Mind Without Measure

Have you ever enquired what is the nature of ending, not ending to begin something, but ending? That is, you are attached, that is a common fact; attached to your children, attached to your husband, wife, attached to something or other. Death comes along and wipes away that attachment. You cannot carry your money to heaven. You may like to have it till the last moment, but you cannot take it with you, and death says no. So can we, while living understand the nature of attachment with all its fear, jealousy, anxiety, possessive feeling; while living, be free of attachment? While you are alive, to end something voluntarily, easily without any pressure, without any reward or punishment, to end, in that there is great beauty. Then one understands the nature of freedom. In the ending, there is a beginning, something new. There is an ending, and when there is an ending, there is that feeling of total freedom from all the burden that humanity has carried for centuries. You listen to all this, smile, nod your head and agree, but you will go on being attached. That is the easiest way, the most comforting and the most painful, but you will go on. And you call that practical. Whereas, if you understand the nature of ending, you end your ambition in a very, very competitive world, understand the ending of your arrogance, your pride, your status. When this so-called organism ends, the content of consciousness of humanity goes on unless you bring about a radical change in that consciousness, a mutation, so that you are no longer in that stream of selfishness; you are no longer caught, engaged, put in the prison of attachment, uncertainty, and so on. There is a totally different way of living.

We first begin by asking what is the significance of death. It is the question of all humanity whether we are very young or very old. What is the meaning, the significance, of the extraordinary thing called death? Yesterday evening, we talked about several things including what is love, compassion; what is the relationship of life which is not only the whole human existence, what is its relationship to love, to death and to the whole search of man for thousands of years to find something that is beyond all thought. We have to understand the meaning of death because we are all going to die. That is absolute certainty. We are so afraid of it or we rationalize it. You say `yes', I accept it, I accept death as I accept pain, as I accept sorrow, as I accept loneliness; I also accept death, which is to submit, to suffer death, to allow the whole of existence of a human being to come to an end, either through disease, through old age or through some incident. We never find out while we are living what it means to die, to understand the depth of it. You are looking at it as an incident of life, as a fact of life, as violence is a fact of life, as hatred is a fact of life. If we are at all reasonable, sane, we must look at this question of death in similar manner, not accept it, not just say it is inevitable or try to find out what lies beyond death, but to observe the nature of dying.

Some of you perhaps have heard of genetic engineering. The genetic experts say that they assume a factor, a creative element, handed out from the father to the offspring, certain tendencies, qualities. `They are saying, since man has not changed for thousands of years, they assume that he can be changed through genetic interference. It is a very complex question which we are not going to discuss. But we must understand what is going on, that as human beings have not deeply changed their characteristics, their way of life, their violence, they are hoping through certain chemical process and so on to change the genes, the factors that transmit certain characteristics from the father to the son. Also we should consider what is happening in the computer world. We cannot neglect all this: the genetic engineering and what is happening in the computer world. They are trying to create a mechanical intelligence, ultimate intelligence through the computer which will then think much more rapidly, more accurately, and inform the robots what they should do. This is happening already and they are trying to bring about a machine, a computer, which has ultimate intelligence. So, there is on one side genetic engineering, on the other the computer acting as human beings, inventing generation after generation of computer, improving, and so on. I won't go into all that. So what is going to happen to the human mind? What is going to happen to us when the computer can do almost everything that we do? It can meditate, it can invent gods, much better gods than yours, it can inform, educate your children far better than the present teacher, and it will create a great deal of leisure for man. Are you understanding the nature of all this, the significance of all this? That is, what is going to happen to our minds? When the computer and genetic engineering are rapidly advancing, what is going to happen to us? We would have more leisure, the computer plus the robot will do a great many things that we are doing now in our factories, in our offices, and so on. Then man will have more leisure. How will he use that leisure? Please go into this with me for a while. If the computer can out-think you, remember far more than you do, calculate with such astonishing speed and give you leisure, either you pursue the path of pleasure which is entertainment - cinemas, religious entertainments, you know all the industry of entertainment, including the gurus - or psychological search, seeking out inwardly and finding out for oneself a tremendous area that is beyond all thought. These are the only two possibilities left for us - entertainment or delving into the whole structure of the psyche and acting. Now we are asking what is our human mind, our brain. We are going to find out for ourselves.

Man has always had these three factors in life - fear, the pursuit of pleasure and sorrow, and apparently he has not gone beyond that. He has tried every method, every system that you can think of, tried to suppress it, tried to escape from it, tried to invent the gods and surrender all this to that invention, but that has not worked either. So we must find out whether sorrow can end, whether we can understand the nature of sorrow, the causes of sorrow. Is the cause different from fear, is the cause different from pleasure, pleasure of achievement, pleasure of talent, pleasure of wealth? Let us find out whether sorrow and fear can ever end. The pursuit of pleasure is infinite, is endless, the pleasure of achievement, the pleasure of being attached to somebody, whether that attachment is to a person, to an idea or to a conclusion. While you are pursuing that pleasure, there is always the shadow of fear with it. Where there is fear, there is sorrow. But they are all together. They are all interrelated, and one must deal with them all wholly, not separately. Be clear that we are not dealing with sorrow separately as though it was something different from fear. We are looking, searching out the nature of sorrow and the ending of sorrow, because where there is sorrow, there is no love.

Sorrow expresses itself in so many ways - the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of seeing this vast country where there is poverty, corruption, utter disregard for another human being, carelessness. When you watch all this day after day, that is also sorrow, the utter neglect by all the politicians all over the world. They only want power, position, and where there is power, there is evil. And sorrow is the loss of someone you love. Sorrow of losing, sorrow of ending something you have cherished, something that you have held on to, the sorrow of doubt, the sorrow of seeing one's own life such an empty shell, meaningless existence. You may have money, sex, children, be very fashionable, rich, but it is an empty life. There is no depth in it. Seeing that, perceiving the nature of it, is also sorrow. So can sorrow end? It is not your sorrow. It is also mine and another's. Don't deal with sorrow as your particular precious stuff. It is shared by all humanity. Deal with it not as your particular sorrow, your private quiet sorrow, but as the sorrow of all human beings, whether you are a man or a woman, rich or poor, sophisticated or at the height of your excellence. Please don't deal with all these factors like fear, pleasure, sorrow, love, and so on as something separate from each other. You must approach this whole thing wholly, not fragmentarily. If you approach it fragmentarily, you will never solve it. So, look at greed, pain, sorrow, as a whole movement of life, not something different from life. This is our daily life. To find whether there is an end to all this - to misery, to conflict, pain, sorrow and fear - one must be able to perceive them, one must be able to be aware of them.

So we are going to talk over together the nature of fear; whether fear can end now or it must end gradually. We are used to the idea that gradually we will be rid of fear, which is, `I am afraid, but give me time, I will get over it.' Can fear disappear through time or is the very time itself the root of fear? What is the root of fear? What is fear? You all know what fear is - fear of not becoming, not achieving, fear of the dark, fear of authority, fear of your wife or husband; fear has many, many aspects. We are not concerned with the many facets of fear or with the wiping away of one or two fears. It is like cutting the branches of a tree, but if you want to destroy the tree, you must uproot the tree, go to the very root of it. So look at that fear. What is fear - fear of an accident, fear of disease, and ultimate fear which is of death or the fear of living? Fear is much too deep to surrender it or to dispel it or to control it or to suppress it. One must enquire into the root of it. What is the root of fear? Is it not time, is it not remembrance, is it not an experience which you have had which was painful and the fear of it recurring again, fear of disease - are not all these the symptoms? We are not dealing with symptoms. We are concerned whether it is possible to uproot totally all fear. If that is clear, then we are concerned not with a particular fear, not your own special neurotic fear but with the nature, the structure, the cause of fear, because where there is a cause, there is an end. So we are together going to find out the cause.

Evolution means becoming, that is, I am greedy, envious, violent. Can greed evolve into non-greed? Or anger, loneliness, become gradually something else? All our tradition, all our religious training, our belief, our faith, and all the so-called sacred literature tell you that you will become something. If you make an effort, if you strive after, if you meditate, you will move from this to that, from `what you are' to `what you should be'. That is evolution. Now the speaker is denying all that. The speaker is saying greed can never become better greed. There is only the ending of something, not becoming something. Most of you probably believe in reincarnation. Why do you believe in it? That is, from this life to next life, where you have better opportunities, where you will be a little bit nobler, where you have a little more comfort, more enlightenment; that is, from `what you are' to become `what you should be'. That is called evolution. The speaker is questioning that. He says there is no such thing as psychological evolution. You have to understand the nature of that statement, what is implied - that there is no movement as the evolution of the psyche which means there is no becoming. I don't become noble, I don't achieve enlightenment if I practise, if I strive, if I deny this or control, and so on, which is gradation in achievement. So one has to understand the nature of time; time, as we said, essentially means to divide, break; time implies a beginning and an ending.

So, time is a great factor in our life. There is time by the watch, the chronological time and the time to learn a language, a skill, a time to achieve in this world - become from a clerk to the executive person, and so on. There is time in that direction. Is there time psychologically, that is, inwardly? Is there time which means a progress from here to there, in the sense of becoming more noble, more free of greed, anger, violence? Time is evolution. From the seed to a tree, from a baby to manhood, the growth, the becoming, all that implies time. Time has evolution. Now we are going to question together whether there is psychological evolution at all. This is important because time and thought are the root of fear. Fear cannot end or fade away or dissipate if you don't understand the nature of time and the nature of thought which are the roots of all fear. We are examining together the nature of time. There is physical time, the new moon becoming the full moon, the seed growing into a great gigantic tree. Time is necessary to learn a language, a skill; time is necessary to accumulate knowledge. You may learn a language within a week or six months. To go from here to your house takes time; from one point to another. All physical movement, physical activity, learning, requires time. The psyche, that is, the bundle of all your thinking, of all your feelings, of all your conclusions, beliefs, gods, hope, fear, all that is a bundle, that is your consciousness, that is what you are. That is what your consciousness is. Your consciousness is made of all these things - your gods, your knowledge, your faith, your hope, your fears, your pleasures, your conclusions, your loneliness and the great fear of sorrow, pain. We are asking whether that consciousness has evolution at all.

