CRISIS IN CONSCIOUSNESS 

by Robert Powell (1967) 

  This work follows logically upon Powell’s previous book Zen and Reality, in which he explained how Reality can only be discovered through self-knowledge, but how certain pointers to this Truth are to be found in the essence of Zen Buddhism, and in the Talks of J. Krishnamurti.  The author particularly favors the latter’s approach because it is clear, simple and unambiguous, and admirably suited to the needs of modern man.  In the present work he explores certain aspects of the spiritual life more fully and, leaving all teachings and external signposts behind, takes readers on a journey of meditation—probing ever deeper into the Unknown.   In the course of this inquiry, he makes some significant and far reaching discoveries about the nature of Thought, Love, Life and Death. .

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Contents

PREFACE
CORRESPONDENCE:-
A Cry from the Heart

The Many Problems of the Agitated Mind

1. The Importance of Right Beginning

2. Zen and Liberation

3. To Have or Not to Have

4. The Worldly Mind and the Religious Mind

5. Repetition of the Pattern

6. Experience, Habit and Freedom

7. On Grace

8. Can Illumination be Transmitted?

9. The Equation of Unhappiness

10. Must We Have Religious Societies?

11. Approach to the Immeasurable 

12. Window on Non-Duality

13. Second Thoughts on Non-Duality

14. Memory Without a Cause

15. Knowledge and Language

16. Self or Non-Self?

17. This Question of Thought

18. “Thinking About Thinking”

19. Void or No-Void?

20. Common Sayings Revealing Uncommon Insights

21. On Contradiction

22. The Outer and the Inner

23. Despair, Emptiness, and Otherness

24. Mind at the End of its Tether

       SOME FURTHER REFLECTIONS

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“Why do we attach such enormous importance to ideas, to beliefs, to conclusions? . . . We see that ideas, beliefs, divide people . . . bring about catastrophes, miseries and confusion . . . There can be collective action only when there is freedom from all desire to take refuge in any ideology, in any belief, in any system, in any group, in any person, in any particular teaching or teacher . . . As long as we repeat, read books, quote authorities, pursue ideals, conform to formulae, follow religions, practice cults, seek out masters, hoping to make ourselves happy, there can obviously be no freedom.”

-- J. KRISHNAMURTI

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Preface

In a world where confusion reigns supreme, most people seek to find order in and through organizations and institutions of various kinds, whether they be economical, political, religious or sociological.  They think that by reform, by activity in one shape or another, the world can be made into a better place.  Whether seeking world peace or peace of mind, sooner or later many become disillusioned in their search; they then join another party, a different church, or perhaps, becoming apathetic about the whole thing, they give up in despair, reasoning that it is the world which is at fault and not themselves.
Very few people ever appear to question the wisdom of action on the collective level.  This process has been going on for centuries, yet the world seems never far removed from a major disaster through politico-military action.  The author of the following work, the confusion and conflict which we see everywhere are merely the reflection of the confusion and turmoil in the mind of the individual.  To change his environment, theouter, without fundamentally changing the inner, appears to him utterly useless, for eventually the inner will always overcome the outer.  A confused mind in action can only create further confusion and misery, and everything it touches will turn into a problem.  If we fully understand this, we shall see that legislation by itself, in whatever form, will never abolish war, just as little as raising the standard of living will improve the quality of living. For example, today in the United Kingdom, with its Welfare State that has brought more widely spread prosperity and higher social security than ever before, we also have the biggest-ever juvenile delinquency problem on our hands. 

 So the first requirement in the world today is to tackle, not the many problems, but the problem-maker.  To change oneself fundamentally–not merely superficially, for that is the concern of most of us–it is obviously first necessary to know oneself, to understand the very ways of one’s mind, for without this insight what we think can have very little value.  This is extremely arduous, because nobody can do it for us–and we are so used to leaning on authorities, on the so-called experts.  In the following pages the author had indicated the general lines of his self-inquiry in the hope that it may arouse an interest in others to make their own investigations. 

