Talks in Europe 1968

This constant battle, both within at the deeper level as well as at the superficial level, is the constant way of our life. It is a way of disorder, a way of disarray, contradiction, misery. And such a mind trying to meditate, by means of some school in the East, is meaningless, infantile. Yet many do, as though they will escape from life, put a blanket over their misery and cover it up. But meditation is bringing about order in this confusion, not through effort, because every effort distorts the mind. That one can see: to see truth the mind must be absolutely clear, without any distortion, without any compunction, without any direction. So this foundation must be laid; that is, there must be virtue. Order is virtue. This virtue has nothing whatever to do with the social morality, which we accept. Society has imposed on us a certain morality, but the society is the product of every human being. Society with its morality says you can be greedy, you can kill another in the name of God, in the name of your country, in the name of an ideal; 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. And that is the beauty of virtue; virtue is not a habit, it is not something that you practise day after day in order to be virtuous. That is mechanical, a routine, without meaning. But to be virtuous means, does it not, to know what is disorder - disorder which is this contradiction within ourselves, this tearing of various pleasures and desires and ambitions, greed, envy, fear - all that. Those are the causes of disorder within ourselves and outwardly. To be aware of it! That is, to come into contact or to be in contact with this disorder. And you can only come into 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.

So one must be tremendously cautious about this word. You cannot possibly experience truth as long as there is a centre 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 one - no guru, no teacher, no Saviour, no one. Because we have accepted so many authorities in the past, have put our faith in others, either they have exploited us or they have utterly failed. So one must distrust, deny all spiritual authority. Nobody can give us this light that never dies.

There is another thing involved in this acceptance of authority - the following of another who promises, through a certain system, method, or discipline, the eventual, ultimate reality. To follow another is to imitate. Please do observe all this, listen to all this simply. Because that is what one has to do: one has to deny completely the authority of another, however pretentious, however convincing, however Asiatic he be! To follow implies not only the denying of one's own clarity, of one's own investigation, one's integrity and honesty, but also it implies that in following, your motive is the reward. truth is not a reward. If one is to understand it, every form of reward and punishment must be totally set aside. Authority implies fear. And to discipline oneself according to that, fear of not gaining what the exploiter in the name of truth or experience says, is to deny one's own clarity and honesty. So if you say you must meditate, 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 that method promises, but it will be nothing but ashes. For the motive is achievement, success and at the root of that is fear, and fear is connected with pleasure.

I think we should be very clear about these two facts, experience and following a method, a system, that promises a reward of some vast transcendental experience. When one talks about experience, the word itself means, does it not, to go through something, to be pushed through? And to experience also implies, doesn't it, a process of recognition? I had an experience yesterday, and it has either given me pleasure or pain. To be entirely with that experience one must recognize it. Recognition means something that has already happened before and therefore experience is never new. Do please bear this in mind. It can never be new because it has already happened and therefore there is a recollection, a remembrance, a memory of it and therefore a person who says, `I've had great transcendental experience, a tremendous experience', such a person is exploiting others, because he thinks he has had a marvellous experience, which already has happened and therefore is utterly old. truth can never be experienced, that is the beauty of it, because it is always new, it is never what happened yesterday. That must be totally, completely, forgotten or gone through - what happened yesterday - the incident of yesterday must be finished with yesterday. But to carry that over as an experience to be measured in terms of achievement, or to convey to others that extraordinary something, to impress, to convey, to convince others, seems to me so utterly silly.

So is it possible to end sorrow? As a human being living in this world, living with a family, with children, living in loneliness, despair, anxiety, guilt-ridden and so on, which all bring sorrow - is it possible to be free of it? Which means, is it possible to analyse the whole problem of sorrow - how it comes, from what source it springs, how it has continuity in our life, darkening our eyes, our heart, our speech, our outlook? Must one analyse it step by step, examine it, discover the cause? And when you do discover the cause, and understand it, does sorrow end? Apparently it doesn't - it never has. So there must be a different approach to the ending of sorrow, to the understanding of this sorrow, the sorrow that love brings, the sorrow when you are not loved by the one whom you want to love, the sorrow in your own heart. Can all that come to an end so that we are human beings living in delight, in beauty, in happiness, in truth. This is not something mysterious out of the dark East; it is a human problem.