We must together perceive for ourselves what is truth and what is false; not to be told what is false or what is true, what is ignorance and what is knowledge, but to find for ourselves a quiet corner in ourselves, living in this dreadful city, living in small spaces, working all day long, commuting, going to great distances in crowded trains and buses. We must find for ourselves a quiet corner, not in a house or in a garden or an empty lane but deep within ourselves, and from there act, live, and find out for ourselves what is beauty, what is time, the nature and the movement of fear, the pursuit of pleasure and the ending of sorrow. We must have such a corner, not in the mind but in the heart, because then, where there is affection and love, intellect, understanding, comes clarity, and from that there is action. But most of us live such strenuous, conflicting, lives with much pressure around us. If we don't find for ourselves some inward space, a space not created by thought, a space uncontaminated, clear, in which there is a light which is not lit by another, a light to ourselves so that we are totally free, we are not free human beings. We think we are free. We think we are free because we can choose, because we can do what we want, but freedom is something entirely different from the desire to do what we want. So we must together find for ourselves without guidance, without help, without any outside agency telling us what to do, how to behave, what is right action, and find in ourselves a space that has no ending and no beginning.

Now, are you arrogant? The man who is trying to become something psychologically is arrogant. A person is arrogant when he tries to become something which he is not. The becoming is the movement of arrogance. Sirs, look at it. It denies totally the sense of humility. When you are facing facts, then you have to be totally humble, not cultivate humility. Only the vain cultivate humility. When they are vain, arrogant, they may cultivate humility, but their humility is still arrogance. We are all treading the same path of becoming and therefore being utterly dishonest, pretending to be what we are not. Whereas, a good mind faces the fact, the fact that you are violent; arrogant. Nobody has to tell me that you are arrogant, it is so obvious. The way you talk, the way you behave, if one is at all awake, one sees the nature of arrogance. To see it, to comprehend it and to hold it, not try to escape from it, is to solve it.

I hope you are listening. It is important to know the art of listening: it is to listen, to see the truth of it and act. For us, we see something to be true, we understand logically, reasonably, very clearly, but we don't act. There is an interval between perception and action. Between the perception and action all other incidents take place. Therefore you will never act. If you see that violence in you is a fact and not try to become non-violent, which is non-fact, but if you perceive the nature of violence, the complexity of violence and listen to your own violence, it will reveal the nature of itself. Then there is the end of violence, completely.

Now, how do I deal with fact? How do I approach fact? How do I look at that fact? What is my motive in looking at the fact? What is the direction in which I want the fact to move? I must be aware of the nature and structure of the fact, I must be aware of the fact without choice. How does one deal with fact? That is, how do I observe the fact that I am violent? That violence is shown when I am angry, when I am jealous. If I am trying to compare myself with another, if I am doing all that, then it is impossible to face facts. A good mind faces facts. If you are in business, you face facts and deal with the fact, change the fact; you don't pretend that you will do something else away from the fact. Then you are not a good businessman. But here we are so ineffectual because we don't deal with facts. Psychologically, inwardly, we avoid them. We escape from them, or when we do discover them, we suppress them. So there is no resolution of any of them. From that, we ask something else, which is: What is a good mind? Is a mind good when it is full of knowledge?

There are other forms of violence, but there is only `what is'. But if you are conditioned to pursue non-violence while you are violent, that is, to move away from the fact, then you must have conflict. Whereas, if one dealt with `what is', there is only one fact - that is I am violent, and in the understanding of the nature and structure of violence there may be the ending of violence, but the ending of violence is not a problem. Our minds are trained, educated, to solve problems - mathematical problems, economic problems, political problems, and so on. Our brains are conditioned to deal mechanically with problems. And we make of life a series of endless problems psychologically. We went into that yesterday. So there is only fact, not the opposite. Is this very clear - that the ideal, the principle, that which you call the noble, are all illusions? What is fact is, we are violent, ignorant, corrupt, uncertain, and so on. Those are facts and we have to deal with facts. Facts don't create problems if you face them. I discover that I am violent, and I have no opposite to it. I reject totally the opposite, it has no meaning. There is only fact.

There is another reason for conflict - which is, there is duality. We are examining something to understand the nature of conflict and to find out for ourselves if it is possible to be totally, completely, free of conflict. Conflict wears out the brain, makes the mind old. A man who has lived without conflict is an extraordinary human being. It is important to realize the necessity of understanding conflict. We see that measurement, comparison, brings about conflict. Also we have stated that there is duality. Some of your philosophers have stated that, posited that there is duality and that one of the reasons of this conflict is this duality. There is duality - night and morning, light and shade, tall and short, bright and dull morning, sun rising and sun setting. Physically there is duality: you are a woman and another is a man. But we are asking, is there psychological duality at all? Or is there only `what is'? I am violent, that is, there is only violence, not non-violence. The non-violence is just an idea. It is not a fact. Where there is violence and non-violence, there must be conflict. In this country, you are talking endlessly about non-violence, but probably you are also very violent people. The fact is, human beings throughout the world are violent. That is a fact. Violence means not only physical violence but also imitation, conformity, obedience, acceptance.

Why does man live in conflict? What is conflict? What is the nature of conflict? I do not know if some of you have seen those caves in the south of France where, 25, 30 thousand years ago, there is a picture of man fighting evil in the form of a bull, and so on. For thousands of years we have lived with conflict. To meditate, it becomes a conflict. Does conflict exist where there is comparison? Comparison means measurement. One compares oneself with another. Where there is comparison, there must be fear, there must be conflict. Can one live without comparison at all? We think that by comparing ourselves with somebody we are progressing. You want to be like your guru, you want to achieve enlightenment, position, you want a follower, you want to be respected, and so on. So, where there is a becoming psychologically, there must be conflict. Is it possible to live a life without any comparison and therefore without any conflict? We are questioning the whole process of psychological becoming. A child becomes an adult, then grows into manhood. To learn a language we need time, to acquire any skill we need time. We are asking, is becoming psychologically one of the reasons of conflict - the `what is' to be changed into `what should be' - `I am not good but I will be good, I am greedy, envious, but perhaps one day I will be free of all this.' Desire to become, which is measurement, which is comparison, is that one of the causes of conflict?

Now, what is the origin of thought? Why is thought divided in its very nature, the very movement of thinking in itself, why is it divisive, fragmentary, limited? Since thought is perhaps the cause, don't ask, `Please tell me how to end the cause; then you are back into your old field of problems. If you try to solve this problem, you have other problems. Thought is creating problems. So you say, tell me how to stop them, how to stop thinking, and there are lots of people who will tell you how to stop thinking. And those people vary from each other - meditate, don't meditate, try this way, you know all that. So we multiply problems after problems. But look at this movement of thought with which man has lived for thousands upon thousands of years, and ask not how to end thought, but what is the nature of it, why has thought become so important. Because, thought implies knowledge. Ask what place has knowledge in life. We must stop now, we will continue tomorrow evening. But please, when you leave here, look at it, find out; that means an active brain, brain that is active, thinking, discussing, not just stuck in a narrow little groove of tradition of some system. One of the calamities in the world is that we are all getting old, not merely old in the body, but old mentally. Decay begins there inside first because we become mechanical. We never have the energy, vitality, passion, to find out. We have all been told what to do, we have all been instructed. This is not a place of instruction nor are you being told what to do. Here we are serious to find out a different way of living, and you can only find that out when you understand the nature of thought and the way of living in which thought is not important at all.

If you say, tell me how to end thought, then you make a problem of it because your brain is trained, educated, to solve problems. As an expert in computers is trained to solve problems there, that same movement is extended into the psychological world. If thought is the cause of this, the question is not how to end it, but to understand the whole movement of thought. If you treat it as your thinking, and somebody else treats it as his thinking, then the issues are totally different. That leads to all kinds of illusion. Superstitions have no reality, but thinking is the ground upon which all human beings - the black, the white, the pink, the Muslim, the Hindu, the villager, the uneducated - stand. Then you move away from the idea that it is my thinking; you are then concerned with global thinking, not the Indian way of thinking. You are concerned really with the world, with all humanity, of which you are. You are not an individual. Individual means unique, undivided. You are not unique, you are totally divided, fragmented in yourself, you are the result of all the past generations. Your brain is not yours. It is evolved through thousands and thousands of years. But your religion, your scriptures, your everyday life, says you are separate from everybody else, and you are trained to accept it. You have never gone into it, you have never questioned it, doubted it, but you accept, and in that acceptance lies your problems. But if you look at it all as a vast movement of life of which you are a part, this movement that is limitless, that has no beginning and no end, then you begin to enquire into the nature of thought.