Where a chapter is not immediately clear, the reader is advised to leave it for the time being and take it up later–for he will find that its meaning is more easily understood by a consideration of the work in its totality rather than through concentration on a particular fragment. 

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1. The Importance of Right Beginning

It seems to me insufficiently appreciated how tremendously important is right beginning, that is our initial attitude, in anything we undertake.  Whether it be the creation of a work of art or an inquiry into what is true and what is false–in either case the outcome stands or falls with the state of mind in which we approach the task in hand.

      The problem of right beginning can only be solved when we have understood the relationship between creative being, and its expression.  As long as there is even one thought, an intention to create–which presupposes a motive–the ensuing expression cannot emanate from the void, which is the true source of creativity; and thus there cannot be a right beginning. Unfortunately, at present, most creative effort in the world comes from such an intention, the artist's motive being “recognition” (consciously or unconsciously); and his activity is, therefore ultimately the outcome of frustration. In the past stages of mankind's history, this was not always the case to the same extent. For example, the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were built and decorated by anonymous architects, and craftsmen. A good many of the inspired writings of the ancient Vedas and Upanishads were anonymously composed.

     On the other hand, when there is true creativity, there is not even one thought for each expression, that is, it may, or may not be expressed, but this has now become totally unimportant, and just because of its total unimportance, the expression can be purely spontaneous. The activity, then springs from a non-beginning and can therefore be called “right beginning”; in this case, it would perhaps be more articulate, speak of an “expression” than of an “expression” of creativity. To readers of this book the all-important question will probably be, “What is right beginning in the spiritual quest?  Here, unfortunately, most of us rush in where angels fear to tread.  For example, when someone claims to be seeking for God, is that right beginning, is that even being serious?  If he is seeking God he must first know that God exists, otherwise search becomes just meaningless.  Furthermore, in order to find God he must also know who or what God is; how otherwise would he recognize God and be certain that what he has found is truly God?

Space Of true and false values cannot be learned from Another; it cannot be mastered through the acquisition of information, which is adding to one store of knowledge, and therefore the cultivation of memory, it comes into being the moment that’s a thought, because aware of its own conditioning, and thus of its incapability of ever freed itself. After all to find out there, if there is the eternal. To readers of this book the all-important question will probably be, “What is right beginning in the spiritual quest?”  Here, unfortunately, most of us rush in where angels fear to tread.  For example, when someone claims to be seeking for God, is that the right beginning, is that even being serious?  If he is seeking God he must first know that God exists, otherwise search becomes just as meaningless.  Furthermore, in order to find God he must also know who or  what God is; how otherwise would he recognize God and be certain that what he has found is truly God?

You see, the trouble is that it is easy enough to invent words, but the words themselves have no inherent meaning.  The truth is, of course, that we do not know God-all we know is the word, the concept, and with that we are satisfied, in that we find a refuge.

For most of us there rarely is a moment of true beginning, for whatever we do is a continuation of the old, a reaction from thought, which is memory.  When we set out to meditate it is because we have heard or read about it–the necessity to cleanse the mind, how to practice, and so on.  But what we do is repetition, not independent inquiry, and has therefore little value.

True meditation takes place when man deeply looks into himself simply because he has woken up–and not from any compulsion, idea of social responsibility, or according to a certain blueprint laid down by others.  Thus, the mind itself, whose inherent nature it is to act from a motive, to be guided by collective consciousness, can never initiate mediation.   There is meditation only when the mind has come to an end, has died to all it knows, believes and hopes for.  It dies when it has completely given up all its self-centered activities, and this can only be when it sees their futility, their voidness.  So what is essential to us is right ending–without which there can be no right beginning.  

There is right ending, and so the beginning of meditation, only when what happens proceeds from the Void, when it occurs in spite of oneself, in spite of the mind’s machinations.  That is why a moment’s real meditation is like a miracle; it is truly a moment of illumination for it throws a clear light on all the false movements of the mind that keep us forever in the dark.