And we are questioning this whole thing altogether. You know, it is very important to question everything, to doubt everything anybody says, including the speaker - especially the speaker - because you are so easily influenced, especially when teachers come from the East! (Laughter). You think they have got a mysterious philosophy, or mission, an extraordinary oriental mysticism - all that childish rubbish! It has no validity at all, it only breeds authority and superstition and hero worship, which has no place whatsoever in understanding what truth is. And that is what we are trying to do, to find out for ourselves - not through somebody else, not through some guru, some teacher - but find out absolutely for ourselves what truth is: not an abstract truth, but truth of life, truth in everyday-living, so that one is tremendously honest with oneself.

So analysis is not the way. You must see the truth of that. Because if you see the truth of that and the falseness of analysis, then you will reject it totally. Then when you do reject, totally, the way of analysis, (as we have tried to point out today), then seeing the falseness of it is seeing the truth of it. Right? When you see something false and recognize it as being false, that very action is truth. When you do that, when you completely see the falseness of analysis, then what have you? You are faced with the problem of looking without the drive of the analyser. Right? You're looking without analysis at the fact. Then you are looking at fear as though with fresh eyes, aren't you? There is no overcoming it, there is no analysing it, but a looking at it as you look at that field of tulips. When you look at fear without the analyser, without the thinker, without the observer, then is there fear at all?

Without love there is no virtue, without love there is no peace, there is no relationship. That is the foundation - for the mind to go immeasurably into that dimension in which alone truth exists. 28th April 1968

Freedom is an explosion which takes place only when time, as a gradual means of change, comes to an end. That is, when you see actually, not theoretically, that the gradual process is utterly false, then the very perception of what is false is the perception of what is true, isn't it? When one sees what is false, that very act of seeing is the act of truth. That is, when one observes what nationalism has done throughout the world, when one sees the danger of it, the utter fallacy of it, the brutality of it - actually sees it - then one is not only free of it, but that freedom is the outcome of seeing what is true; but if you say `I will gradually get rid of nationalism by becoming international, European, gradually evolve to a wider acceptance of people' - in that gradualness you are sowing the seed of war, the seed of separation. It's like those people who are everlastingly talking about non-violence, but actually in their hearts, in their way of life, they are violent, through their discipline and through their resistance.

So, when we ask ourselves, when we look at ourselves, deeply, we see this activity of self-isolation, the `me', the `I', the `ego', building resistance round itself and that very resistance is the `me'. That is isolation, that is what creates fragments, the fragmentary look of the thinker and the thought. So what place has pleasure, which is the outcome of a memory given sustenance and nourishment by thought (thought which is always old, which is never free) what has that thought, which has centred its existence in pleasure, to do with relationship? Do please ask yourselves this question, don't merely listen to the speaker - he is gone tomorrow and you have to live your own life; so the speaker is of no importance whatsoever. What is important is to ask these questions of yourself and to ask such questions you have to be terribly serious, you have to be completely dedicated to the search, because it is only when you are serious that you live, it's only when you are deeply, fundamentally, earnest that life opens, has meaning, has beauty. You have to ask this question: whether it is not a fact that you live in an image, in a formula, in an isolating fragment. Is it not out of that isolation that fear, with its pain and pleasure (the outcome of thought) has become aware of this isolation? That image then tries to identify itself with something permanent, God, truth, the nation, the flag and the rest of it.

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.

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

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.