Now, we are going to look at the various issues of our life not with a brain that is trained to solve problems, but to observe the issues, not demanding an answer, not demanding a solution, because to live a life without a single problem is the most extraordinary life. It has immense capacity. It has tremendous energy. It is always renewing itself, but if you are always caught in the field of problems and the resolution of those problems, then you never move out of those problems. Is this clear? We are going to find out whether it is possible to look at any issue and not call it a problem, to look at any issue of our daily life and not label it as a problem but only to observe it, to be aware of the whole nature of that issue, the content of that issue; but if you approach it as a problem and therefore try to find an answer to it, you will increase the problem. Say, for example, it is important to have an unoccupied mind. It is only a brain that is unoccupied that can perceive something new, that is free, that has tremendous vitality. It is necessary to have a very quiet mind because it is only a quiet mind, unoccupied mind, a brain that can see things clearly, that can actually think totally differently. Now, you hear that it is necessary to have a quiet, still mind, then you ask, `how am I to get it?' Then you make a problem of it - `I need a quiet mind. My mind is occupied, restless, chattering all the time and how am I to stop it?' The desire to stop it brings about problems. How am I to do it is a problem. Have you understood this? But if you approach the question of that unoccupied mind without the how, then you will begin to see for yourself the nature of occupation, why it is occupied, why it is constantly dwelling on a particular thing. When you observe it, when you are aware of it, it is telling you the story. Do you understand this?

Now we ought to ask a question: what is meditation? We are together going to examine what is meditation, not how to meditate, but what is the nature, the quality, the structure, the beauty of meditation. The word `meditation means to ponder over, to think over, to consider, to probe, to investigate, to look, according to the dictionary. And the word `meditation also means measurement, to measure. I believe in Sanskrit ma is to measure. Measurement means comparison. Have you ever considered how the ancient Greece in 450 B.C. exploded all over Europe? Greece was responsible for measurement; the Greeks invented measurement. Without measurement there can be no technology. And the Western world is capable of great technology, which has moved to Japan. The ancient Indians said that measurement is illusion; India exploded all over Asia. Don't be proud of it, it is all gone. You have lost the one thing that was so precious. You have lost the greatest jewel that you had ever had. So meditation means to think, to ponder, and also it means to measure. That is, I am this, I must be that; I am comparing myself with yourself who are clever, beautiful, lovely, and I am not; that is measurement. Following an example is measurement. Wherever there is comparison psychologically, meditation cannot be. Where there is measurement, comparison, there cannot be meditation. You can compare between two cars, between two materials, better cloth, better paper, better house, better food, but where the mind thinks in terms psychologically of the better, meditation is not possible. You can sit cross-legged, do all kinds of yoga, all kinds of control, but where there is control, there is measurement. Where there is control, there must be conflict and there must be measurement, and that is not meditation.

Also we are going to talk over together this question of death - death being the ending, the ending of our memories, of our attachments, the bank account if you have one. You cannot carry it with you but you would like to have it till the last moment. So, what is death and who is it that dies? And what is life? Do you understand? Who is it that dies, and what does it mean to die? We are not talking of the ending of the physical organism, but we are enquiring into life, the ending of life and the great significance of what death means. What is life which we have separated from death? There is a gap 40, 50 or 100 years. We want to prolong our lives, as long as possible. Modem medicine, surgery, health, and all that helps to prolong one's life. I do not know for what, but one wants to prolong it. So what is life, your life or the life of the universe, life of the earth, life of nature, life which is the vast movement without a beginning and without an end? Don't fall back into the trap of your tradition. That is dead, as dead as a door nail. So we must examine when we talk about living, life, what that means - the life of a tree, the life of the fish in the water, the life of the beauty of a tiger, the life of the universe, this life that seems so extraordinarily vast, immense, measureless. Are we talking about that or your life? If you are talking about your life, what is that life? Going to the office from morning till night for 50, years, having children, belonging to some sect, following some guru? Your life is conflict as pleasure, conflict as fear and the pursuit of pleasure and desire. This is your life. Is that what we are talking about, the ending of that life? What is important - before or after death? Life, the beauty of it, the energy, the pleasure of it, the immensity of it you have reduced to such shallow little `me'. Are you concerned about that, the `me' that is going to die? Is it your name, your form, how you look, your bank account, your ideals, your beliefs, your experiences? So what are you? Please look, question it, doubt it, ask it. Is that what you are frightened of - dying? Knowing that your body, that organism, is going to die? You may prolong it for a long time, but it is going to come to an end. Or you can say, `I have had a jolly good life, I don't mind dying.' We are asking, what is it that dies and what is it that clings to life? By life I mean going to office, sex, pain, pleasure, fighting each other, quarrelling, destroying each other. This is your life, whether you are young or old. Is that what you are afraid of ending? Or are you considering life as a whole, the life of the universe, which is so immense, so vast, so incalculable? Please enquire what you are, to which thought clings, to the image you have built about yourself. It is not the immortality of one's soul, of yourself. Yourself is built through time, your image as `me' from the moment you are born till now. And you accept that `me' as a reality; is it real at all or is it a series of words, series of memories, accidental experiences, which are all put together by thought, and is that `me' holding on to all this travail of life? If you are not holding it then life is something totally different. It is a vast incalculable movement. But that can only be seen when the self is not.

And what is compassion? - not the definition that you can look up in a dictionary. What is the relationship between love and compassion, or are they the same movement? When we use the word `relationship', it implies a duality, a separation, but we are asking what place has love in compassion, or is love the highest expression of compassion? How can one be compassionate if you belong to any religion, follow any guru, believe in something, believe in your scriptures, and so on, attached to a conclusion? When you accept your guru, you have come to a conclusion, or when you strongly believe in god or in a saviour, this or that, can there be compassion? You may do social work, help the poor out of pity, out of sympathy, out of charity, but is all that love and compassion? In understanding the nature of love, having that quality which is mind in the heart, that is intelligence. Intelligence is the understanding or the discovering of what love is. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought, with cleverness, with knowledge. You may be very clever in your studies, in your job, in being able to argue very cleverly, reasonably, but that is not intelligence. Intelligence goes with love and compassion, and you cannot come upon that intelligence as an individual. Compassion is not yours or mine like thought is not yours or mine. When there is intelligence, there is no me and you. And intelligence does not abide in your heart or your mind. That intelligence which is supreme is everywhere. It is that intelligence that moves the earth and the heavens and the stars, because that is compassion.

So, what is sorrow? What is the nature of it? In that thing called sorrow, there is pain, there is grief, there is a sense of isolation, a sense of loneliness in which there is no relationship. It is not only a physical shock but a great crisis in consciousness, in the psyche. I have lost my son; I am only taking that example. I have lost my son to whom I am attached. I want him to grow up into some businessman, have some kind of good substantial income, a house, and so on, and suddenly he has gone. What is that quality of suddenness, something which has given me great joy, great pain, great anxiety, concern about his future? All that movement - my affection, my concern, my care, my sense of helping him to have good taste, to live aesthetically - suddenly ends. Don't you know all these feelings? In every house there is this shadow of sorrow. There is sudden ending of my attachment, sudden ending of all my hope which I have invested in him, sudden in the sense of a deep shock and life becomes empty; either I become very cynical or find a rational explanation or plunge myself into some form of entertainment - drugs, trips and all the rest of it, or believe in some future life. This is the lot of human beings.

Is it possible to end this enormous burden carried by humanity and by those who are still in sorrow? What is sorrow? What is the cause of sorrow? Where there is a cause, there is an end. If I have cancer, the cause, the pain, then perhaps the cause can be removed. So, where there is a cause for anything, there is an end to that. The causation is a movement; it is not a fixed point. If you can understand and discover the cause of this burden of sorrow, then perhaps we can understand the nature of love; not love of god, not the love of the guru, not the love of some book or a poem but the love of human beings - the love of your wife, the husband, your children. To find that extraordinary perfume that is really the light of the world, one must understand the nature of suffering, the structure of suffering.

Yesterday evening we talked about fear, the nature of fear and what brings about fear. We said time, desire, thought, are the causes of fear and man has lived with fear. We live with fear now - fear of the past, fear of the future of man, what is going to happen to man. Surely, the future of man is what he is now. If he does not radically change, psychologically, inwardly, the future is what he is now. That is guaranteed because there will be more wars, more instruments of wars, more destruction, more violence, more fragmentation of human beings into nationalities, and so on. The future is what we are now. It is so urgently necessary to bring about the psychological revolution. What does it mean to bring about a change - not move from one form, one system, one idea to another, but is it possible for human beings who have lived on this lovely earth for so many millennia to change?

We are asking, what is the root of it? The root of it is time and thought. I had pain a couple of weeks ago and I fear it might return again, which is time. There is the remembrance of that pain and the fear that it may happen again. My wife has hurt me, as I have hurt her, not physically, but inwardly, and I hope she won't hurt me more by word or a gesture or by a tear. I am afraid she might hurt me, so there is fear. Fear is time and thought. If one understands the nature of time and thought and the movement and the wandering of desire, understand in the sense see the truth of it instantly, not the verbal conclusion of it but the fact of it, the reality of it, the depth of it, the intensity of it, if you do see it so clearly, then you will never ask how is fear to end. Nor can you ask, `How can I control thought', or `How am I to stop thought', which are the causes of fear. You will never ask that question because you cannot ask that question about it. You actually see the truth. It is there. It is there for you to see, not to accept, to argue, analyse, discuss, take sides; you can't. This is like seeing the most beautiful thing on earth, which is there - an excellent sea, an excellent mind which is there, a heart that is always aflame, which is there. If you see it, then fear ends. And where there is the ending of fear, there is no god. It is out of our fear, out of our desire, that we invent the gods. When a man is without fear, then he is a totally different human being and he needs no god. And sirs and ladies, give your heart to consider all this - not your mind, not your intellect. Intellect has its place, but when you are examining something very, very seriously, the head must enter into its consideration. When the heart enters, that is when there is love to observe, love of watching, seeing; then, when you see the truth of desire, time and thought, there is no fear whatsoever. Then only there can be love. Fear and love cannot go together. Fear and pleasure go together, but not love and fear.