For most people creativity is inextricably associated with expression, the one not being possible but for the other.  They think that creative energy only comes about in the process of writing poetry, music, painting, dancing, and so on.  Yet it is our contention that there exists a kind of primordial creative energy, which is totally  divorced and independent of these activities, although they may flow from it.  It is this energy which affects the whole person and not a mere fragment, and has no connection with mental or artistic capacity and knowledge, although it may use these.  On a deeper level, we may say it is Creation uncontaminated by thought.

However, not only are creativity and expression one in the public mind; but, in its view, what matters most is the result, the expression, which may be “beautiful”, “useful” or “fashionable”, and so on in a materialistic world some can be put on it.  Thus we can see that the climate of collective thought has given undue emphasis to the value of expression.  And obviously, if we regard expression as more important than Being, we are still caught up in the play of the World; for why should we express the inner at all unless to fulfill ourselves in the outer? At the same time, have we perhaps not noticed that as the creative tide in us rises the urge to fulfill ebbs away?  If in this state there is an expression, it is completely spontaneous, without a single thought to impress.  The true artist therefore has no public; he works for the sheer joy of it.  

This then means the introduction of an element of casualness, a certain playfulness, into the creative process, barring which, what passes as creativity is not at all of the order of Creation.  As soon as the activity becomes “serious business”, that is, the result of “effort”, the source of the creative effort becomes suspect.  In fact, the words “creative effort”, however commonly used without being given a second thought, are really deeply contradictory.

This applies particularly to meditation, for in its pure form meditation represents the creative process par excellence; and without the element of playfulness there can be no true meditation.  It is because of this condition that the “I” can never meditate, for however superficial, frivolous and scatterbrained in its manifestation, in the core of its being and secret intent it is always deadly serious.  Because it is always scheming, calculating, end-gaming, it can never be relaxed and fully Live.

The miracle of meditation as true creativity is that it is experienced as the ending of one thing and the beginning of another.  The “other” is the purest substance of Play, and moreover a play which has no shadows because it is all-illuminating, being beyond the movement of the opposites.  All this and much more is involved when Krishnamurti talks about what it means “to be serious”, showing us incidentally that unless we pierce through the words we shall be bogged down in their contradictions.  

How many of us can truly say we are serious in Krishnamurti’s sense?

The lack of clarity in certain circles regarding the problem of right beginning is no more clearly illustrated than by the confused thought about meditation as “mind discipline”.  There are those who favor this as a proper path towards enlightenment; and others who oppose it on the grounds that deliberate spiritual training only constitutes “manipulation of the ego” and not its transcendence.  However, it may be asked, “Who is it that manipulates the ego?”  The above quoted statement appears still based upon the false notion of duality, for are not the manipulator and the manipulated one?  Spiritual training, either deliberate or undeliberate, can thus only be meaningless action, and not more relevant in this connection than, for example, going to the pictures.  But before the false notion of spiritual training drops from us, it must be clearly seen that it is just another escapist activity.

“Training” always entails looking into the future, does it not?  It implies that in time the desired result may be achieved, by continuous patient effort. We shall be happy, not today, but next month, next year, or next life, if we perform the prescribed exercises regularly and assiduously.  So by fixing my goal in the future, by keeping my eyes fixed on the ideal, which does not exist, I avoid looking at the actual, which is what I am at the moment.

Now if there is completely clear perception of what exists in the present, do I then still need to “train” myself?  If I have seen without distortion, that I am ambitious, greedy, envious, do I then still want to get rid of these properties, gradually, that is bit by bit over a period of time?  Or, having seen myself as I really am, is there not a purgation all at once?

So it is necessary to have this attention to deal with the here and now; and the looking at the future, at the ideal to be gained in due time, distracts from the perception of what is now.  Thus any pre-meditation to do something, any plan to further one’s ends, which has a psychological motivation, can never be right beginning.  Have we not noticed how the most significant events in our lives have always taken place unexpectedly?  There is right beginning only in the total absence of any thought of beginning, any commitment to a certain course of action or way of life.  It is the empty mind, the mind that has completely let go of all ideas about achieving goals, which dies continually to every experience, that is in a state of complete Attention to what is.  Therefore, to such a mind, which is all the time living under the shadow of Death, everything is new, fresh, and so every moment is a true beginning.  