So one sees all this, the misery, the agony, the aggression, the violence and the occasional beauty of love, and the occasional sense of something other than the daily monotonous routine of life. And the demand to capture that otherness, that something which man has always sought after, asked for, has been exploited by the churches throughout the world, by the religions, the clever people who say `this is the door through which you must go, there is only one Saviour and we are his representatives', or `there is only one organization we know the truth and nobody else does'. There are others who say `Come to this Ashrama, to this centre, to this concentration camp, we will drill you so that you will find it'. Man's greed for the otherness has been exploited. And all of them in varying degrees teach such things as the control of thought, because you know if you would see anything very clearly (the flower, the cloud, the bird on the wing, or the clear line of a beautiful mountain), you must look with fresh eyes, with an unspotted, innocent look, which means you must give attention.

But you need attention, which is entirely different from concentration. I do not know if you have ever given your attention to anything. Perhaps you may go to a museum and look at a picture or statue. Does one attend or is one always comparing, judging, evaluating? Attention comes only when you give your mind, your heart, your nerves, your eyes and ears to something completely, when you listen to truth, or to a falsehood. When you give your complete attention then there is no more problem. It is only when there is inattention, that is when there is no attention that a problem arises. And attention has nothing whatsoever to do with will and concentration. Because a mind that is inattentive is a mind that is full of thought. Do you accept what is being said, or do you deny it? What we said just now was: a mind is inattentive, is not completely attentive, when thought is operating. We said thought is inattention. I do not know if you have ever given attention. When you give attention completely with all your being there is no thought at all. It is only when we are not in that state of complete attention that thought begins. And thought is a waste of energy, because thought is the response of memory, the response of experience, knowledge, which is necessary in the technological field but totally unnecessary and a waste of energy at a different level, at the psychological level.

And so it matters very much how one listens because we are going to go into something very complex that demands care, affection, not merely intellectual argument or agreement - we are not propagating ideas, that would be terrible. What we are actually doing together is to unfold, expose, the whole process of thought, of life and see what is actually the truth about them. And so it matters enormously how you listen, whether you listen casually, or whether you listen with a mind that is comparing what is being said with what you already know, or have already read - such a mind is not listening. A mind that listens gives complete attention. It is only when there is inattention that the whole mischief begins.

Then meditation comes into being (not that eastern monopoly, of which gurus talk endlessly, that's not meditation at all) and it is the meditative mind that sees, without time, what is truth. And perhaps when we next meet we can go into this. 18th April 1968

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.

When you see the truth, then you avoid all danger. But we have become so accustomed to danger that we have accepted it. We have accepted war as the way of life and war is the most deadly thing, which has become very normal to us - to kill somebody - organized killing, patriotism, nationalism, the leader, propaganda, all that dangerous rubbish. It is important to see the truth in that danger, the truth of that fact, that as our civilization, our culture is a most deadly thing, every sane man must revolt against it, must totally deny it, inwardly, psychologically. You cannot deny if you don't see the danger, and to see the danger is to see the truth of it, not intellectually, not verbally, not emotionally, but factually. Then, if you are lucky, the mind may come upon that truth; then there is an explosion of something that cannot be put into words. Without understanding that, without having a life there, a life in which your heart and mind are living at a different dimension, your ordinary life, however noble, however good, however helpful, has no meaning. This is so because the social good (of course there must be social reform and all that) but the `social good' and the striving to improve ourselves and society has no meaning; what has meaning is the coming upon reality and from there living in society, living in this world; then there is beauty and love - otherwise there is nothing.