Can we find out, without control, without suppression, just see how thought is acting upon sensation, even verbally, even intellectually, and go into it very deeply, to have such alertness, such care, such affection, such love to see its nature, how desire is born? You have to see what thought is, how thought makes all life a problem. Thought is a material movement. Thought is limited because all knowledge, all experience, is limited. Thought springs from knowledge, experience, memory. And this whole process is limited. There is no complete knowledge about anything, can never be. Science, technology, is always adding more and more. So, time, desire, thought, are the factors of fear. I am afraid of what might happen to me because I have had an accident a couple of days ago or a year ago, and I am afraid it might happen again. I am watchful. There is fear. I am afraid of the dark, I am afraid of the wife, the husband, I am afraid of my boss. Aren't you all afraid? Don't be ashamed. It is the common lot of man. You may not want to acknowledge it, you may not want to face it, but you are frightened, and fear does terrible things to human beings. Mentally, psychologically, it narrows down, it curtails. It makes human beings so bound to authority, to some ideas. They have become so dependent, so attached, so inhuman. We are not talking about the many expressions of desire, of fear, but fear itself. We are not talking about the various aspects of fear, but the root of it.

Now, we ought to talk over together what is desire because, time, desire and thought are the major factors of fear. What is desire? What is the wandering nature of desire, desire which is never content, the desire that all religions have said, suppress? Why have religious leaders all over the world, and all the books, said we must suppress our desire; desire is all right for god, but to desire a woman, desire a house, desire the lovely things of the earth, the beauty of a painting, the beauty of a statue, a poem of Keats, that you must not desire? We have learnt through the ages the art of suppressing desire or yielding to desire.

So, what is desire? - not the object of desire or the object creating the desire. Does the object create the desire or desire exists and the object varies? You must be clear on this point. You see a nice car, a nice shirt, a lovely house, a beautiful painting. That painting, house, the car, the woman, the man - does the object create the desire or desire exists and the objects don't matter? If the object creates desire, then it is a totally different investigation, but if desire exists and the nature of desire is not wandering from one thing to another, then it is difficult. We have to examine together what is the origin, the beginning, of desire; not how to control desire, not to suppress it, transcend it, but the beginning of it. If one can understand the origin, the source, of desire, then we can deal with it. If we don't ask the origin, the beginning, then we are merely trimming the branches of desire.

We have been talking over together, in a conversation between two people, the very complex process of our living from the time we are born till we die. We talked about whether it is possible at all to live a life without a single shadow of conflict - conflict in our relationship with each other, however intimate or far away. Conflict brings about disorder, and as long as each one of us lives in disorder, we cannot possibly bring about a psychological revolution in the structure of society. This evening we ought to talk over the nature of time, desire, fear, pleasure, and whether sorrow, which happens to be the lot of man throughout the world, has an end to it. Together you and the speaker are going to investigate the nature of time, explore desire which is very complex, and talk over together as to whether there is an end to sorrow. Because, where there is sorrow, there cannot be love, there can be no compassion, there can be no intelligence. So, it is important that you and the speaker meet at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity. Otherwise, there will be no possibility of communication. One hopes we will meet on the same level because, the speaker has no authority, he is not telling you what to do, or what you should do with your life; but when we are together, discussing, having a dialogue over a problem, that problem is the concern of both the speaker and you. It is your concern as well as that of the speaker. Merely to meet at a verbal level, as most of us do, has very little significance because we are concerned with not physical revolution, but psychological revolution - inward, radical, fundamental change. We have lived for millennia after millennia, for thousands of years, with sorrow, pain, anxiety, loneliness, despair, fear and the pursuit of wandering desire, and man has always asked if there is a stop to time.

What is time? Time fundamentally means division, evolution, achievement, moving from here to there, the constant division as of yesterday, today and tomorrow - sun rising, sun setting, the full moon of a lovely evening and the time to meet your friend. Time is hope. Time is a very complex affair, and that requires patience. Patience is timeless; it is only impatience that has time. To enquire into the nature of time, one must have a great deal of patience, not impatience, not say `get on, I understand what you are talking about.' We have divided our life in a time movement. Movement is time. To go from here to there requires time. To learn a language requires time. To accumulate knowledge, to experience, looking forward to something as fear or as pleasure, the memories of yesterday, a thousand yesterdays, meeting the present, modifying and moving towards the future, all this is time. For a clerk to become the manager, to acquire any skill, requires time. The desire to experience something other than the usual experience and pursuit of that, is also time. Is there psychological time at all? Being violent, to become non-violent - that requires time. The pursuit of an ideal requires time. One has the fallacy that one will evolve into something totally different from `what is'. All this implies time. So we must together understand, not verbally, the feeling of time, the sense of time.

The moment there is the idea `I must not' or `I should, or, I will, away from `what is', then there must be conflict. Does one perceive this intellectually or actually - that there is no opposite psychologically, inwardly, but only `what is'? You deal with `what is', not `what should be'. I am violent, and this idea of non-violence is fictitious, is hypocritical. It has no value because, in becoming non-violent, I am sowing the seeds of violence all the time. So there is only violence. What is the nature and the structure of violence, not only to get angry, to hit somebody, to kill somebody, not only the killing of human beings but killing animals, killing nature? Violence is also imitation, conformity, trying to be something which you are not. Can one look at that violence with all the content of that word, not just physical anger or physical expression of that anger but to look at the whole content of that word and hold it, look at it, and not move away from it, neither suppress it nor escape from it nor transcend it but just look at it as you would look at a precious jewel? When you so look at it, are you looking at it as something separate from you or what you observe is what you are? This is important to understand. We are violent. That violence, we have said, is different from `me'. Therefore, I try to change it to become something else. That violence is me. I am not different from violence, greed or hate or jealousy. Suffering is me, but we have separated anger, jealousy, loneliness, sorrow, as something separate from me so that I can control it, shape it, run away from it; but if that is me, I can do nothing about it but just observe it. So the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought, the experiencer is the experienced. The two are not separate.

If one sees that, not intellectually, not as an idea or a conclusion but as an actuality, as a fact, then one can see that the only instrument that we have is thought. Please understand the nature and the content of thought. Thought is all the sensory responses, the imaginations, all the sexual symbols, the sexual pictures, and so on, the feeling of depression, elation, anxiety; all this is the result of limited thought, because thought is the outcome of limited knowledge.

There is no complete knowledge about anything. We ask a totally different question, which is, `Is there a different instrument?' If thought is not the instrument to solve human problems, then what is the instrument? Thought is a worn out instrument, blunt instrument. It may be clever, it may solve certain problems; but the problems it has created in human beings and between human beings, the instrument of thought that we have used to solve our problems in our daily life, in relationship, that instrument is blunt, limited, worn out. Unless we find a new instrument, there can be no fundamental, radical, change of human psyche. So, we are going together to enquire into the nature of that instrument, the quality of it, the structure of it, the beauty of it. But before we can enquire, one must be absolutely clear that the instrument which we have now as thought, has reached its tether. It cannot solve the problem of human relationship, and in that human relationship there is conflict, and out of that conflict we have created this society through our greed, through our brutality, through our violence.

We have to be absolutely, irrevocably, clear that thought is not the instrument to solve our human problems. We have tried every method of solving our human problems, surrendering ourselves to some ideals, to some guru, to some concept, to some conclusion - we have done all these things. We have followed all kinds of leaders - political, religious, various quacks, many gurus. And we are still what we are, slightly modified, little more observant, little more kindly, but basically, millennia after millennia, we are what we have been from the beginning of time. And the instrument that we have had, which is thought, can no longer solve our problems. This is very clear, and that requires great observation, questioning, doubting, asking, never accepting authority - the authority of the books, the hierarchical structure of our society, the authority of institutions, the authority of those who say , `I know.' A mind which is enquiring into the nature of a new quality and structure of a new instrument must be entirely free from authority, not the authority of the policeman, not the authority of the governments.

So, we must together examine very carefully what is the source of thought, why thought has created such havoc in the world, whether thought can ever have as its companion love, or is love entirely different from the activities of thought. Is it possible to examine without any sense of authority, without any sense of belonging to any group, and go beyond the present confusion and chaos? Please listen; do not agree. but listen to find out. We have to be both the teacher and the disciple. The meaning of that word `disciple' is he who learns. Also we must be the teacher. The very act of learning gives us the responsibility to teach. So, we are going together to learn, not hold on to our own traditions, to our own opinions and conclusions; then that prevents us from learning, not from the speaker, but learning through observation, learning through the investigation of the nature of thought and the nature of the brain - not the physiological brain but the activities of a brain that is conditioned. So, first of all, we are going to examine together why the brain, which has evolved through thousands of years, which has gone through every kind of incident, accident, has become so limited. It is not limited in the technological world at all. It is moving with extraordinary rapidity. So, in one direction, in the direction of technology, the brain has infinite scope. The brain has put man on the moon, invented terrible things to kill human beings. Also technology has given man great comfort, hygiene, communication, and so on. But the brain is limited because it cannot go in any other direction but that direction. it is incapable at present to go inward, and if it can go in one direction, the outward direction, with such extraordinary vigour, extraordinary energy, then it can also go in the other direction, in the world of the psyche, the psychological world.

