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Then the person makes a conditioned response to the challenge made by the quality, fear the conditioned response being "how to overcome fear" or " how to run away from fear." The conditioned mind can never be free of fear by "overcoming it" by compulsion or discipline, because any such overcoming will necessarily repeat itself. Nor can the mind be free by running away from fear.
If we examine closely, we shall see how our whole education, culture, and philosophy are based on running away from conditioned responses like fear. Every attempt to run away from fear fails and the mind is continually engaged in going from one escape to another - only to find ultimately that every such attempt is futile. When pleasure is apprehended, the experiencer identifies himself with the quality of joy, etc, and goaded by the memory of what he experienced, seeks to have a similar experience again.
Another experience of a similar nature only strengthens the memory and therefore strengthens the desire for the experience again. Then, with a view to having absolute security, the conditioned mind projects the idea of God and seeks God. A conditioned mind can only think of the known and not of the unknown.
Therefore, the conditioned mind can never find Reality, God. We are now trying to understand fear. We know how fear distorts and makes the mind small and also poisons the system.
The little-minded people are afraid and they cannot understand the supreme. We have seen how futile is the attempt made by the mind either to overcome fear or to run away from fear. We have also seen how fear is primarily based on the mind' desire for self-protection.
Naturally, our problem of fear has not been solved so far because we gave importance to and pursued fear which is only a secondary value, instead of giving importance to and pursuing 'the desire for self-protection' which is the primary value. We are in confusion because we give importance to the symptom and not to the cause, to the secondary values and not to the primary. As fear is a conditioned response, our concern should be not to condemn it or to justify it but to be aware of it as and when it arises and not run away from it.
When we are thus aware of fear and of the process of 'the desire for self-protection', fear ceases and the mind is free of fear. In understanding fear, one opens the door to the extraordinary meaning of Death which is the Unknown as God is the Unknown. If we do not understand death, we cannot love.
-- Before we continue the discussion about fear, death and love, we should discuss quite an important subject - the art of listening. Life is really both a challenge and a response, and if we do not know how to respond truly, there will be misery. Similarly, if we do not know how to listen, our mind is so filled with our own thoughts, our own problems, our own conclusions and our own questions, that it is almost impossible to listen to somebody.
Is it not possible to listen with an extraordinary alertness, but not with an effort? After all, understanding comes, not through effort but spontaneously when there is an effortless relaxation, a sense of communication with each other. When you love somebody very deeply and really, in that state of real affection, there is a sense of full communication.
We do not have to make an effort or to exert ourselves. I think it is important during these discussions to listen with ease but yet with a tension because most of us, when we are at ease, are generally lazy, so relaxed that nothing can penetrate. But, there is a right tension, a psychological tension, not a tension to the breaking point; but, as the string of a violin, it must be tuned just right.
Similarly, it is possible for us to listen in such a way that communication is possible instantaneously, at the same time and the same level. In understanding fear we found that the desire to protect oneself projects the quality of fear, and that merely dealing with the symptom and not with the the cause is utterly futile. So, the question of overcoming fear never arises to a thoughtful person, as it is only dealing with symptoms and not with the maker of symptoms.
A conditioned response is like a wave in a lake when a stone is thrown, and we pursue and try to solve that wave which is a conditioned response. We came to the point of studying what Death means. We said that as reality is unknown, so Death is also unknown.
We have spent centuries in studying Reality, but we have hardly spent five minutes in studying Death. We have avoided Death as something abominable, something of which we are frightened and we have tried to overcome it by beliefs and ideations of morality. But we have never understood the significance of Death.
Response and challenge are not different things. They are only separate when the response is conditioned. Our response to a challenge is according to our environmental influence - Brahmin, Non-Brahmin, writer, poet, etc.
There is always the distance of time between challenge and response; and when such responses cease, there is death. Let us experiment and be aware of the significance of death on all the different planes of consciousness. We have seen the effects of death on a body, to a bird, to a leaf, wearing out of the physical organism.
But that is not death, that is only a part of awareness of death. In life, everything seems to end in death; all our activities, our civilization, wars, conflict with each other, our physical existence, emotional responses, ideation and thoughts, all come to an end. Seeing that all that is known to it comes to an end, the mind apprehends itself coming to an end and, as it does not like to die, seeks permanency by anchoring itself to something unknown which it considers to be secure; if it is not anchored to something which it knows to be secure, it ceases to function.