So order is virtue. And order isn't a thing to be cultivated; you can't say `I will be orderly', `I will do this and I won't do that' - then you are merely disciplining yourself, becoming more and more rigid, mechanical; such a mind is totally incapable of coming upon this beauty that has no name, no expression. Order, like virtue, cannot be cultivated - if you cultivate humility you are obviously not humble; you can cultivate vanity, but to cultivate humility is not possible any more than to cultivate love - so order which is virtue cannot be practised. All that one can do is to see this total disorder within and outside oneself - see it! You can see this total disorder instantly and that is the only thing that matters - to see it instantly. You know you cannot see disorder through explanations, through analysis of the various causes of disorder. There it is; walk down any street, watch any culture, any society in action, watch your own mind, your own heart, the way you think, the way you feel, your contradictions, your desires tearing at you and what you see is an endless corridor of opposites. There is disorder. But you can see this at a glance. You can see it at a glance - and it is only with a swift glance that the truth of disorder is seen - you cannot see it if you are intellectually analyzing its causes; it's fairly simple to discover the cause of this enormous inner and outer confusion, disorder and dishonesty - any analytical mind can see what brings about this appalling chaos in the world. But such analytical observation, and descriptions of the cause of disorder, do not eradicate disorder. So to see at a glance the truth of disorder, the fact has to be seen instantly, as you see the beauty of a cloud when you look at it casually.

Now, as we travel together we begin to see what is necessary; that order, absolute order, inwardly, is essential. There are two kinds of order; the first is the order that discipline brings about, the order that a soldier has, who has been drilled for months to obey, to conform, to destroy himself in order to carry out instructions and that brings about the order of death, which is utterly mechanical and meaningless. But there is another totally different kind of order, which is not dependent on any conformity, imitation, any pattern, which is not repetitive of things that were seen yesterday and followed through to today. I hope that we are not merely listening to a lot of words but rather seeing the truth, the fact, for ourselves as we go along - seeing it for ourselves independently of the speaker and what he says. Because freedom is absolutely necessary. And freedom is not at the end but at the very first step that is taken. And freedom doesn't come through discipline, it comes through order. This order (not the mechanical order of respectability, the order which society tries to impose upon man, the order of a rotten, corrupt society) the order we are talking about is of a totally different kind and dimension. This order comes out of under- standing what disorder is. You know the positive comes into being when that which is not true is denied.

So, we go on to discover for ourselves what is disorder; the whole social structure as it exists is based on disorder, with its class and other divisions. When each man is out for himself, competing, worshipping success and fame - that's part of this disorder, both outwardly and inwardly. Disorder means conflict deep within the psychological structure; and conflict outwardly, conflict with your neighbour, conflict with your wife or husband, conflict must exist as long as there is self-centred activity. And conflict is bound to create disorder; there is disorder, nationally, linguistically, the disorder that religions have brought about, dividing those within the house of truth from those outside it, and saying: `There is only one saviour and nobody else' `You must go through this door for salvation and not through any other door'. The worship of nationalities, the worship of the flag are all disorder. And to find out what is absolute order (and there is such a thing as absolute order within oneself, not a relative order, circumstantial order but complete total order) - we must understand what is disorder; we shall then see what this disorder is in the world with its national, religious, class competition, this everlasting pursuit of pleasure and envy. These breed disorder, and you cannot put aside all that without understanding it, without understanding the enormous complex structure of pleasure.

So one discovers as one takes this journey for oneself that every form of experience has its own limitation. We have had thousands and thousands of wars; we have had millions of years of sorrow and we are not free from it. So one wonders, psychologically, if experience teaches anything at all, or only toughens the mind, makes the mind more dull. A mind that is seeking reality through experience, will never find it. And that is what those people who take drugs do and by so doing they hope to expand their mind and experience a certain state: obviously they do experience through heightened sensitivity a semblance of the real, but it is not the real. One can see all this very simply; you see according to your own conditioning. If you take a drug, and if you are an artist you see colours more brightly, more intensely, alive, vivid; or if you are conditioned by religious dogmas about a saviour, or the Masters, obviously when you take that drug, you will see your own projection. And what you project out of your conditioning is the furtherance of your own pleasure and it may superficially change the manner of your life but it is not, obviously, that thing which man has sought endlessly. So one discovers, for oneself, or rather understands, that truth is not to be experienced - that's a tremendous discovery. It can only be seen, not experienced. You know, to see something is one of the most difficult things: to see a leaf, a cloud, the light on the water, without naming it, without saying `how beautiful it is', without being caught in the emotional prejudice of like and dislike - just to see the fact, without the interference of thought, is one of the most difficult, but necessary, things to do.