Then, there is attention. Have you ever attended to anything, given your whole energy, listened totally to another, completely attended? Not like a soldier who is drilled to attend, but if you understand the nature of awareness, concentration, then what is attention? If you are attending now completely to what is being said, in that attention there is no centre as the `me'. Are you so attending to what is being said? That is, giving all your energy, listening vibrantly, alive to attend? If you are, then you will find there is no centre as the `me' attending. Then, when you are attending so deeply, the brain becomes quiet, naturally. There is no chattering, there is no control. Who is the controller to control thought? The controller is another part of thought, isn't it? One part of thought says, `I am the witness, I am going to control my thought.' The controller is the controlled. In meditation there is no controller, there is no activity of will, which is desire. Then, the brain, the whole movement of the brain - apart from its own anxiety which has its own rhythm - becomes utterly quiet, silent. It is not the silence cultivated by thought. It is the silence of intelligence, the silence of supreme intelligence. In that silence comes that which is not touched by thought, by endeavour, by effort. It is the way of intelligence which is the way of compassion. Then that which is sacred is everlasting. That is meditation. Such a life is religious life. In that there is great beauty.

J. Krishnamurti Mind Without Measure Talks in Madras 1st Public Talk 25th December, 1982 `The nature and Content of Thought'

Our thinking is the outcome of knowledge, and knowledge is always limited. Knowledge always goes hand in hand with ignorance. There is no complete knowledge about anything. Our thinking, which is born out of our knowledge, is always limited under all circumstances, whether you are a scientist or a psychologist or an engineer, and so on. So thought, thinking, is limited, circumscribed, and what is limited must inevitably, in its action, create fragmentation. Thought itself is the cause of all division, of all fragmentation. Unless one understands the nature and the structure of thought, one cannot go very far, and to go very far you must begin very near, which is you, how you think, what you think, and discover for yourself that thought always is limited. Thought can invent god, the immeasurable, the nameless, the invisible, the supreme, but it is still the product of thought. So thought is one of the major factors of our conflict, of our misery, of our sorrow. Unless one understands this basically, very deeply, not intellectually, not verbally or argumentatively or logically, unless you understand the nature of thinking, you cannot begin to discover for yourself a new instrument, a totally different instrument. Because, the only instrument we have now is thought, and thought has created incredible problems, most complex problems, and thought tries to solve those problems and thereby creates more problems. You must have noticed this politically, religiously, and so on. We must find together a new instrument, and that is what we are going to do when we talk about death, religion, meditation. And to understand, to discover, and to come upon something that is not man-made, that something must be beyond time, beyond all measure.

Also we should discuss the nature of intelligence. Compassion has its own intelligence, love has its own intelligence. We are going to enquire into what is intelligence. Surely, it cannot be bought in books. Knowledge is not intelligence. Where there is love, compassion, it has the beauty of its own intelligence. Compassion cannot exist if you are a Hindu, or a Catholic, Protestant or a Buddhist, or a Marxist. Love is not the product of thought. In understanding the nature of love, compassion, which is to deny all that which is not, to see that which is false as false, is the beginning of intelligence. To see the truth in the false is the beginning of intelligence. To see the nature of disorder and end it, not carry on day after day but to end it - the ending is the immediate perception which is intelligence.

You are all attached to something or the other. If I may suggest, most respectfully, become aware of the consequences of that attachment. If you are attached to an ideal, you are always on the defensive, or aggressive. If you come to a conclusion, to hold on to that conclusion is to end all further enquiry. Where there is attachment, there must be pain. I am attached to my wife and she may run away, she may look at another man, or she may die. In attachment, there is always fear, there is always anxiety, suspicion, watching. Surely, that is not love. So, can one be totally free of all attachment? It is up to you, but when you are attached, there is no love. Because, in that attachment there is fear. Fear is not love. And the ambitious man who wants to climb the ladder of success has no love because he is concerned with himself, with his achievements, which is the gathering of power, position, prestige. How can such a man love another? He may have a family, children, but in that man there is no love. When you say, `I love god as the highest principle', is that also love? That god, that principle, the highest principle `Brahman', is the result of thought. God is invented by man. I am sure you won't like this. But you are attached to that concept: god exists. Then you ask who is the creator of all this misery. God hasn't created all this, has he? If he has, he must be an odd god, he must be a sadist god. All the gods in the world are invented by thought, and to find out what love is, there must be an end to sorrow, end to attachment, end to everything we are committed to inwardly. Where the self, the ego, the me is, love is not. You hear all this, and you will walk away from here with the same attachment, with the same convictions, and never enquire further because the more you enquire about all this, the more life becomes dangerous. Because you may have to give up a lot of things naturally, easily, not as self-sacrifice. You have to understand the nature of attachment and be free from it. You have to realize that when you see the truth of something, you are standing completely alone, and that you may perceive that, and of that you are frightened. You may believe, see the truth inwardly of the nature of attachment, but as you don't want to quarrel with your wife, or husband, you accept. Gradually you become hypocrites.

We also have to talk over together what is love. What does that word mean to you? If you are asked in a drawing room what is the meaning of that word to you, what would you answer? What do you mean by that? I love playing golf, I love to read, I love my wife, I love god. Is that love? Do you love your wife? Do you love your husband? Do you love your friend? We are enquiring into what is love. This is very important to enquire because without love, life is empty. You may have all the riches of the earth, you may be a great banker, great scientist, mathematician, great technician, capable of great technology, but without love you are lost, an empty shell. Together we are going to find not what love is, but what is not love. That is, through negation come to the positive. Is jealousy love, jealousy in which there is attachment, anxiety? In jealousy there is hate. Is that love? You are attached to your family, you are attached to a person or an idea or a concept or a conclusion. What are the implications of your attachment? Suppose I am married, I am attached to my wife. What does it mean? Where there is attachment, there is fear. Where there is attachment, there is possessiveness. When there is attachment to an ideal, to a concept, to a belief, or to a person with all the consequences of jealousy, anger, hatred, suspicion, surely all that is not love. To understand the nature of love, is it possible to be totally free from attachment? Please ask this question of yourself.

We together will go into this because, there is an end to sorrow. Sorrow comes with the loss of somebody, with the death of somebody. My son - I have lost him; there is grief and tears and great sense of loneliness. Then, in that state of shock, in that state of pain, anxiety, loneliness, I seek comfort, I want to escape from this agony. I escape through every form of entertainment, whether it is the drug, the alcohol, the temple, mosque or the church. I begin to invent all kinds of fanciful concepts. I lost him, he is dead, gone, and there is that pain. Can one remain with that pain? Can I look at that pain, hold it, hold it as a precious jewel - not escape, not suppress, not rationalize it, not seek the cause of it, but hold it as a vessel holds water? Hold this thing called sorrow, the pain, that is, I have lost my son and I am lonely, not to escape from that loneliness, not to suppress it, not to intellectually rationalize it, but to look at that loneliness, understand the depth of it, the nature of it. Loneliness is total isolation which is brought about through our daily activity of selfish ambitions or ideological ambitions, competitions, each one out for himself. Those are the activities which bring about loneliness. But if you run away from it, you will never solve sorrow. The very word `sorrow' etymologically means passion. Most of us have no passion. We may have lust, we may have ambition, we may want to become rich; we donate our energies to all that. But that does not bring about passion. Only with the ending of sorrow there is passion. That is total energy, not limited by thought. So it is important to understand the nature of suffering and the ending of it. The ending of it is to hold that sorrow, that pain, too. Look at it. It is a marvellous thing to know how to hold the pain and look at it, be with it, live with it, not get bitter, cynical, but to see the nature of sorrow. There is beauty in that sorrow, depth in that sorrow.

We ought to talk over together sorrow, whether there is an end to sorrow. When there is an end to sorrow, then only there is love, then only there is compassion. What is sorrow, grief, pain, a feeling of loneliness, the sense of isolation? What is the nature of sorrow? What is the cause of sorrow. which is pain, fear, a sense of desperate loneliness? Why have human beings, from time immemorial, suffered and are still suffering, not from physical pain, some fatal disease or a feeling of utter rejection, but from the nature of suffering inwardly - the pain, the fears and the escape from it? I wonder if we have realized that for the last thousand years there have been many wars, and how many people have cried, mothers have shed tears! The pain, the anxiety, the hope, all that constitute sorrow, and this sorrow exists in all the days of our life, and we never seem to be free of it, completely ending that sorrow.

Now, to question spiritual authority - whether it is Christian authority or the spiritual authority of Islam with their book, or your guru with his statement - to question, to doubt it, is to rely entirely on yourself, be a light to oneself, and that light cannot be lit by another. It requires your questioning, your demanding, of not only the outer, the spiritual authority, but of yourself - why you believe - so that your own mind becomes clear, strong, vital, so that there is energy for creative activity. But when you follow somebody, your brain becomes dull, routine, mechanical, which is the very destructive nature of the human mind, or human brain. So please see why this disorder exists in our life, and when you begin to investigate into this disorder, then out of that disorder comes order. When there is the dissipation of causes of disorder, there is order. Then you don't have to pursue what is order. Order is virtue, order means freedom.

We never look at `what is'. We want to change what is taking place to something else. This has been the process of centuries upon centuries. The political ideal, the religious ideal, the ideal that one has created for oneself, an end, a goal - and the goal, the end, the ideal, becomes extraordinarily important and not what is actually happening. That is, the `what is' is being transformed into `what should be'. Then there is struggle, there is disorder. Whereas, if we give our attention to `what is', and the `what is' is violence, hatred, antagonism, brutality, we can deal with it. We are concerned to discover the causes of disorder. We are saying that one of the major factors of disorder in life is trying to transform or change `what is' into `what should be'. The `what should be' is totally unreal, but `what is' is all-important. If I am greedy, I have to enquire into the nature of greed, whether that greed can really have an end or it must continue and not have the ideal of non-greed. To see the illusory nature of `what is', is the beginning of intelligence.