Thought is the result of the past, the known, the accumulation of what it has read, what it has been told, social environment, religious background, and what it has been conditioned to. As long as the mind is the known, it translates the unknown or any new experience that comes, in the light of the known. When we meet a stranger, we view him with all our prejudices and conditioned responses.
In the unknown, there is no security because we do not know it at all. Therefore the mind is afraid of the unknown; therefore it must project itself into the unknown and seek security there. So it must have a belief in the unknown, in Reincarnation, in God, or in an idea, and so on especially as the mind is afraid of coming to an end.
Therefore our thoughts are always proceeding from the known to the known, from memory to memory. A memory is the residue, left in the mind, of an experience. The moment the mind is uncertain, it becomes anxious, and therefore it must have the known all the time.
If the mind is moving from the known, to the known, it cannot possibly know the unknown; and therefore we are unaware of the significance of Death. We are afraid even to talk about it, and so we put it away and think about God. We deny Death and hold on to God though we do not know what God is.
Beauty is not the denial of the ugly. We cannot understand the pleasant by denying the unpleasant. We do not know what the ugly and the unpleasant mean, yet we have condemned them.
We do not know what God is, yet we accept God. Suicide is a part of death. A person who is committing suicide puts an end to his life when he is faced with a problem which he cannot solve, when his thoughts and feelings have come to a point when they cannot see into the future and cannot proceed further.
When one is happy he has no problem and he does not wish to end that. You ask whether hate is not a manifestation of death. Hate is a conditioned response, Death is also a conditioned response to something which we do not know.
Hate does not exist by itself. Our mind is ever seeking continuance through various means. To us, God is the ultimate continuance and Death the ultimate denial of continuance.
Because thought is the result of the past, it can only think in terms of time, today, yesterday and tomorrow, in terms of the known; and the known it wants to continue. If that continuance is denied, it will commit suicide. It is only concerned with moving from the known to the known.
When it proceeds to God, it is only projecting itself into the unknown and seeking security there in God; therefore, that projection, God, is still the known through the mind has invested in God as the ultimate guarantee of its continuance. As long as the mind is moving from the known to the known, it is 'dead', and a 'dead' thing cannot understand anything. When the mind realises that it is 'dead', there will be life.
We can discover something amazing when we realise that we are 'dead' and are alive only verbally. .. These discussions are a process of self-exploration and self-examination, and not self-introspection which is quite different from awareness.
It is as though we are watching a mirror in from to us, which is not distorting our thoughts and our feelings and actions, but is showing exactly 'what is' and not what we would like them to be. When we discussed about fear we found that fear was only secondary but what was really significant was self-protection in all its extraordinary and subtle ways on different levels and different sates of consciousness, which gave rise to fear. In understanding the process of self-protection which is primary, fear which is secondary, loses its significance.
In discussing death, we found that, realising that everything comes to an end - relationship, things and ideas, not only physiological but psychological also - we are afraid of death, we are desirous of proceeding from the known to the known, to give us continuity, and this continuity we call immortality. When that continuity comes to an end, we call that death. We do not know Death just as we do not know Reality.
We have divided life into living and death and we have shunned death and clung onto what appeared to give us security. I think it is important that we should understand the whole question of death because, in that, there is renewal. That which ends has always a beginning.
That which continues without an end has no renewal. As thought moves from the known to the known, there is no ending of thought; therefore, there is no renewal; and it is only in death there is renewal. A society can be renewed only when it throws off the old.
But you cannot have the old and the new together and that leads to destruction. It is one of the tricks of the mind that, being confronted with uncertainty, it seeks security elsewhere in property, family, ideas and beliefs and so on. As one cannot think of the unknown, one can only think of the known, the outcome of the thought which is the result of the past.
Thought abominates coming to an end, that is, to be uncertain of anything, and it wants continuance. Ordinarily, in the physical sense, we desire to continue through property, through our job and through our routine. Psychologically, we continue through our memory.
All our systems are based on continuity. We seek continuity in property, name, and identifying ourselves with something. When we find that there is no continuity or permanency in objects we turn to psychological factors, such as beliefs and ideas and so on.
The thought, being afraid of discontinuity, thinks in terms of the continuity of the soul. Continuity implied through a belief or through the soul is the product of thought and therefore it is the result of the known, because thought can only think of something which it knows. So thought is really concerned with continuity and not with Truth or God.