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2. Zen and Liberation 

or 

The Importance of Total Denial

Zen may be true, but is it necessary?  And if so, for what and for whom is it necessary?  It may be a need with the Buddhist, or with the individual who has a penchant for exotic cults; but is it essential for ordinary human beings seeking liberation from sorrow?  For if Zen is Life–and this is how the author sees it–do I then still have to bother with it?  For as little as I can avoid Life, can I avoid Zen, and any conscious preoccupation with the word “Zen”, or what has been said about it or in its name, must be superfluous and unnecessary. 

On the other hand, if Zen is not Life, but a mere fragment of it, a special discipline, or pattern of action, it cannot be true.  Then it is just another “ism”, an invitation of the mind anxious to find security, or it may be merely an intellectual pastime.  In that case the question starting off this chapter would not arise at all.

To inquire from a particular point of view, according to a certain “ism”--whether Communism, Roman Catholicism or Zen, is immaterial–is no inquiry at all; for what I find will in some way be dependent upon my premises.  Moreover, it is not Zen either. 

It is important that the reader be fully aware of the contradiction involved in the last paragraph, on the verbal level.  If Zen is the Nothingness of Life, then what more is there to say?  Then surely, the moment I utter one word–that is, a word about it–I have betrayed, I have cut up the Wholeness of Life.  And is it not this which is taking place in the world today and has happened from time immemorial whenever an individual caught a glimpse of the Truth and tried to communicate it to another?  

Because only very few understood and kept tongue-tied, the Truth was so-called “passed on” by the “followers”, and in the process “interpreted”, that is, twisted and stepped down, so that it was no longer Truth at all. Thus Zen as an “ism”, was born, with its philosophy, its meditation exercises, koans, etc., to be greedily snapped up in the twentieth century by the ennuye intellectuals of the West, who are ever looking for some new stimulant, some new fad to cover up the barrenness of their minds and the emptiness of their hearts.  And so it came about that Zen Buddhism became a factor in increasing the confusion in a confused world.

Now, the person who really clearly perceives this, is at once free from all flirtation with words, isn’t he?  Having seen that all intellectualization, all speculative philosophy, is a betrayal of what is true, he will have none of it.  To him the issue is not whether to embrace Zen, but to live totally, to face one’s immediate problems with intelligence, knowing that this intelligence cannot come so long as there is a dependence on authority or the following of a system.

To cling to Zen, or to any other technique, approach or circumscribed path, is to deny Life, which is a pathless land.  To find this Life, to discover whether there exists anything beyond thought and experience, one must deny Zen as well as any other school of thought; as Krishnamurti once expressed it so pointedly: “You can only find everything by abandoning everything.”

The denial of everything that stands in the way, i.e., this whole intellectual process of analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, must be made with passion, with intensity, which springs from an instantaneous perception of the fallacy of any positive approach.  Thus there is only the negative approach, which–as must now be clear–is not merely the opposite of the positive approach.  Nor is it an “approach” in the accepted sense of the word because it is not a movement in time, not progressive, but it is the seeing of things in a flash.  The negative approach means the destruction of all false values in one’s outlook on life.  Let us first do that, before seeking for “positive values”.  Maybe then we shall find that all “positive” values are false—“values” being ideas or ideals–and that their total denial brings into being a positive state which is not a reaction to the false–a form of being which may be said to have “virtue”.  But the above implies that what is referred to by the word “state” is far from static; it is a “being without continuity”: the dynamic process of denial, which requires a great deal of energy as passion and alertness.   

This revolutionary approach to an investigation of true and false values cannot be learned from another; it cannot be mastered through the acquisition of information, which is adding to one’s store of knowledge and therefore the cultivation of memory.  It comes into being the moment that thought becomes aware of its own conditioning, and thus of its incapablity of ever freeing itself.   After all, to find out if there is the Eternal, the Unlimited, the mind must first be limited, have destroyed its own frontiers, for can the limited mind ever find the Unlimited, the Immeasurable?  And how can the mind destroy its frontiers when it does not even recognize them?  There are really two separate questions involved in this problem, namely: can the mind know its own limitations; and if so, can it then proceed to destroy these limitations?