What is the good? According to the dictionary, the common usage of that word means good behaviour, good in the sense of being whole, not fragmented but having that sense or understanding of the nature of the wholeness of life, and in that there is no fragmentation as the evil. But if evil is the outcome of the good, then that evil has a relationship with the good. We are enquiring together if there is an opposite in our life, if there is hate and love. Can love have a relationship with hate, with jealousy? If hate has a relationship with love, then it is not love. Obviously. If I hate someone, and at the same time talk about love, it is incompatible. The two don't meet. We are questioning, is there an opposite at all? Where there is an opposite, there must be conflict. I hate, and also I think I love him. The opposite of hate is not love. The opposite of hate is still hate.

We are talking over together - you and the speaker - our problems amicably, without any resistance, not agreeing but exploring, investigating, seeing why we live such disorderly lives and why we accept things as they are. We are not advocating or talking about physical violence, physical revolution. On the contrary, such revolutions have never produced a good society. We are talking about human behaviour, why man is what he is. We cannot blame the environment, we cannot blame the politicians or the scientists. That is a very easy escape, but what we ought to be concerned with is why somewhat intelligent people, somewhat educated people, lead such disorderly lives. So our question is, what is disorder? A confused mind, a confused life, cannot find what is order. Could we together find out for ourselves what causes disorder in our lives, what brings about a society which is utterly disordered? What is disorder? What is the nature and the structure of disorder? There is disorder, isn't there? Where there is contradiction - saying one thing and doing something totally different - there is bound to be disorder. I wonder if one is aware of this. Then, there is conflict, disorder, when we are pursuing ideals - whether political ideals, religious ideals or our own projection of what we think we ought to be. That is, where there is division between actually what is happening in ourselves and neglecting that and pursuing an ideal, that is one of the causes of disorder. Another cause in the psychological, so-called inward life, is to pursue authority, the authority of a book, the authority of a guru, the authority of so-called spiritual people. We accept very easily authority in our inward life. Of course, you have to accept the authority of the scientists, of the technocrat, the doctor, the surgeon. But inwardly, psychologically, why do we accept authority at all? This is an important question to ask. We will come back to it.

If you are really, deeply, concerned with the nature of fear and the total ending of psychological fear, one has to go into the question of time in depth and also the nature and structure of thought. But if you say, `Please tell me a method to get rid of fear,' then you are asking a terribly wrong question because, the very question implies that you have not understood yourself, you have not looked at yourself. Death, conflict, pain, sorrow, pleasure, fear, meditation, all that is our life, and to understand it one must have vitality, strength and you will not have that energy if you are merely repeating words, if you cling to some belief, to some conclusions; that destroys all energy. Energy implies freedom; not what you like to do, but freedom. Only then you have extraordinary energy.

From there you start, but when you are comparing, trying to become something else, you never understand yourself, what you are. So time is a becoming, a becoming which is non-fact. That is, `I am violent, I must become non-violent.' The non-violence is not a fact, has no reality. Though you talk a great deal about it in this country, it does not exist. What exists is violence. If you forget the non-violence, then you can tackle violence, go into it. The understanding of violence can be long or very quick. Either your investigation of violence can take time because you are lazy, or you may say, `I will investigate it tomorrow, it is not important', and so on. But a man who is concerned with violence which is spreading all over the world, destroying humanity, wants to understand the depth of violence, he will understand it instantly. Where there is a becoming, you must have psychological time. That becoming is illusory. The fact is what exists, what you are at the moment - your anger, your reactions, your fears. Look at it. Time is a major factor of fear and also thought. You cannot stop physical time, but when you begin to understand the nature of time inwardly, the becoming and the non-becoming, and understand the whole movement of thought, not suppress it, deny it, say how am I to control thought, then who is the controller? The controller is another part of thought.

We are not saying how to wipe away time. We are enquiring into the nature of fear. Then, is not thought, is not the process of thinking, another factor of fear? Look at it. I think I may die. I think that god exists, but you come along and threaten my belief, and I am frightened. So, thinking of the past incident, hoping that pain will not recur again, thinking about it and wishing that it will not happen again, is the movement of thought. So thought and time are the very root of fear. The physical time - to go from here to your house, that requires time - you cannot stop that. To learn a language, to learn any technique, requires time. We see that time is one of the factors of fear as well as thought. So thought is a movement. Is it not? Time is a movement. Is there actually, factually, psychological time at all? You understand my question? The problem of time is very important as the problem of thought. We live by time. All our knowledge is based on time - the struggle to become less violent, the struggle to become something, which is all measure. I an unhappy, violent, lonely, depressed, anxious. That is `what is'. That is a fact. Then comes the idea, `I must become something else from ``what is.'' That becoming is time, as becoming from a clerk to a manager requires time. That same process of thinking we have brought over into the field of the psyche, into the field of thinking. That is, `I am violent, I will become non-violent', which is, you are allowing time to come, interfere. But when you say, `I am violent, I am going to understand it, look at it, watch it, go into it very quickly, deeply', there is no time. But if you are trying to become something else, there is time.

You see a beautiful tree, which man has not created. Man has created the cathedral, the mosque, the temple, and all the things therein; but he has not created the tree. He has not created nature, but man is destroying nature. Now, you look at a beautiful tree. You wish it were in your garden. And you see it. There is the sensation of the dignity, the shadows, the light on the leaf, the movement of the tree. Then sensation arises. And then thought says, `How nice it would be if I had that tree in my garden. When thought creates the image of that tree in your garden, at that second desire is born. Right? The fact is, it is natural to be sensitive, to have sensations. Otherwise you are paralysed. You must have sensation, you must have sensitivity in your fingers, in your eyes, in your hearing and looking, and you are sensitive to watch, to look - out of that looking, watching, observing, sensation inevitably arises. It must arise; otherwise you are blind, deaf. When there is sensation, then thought creates an image, and at that moment desire is born. Have you found it to be so? Or are you going to repeat just what the speaker has said or go back to your tradition and say we must suppress desire or say what you are talking is nonsense? If you really go into this question of desire, which is so important in life, then you will find out for yourself the origin, the beginning, of desire. Now, the question is to look at a car, at the shirt, at a woman, at a picture; there is arising of sensation. Find out whether thought can be in abeyance, not immediately create a picture, an image of you in that shirt, or in that car, and so on. Can there be a gap between sensation and thought impinging upon that sensation? Find out. It will make your mind, brain, alert, watchful.

What is desire? You see a pleasant object, a beautiful object, a beautiful woman or a man. You desire him or her or that object. That is so. You see a nice car, polished, good lights, powerful, and you touch it, get inside, feel the pleasure of owning it if you can afford it. Then the desire is there. First, the object creates the desire, or desire exists apart from the object; which is, the object, car, creates the desire, or desire exists and the objects may vary. We are not discussing the objects of desire - to be a powerful minister or prime minister, governor, an executive or a talented violinist - but we are enquiring into the very structure and nature of desire. If we understand that, not verbally but factually, then there is never a question of suppressing it, never a question of controlling it. We have controlled, never understanding who is the controller. We have controlled desire, we have controlled our sex, we are brought up to control. And where there is desire, we are trying to understand it, explore it, probe into it, not control it. If this is clear, then we can go together into the understanding of the truth of desire, what place it has in life, or has it no place at all. So we cannot possibly start with any conclusion; that is, suppress desire or let desire run rampant. But we are slowly, hesitantly, carefully, probing into this which becomes an extraordinary factor in life and a torture too.

Christian world has said, `Suppress desire, suppress your feelings, don't look at a woman, torture yourself; then only you find god or nirvana or moksha or whatever you want; only then you will be illumined; which is utter nonsense. How can you destroy the most extraordinary instrument that you have - the body, with all its senses, the beauty? It is an extraordinary instrument. These people say, `Suppress desire, don't yield to desire.' So we must understand the nature of desire. It is very important, in the investigation of a new instrument, to realize just that the old instrument, which is thought, is not solving any human problems. In the investigation of all that, we have now come upon this thing called desire. What is desire? Why have people said, suppress it, deny it? If you cannot identify it with something greater, it is always a problem of struggle. We are not advocating suppression, avoidance, escape, and all that. We are investigating together the nature of desire, how desire arises, why we are caught in it, why it has become so extraordinarily powerful.

Have you ever tried to observe yourself, your wife, the tree across the road and that animal that goes by, without the word? Have you ever tried to look at a tree without naming it, without bringing all the past pictures about a tree, just to observe the tree without the word, to look at it? Have you ever done it? Have you ever looked at your wife or your husband or your politicians? Have you ever looked at them without the symbol? Can you look at the speaker without the word, without all the rubbish and all that reputation, look at him without the image that you have built about him? Perhaps, it will be easier to look at the speaker that way because he does not know you and you don't know him. But to look at your wife, at your husband, is much more difficult. Can you look at the animal without the picture, the image, the word? First, be aware whether you can see, observe, look, without a single word the picture, because then you will awaken your sensitiveness. You are not sensitive to the dust, to the squalor, to the misery, to the poverty; you have just accepted it. The poverty of this country can never be solved, is not ever going to be solved, unless you drop your nationalism completely. It will be solved only when you have understood the global relationship of man to man. Then there will be no frontiers. That you have probably not understood. So, I say that the first essential quality in investigation, in enquiry, in that one has to be extraordinarily sensitive. All religions have said: suppress your senses, suppress your feelings, so that you have gradually lost the sensitivity of the senses. The speaker is saying quite the contrary. The speaker is saying, `Awaken all your senses to their highest degree so that you look at the world with all your senses.' To look at the world with that immense feeling when all the senses are fully awakened, in that there is great, extraordinary sense of energy, beauty. In the investigation of another instrument, we see that the first thing is, man has become dull through repetition, through tradition, through the oppression of the environment; the environment is not merely nature; the environment is the politician, the guru and all that is going on around you. You have gradually lost all sensitivity, all energy to create, but we are talking of creation in the sense of bringing about something totally new, and to have that capacity, the drive, the beauty, one must have great sensitivity. You cannot have great sensitivity if every sense is not fully functioning, fully aware.