Continuity is a time-process and there cannot be a renewal in the time-process. Memory is the residue left in the mind of insufficient experience; and when an experience is complete there is no memory. Some say that the mind is the instrument of the spirit.
But the spirit is also the process of the mind. The moment we say there is spirit, it is a process of thought. There is perception, sensation, contact, desire and identification, all processes of challenge and response.
In other words, we have exercised thought which is the product of the mind. Even while we are sleeping, the unconscious is working, which gives hints to thoughts. When we are thinking about something beyond, it is also the process of the mind and therefore it is unreal.
To say that God is 'me' is incorrect as God or Truth cannot exist in contradiction, because we are in ourselves having the evil and the good, which is a contradictory state. Complete paralysis is death and incomplete paralysis is life. We come across several people who are both physiologically and psychologically half dead, yet they function.
If God is in us, we need not purify ourselves or renew ourselves. Every experience is leaving a residue and we call it memory. When we meet an experience anew, it will not leave any residue; that occurs when we meet the experience direct without a screen.
When new wine is put in the old bottle it breaks. When we are thinking about death, we are not looking at facts, but are translating it to suit our conditioning. Because we are not looking direct at facts but through a screen or a condition or a belief, we are not finding the truth of it.
When we do that, we are only strengthening our conditioning and the walls of our conditioning are growing thicker and thicker. As memory is of the known, when we are facing the unknown, we withdraw and translate it in terms of the known. We think we can thereby have continuance.
We cannot understand either Death or Reality through memory. There is no renewal through continuance. Because we are caught up in the walls of memory, whether the memory is of the leftist or the rightist, religious or the non-religious, we are dead.
Only when the walls break there is going to be renewal. A society that is merely transforming itself within the walls, cannot produce culture. In order to bring about a renewal we must die; and that means we must start anew, putting away completely all memories of the past.
.. We have been discussing the question of death and fear and we said that any form of continuity is death because continuity implies a constant movement of thought in the fortress of the known. Thought is always moving from the known to the known, from memory to memory, from continuity to continuity, and it cannot think of the unknown. It can verbally picture the unknown or speculate on it, but that picture is not the unknown.
Because the mind is moving in the field of the known, it gives continuity to it through the family, through property, through responsibility, through the machine of routine, through ideation and through belief. Memory is merely the residue of experience. We experience through the screen of the past and therefore there is no experience at all but only a modification of experience.
If we have a certain belief, that belief not only creates that experience, but also translates that experience according to its conditioning. So there is never an experience which is free from conditioning. When the continuity through the family, through the name, through relationship, etc.
is threatened, there is fear; and the ultimate threat to continuity is death. There is no renewal or rebirth in that state; a renewal can only be effected in ending. Meditation is thought freeing itself from continuity and then there is renewal, creation and reality.
Our whole structure of thinking is based on the desire for continuity. In understanding continuity we can understand the significance of rebirth or renewal. Our process of thought is based on time - yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Yesterday coming in contact with today creates the present. Yesterday's memory continuing today in a modified or transformed manner is the present. The present thought has its root in the past and so thought is continuity.
The thinking process of a process of time and therefore a process of memory. Since we do not understand the process of our thinking, which is the result of time, merely to deny continuity is completely useless. If we want to understand the truth of continuity, we must watch it, go with it, every moment of the day.
We are not concerned with physical continuity. What we are primarily concerned about is whether through things there is psychological continuity; that is, we are not concerned with the continuity of matter, but are concerned with the value we give to matter. We have seen that on one of the causes of the havoc and destruction in this world is our extraordinary adherence to property.
We need a certain amount of food, clothing and shelter. But, the moment we bring psychological value into it, it creates chaos. The moment we use our position or property as a means of psychological continuity, there is chaos.
When we feel pain we take immediate action to arrest it. We do not seem to take such psychological action with regard to property, which means we are not aware of what we are doing. Our desire for continuity has brought us to death; it has made us insensitive and inactive.
Psychologically we have given ourselves over to property and so we are dead, because things are dead. So, we have discovered the truth that the moment we have continuity through property, we are dead. The same is the case with regard to relationship.
When we seek continuity through the family, we give importance to continuity and not to the family, and thus we are creating the nation, the group, etc, which leads to disaster, or to death. Similarly, ideas are also a form of continuity. We believe that we live even after our death.
It is a belief through which we find continuity in some other quarter and at a different level. We cling to our God, our Truth, our Path and so on. So, the different kinds of organised beliefs have led us to division between ourselves, the Hindu, the Christian, and the Muslim and so on.