But truth is not something of time, memory. It isn't something that you can invite, hold and say `I have experienced it'. Like the beauty of yesterday's sunset; when you saw it there was the great joy of the light on the trees, which has left an imprint, and tomorrow you see the sunset through that imprint, you don't see the sunset afresh, anew, it isn't something totally new. Experience can never bring about that quality of freshness, of innocence. And a mind must be completely innocent to see what truth is. And so a mind that practises a discipline, in order to find reality, to experience that reality, such a mind is a dull, stupid mind; it can never possibly understand that unnameable thing. Yet, there must be discipline.

Now, a mind that is seeking experience must invite illusion, because truth, reality, that thing that cannot be put into words, is not an experience and that's the beauty of it; it is not a thing that you can recognize, put in your pocket, or organize - you can't say `I have got it' - it is much too vast to be captured, to be held in the fist of a hand. And yet that is what most of us want, to experience that bliss, that loveliness, a beauty that cannot be destroyed.

And so the responsibility of journeying together is yours as well as the speaker's. You can either take that journey casually out of curiosity, or out of intellectual amusement; or you can be very earnest and pursue it without any deviation. You will then enquire profoundly, take every step fully aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it, and so become aware in that choiceless, clear, awareness, seeing exactly what is taking place. Then you may find or come upon, this truth that has no name, that is not measurable, and without which man has no meaning. Man can go to the moon and write extraordinarily clever books, perfect his technology, establish a moral relationship, but this is all mechanical, vain and has very little significance. So it is essential for each one of us, if we are at all earnest to pursue this essential enquiry; then we shall see that there are certain things one must, not only enquire into, but also be free of. And we must be earnest, not only because the times demand it, but because, unless we are serious, we are not alive. You know, our minds are very distorted, we can't see anything very clearly, or hear anything directly - we only hear what we want to hear and we see things that please us. We are incapable of looking at something directly, without hedging, trying to escape from what is.

WHEN WE MET here the other day, we were saying that it is essential to find out for ourselves what truth is, and not depend on others. We are so easily influenced, our minds are so eager to accept, we fear the loss of security psychologically and we are always eager to follow and to obey. And we are apt to create heroes out of those people who say they know, or they have experienced. I think there is a great danger in the relationship between the speaker and yourselves. The speaker is utterly unimportant - he is like any other instrument, like a telephone. One obviously doesn't make a hero out of a telephone, one is not influenced by the outward aspect of the speaker. So we are not in any way trying to do propaganda, influence, or shape your minds to think in a certain way. But one can see by observing the events of the world (and also the accidents within ourselves that take such deep root), one can observe the monumental chaos of the world, where technology has advanced so well with its computers and other devices. Human beings are becoming more and more mechanical, more and more superficial, filled with all the latest information, following the latest exhibitions, news, novels. And the more mechanical we are, the more superficial we become. But when we are together we are exploring a realm in which all influence, propaganda, obedience, and following, must completely cease. This implies that one has to stand completely alone. Because to find reality, all influence, all imitation, all obedience to a principle, or to an example, or to a guru, or to anyone else, has no value whatsoever. I think that must be made very clear between ourselves, that we are not laying down a law, a method, a system, but rather taking a journey together and in that journey we may come upon certain obvious facts for ourselves, which we have hitherto neglected.