We see that thought, politically, religiously, and between human beings, has created innumerable problems. And thought says, `I will solve it.' In that solution, you are producing more problems. So life is becoming more and more complex, full of problems, because we think that thought is the only instrument and that thought is limited. Is this clear? We can then ask, is there a new instrument? What is the nature of thought? Thought is a material process because it is held in the very brain cells themselves. Whatever thought thinks about or invents, is the result of a material process. When thought creates god, it is still a material process. Thought is not sacred. if this is very clear, not verbally but deeply, profoundly, then we can ask, is there a new instrument? - not higher consciousness or lower consciousness; that is another invention of thought.

We are going to find out together if there is a new instrument totally different from thought, which thought has not touched at all, because whatever thought touches must be limited and, being limited, it must inevitably create conflict, bring about fragmentation, as it has done in the world - religious fragmentation, political fragmentation, and so on. Is this clear? Can we go on from there? If you are at all serious, deeply concerned, if you have a great affection for humanity, you must have the energy to enquire; the drive, the passion, to find out. A new instrument is so absolutely necessary in this world which is degenerating day by day, destroying itself. By questioning the nature of thought, doubting, asking, probing, we are going to find out for ourselves that thought, at whatever level, is fragmentary, limited, finite, and this limitation has conditioned the brain. The brain has got extraordinary capacity as can be seen from what is happening in the technological world, but the capacity has been developed in one direction only and that is in the technological world - the doctor, the surgeon, the mathematician, the computer expert, and so on. But the human problems, which is our conflict with each other, our sorrow, pain, grief and endless conflict, the technological world can never solve. No politician, no system, no method, is concerned with all that. As ordinary human beings, we are going to find out for ourselves if there is or if there is not a new instrument which is not touched by thought, which is not the result of time, which is not caught in the process of evolution which is thought.

It seems to the speaker that we are not releasing creative energy to bring about a new culture, a new way of life, because the old Brahmanical culture of this country has completely disappeared - a culture which we are not saying is good or bad; a culture that has existed perhaps three to five thousand years has completely gone overnight, disappeared altogether. And one questions, asks, why human beings who have lived with a particular culture for so long, why that culture has disappeared. Perhaps it was not a culture at all. It was only a series of words, traditions without any life behind them. So, in exploring together the condition of our mind and our heart, in investigating the nature of our brain which is the centre of all our actions, of all our feelings, of every thought, we see whether it is possible to release that creative energy. And we are going to go into this very carefully.

Now we are going to enquire into the nature of our consciousness. Your consciousness is what you are - your belief, your ideals, your gods, your violence, fear, romantic concepts, your pleasure, your sorrow, and the fear of death and the everlasting question of man, which has been from time immemorial, whether there is something sacred beyond all this. That is your consciousness. That is what you are, You are not different from your consciousness. We are asking whether that content of consciousness can be transformed, can be totally changed.

Also now we ought to talk over together religion and meditation. What is religion? What is religion for most of you? - beliefs, rituals. If you are a Christian, you believe in a saviour, in a particular saviour, with all the rituals, with all the marvellous, beautiful architecture inside the churches, the great cathedrals. Have you seen a cathedral performing a mass? It is a great sight, with great beauty, with utter precision, to impress the poor people who believe and do all the rituals, puja, daily, and above all believe in god. That is what you call religion, which has absolutely nothing whatever to do with your daily life. All religions, organized or unorganised, have said, `Don't kill, love someone.' But you go on killing, you go on worshipping false gods which is your nationalism, your tribalism. So you are killing each other. That is what you all call religion. To find out the nature of a religious mind, you must put away all those childish things. Will you? Of course not. You will go on doing your puja, your ceremonies, become slaves to the priests. Religion has become a form of entertainment. Can you put away all that and not belong to any religion, neither be a Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim? Leave all that; that is a propaganda of centuries. Like a computer, you are being programmed. When you say, `I am a Hindu', you have been programmed for the last 5,000 years. When you are enquiring into the nature of religion, you must be free from all this. Will you? When there is freedom from all that is false, illusory, then you begin to enquire into what is meditation; not before. A mind in conflict, a brain in struggle, cannot possibly meditate. You may sit down for 20 minutes every day, but if the brain is in conflict, pain, anxiety, loneliness, sorrow, what is the value of your meditation? We are going to enquire into what is the meditation, not how to meditate. You have asked, `Tell me how to meditate', which is to give you a system, a method, a practice. Do you know what practising every day does to your brain? Your brain becomes dull, mechanical, it is tortured, making effort to achieve some silence, some state of experience. That is not meditation. That is just another form of achievement like a politician becoming a minister. In your meditation, you want to achieve illumination, silence. It is the same pattern repeated; only, you call it religious and the other calls it political achievement. There is not much difference.

Now, to live without measurement, to be totally, completely, free of all measurement, is part of meditation. Not that `I am practising this, I will achieve something in a year's time.' That is measurement which is the very nature of one's egotistic activity. In schools we compare, in universities we compare. We compare ourselves with somebody who is more intelligent, more beautiful physically - there is this constant measurement going on. Either you know it consciously or you are not aware of this movement of measurement. Meditation is the ending of measurement, ending of comparison, completely. See what is implied in it - that there is no psychological mark. Tomorrow is the measurement of what is in time. Do you understand this? So measurement, comparison, and the action of will must end completely. There is no action of will in meditation. Every form, every system, of meditation is an activity of the will. What is will? I will meditate, I will sit down quietly, control myself, narrow down my thoughts and practise - all that is the action of desire, which is the essence of will. In meditation there is no activity of the will. Do you understand the beauty of all this? When there is no measurement, no comparison, no achieving or becoming, there is the silence of the negation of the self. There is no self in meditation. So a mind, a brain, that is in the act of meditation is whole. The whole of life is meditation, not one period of meditation when you meditate. Meditation is the whole movement of living. But you have separated meditation from your life: It is a form of relaxation like taking a drug. If you want to repeat, repeat Coca Cola or any other cola which has the same effect to dull the mind, whereas in meditation, when there is no measurement, when there is no action of the will and mind, the brain is entirely free from all systems. Then there is a great sense of freedom. In that freedom there is absolute order, and that you must have in life. Then, in that state of mind, there is silence, not wanting, desiring to have a quiet mind, but there is freedom from measurement. In that freedom there is absolute order, there is silence.

Also we ought to talk over together the question of death. Like love, hate, pain, sorrow and fear, death is part of our life. You may postpone it, you may say I have ten years more to live, but at the end of it there is death waiting. All humanity fears death or rationalizes it away saying that death is inevitable. To understand the depth and the full significance of that extraordinary incident which we call death, you must understand the nature of our own consciousness, the nature of what you are. If you do not understand what you are actually, not descriptively, then death becomes a dreadful thing.

We are asking, is attachment one of the causes of this sorrow? I am attached to my son and he dies, and then I invent various forms of comfort. I never remain with sorrow. To remain, not to escape, not to seek comfort, not to run off to some form of entertainment, religious or otherwise, but to look at it, live with it, understand the nature of it - when you do that, sorrow opens the door to passion. You are not passionate people because you have never understood the nature of sorrow and the ending of sorrow. You have become very dull. You accept anything, accept sorrow, accept fear, you accept being dominated by politicians, by your guru, by all the books and traditions. That means you never want to be free and you are frightened to be free, frightened of the unknown. You invent various forms of consoling, illusory images and hopes.

So we are asking, is pain, the anguish, sorrow, brought about by our isolation of mind, of thought, of action? Is sorrow the result of our daily attachment, how we are attached to people? Please wake up to all this, see the truth of all this. Please explore the nature of attachment. It breeds anxiety, fear, pain, jealousy, hatred. All these are the consequences of attachment. You are attached to your wife or to your husband. See the consequences of it. You depend on each other, that dependence gives a form of security. When that person leaves or dies or runs away from you, you are then in pain, in agony, you have suspicion, hatred and sorrow. Don't you know all this? It is nothing new. This is an everyday fact of life. It may not happen to you, but it is happening to others, millions of others. In their relationship, there is sorrow, fear, agony.

When we are enquiring into the nature of sorrow, we are not discussing your particular, narrow, little pain and agony but the agony of mankind and you actually are mankind. This enquiry is not selfish. This enquiry opens up tremendous possibilities. Kindly listen, find out for yourself the nature of sorrow, why human beings all over the world have gone through tortures, sorrow. What is sorrow and why has not mankind put it off, thrown it off? Please ask this question of yourself. Why must you have some kind of sorrow, some kind of grief, pain, the sorrow of loneliness, though you may be married, have children? You are lonely people. You have separated yourself enormously. When there is a great grief, you realize how lonely you are. We are asking, is one of the causes of sorrow this loneliness? Loneliness is the result of our daily life. Each one of us, from the highest to the lowest, is completely convinced that he is a separate soul, separate entity, and all his activity is self-centred. The daily activity of this self-centredness will inevitably bring about solitude, loneliness, separatism, division. We are asking, is this isolation in our way of thinking, in our way of life, one of the causes of sorrow?

