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Merely observe the fact - you can't do anything about the fact - , see that is how the mind operates. The nervous system, the whole defensive organism gets going; it is very anxious to do the right thing, always with the background of fear, of pain, of sorrow. Then what is sorrow?
We have understood the physical process that engenders fear and suffering. Then what are the other kinds of sorrow - not other kinds - , what is sorrow otherwise? Take the fact that most of us have experienced, the death of some one whom we loved.
There is a terrific sense of loss, there is a sense of anguish, a sense of complete loneliness, of being left alone, stranded. We know that; most of us have had that experience in various degrees of intensity. Why is there suffering?
What do you say, Sir? The thought of fear is there. Yes, Sir, there is the thought of fear.
Go into it. A feeling of utter helplessness. The feeling of utter helplessness - but why should that cause sorrow?
Why should death cause sorrow, why should living cause sorrow? Why should this thing called death be such an extraordinary factor which produces untold fear and sorrow, as living also apparently causes untold suffering and sorrow? So life and death are synonyms, when there is sorrow.
Do understand this, Sirs. It is not that you are afraid only of death which causes sorrow, but you will also see you are afraid of living which causes sorrow living, being good, being respectable, having a job or no job, being loved or not loved, ambition with its frustrations, the incapable or the capable mind which has its own tortures, the feeling of being frustrated. You know the life you lead - going every day to the office, the routine, the boredom, the insults, the anxiety.
Not approximating, not reaching, not arriving - that is also our living, is that not so? The eternal competition with somebody and with some idea - that is what we call living. Such living also produces an astonishing kind of this thing called sorrow, as death does.
Why are we so frightened of death - not what happens after? We are not talking about the after-effects, whether there is continuity or not, whether there is a soul or not, and all that. We are discussing the fact that we are all acquainted with this terrible thing called death which causes pain, suffering, anxiety, a sense of utter helplessness, the loneliness, the isolation, the feeling that you are stranded.
Don't you know this feeling, Sirs? We are in sorrow because when he was living, the person we loved was filling some space in us and helping us to live. That is so, and that is why we loved the person.
I love my son because he is going to immortalize me, I am going to carry my name through him, I am going to perpetuate myself; because he is going to support me when I am old, he will be better than me, he will go to college, be clever and get better degrees, have a better job, become an important man, and so he will be recognized as an important man and in that importance I also glory, and so on and on. And therefore I say, "I love my son", and the mother says, "I love my son". This extraordinary process goes on everlastingly from the known existence of man thousands and thousands of years ago, till now.
The religions, the great teachers have talked about it; and we are caught in it. We instinctively avoid pain and sorrow. The gentleman says that we instinctively avoid pain and sorrow.
When you say you avoid pain and sorrow, then why do you suffer? Such a question has no meaning. If you say I instinctively avoid a snake, then that has an answer; that is a fact.
But when you say you instinctively want to avoid pain and suffering, you are living in suffering, you can't avoid it. You are following all this, Sirs? Why do you suffer?
Go into it, Sirs. That is your challenge. What is your response to that challenge, Sirs?
Why do you suffer? Because we are not full, because our mind is not full. There is the utter emptiness of life.
You have given explanations, and at the end of it you suffer - which means that you accept suffering as inevitable. A healthy mind does not accept suffering, Sir. Now after explaining, do you want to go into it?
How do you go into it so that when you leave this room you are finished with suffering once and for all, you do not go back to the eternal wheel of sorrow? Accept the fact that there is suffering. Attachment is the cause of sorrow.
You say that attachment is the cause of sorrow. Therefore, you cultivate detachment and in the meantime you are agonizing. You are in a state of agony, and you accept the fact that you are suffering?
Why do you accept it? You don't accept sunshine, do you? Suffering is there, you don't have to accept it.
Pain with its burning intensity is agonizing you, and you don't say, "I must accept it". It is there. You can explain, you can gradually push it away - that is what you are doing.
