind that suffers is always living in darkness; it cannot see very clearly, it always lives in confusion. To understand, and in so doing to end sorrow, needs a great deal of attention, bearing in mind that the word is never the thing, with its pain, despair, lack of love, sense of loneliness and consuming self-pity. But is it possible for a human being living in this world of utter chaos (where each individual is neurotically working for himself) is it possible for a human being ever to be completely rid of sorrow? 3 I wonder if one has ever even asked that question; or if we merely put up with sorrow, bear it, get used to it. When we do get used to anything (used to beauty, used to ugliness, used to a lovely cloud that's moving across the earth, to the flowers), when we get used to beauty or to ugliness the mind becomes very dull. Most of us have been unable to resolve this question of sorrow and so we either worship it as a symbol in a church, as the Christians do, or as in Asia, give explanations, endless explanations of the cause of sorrow. But explaining the cause never dissipates sorrow. So if one would be rid of sorrow at all levels, as one must, completely rid of it at all levels of consciousness (never to have pain, anxiety, loneliness, self-pity, which that word sorrow covers) to do so one has to understand the nature and the structure of thought and time. And, if we can, this morning we are going to explore this problem together.

I wonder if you ask these questions of yourself when you look at those chestnut trees with their blooms like white candles against the blue sky. What relationship exists between you and that, what relationship have you actually got (not emotionally nor sentimentally) what is your relationship with such things? And if you have lost the relationship with these things in nature, how can you be related to man? The more we live in towns, the less do we have any relation with nature. You go out for a walk on a Sunday and look at the trees and say `How lovely', and go back to your life of routine, living in a series of drawers, which are called houses, flats. You are losing relationship with nature. You can see this by the fact that you go to museums and you spend a whole morning looking at pictures, abstractions of what is, and this shows that you have really totally lost your contact, your relationship with nature; pictures, concerts, statues, have all become terribly important and you never look at the tree, the bird, the marvellous lighting of a cloud.

This fragmentary, separative existence, inevitably leads to various forms of violence. So, if we could give our attention to this question of relationship, then we could perhaps solve the social inequalities, injustices, immorality and that terrifying thing `respectability' which man has cultivated; to be respectable is to be moral according to that which is really essentially immoral. So is there any relationship at all? Relationship implies being in contact, in touch, deeply, fundamentally, with nature, with another human being - to be related, not in blood, or as part of the family, or as husband and wife as these are hardly relationships at all. To find out the nature of this question, we must look at another issue, which is this whole mechanism of building images, putting them together, creating an idea, a symbol, in which man lives. Most of us have images about ourselves - what we think we are, what we should be, the image of oneself and the image of another; we have these images in relationship. You have the image about the speaker, and as the speaker doesn't know you he has no image. But if you know somebody very intimately you have already built an image, that very intimacy implies the image that you have about that person - the wife has an image about the husband and the husband has an image about her. Then there is the image of society and the images that one has about God, about truth, about everything.

Perhaps this evening we may consider (not intellectually, but actually with our hearts, our minds, our whole being) we may succeed in giving complete attention to this question of man's relationship to man, and not only his relationship with another but also his relationship to nature, to the universe, to every living thing. But, as we saw, society is making us and we are making ourselves more and more mechanical, superficial, callous, indifferent - slaughter is going on in the Far East, and we are comparatively undisturbed. We have become very prosperous, but that very prosperity is destroying us, because we are becoming indifferent and lazy, because we are becoming mechanical, superficial and we are losing close relationship to all men, to all living things. And it seems to me that it is very important to ask this question: what is relationship, whether there is any relationship at all, and what place in that relationship love and thought and pleasure have?

What is important is not how to keep the mind still - that comes naturally, easily, effortlessly if you understand, if you know how to look at the whole structure and the nature of thought, not intellectually, but actually look at the machinery of thought. And to look has its own discipline. That is the beauty of it. You know beauty and love go together; and neither love nor beauty is the product of thought and pleasure. A mind that is seeking pleasure doesn't know what it means to love, and without love there is no meditation, there is no understanding of truth. 21st April 1968

In enquiring into this way of meditation, one also has to enquire into the whole structure of thought. What is thinking, what is its worth, its meaning? Does it have any meaning at all except for technological purposes? I know thought has become very important; for us, thought, the intellect, the brain is of tremendous significance. Because you will say `If I do not think what shall I do, what shall I become?' You can't stop thinking by will, but you can understand its nature and its structure and how it comes into being. Without understanding thought you will never be free of fear. Without understanding the nature of thought sorrow has no ending.