If we go into this problem for ourselves and experiment a little, we shall discover that the mind can become aware of its own limitations; and that this very awareness signifies at once the destruction of these limitations.  So in order to go beyond thought, I have first to go strenuously with thought as far as it will go; and to pursue thought in this manner to the very end, I should be able to think straight, with accuracy and patience.  In this awareness comes to light the chain of cause-and-effects leading to the exposure of the mind’s conditioning: the seeing that whatever the mind does is from its background and is therefore rigidly determined.  This perception is the first stepping into freedom, but it is also the last step; it is truly an explosive shattering of the prison of the mind: the first of the First and Last Freedom. 

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3.   To Have or Not to Have 

(An Examination of “Satisfaction” and “Happiness”)

Life is suffering–or, to put it in a more universally acceptable form, there is frustration, agitation, in the mind, and somehow we think this state can be negated by possession; for example, by acquiring a beautiful house, car, wife, a bank balance and the rest of it, we think we can buy happiness or perhaps we are not ambitious on the material level, and then we want to acquire virtue, inward poise, etc.  Thus the mind, whether materialistic or so-called spiritual, is constantly trying to acquire one thing or another. this activity really is the mind, for would there be a mind at all in the total absence of all striving for the result?

The state of affairs as just described has come about because the mind at any level is concerned with satisfaction, and it thinks that satisfaction, the guaranteed continuity of gratification, signifies permanent happiness. But can satisfaction be permanent? Is the possession of a lovely home, a glamorous wife, and so on, in itself the basis for lasting happiness?

Gratification is the “satisfaction”, the elimination of a particular stimulus, and owing to the fact that any kind of gratification is always experienced against the background of Emptiness, which is our essential being–an emptiness which cannot be filled because gratification itself is of this emptiness–complete satisfaction is never possible.  Thus, the residue of dissatisfaction left from any act of gratification gives rise to the desire for further gratification.  Therefore the mind that merely seeks satisfaction, the release of its own tensions and stresses, is ever an agitated mind, a mind in distress.

Now happiness, deep inner contentment, is complete peace of mind, and therefore an experience of the Silent Mind: the very opposite of a mind driven on by desire in one form or another.  There is a further, more fundamental, difference between satisfaction and the contentment born of the Silent Mind.  The satisfied mind is a relative state, for can there ever be an end to satisfaction?  You see, it is always possible to be more satisfied; to have a more beautiful house, a more impressive car, an even lovelier wife, a bigger bank balance, etc.  A mind that is merely satisfied can always be tempted into action towards further acquisition if the right bait is presented.  And although the mind may think it has enough in one particular direction, it only thinks on those lines because it is already busily engaged in expanding itself in other directions.  For this is its essential nature–the incessant activity of pursuing the “more”--and without it, the mind would not be at all.

The state of the Silent Mind, on the other hand, is really much more than a mind in suspension; it is not, as might be thought, a static, dead thing.  The Silent Mind has something “absolute” about it; in fact it is an absolute state for it has no continuity–it is ever flowing with the events–and is therefore not of time; such a mind cannot be tempted by the “more”, it is incorruptible, for its happiness does not allow of degrees; to it the description “fairly happy” means “not happy”.  Nor is it bound by limits of space, for this mind has no frontiers, no resting place and contains no fixed point from which its thinking proceeds.  

When we look at “action”, we see that all action springs from the mind’s deliberation, i.e., ideation.  And what is ideation ultimately concerned with?  With security–psychological as well as material–with various kinds of acquisitions and their safeguarding, with “conditions” which we think will favor our happiness, that is, ways to satisfy the mind.  For how does the mind look upon satisfaction?  Being bothered by desire, fear, it seeks to allay the agitation by appropriate action whereafter it will have got rid of the tiresome demands of the obtruding thoughts, feelings and emotions.  This “getting rid of” it calls satisfaction.  Thus, paradoxically, the mind is constantly engaged in a search for tranquility–the agitated mind’s own perverted solution to find its way back to the womb–but of course, as we all know, it never succeeds, for all satisfaction is temporary, which is the dulling of all sensitivity.