You might say, "I accept it, I will bear with it; but you can't bear with an intense pain more than a few hours or so. And the mind says sorrow is created by attachment - which means, you will be free from sorrow if you are detached. So you begin to cultivate detachment which all the books talk about.
Why are you attached first of all? You say that you are inwardly empty and therefore you are attached to the wife, to the child, to an idea, to power, position, to fill that emptiness. You don't tackle the emptiness, but you run away from the emptiness.
So how do you face this fact of suffering? What are the implications of suffering? How do you enquire into suffering?
That is my point - not `what are the causes?' You know the causes. But you are not facing the fact.
You are suffering, how do you tackle it, Sirs? Stop thinking of it. Take a drug, go to a cinema, take a tranquillizer?
Will that help me? You are advising me how to kill suffering, you are advising me with a lot of words, aren't you? You give me explanations, and at the end of it all I am still empty-handed.
I want to know, when I suffer, how to be free of it. Not with words, not with explanations. When I have a toothache actually, I go to the nearest dentist; I don't sit down, explain, explain.
If that is the mind that asks and that responds to the challenge, that wants to be out, then what will you do? It can only then look at the fact, and stop escaping altogether. I want to know why I suffer; therefore I cannot escape away from this thing, through explanations, through drink, through women, through the radio, through something else.
I want to understand the thing, I want to break through it, crash through it, put it away everlastingly, so that it will never touch my mind again. That means, I want to be with it; I want to know all about it - not give words to it, not give explanations to it. As I would go to the nearest doctor and see that there is no pain, in the same way I end suffering.
I am not going to escape from it, because I see that through escape - however subtle, however cunning, however reasonable - there is no solution. Then what happens to the mind that has stopped escaping, that has no longer the Gita, the Upanishads, the guru, reincarnation, tradition? It has stopped everything.
What is the state of mind that is no longer escaping, that wants to grapple with this thing and come out of it clean-washed, bright, spotless? The mind has realized that to look at something there must be no escape of any kind and it has to be scientifically ruthless with itself, and so it has no self-pity. Then for the first time you have no words; you have stopped the use of all words.
Before, you had indulged in words, explanations, quotations; now, you have no words, words have stopped. So the mind that knows suffering, that has suffered, that has gone through the travail of existence, is faced with the stark fact, and it observes. Now, let us look into the word `observation' - not into the thing that you are looking at, but the state of observation.
How do you observe? How do you look at your wife, husband, child or a tree or a flower? What happens generally all kinds of pictures, ideas, desires surge forward.
If you could understand how you observe, then you will come to something which will help you to understand sorrow. When you see a most lovely thing, a beautiful mountain, a beautiful sunset, a ravishing smile, a ravishing face, that fact stuns you and you are silent; hasn't it ever happened to you? Then you hug the world in your arms.
But that is something from outside which comes to your mind; but I am talking of the mind which is not stunned but which wants to look, to observe. Now, can you observe without all this up-surging of conditioning? To a person in sorrow, I explain in words; sorrow is inevitable, sorrow is the result of fulfilment.
When all explanations have completely stopped, then only can you look - which means, you are not looking from the centre. When you look from a centre, your faculties of observation are limited. If I hold to a pose and want to be there, there is a strain, there is pain.
When I look from the centre into suffering, there is suffering. It is the incapacity to observe that creates pain. I cannot observe if I think, function, see from a centre - as when I say, "I must have no pain, I must find out why I suffer, I must escape".
When I observe from a centre, whether that centre is a conclusion, an idea, hope, despair or anything else, that observation is very restricted, very narrow, very small, and that engenders sorrow. So, when I want to understand suffering, because of the intensity of wanting to understand, I do not look at it from a centre. I want to be free from sorrow - free, so that it will never touch the mind again.
The mind says, "It is an ugly thing, it is a brutal thing, it distorts perception, it distorts living, death and everything". There must be a total comprehension and therefore a total wiping away of it from the whole of the mind. That is the challenge.