So when you begin to enquire into thought you have also to enquire into the nature of pleasure, of our evaluations, our morality, our way of life which is based on pleasure. The very search for truth, for God, or whatever you like to call it, is based on pleasure - the desire to be secure, to be certain - from which we derive tremendous pleasure. So in enquiring into this question of pleasure one has to ask oneself: is love pleasure? Is love a thing of pleasure, a thing of thought? You had an experience yesterday, it gave you great delight, it was that delight, that pleasure that has left a mark, and thought builds upon that pleasure, sustains it, nourishes it, gives it vitality, gives it a continuity and you demand to have that pleasure again - that's what you do sexually. And this demand of thought, of pleasure, is what is generally called love. When you do so love, in it there is pain, jealousy, anxiety, fear, lack of companionship, loneliness. So, is love pleasure? Or if you love is there no pleasure? When you see something very beautiful, the cloud of an evening lit by the setting sun, the looking at it is a great delight - provided that you give your whole attention to it and you can only give your whole attention to it when you don't say, `How beautiful', or when you aren't thinking how you can put it into words, put it on a canvas and so on - when you can look at it attentively, non-verbally. So is love a word, a symbol, an image, which gives you great pleasure? Having given you great pleasure, to be denied that pleasure is fear. Thought creates pleasure, gives it continuity, as thought gives continuity to fear. You can see that in yourself, you don't have to read any books about it, it's all there if you can look directly and very simply.

I do not know if you have ever looked at pleasure - just looked at it, when you are enjoying something, looked at it. While you are enjoying a drink, to be aware of the whole meaning of that pleasure, to enjoy, to have a great pleasure in something that is over, dead, gone, to remember it, to resuscitate it because it gave you pleasure yesterday - now, that's the whole process of sex, the building of that image, the remembrance of it and getting terribly excited over it and its fulfilment, which is the pleasure built up by thought. Please do follow all this - this pleasure built up by thought, intensified and sustained by thought, of the thing that happened yesterday, and is now the continuance of that dead thing of yesterday. So to understand the nature and the structure of desire and pleasure is to understand the whole mechanism of thought, not to deny pleasure.

To come upon this reality, you cannot possibly invite it because our minds are too small; you cannot contain the ocean in your fist, you can have the image of the ocean in your mind but it is not the ocean, it is not the restless, blue depth of that water. As you cannot invite reality, as you cannot possibly know what it is, all that you can do is to see what is the truth of falsehood, the truth of disorder, the truth of what virtue is, the truth of pleasure and the structure and the nature of experience; just to see these facts - that's all one can do, nothing else - that is to deny totally what one is, because each one of us is a bundle of memories, memories creating future hope or despair, agony or guilt, or mounting sorrow - that's what we are. We may invent out of that we are God, that we are divine, that we are everlasting, but to see the actual naked fact of what we are, with our ambitions, with our greed, our pursuit of pleasure and success and all that - to see the truth of this is enough.

To come upon this strange reality we must first understand the nature of experience and why human beings want experience at all. Experience in English surely means, to go through: to go through a thing. And when you `go through', there must be no memory of what you have been through, otherwise you are not through the experience. Do please understand this. We do not go through any form of thought, or feeling (which is to experience the fullness of thought or feeling) if we don't go right through it; it must leave no mark, no imprint. That imprint, that mark, that memory otherwise directs the next experience, shapes the next experience. You can see this in yourself, it is not very complex psychologically, it doesn't need great intellectual or analytical capacity. We have a thousand experiences and each experience leaves a mark and that mark leaves the memory which recognizes the next experience, and so shapes that experience, conditions it so that the mind becomes more and more conditioned by the past. In this experience there is always a recognition.

Then we come again to this extraordinary question of the nature of death. That must be answered, neither with fear, nor by escaping from that absolute fact, nor by belief, nor hope. There is an answer, the right answer, but to find the right answer one has to put the right question. But you cannot possibly put the right question if you are merely seeking a way out of it, if the question is born of fear, of despair and of loneliness. Then if you do put the right question with regard to reality, with regard to man's relationship to man, and what that thing called love is, and also this immense question of death, then out of the right question will come the right answer. From that answer comes right action. Right action is in the answer itself. And we are responsible. Don't fool yourself by saying `What can I do? What can I, an individual, living a shoddy little life, with all its confusion and ignorance, what can I do?' Ignorance exists only when you don't know yourself. Self-knowing is wisdom. You may be ignorant of all the books in the world (and I hope you are), of all the latest theories, but that is not ignorance. Not knowing oneself deeply, profoundly, is ignorance; and you cannot know yourself if you cannot look at yourself, see yourself actually as you are, without any distortion, without any wish to change. Then what you see is transformed because the distance between the observer and the observed is removed and hence there is no conflict. 16th April 1968