There is only unity through intelligence and love. It is only when we recognise we are dead that there can be life. If we recognise we are blind, we would be careful and would not make any dogmatic assertion about anything.
What happens if one of your nearest relatives passes away? It is a great shock and a paralysis to the mind because you have invested your affection in him and he has come to an end, and suddenly you find that there is a psychological and physical breakage. You suddenly realise that you are alone.
As you do not like the loneliness, there is sorrow, not exactly because your relative is dead, but because you have discovered your loneliness which you do not like. That is, as you do not like what you are, you seek continuity through property, relationship and ideas - which has led you to utter chaos and misery. We cannot proceed any further without the recognition of that.
If we recognise that we are dead, there will be a revolution in our daily life. There will no longer be the psychological attachment to name, to family and to position. There will be a revolution with regard to our beliefs, which implies the cessation of beliefs.
We have seen and heard about several revolutions which have all brought about misery. But a revolution which is completely different from the revolution of theory, is a revolution of values, a revolution of thought, which can only come about by the recognition of 'what is'. There is a revolution in thought when I know I am blind.
My whole action will be different; Then I will be very tentative, very watchful; I do not accept, but listen, I move very slowly, my whole being is revolutionised. If I do not recognise that I am blind, my actions will be quite different. If we refuse to recognise what is, we cannot find what truth is, because truth may be in that which is and not away from it.
.. Before we proceed with our discussion about continuity and death, I think we ought to consider for a few minutes the art of listening. In order to understand, you should listen without any apprehension, without any fear of loss or fear of pain. Because you are suffocated with so many erroneous ideas and beliefs, there is no immediate communication with one another.
Communication is possible not when there is fear but only when there is love. We ought to consider very deeply the attitude of teaching and learning. Is there such a thing as teaching and learning?
Do you learn anything? You may learn a technique, how to play the piano, or construct a motor, or how to drive. Our whole attitude towards life is the question of something we are going to learn, or something we are teaching.
Communion with each other stops when there is this attitude of learning or teaching. There is beauty in real communion, which can only come with love. When there is, on the part of one, the attitude of learning, and, on the part of the other, the attitude of teaching, communion really ceases; and without communion, without partaking, without sharing, and without being together in good company, clear thinking is almost impossible.
During these few weeks of discussion have you learned anything? If you caught a few phrases or a few sentences from me, that is not learning. I was not teaching, but we were travelling together in deep communion, and therefore there was an understanding simultaneously, at the same time and at the same place.
A man who is merely teaching is not living any more than a man who is merely listening. If we can alter fundamentally that attitude of learning and teaching, we can enter into communion with each other. It is a mistake to go to somebody to learn.
If you are enthusiastic and eager, then you will be able to share the wisdom, the song, or the truth with another. When a child is learning music, the teacher instructs him how to put his fingers and so on. But if he is really interested, he would be pestering the teacher with so many questions about music; then the relationship between the teacher and the pupil is immediately changed.
We are used to being told or being directed; as such, I become the teacher, and you become the learner, which is really absurd. After all we all human beings, not divided into the teacher and the pupil and all the other absurdities. We are here to find out what is reality, what is love, and not for me to tell you, and for you to follow.
Now, if we can establish proper relationship, there would be a real affection and therefore a quick response. In discussing continuity, we have found out that we seek continuity through name, property, etc. and that genetic continuance and physiological continuance have become extraordinarily important, as long as psychological continuance is maintained.
This psychological continuance is doing great havoc in this world, as can be seen from history and from what is happening nowadays. Certain political systems have limited physical continuity. for instance, the father can no longer leave as before property for his son to inherit.
But there is the emotional continuity, the ideological continuity which ultimately beings about agony and misery. Continuity is memory. All our life is a challenge and a response.
There is the response to a condition and that condition is modified or altered according to circumstances, but it is always conditioned; and any experience which comes along is met through a screen of conditioned response. The conditioned response is memory. We experience and we translate our experience according to our belief.
Therefore, that experience is not fully completed. It is always broken down to constitute a particular condition and therefore, there is never a complete action. So, we, from day to day, carry yesterday to today and today to tomorrow and there is always the conditional burden of memory, not factual memory but psychological memory.
The older we are, the heavier it becomes. This continuity is really decay, and the older we are the more we are decayed, the more mentally sterile we are. I do not know if you have noticed that an experience that is followed through completely, leaves no residue.