When the mind responds according to its conditioning, according to its background, from its centre, the observation of the fact is prevented. When I look at the world as a nationalist, I can't look at another human being who comes from abroad, I have no relationship with him, though I may talk of brotherhood, peace and all such things. When I am looking, observing from a centre which I call `nationalist', I am functioning within the boundaries of a petty small island.
So I can only look at the full, whole world and be with the world totally, wholly, when I have no centre as a nationalist, as a Hindu and all the rest of it. So what is important is to look at, observe without the centre, and then there is no suffering ever more. There will be physical suffering, the kidneys may go wrong, you may have cancer, blindness, death may occur; but you are then able to look at physical suffering, every torturous psychological suffering, without the centre.
Therefore you will never have psychological suffering. And it is only the mind that does not suffer that has no fear. It is only such a mind that is in a state of compassion.
Sirs, do go out of this room with that intensity; when the challenge is so great, you have to respond greatly, not from a little corner of the universe as the `me'. March , The last time we met here, we were talking about fear, sorrow and compassion. One could see very clearly that when the mind is crippled with fear, there cannot be compassion, nor sympathy, nor pity; a mind that is tortured by suffering, to whatever degree, to whatever depth, cannot feel the extraordinary power of compassion.
The scientific mind being precise, clear in its investigation, cannot feel this compassion which can only be when the mind has understood itself. The outward investigation of things does not necessarily lead to the inward comprehension of things; but the inward comprehension of things does bring about an understanding of the outer. The inner comprehension is of the religious mind.
The totality of the mind includes all its feelings, ambitions, fears, anxieties, capabilities, the power of observation, the power of position, the power of prestige, cruelty, the venomous hatred and all the rest of it. Today, let us go into and understand time and timelessness. To understand this whole process of time, with all the complexities involved in it, one has to understand what is influence.
Let us investigate this a little; through the understanding of influence, we shall understand what is time and timelessness. If we could, instead of merely discussing it at the verbal level, or intellectually spitting it all up, understand the mind that is conditioned by time, which is essentially the word and the influence, perhaps we shall come to understand what it is to be timeless. So let us investigate what is influence.
We are, each one of us, influenced by environment; we are the result of all kinds of influences - good and bad, beautiful and ugly, the influence of the past, the racial inheritance, the family tradition; we are influenced by the food we eat, the dress we wear; every thought, every movement is the result of influence. We are influenced by newspapers, by the magazines, by the cinema, the books we read; we are influenced by each other, consciously or unconsciously. There is this process of response to a challenge, which is from past influence.
Please, Sirs, when I am saying this do not accept it.or deny it, but just observe it - how you live, how you are influenced by the Gita, the Upanishads, the guru, the politician, the newspapers. We are the result of propaganda, the subliminal propaganda or the obvious propaganda - the subliminal propaganda being very very subtle, suggestive. The immediate yesterday is not so important, but the memories of ten years ago have hypnotic vitality.
If we observe, religiously, economically, socially we are the result of the traditions that this country has inherited, you and I have inherited, from the past. When you say you believe in God, you are influenced, you have been told; and also there is your own desire to find some safety, some security, some permanency; so you are brought up to believe. There are others, those in the communist world, who are brought up not to believe again influenced.
So you are no more religious than those who are brought up not to believe, because you are the result of propaganda, you are the result of your circumstances, you are the product of your environment; obviously, whether you accept it or not, that is a psychological fact. Calling yourself a Hindu, a Parsi, is obviously the result of your conditioning. So also is calling yourself a Russian and all the rest of it.
So the mind is the result of conditioning, of innumerable influences, conscious and unconscious. The unconscious is much more powerful, much more potent than the conscious mind; the unconscious mind is the residue, the storehouse of innumerable memories, traditions, motives, impulses, compulsions. Please, watch your own mind, watch yourself when I am talking, you are not just listening to a vague description to which you are approximating.