To understand the present you have to understand the nature of time which is yesterday with all its memories, the culture and the tradition, today and tomorrow. You cannot live totally, completely in the present when there is the image of the past or the concept of the future. To live in the present is only possible when there is love, and love has no tomorrow. But love is not pleasure nor desire; pleasure and desire have a tomorrow, have a future - I am going to be happy tomorrow.

As long as thought is seeking pleasure, there must be fear because pleasure means pain. We will go into that a little bit and you will see it for yourself. Please follow this carefully because it is your life, not mine! You and I together are making this terrible world; we are causing so much destruction, so much misery and we are responsible. And without understanding the nature of this thought with its pleasure and pain, its fear and its sorrow, we shall continue to bring about tremendous chaos in the world through our actions, our selfishness and our violence. As we said, thought breeds pleasure. Yesterday you had an experience which gave you pleasure and thought wants that pleasure repeated, so it thinks about it. The more it thinks about it, the greater the pleasure it derives from that experience. Thought also thinks about pain and it doesn't want that pain; so thought creates both pleasure and pain and gives them continuity. Right? And fear is also bred by thought. I am afraid of tomorrow; I don't know what is going to happen, I may lose my job, I may fall ill and I haven't fulfilled myself and I may die. I haven't understood this monstrous life and there's nobody to tell me; I am lost and afraid, I seek somebody, an authority to tell me what to do.

Then one begins to enquire what is the nature of thought. To understand the structure of thought, not intellectually, you must see it as you would see a sensuous thing, feel it and then you will realize - if you go into it very deeply - that thought begins to understand itself as the origin of fear and it will act upon itself. You will see this for yourself if you go into it very deeply with the speaker. Thought is the product of time, time being memory, the accumulated knowledge of the many days, the many yesterdays, the many experiences. From that accumulated knowledge, experience, memory, there is a response which is thought and thought is matter. A mind that is concerned with going beyond the sensual, beyond matter, must understand thought; thought breeds sorrow as well as fear and pleasure. Yesterday you had an experience - sensual, sexual, or otherwise - and that experience leaves an imprint on the mind, on the brain. We mean by that word `mind' not only the whole nervous organism, the brain cells, but the totality of all human intelligence, its activity, fears, thoughts, despairs and anxieties. All that is included when we use the word `mind'.

Therefore in understanding fear, which is very complex, we shall then understand the nature and structure of authority and so become a light to ourselves, not depending on anybody to tell us what to do. This is very important especially as chaos, anarchy and violence are growing in the world. When the mind is confused, at a loss, not knowing what to do, then out of fear it turns to some kind of authority - the authority of a priest, or a new society, the authority of a new guru or a new theological concept. So it is absolutely imperative that one understands this whole complex problem of fear, because a mind that is afraid cannot think straight. When the mind is afraid, it is confused; it lives in darkness. And most of us are afraid, afraid of falling ill, afraid of old age and death, afraid of what people think and so on. So is it possible for a human being, living in this world, to be radically, totally free of fear, not as an idea, not as an intellectual concept but actually?

The other day we were walking through a wood; it was spring-time and there wasn't a single bird in sight. And two men passed by carrying guns. Your whole life is violent; you are brought up to kill animals to eat. I don't think you realize how terribly serious this whole thing is; if each one of you felt totally responsible for every war, then you would create a different kind of society with a different form of education, with different history books. But you're not interested, you don't feel responsible. And that's why the younger generation are revolting against it - they must! Unfortunately they don't understand the nature of human beings so they will create another society which will be corrupt and destructive in a different way. The problem is: how to bring about this change in the human mind and the human heart and whether the intellect can ever bring about this change. There is this capacity to think very clearly, very sanely, logically, objectively; that is the function of the intellect. But the intellect, as we now see, has brought about this destructive society in the world; it has invented guns, it has invented class distinction, and seeking security it has created gods and the organization of belief which is called religion. So thought has brought about this structure which is called society and thought is responsible for it. The intellect is responsible for the war within yourself, the war in Vietnam, the war between you and your wife or husband, and the war with your neighbour.