But supposing the mind gives up all preconceived ideas about what is good for itself, i.e., it is free from precedent which is its conditioning, is all this activity towards satisfaction then still necessary? Or is it then  immediately in that state of tranquility for which it has striven so vainly, a state of satisfaction without object of satisfaction, that is, therefore also without fear, without anxiety that the object of its satisfaction may be taken away. But such a state of “satisfaction without object” must be quite different in quality from what is ordinarily called “satisfaction”, which is only the temporary dulling of a continual state of agitation, a moment’s suspension of the chain-reaction of desire.  For in the state of satisfaction without object there can be no entity that is satisfied: this entity comes into being with “possession”, for it is only after the imagination has projected the “owner” that “desire” arises.  For example, you see a beautiful car, or anything else you fancy, and immediately you play with the idea of being the owner, if only for a split second or largely subconsciously.  The very word “fancy” seems to suggest ownership.  Thus, with the creation of the “owner”, desire arises, that is, this whole process of the entity, identified with desire, seeking gratification.

When there is neither an entity that experiences satisfaction, nor an object of satisfaction, then an altogether different state prevails: a bliss, which, because it is independent of the phenomenal world, is immovable and imperishable.  It is the eternal home of the Silent Mind.

That there are really two kinds of mind, corresponding to two entirely different modes of consciousness, is a little-known fact that cannot be demonstrated save in one’s own experience.  Like every form of discrimination, this differentiation is not the setting up of a fundamental philosophy of Duality, but is created by the limited form of consciousness that needs duality for its expression.  On the fundamental level both forms of mind are to be equated, just as Nirvana is Samsara (see also p. *)

We may say then that the ordinary mind–the only one we generally know and in the present context called the “analytical mind”--acts like a spotlight.  Operating within the limits of space and time, it perceives in piece-meal fashion.  Its proper function is to look after the body as a physical entity (food, clothing, shelter, means of livelihood, etc.).  But when it goes beyond this in building up the “I” as a psychological entity, it creates nothing but mischief and suffering.  Having given us the marvels of science and technology, it is also this mind which is responsible for the horrors of wars, concentration camps, etc.  Its activity is basically expansionist, i.e., in the nature of clinging and grasping, for this expansion in space and time is its striving for “security”, for the greater glory of the “I”.  The Silent Mind on the other hand acts like a floodlight: it perceives Reality in its totality,, and so goes beyond any limitation.

The analytical mind produces (and, also, is the product of) thought, which is based on “abstractions” (“things” and “ideas”) of a Reality which knows no “thingness” because it is indivisible and indefinable.  This mind is therefore utterly incapable of knowing Reality.  Since in the spiritual life we are not concerned with things that can be abstracted as entities in space and time, the analytical mind is entirely irrelevant.  When it attempts to solve psychological problems it works on a false assumption, for it can only correlate, never understand or effect transformation (this mind cannot “control” happiness, for instance).  When faced with suffering, it can only justify itself or seek an escape, but it cannot dissolve the torturing thoughts–because thought can never cleanse itself, as little as blood will wash off blood (we all know that worrying about our worries does not help–on the contrary).  The analytical mind thus always strengthens itself, but sorrow only disappears when the analyser comes to an end.  

The Silent Mind on the other hand is capable of complete and instantaneous understanding–because this mind is not based on memory, it is timeless.  Being grounded in Reality, it is not merely the opposite of the analytical mind,, which is an empirical entity.