Sir, how did the first mind come into being? We can observe theoretically how the first mind came into being. Obviously it came into being through sensation, through hunger, through taste, smell, touch.
We have developed the arm to stretch, to catch. That is not the problem, Sir. How we began we can enquire into, we can suppose, we can investigate; but the fact is, here we are.
To investigate the origin of all things is to approach it scientifically, as the scientists, the biologists are investigating the origin of life. You have to investigate what you are actually now. When you investigate, the problem arises whether there is a beginning or an ending - not what was the beginning.
We started with the question of time and timelessness. If we investigate the problem of time, we must investigate the problem of existence which is living, which is influence, which is the result, what we are. And to discover what we are, we have to take ourselves `as we are', and be ruthless in our investigation of what we are not suppose that we were something in the beginning of all things.
If we can understand what is in the present, then we will see the beginning and the ending of the thing. There is no beginning and no ending, and you cannot comprehend that extraordinary sense of timelessness unless you understand the mind that is in the present. I am not avoiding the question about what was in the beginning.
How will you find it out? You are not biologists, investigators; you are not specialists who can investigate the whole problem of what was, how all life came into being. The specialists have experimented, they have created life in a test-tube.
What does it matter if we are not going to find out the origin of all things? Let us see the mind, our minds, yours and mine. The human mind, as it is now, is the result of the environment.
You can see that very clearly if you observe yourselves in your relationship with society, with your neighbours, with the country. We object to being told we are the result of our environment, because we think we are something extraordinarily spiritual, as though the environment is also part of the whole existence of man. So it is very important to understand if it is possible to extricate the mind - for the mind to extricate itself - from all influences.
Is that possible? Because it is only when the mind has extricated itself from all influences that it can find what is the timeless. To understand what is time not put it aside, not create a theory, not involve your mind in suppositions and wishes and all that - you actually have to investigate your own mind; and you cannot investigate if you are not aware of the extraordinary impacts of influences.
Obviously, when you listen to me you are being influenced, aren't you? When you listen to that bell in the street which that garbage-collecting lorry makes, that very sound is influencing; everything is influencing. Can the mind be aware of these influences, watch every influence that is shaping the mind and extricate itself; or be aware of it and walk through it?
So that is a problem, which means really the understanding of the whole, of the many yesterdays. There is now, as I am talking to you, the impact of influence in the present, and your response to what is being said is, surely, the memory of a thousand yesterdays. The thousand yesterdays are the result of a thousand previous yesterdays with their influences and with their challenges and responses, with their conditioning - which is memory, which is time.
Isn't it? Sir, have you noticed in yourself that yesterday is not so very important, the memories of yesterday fall away very quickly, but the memories of the past ten years have an extraordinary hypnotic vitality? I do not know if you have noticed it.
What you did ten years ago, how you felt ten years ago, or what you felt when you were a young boy running about, suddenly capturing the light on the trees, the memory of swimming, that freedom, no responsibility, the fullness of living where there was no conflict, where there was a complete sense of joy - you remember all that, all that has extraordinary vitality, much more than the memories of yesterday. That is influencing us, that is shaping our thinking. So we understand time as the influence of a thousand yesterdays.
So we begin to investigate time as memory, as yesterday, time as today, and time as tomorrow - time as yesterday going through the passage of today, coming out shaped, conditioned, moulded into tomorrow. So there is not only the time by the watch, the chronological time; but also there is the time as memory, stretching backwards and forwards, this memory as the unconscious, hidden deep down in the vast recesses of one's mind. So, there is time by the watch, by the chronometer as yesterday, today, tomorrow; there is time from place to place, from here to there, before and after; and there is the time of ` `I am this' and `I shall be that; I am today brutal, violent, ugly, stupid; and tomorrow or perhaps after ten tomorrows, I will be `that'.