We are questioning, asking the causes of sorrow, the pain of sorrow, the grief, the anxiety that comes with sorrow, the utter loneliness of sorrow. Like pleasure, sorrow is narrowed down as mine. When we are concerned with our own particular sorrow, we neglect, we disregard, we are not concerned with the sorrow of mankind, whereas our consciousness is the consciousness of humanity. One must understand this very clearly because, in understanding the nature of our consciousness, what we are, we begin to see that our pain, our loneliness, our depression, our joys, our beliefs, are shared by all humanity. You may believe in one kind of god and he may believe in another kind of god, but belief is common, belief is general, and that is our consciousness. That is what you are. The language you speak, the food you eat, the climate, the clothes, the education, the constant repetition of certain phrases, the loneliness, the ultimate fear of death, is the ground on which all humanity stands. You are the humanity. Your consciousness is not individual. It is the consciousness of all mankind with their myths, superstitions, with their images, fears, and so on. This is important to understand, not intellectually, not verbally, but with your heart, with your mind, because, when we come to the question of what is death, we must first understand the nature of our consciousness, the nature of what we are actually; not what we should be, but what we actually are in daily life. That actuality is shared by each and every human being in the world.

We see disorder in our lives, at whatever level we may live. You may have the greatest power on earth, be a politician or a guru, but you live in disorder inwardly. Therefore, whatever you touch, to it you bring disorder. You see this all over the country. There are many factors of disorder, and desire is one factor. We went into it - desire, time and thought. If you exercise thought to create order, you are still creating disorder. Do you understand? Our whole life is based on discipline. We have disciplined ourselves to do this and not to do that. The word `discipline' is, the root of it is, `to learn; not from somebody, but to learn from oneself, one's own reactions, one's own observation, and one's own activities and behaviour. But discipline never brings about intelligence. What brings about intelligence is observation, and being free from fear, and understanding the nature of desire. For example, if you understand desire, see the nature, structure, its vitality, and find out for yourself the sensation and when thought enters it, when you become aware of that, you are beginning to have intelligence, which is not your intelligence or my intelligence but intelligence. So, is it possible to be free of fear which is such a tremendous burden? You have listened. Are you free from it? If you are honest, you are not. Why? Because, you have not really investigated, gone into it step by step and said, `Let me find out' with your passion, with your guts, putting your vitality into it. You have not done that. You have just listened casually, you are afraid to look at it. And so you live with it, as with some horrible disease, you live with fear, and that is causing disorder. If you see that, you are already operating from intelligence. If you understand the nature of thought, the intricacies, the subtleties, the beauty of it, from that understanding the unfolding of a flower happens. It is unfolding - the beauty of the flower.

Do you see the beauty of the flower, of the mountain, of a full moon on a leaf, the lights of silver on a piece of rock? Sir, what is beauty, not in a painting, but beauty in our life? What is the nature of sorrow, the ending of that burden, puffing away of sorrow? If you suffer pain, anxiety, ambition, and so on, you don't know what love is. You want to be ambitious, you want to have power, position, better house, better cars. Have you ever understood that a man who is ambitious has no love in his heart? And we are all very ambitious to achieve nirvana or to become a bank manager. To reach nirvana or moksha is the same thing as becoming manager of a bank because both are ambitions. To live a life of intelligence means no ambition but to be tremendously active. Sir, we have to talk over together the ending of sorrow, and what are the implications of death, and what is religion. Without religion you cannot create a new structure, a new society. What we have as religion is utter nonsense, meaningless. We have to enquire into the depth of that word. Because, only a new culture, a new civilization, can be born out of true religion, not all that paraphernalia that goes on in the name of religion. Religion is something entirely different. To have a religious life means to have compassion, love; it means the ending of sorrow, to find right relationship with each other. What most people want is not to be disturbed. They want to continue with their own particular pattern of life. So, please consider, give your energy, your capacity, to find out whether there is a different way of living on this earth.

Beauty is complete order. But most of us have not that sense of beauty in our lives. We may be great artists, great painters, expert in various things, but in our own daily life, with all the anxieties and miseries, we live, unfortunately, a very disordered life. It is a fact. You may be a great scientist, you may be a very great expert in a subject, but you have your own problems, struggles, pain, anxieties and the rest of it. We are asking together, is it possible to live in complete order within, not impose discipline, control, but to enquire into the nature of this disorder, what are the causes, and to dispel, move away, wash away the cause? Then there is a living order in the universe.

Would you consider desire as one of the factors of disorder? What is desire? For most of us desire is a potent factor: desire drives us, desire brings about a sense of happiness or disaster. Desire changes with the objects of desire. Is desire one of the causes? Why is it that all religions, all so-called religious people, have suppressed desire? All over the world the monks, the sannyasis, have denied desire, though they are boiling inside. The fire of desire is burning, but they deny it by suppressing it or identifying that desire with a symbol, with a figure and surrendering that desire to the figure, to that person. But it is still desire. Most of us, when we become aware of our desires, either suppress or indulge it or come into conflict; the battle goes on. We are not advocating either to suppress it or to surrender to it or to control it. That has been done all over the world by every religious person. We are examining it very closely so that out of your own understanding of that desire, how it arises, its nature, out of that understanding, self-awareness of it, one becomes intelligent. Then that intelligence acts, not desire.

Now, suppose I am violent. How do I observe that violence? I want to understand the nature of that violence. I want to explore, discover the extraordinary factors that contribute to violence. How do I observe? First, is violence different from me? Do you understand my question? I am asking, is that violence, which I see when I say I am violent, is that violence different from me, or I am that violence? When you are angry, you are angry. It is not that you are different from anger. You are different from anger only when you want to control it, only when you say, `I must suppress it,' but are you actually different, separate from violence? Is that so? Has the word `violence' - separated through tradition, through constantly talking about violence and so on - created a separation from observation?

We are capable of listening to the actual fact that our consciousness is its content; our consciousness is made up of its content. Isn't it? Look, a great many books have been written about consciousness. There are specialists about consciousness; conferences about consciousness are held all over the world. One has to enquire into the nature of one's own consciousness, observe the content, because without the content there is no consciousness. Are you following all this? Consciousness is made up of one's beliefs, one's tendencies, one's secret desires, anxieties, loneliness, and so on. There is the content which makes up consciousness. Without the content, there is no consciousness as we know it. If you observe your own consciousness, that is what you are; your consciousness is what you are. Your fears, your desires, your pleasures, your loneliness, depression, anxiety and all that, that is what you are, what you believe.

We must go into this very carefully because we are trying to understand why human beings live perpetually in conflict, why there is a contradiction - I am, I should be; I am violent, I must become non-violent. The non-violence is an idea, is a concept, is not an actuality, because I am violent. This is a fact, an actuality. The other is non-fact, but we think the pursuit of non-violence will help us to become non-violent, that we will be free from violence. Let us understand the content of that word. What does violence mean? There is physical violence. You shoot with a gun, or you hit, or you throw a bomb, you slap, you injure. That is physical violence. What is psychological violence? - the inward anger, hatred, wanting to dominate people, not only physical domination, but the domination of ideas. I know, you don't know; I will tell you, and you will obey. That is domination. The gurus are violent because they are dominating people with their ideas, with their systems of meditation and all that. Please understand this. We are not attacking gurus. I am just pointing out that psychological dependence, imitation, conformity, domination, all that is inward violence. That is a fact. Can we deal with the fact and not with the idea of the opposite? There is no opposite. Right? There is an opposite as darkness and light, woman and man, tall and short, dark and white, and so on. Inwardly, is there a duality at all? Actually we are asking, `Is there a duality or only `what is''?' There is only `what is', that is, I am violent. Now, is it possible to be free of violence, not to become non-violent? Is this clear? This country has propagated this idea of non-violence. Being violent, they are propagating something which they are not. That means I am gradually, day by day, practising to become that, not to understand violence, but become something which I have called non-violence. Do you see the difference? Hence there is conflict. When I am observing, learning, enquiring into the fact, there is no conflict in my mind. But if my mind is all the time saying, `l must achieve non-violence', then there is conflict. But if I say I am violent, what is the root of violence, what is the nature of violence? I don't condemn it, I observe it.

We were saying yesterday that the future of man is at stake, and that man has no existence in isolation - isolation as a nation, isolation as a group, isolation in religion, isolation as an individual and isolation in consciousness. For most of us thinking is individual. You think there is a difference, a division - your opinion against my opinion, my thought against your thought, or your husband's thought, or your wife's thought. But thinking is not individual. Thinking is the ordinary factor from the poorest, ignorant man to the great Nobel prize winner, the scientist. They are both thinkers. But we have the idea that your thinking is yours, whereas thinking is the nature of man. Be clear on this point. When you think, it is not your individual thinking, it is the capacity of your brain to be active and respond in words, in form, and that is the nature of man. But we have reduced thinking to my thinking as opposed to your thinking. Most of us have got strong opinions, bias, conclusions. We have experienced so much and we think it is our experience, our conclusion. When a new outlook is put before you, you refuse to look. But thinking is the nature of man.

We have, as two friends, gone into the question of relationship, and we will enquire further into the nature of that relationship. Is the human brain your brain, or is it the brain of mankind? This is really a very serious question. Is your brain an individual brain or the brain of humanity? When you say it is my brain, when you say it is my consciousness, is it so? Or is it the consciousness of mankind? Enquire into it. You suffer, you are uncertain, you are anxious, you are in agony, pain. That is what you are. You have belief, knowledge, character, and that is what you are. And that is exactly what your neighbour is. He is suffering, he goes through agony, sorrow, pain, trouble. So, is your consciousness separate from the rest of mankind? No, of course not. If you admit that, if you see the truth of that, then are you an individual? You may think you are an individual because you are dark, you are short, because peripheral activity makes you think you are an individual, but deeply, are you not the rest of mankind? When you realize that, the truth of that, you will never kill another, because you are killing yourself. Then out of that comes great compassion, love.