When there is the “stopping” of the analytical mind there is identification of memory with phenomena, bringing about the “self” as a center of desire; and this overlays the functioning of the Silent Mind.  When, however, the analytical mind is no longer held by phenomena, it no longer “stops” (the end of conceptualized thought); there will then be an “experiencing without the experiencer, without the analyzer”--and hence the Silent Mind will come into its own.  This is, however, not something to theorize about; it must be experienced.  Then we shall find that there is a totally different state of Consciousness, free of the shackles of our normal limited consciousness. In that unlimited condition there is an immediate perception of Reality, without the need for the mind to build it up progressively,, bit by bit; in other words, the process of identifying memory, of time-binding, has been put out of action, and there is only living in the Now. This signifies the end of Fear, for Fear is always of tomorrow, and in this state there is no tomorrow.  

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4.   The Worldly Mind and the Religious Mind

It seems to me that the two fundamentally different ways of functioning discussed in the previous chapter–the mind that wants to possess, to cling, and the mind that is free from all this–are well represented by the worldly and the religious mind.  I am not now referring to persons or types of personalities, for we must see that the mind is something more fundamental than what we call “personality”, and that it is possible to conceive of both types of mind as being manifested at different moments in the same person.  If the reader is a little aware he will perceive that this also applies to himself.   

    The worldly mind is the mind of the more and more, or the less and less, but whether positively or negatively, it is concerned with acquisition, accumulation, private property; by all these means this mind is trying to gain security and thus permanency for itself.

The religious mind, on the other hand, is the mind that does not possess, does not cling, does not seek security and thereby continuity.  As Prof. D. T. Suzuki once said, the religious life is essentially a life of poverty–which does not necessarily mean “need”.  It is even possible for the religious man to be surrounded by valuable things, yet he does not possess them for there is no sense of “ownership”--he merely has them in trust.  At the same time the religious mind is also a clear, orderly mind that dislikes waste and mismanagement in any form; and consequently the religious man often looks after his property (which he does not acknowledge as “his”) even better than the worldly man who is attached to and identified with his possessions. 

   Because the worldly mind derives its security and continuity from “ownership” in every kind of form, it is totally committed to this, and ever expending most of its energies to ensure its continuity.  Thus it is necessarily highly involved with the affairs of the politicians, the party, the nation and so on, especially i the complicated machinery of modern society with its high degree of interdependence of economical, political and sociological influences.  Perhaps more than ever before in history, is the fate of millions dependent upon the whims of the so-called statesman.  So it can be seen that the worldly mind is highly deserving of its appellation, although it is completely unaware of its terrible involvement.  And not only that, but it prided itself on its patriotism, having a “stake in the country” (whatever that means) and on its exemplary community-mindedness.  In reality, this community-mindedness extends only to a certain section of the community, namely that with which it is identified; and it looks down (at best) or despises those sections that are a threat to its security.  After all, this is the basis of all politics, it is not, that it is concerned with sectarian interests and not with mankind as a whole?

In modern democracy we are ever paying lip service to “equality of opportunity”.  So why then do we have parties and politicians at all, if not because some of us are considered more “equal” than others?  Fir if we were all equal in law and the individual’s interests were paramount, there would  be only one solution to any social problem, and this would not be the solution according to the Left, the Right or the Center.  But that would spell the end of politics as we know it today, with its class war, behind-the-scenes intrigues and corruption.  Why cannot a region on this earth–call it “country”, if you like–be administered on the sane and rational lines by a management committee of technical experts–people who know and love what they are doing and have no ulterior (i.e. political) motives?  Is running a country so very different from running a business?

The management of any business proceeds according to well-established principles and is based upon technical and economical realities and not upon wishful thinking and personal intrigues.  It is true that this sane and rational approach is occasioned by the individual’s profit motive, but it does show its feasibility. Maybe then we can define the nature of an enlightened society as of that community where people set about tackling their everyday problems as well as their long-term requirements is a scientific manner and in a spirit of real co-operation.  Their willingness to work together for the common good exists in the absence of any compulsion or any motive, either that of profit or of personal acclaim. 

In such a profitless society there may not exist such a thing as what passes today under the phoney name of “profitless prosperity” (for the few).  However, there would be sufficient to satisfy everyone’s essential needs (which would amount to relatively complete material security), thanks to a sensible deployment of manpower, machine power and natural resources.  The aged and the infirm would be well looked after.