So there is time from here to there. All aspiration is that - one day I shall. achieve, one day I shall become the Manager, one day I shall become the chief boss of the whole show.
So there is in this time the urge to fulfil; and with the urge of fulfilment there is the inevitable frustration and sorrow, which is still a part of time. We know this, we accept this as inevitable, as a part of our natural existence and hope that one day through time, gradually, life after life, or after a series of many tomorrows, we shall arrive there. We say a seed becomes the tree, and there must be time for the seed to become the tree.
I planted it yesterday; I watch it today; and in ten years time, it will be a lovely thing, full of leaves, shadows innumerable. So I pretend that I shall also be one day reaching that place where there is permanency. So we begin to introduce permanency and the transient, and say that eventually we shall arrive at the permanent.
Is there anything permanent? Permanency in relationship, permanency of house, of government, permanency of something or other, permanency of truth, God - this means a continuity which means time. We accept all this like children who are told what to do, and for the rest of our life we are slaves to what is being said.
So unless we understand this whole process of time, we shall not enter into that state which may exist or may not exist. Should I accept the state of timelessness? All that we know is time.
Because we are slaves to it, it tortures us; there is a continuous battle from `what is' to `what shall be'. So we have to understand that; let us be clear. There is a time according to the watch, there is a time when the train leaves, there is a time when the aeroplane leaves the earth, there is a time when you just go to your office, there is a time when you must sow, there is a time when you must reap - that is one kind of time.
Then there is the time - inward time - which is memory; that is extraordinarily complex, extraordinarily subtle; and without grappling with it, without understanding it, without going into it ruthlessly like a scientist who investigates something, you cannot find out if there is or if there is not a state when time is not. As long as there is cause and effect, there must be time; as long as there is action based on an idea, there must be time - the time bridging the act or approximating the act according to an idea. You see the difficulty?
When I am dull and I am trying to become clever - that is also part of time. When I realize I am violent and I am trying to practise, to discipline, to control, to become non-violent, the gradation, the gradual process to `become' demands time. We are all brought up that way.
When in the school, you are told that you must be the best boy - at once, there is time. All competition is time - competition of the clerk to become the Manager, and the Manager competing to become the Supermanager, the Director and, eventually something bigger. There is not only chronological time, but also psychological time, the time of `becoming'.
Mind, Time and Experience seem to be one thing; but memory cannot be time because memory is of the past. It is part of the conception of time. Are we discussing this theoretically or factually?
Look at your own minds, Sirs. Your mind is the result of experience, which is the result of time, isn't it,? And the mind varies with the experiences, but it is still within the field of time.
You may have different experiences and I may have different experiences; but that experience, which has created memory from which springs thought, is still within the field of time. Now, we are discussing time, unfolding it; we are not even discussing, we are just exposing it. It is not a question of my agreeing or your denying.
We are just looking at the map. When I listen to you, I am being influenced by your thought; then I I will investigate what you are talking about. Don't you think the question, "I will investigate", also involves time?
Of course, Sir. The whole process of thinking involves time. How do you ask us to be aware of facts without being influenced?
I never said that, Sir, you are assuming it. I first let us be aware of the facts - neither accepting nor denying them. Where is the difficulty Sir?
Before I enter into timelessness, if there is such a state, I must know first what time is - not according to Einstein, according to the Gita, or according to the latest professor, or the interpreter of the Gita. I want to know what my mind is like, which is the result of time, and I want to understand time. If you want to understand something you must approach it simply, mustn't you?
If you want to understand a very complicated machinery, you must begin to unscrew little by little taking one thing after another, bit by bit; you can't jump into it - you can, if you have the mind. But most of us have not got that sharp, clear, scientific mind, which is not prejudiced, which is not conceiving, formulating. So you have to look at time.
There is the time of going to the office, the train time, time by the watch; and that is one time. Then there is this vast field of time which is experience, memory, thought, mind, aspirations, the becoming, the denying, the fulfilling, the mind which I must be something - all that is time, which we are discussing. We are looking at it, observing it; we are not denying it, we are not accepting it; but we are seeing something as it is.