There will be division as long as there is the image which engenders the whole structure of conflict. So one must learn the art of looking, not only at the clouds and the flowers, at the movement of a tree in the wind, but actually looking at ourselves as we are, not saying, `It is ugly', `It is beautiful, or `Is that all?' - all the verbal assertions that one has with regard to oneself. When we can look at ourselves clearly, without the image, then perhaps we shall be able to discover what is true for ourselves. And that truth is not in the realm of thought but of direct perception, in which there is no separation between the observer and the observed. One of the fundamental questions is man's relationship to the ultimate, to the nameless, to what is beyond all words.

I hope this is more or less clear. If it is not, then I'm sorry, because we haven't time to go into it more deeply. That's one of the most absurd things, isn't it - not to have time; time doesn't make us understand, neither do explanations. It is seeing the truth of something that makes us act immediately, not all the words, the explanations, and the whole rigmarole. A mind that is crippled with inward authority of any kind prevents order, and experience does not bring order or freedom, on the contrary. Man has experienced five thousand years of war, of killing people always with more and more efficient weapons, but basically that experience hasn't taught him a thing except perhaps at the periphery where he has gained certain advantages and acquired new techniques. He is still violent, still brutal; he will kill for any reason.

You know there is a story of the Devil and a friend walking along the street. And the friend picks up something from the pavement, looks at it and says: `I've found the truth. Here it is!' So the Devil replies ``I'll help you to organize it.'' All the world has tried to organize truth and therefore has destroyed it. So is it possible for man to find something, to come upon this timeless, immeasurable reality without any illusion - not as an experience, not as a formula, not as an idea or concept but actually, because if we don't find that, life is wasted, life has no meaning. A man may be very capable, own a lot of property, live very well and become famous, but without coming upon this highest thing, life becomes shallow, empty and meaningless. And realizing this meaningless state, man begins to invent gods, the gods of the country, of the party, the gods of the churches, the temples and so on. So is it possible to come upon this benediction which is not in any church, in any temple, in any mosque? To find that out, to come upon this thing, first there must be order, absolute order within and this order, which is virtue, is denied unless you totally reject the morality of society. In that total rejection of social morality there is morality. Do please understand this! The morality of society is no morality at all. The social morality of any country has produced this utter chaos in the world and man living in this culture - although outwardly he may have very polished manners, go to the office, attend church and visit temples - is competitive, envious, brutal, greedy and violent. Inwardly he is immoral and this inward state is producing outward disorder, so the morality that man has pursued, which has brought about chaos is not morality at all. And order is the highest form of virtue and therefore freedom. There is no virtue without freedom, freedom from imitation, freedom from fear of authority. We investigated the question of fear the other day - whether it is all possible to be free from this tremendous burden - so we won't go into it again at the moment. Without being totally free from fear I do not see how it is possible to be virtuous; surely to be orderly, which means to be virtuous, is not an imitative process.

So only a mind which is free from the known, dying every day and therefore renewing itself, can possibly understand this whole business of time, fear, pleasure and sorrow. And it is only such a mind that can see what is truth. truth is not a word, it is not a concept; it isn't your truth and my truth, the Christian truth and the Muslim truth. truth, like love, has no nationality, but to love and to see truth there must be no hate, no jealousy, no division and no anger. So one has to die to all that, to all the things which we call living and only then is there a possibility of that dimension in which time does not exist. 12th March 1968

Therefore belief - please follow this - destroys innocency. Belief is the result of fear. Whether you believe in God or don't believe in God, there's very little difference; they are both the result of your conditioning. You are conditioned to believe in God and the Communist is conditioned not to believe. But the believer and the non-believer has his own continuity and therefore there is no innocency to find what truth is. There is only innocency when every psychological memory comes to an end and out of that comes a totally new dimension. Death is after all a fact; we are all going to die whether we like it or not, through disease, through an accident or naturally, that is inevitable. Some scientist perhaps may discover a drug that will keep us alive fifty years longer, but it will be the same chaos. Death then is inevitable; through usage, through conflict, through constant struggle the physical organism wears itself out. Emotional stress and strain wear out the heart more quickly than actual physical activity. So there is physical death.