Accumulated memory is static. It has no life unless we inject new life into it, ie, by our recalling the memory, we revive it. By this static memory which is dead we translate life which is a living thing.
We believe in God, not knowing what God is. We cannot have an idea of something which we do not know. We know Him by reading books written by somebody else.
Reality can never be described. A man who loves, may tell us what love is; but can we know love in that way? We can imagine about it.
In the very telling of what God or Love is, we have put that into a small vessel, in our own vessels; and it is not Truth. The very description of Reality by a person who has experienced Reality, is a denial of truth. If we put Reality into words, it ceases to be the Real.
We think about God as a form of security, as a form of gratification or comfort. In other words, we are not really seeking God, but comfort through God. We seek happiness through things, property, relationship, etc.
and, therefore, they become important. We do not know God and if we say that we are living in God, it is a form of traditional assertion. Viewing it realistically, we can see that we love our family because it gives us joy; we love that which gives us pleasure, that which brings us a reward.
As long as we are mutually agreeable, we love each other. It means that if we eliminate this pleasure or pain, there is nothing left, and so there is no love. We only know pleasure and pain and we do not know what love is.
Therefore, to understand what love is, we must be free from pleasure and pain. We do not know what God is, what Death is, and what Love is. These are the three amazing principles in life, of which we do not know, though we talk about them.
So, the wise man says that he would not talk of them any more. How can we find out what Love is? There are certain extraordinary moments in our life when we do love, i.e.
when there is no pleasure or pain, when there is no relationship in love. These are very rare and extraordinarily beautiful moments. Anything built on memory has no value; and as most of our relationship is built on memory, it has no significance.
Therefore, how can our minds which are caught in the net of pain and pleasure be freed? Any action, inside the net, to get out of it, is still based on pleasure and pain. We have woven a net and brought everything into it.
What is our response to this fact? We are looking at it through a screen and therefore we are not directly faced with it. The moment we face and recognise the fact without a screen, there is Truth.
Since we are unwilling to face the fact we are hypocrites. So to get out of the net, we have, first of all, to be aware of the fact that we are hypocrites. The implications of this are tremendous.
Love and hypocrisy can never go together. The very recognition of the fact that we are hypocrites or exploiters will bring about an instantaneous change in our actions. .. We have met in this group not for learning as in a classroom but to discuss with each other; and, in exchanging our thoughts, we begin to discover our own process of thinking.
This is a self-revealing process, not of some metaphysical higher or superior self, but of the self which is working through you and me. Without self-knowledge which is being aware of our own actions and our own feelings, there can be no right thinking at all. Self-knowledge as distinct from factual knowledge or the knowledge of a technique, is not a matter of learning from another; it can come about only through awareness.
No understanding or comprehension can come when our relationship is that of the teacher and the taught, a Master and a Disciple, or a Guru and a 'Sishya'. Learning is not understanding; it is really destructive, whereas understanding is creative. Understanding comes only through communion, which is possible only when there is deep love.
These discussions are meant to establish that extraordinary depth of understanding in which right relationship with another can be established. We have discussed various subjects, the various hindrances to clarity of thought, also other things like "fear", "death" and "love". Our whole social, economic and psychological structure is based on the desire for profit and gain, on pleasure and pain; that which is pleasurable we accept and that which is not pleasurable we reject.
Our relationship has also a similar basis. I like you as long as you like me; and if you do not like me, I find someone else. Our so-called friendship is really mutual gratification.
Our emotional structure is based on this. You love Reality as long as it is pleasurable or profitable to you; when it is painful, you reject it and go to a guru or somebody else; and thus you go on seeking gratification. As long as the mind is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, there cannot be love.
We misuse the word love when we call this love. We do not really know what love means. Since we do not know what it is to think rightly, deeply and profoundly, our solutions, political or religious, are in no way going to produce a sane and balanced world.
After all, the world is you and I; and it is no good trying to love each other when we do not know how to love. It is no good discussing theoretically what love is. We can only start with what we know, i.e., by examining and becoming aware of "what is."
What we call love is really based on the desire to please and to avoid pain. Actually, all our relationship is based on pleasure and gratification. Our desire for gratification pulls us along and pushes us also along into a mass of beliefs.
From that relationship, we talk of having a duty, a responsibility, etc, which are all words having no significance, because they are merely based on gratification. Some of you say that love gives you a sense of unity with another. Do you feel unity with the object you do not like?