So your mind is that - not what it was at the beginning and not what it will be at the end. I do not know what it was at the beginning, and what it will be at the end. But I take a slice off in this vast time, a gap, and look at it, which is `myself'.
If you don't want to look at yourself, that is quite a different matter. I do not see how you can investigate - investigate in the that you directly experience, directly observe, directly feel your way taking the thing as you are, not assuming what you were - which may be merely tradition and acting according to that tradition, not having any hope of what you will be, which too is within the field of time. Has time any relationship with God?
Do you believe in God, Sir? Belief in God, what does that mean, believing in something which you don't know? You hope and you believe there is God and that you will eventually reach God.
We have to understand this process of time; and that is real meditation. Meditation is not sitting in a corner and doing all kinds of self-hypnotic processes. But to investigate the mind whether it is caught in time or whether the mind can be free of time - that is real meditation.
I want to find out if there is a timeless state, because as long as the mind is a slave to time there is no freedom. It is a slave to cause-and effect. I love you because you give me something; I go from here to there, because I want to get something; I see that to be non-violence is very profitable, economically and inwardly it gives me a sense of success - so there is cause-and effect.
The mind which investigates, wants to find out if there is a state where there is no cause-and effect, which is pure energy - energy which has a cause-and effect is limited energy. If I say, "Be good", you may be good; this involves a pressure, an influence - is that goodness? If you are good with a motive, is that goodness?
Or is goodness something which has no motive at all? Has love a motive? If I love my wife because she gives me her body, because she bears me children, she cooks for me, she looks after my laundry and the house when I earn a livelihood, is that love?
Has love, compassion, a cause? You follow all this, Sirs? I want to find out, my mind is curious to find out; I cannot be curious if I accept various stupid, vague theories, however pleasant they may be; I must investigate, find out, be ruthless with myself.
So, let us begin. The mind is of time, is of experience; and that experience is based on memory; that memory is the record held within the mind - memory not only of my own personal experience but also the memory of man held within the unconscious, which is conditioning my thinking all the time, which is shaping my thoughts all the time, consciously and unconsciously. Can the mind which is the result of all that be free?
You follow the problem? You understand the problem, Sirs? Then only can I find out if there is a timeless state; otherwise, I cannot possibly understand it.
Theoretically it may be that a few saints - not saints that recognise themselves as saints; the public, the Church may call them saints; they never experience the timeless - , a few people out somewhere have experienced this. But let us not go into that now. Here I am, here you are; we are the products of influence which shapes our experiences; and those experiences being conditioned, our future experiences are also conditioned.
I am asking myself, are we conscious of this fact? You understand? This is a very simple thing.
Am I conscious when I say I am a Hindu or a Buddhist, or a Parsi? Do I know, am I conscious that I am believing, that my mind is operating in a conditioned state which is within the field of time? Do I know that mind - not that it is right or wrong?
Do I know that much? Then, if I know that, then I say to myself, "Is it possible, being in that state, to see, to observe?" I cannot see anything, I cannot observe clearly, precisely, when I call myself a Hindu, a Christian, a Buddhist - which is the whole tradition, the weight of tradition, the weight of knowledge, the weight of conditioning.
With that mind I can only look at life, at something, as a Christian, as a Buddhist, as a Hindu, as a nationalist, as a communist, as something or other; and that state prevents me from observing. That is simple. When the mind watches itself as a conditioned entity, that is one state.
But when the mind says, "I am conditioned", that is another state. When the mind says, "I am conditioned", in that state of the mind, there is the I as the observer, watching the conditioned state. When I say, "I see the flower", there is the observer and the observed, the observer is different from the thing observed; therefore there is distance, there is a time-lag, there is duality, there are the opposites; and then there is the overcoming of the opposites, the cementing of the dual - that is one state.