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  5.  Repetition of the Pattern

Rationalization, that is economic and elegant utilization
of a pattern, is of the essence of intelligence.

Unnecessary and automatic repetition of a pattern is
the essence of stupidity.   

The Silent Mind, as is already implicit in its name, cannot be acquired.  It is or it is not.  It comes into being only when the analytical mind (i.e. our normal mind) has fully understood that analysis is not the way to liberation from sorrow.  The analytical process takes time, it is accumulative, for it is gathering knowledge of the past, we try to understand the present, which is ever flowing.  As soon as we have analyzed one particular aspect of the mind, its totality has already changed.  Therefore the analytical mind can never fully catch up with what is: its analysis is never complete, always fragmentary.  

The analytical mind that makes an effort to transform itself into the Silent Mind is merely projecting from its hearsay about the Silent Mind.  It is the projection from an “idea”; therefore this operation is still wholly within the field of the analytical mind, and so can never lead to a transformation.  But the moment the analytical mind has seen all this, and realized that the past can never understand the present, there is a pause in its activity–and in this silence there is a revolution in the mind.  In that very moment the Silent Mind is born, which, because it is thus free from continuity is in a state of Freedom.

 The two fundamentally different modes of seeing (i.e., understanding) with the mind seem to be somewhat analogous to the two fundamentally different modes of seeing with the eye, as evidenced by the anatomy of the retina and the mechanics of vision, it is almost as though Nature repeats a pattern which it has found useful.  Although we may not be aware of it, normal vision is really made up of two components: central and peripheral vision.  In the former only the central part of the retina is involved.  This kind of sight is very sharp, but is restricted to a small area, and the eye is therefore obliged to scan the field of vision, to take in the information bit by bit.  Peripheral vision, on the other hand, is made possible by the peripheral part of the retina.  This type of vision has no great acuity, but it takes in the whole field of vision all at once, so that there is no need for scanning.

The analytical mind resembles in its mode of functioning central vision, moving from point to point, and needing time to take in the whole picture–and even then it is dependent on memory.  The Silent Mind is like peripheral vision; its perception is all–embracing, immediate, and it does not rely on memory.

The person whose peripheral vision is disturbed, although able to read the finest print, will be almost as helpless as a blind man in moving about.  Are we, who do not know the Silent Mind, not equally blind, equally helpless, in our lack of discrimination between false and real values?  Moreover, not knowing anything but the process of the intellect, we do not know what a precious instrument the mind potentially is, we do not know how to Live.

Few people seem to have discovered these two basic modes of mental functioning, and fewer still have voiced their discovery.  The following quotation represents a rare example where an academically informed mind very aptly describes what it has discovered about itself. 

*“There are two ways of understanding: a phenomenon in nature may reveal itself to me so that I know it as an immediate truth.  This understanding demands nothing, touches nothing, and leaves the other entirely free and respected.  This matter is the kind that arises from love.  Opposed to it is the scientific, analytic understanding of facts.  The scientific understanding is for every restless, never satisfied.  Inherent in the dissecting scientific method is that its results can be used only for manipulation, control and attempts to change.” (Joseph Schorstein, the distinguished neurological surgeon in paper “The Present State of Consciousness” Penguin Science Survey 1963 B.)

Note that the author has correctly understood that the analytical mind can only function mechanically (“manipulate, control”) which is not understanding, and that the farthest it can go is at “attempts to change”.  However, the attempt to change is not change; it is merely the perpetuation of conflict, the modification of the Old, and therefore not mutation. Mutation can only be when the analytical mind is momentarily paralyzed, which occurs the moment it sees itself in its totality, undistorted and undisguised, in the mirror of relationship–and such seeing brings with it the fullest understanding possible. 

*To be thus jolted into self-awareness implies the discovery: “my life to date has been lived altogether wrongly”; and to say this without moral judgment and without regret.  If there is judgment, it results from my conditioning, from “idea”, and again implies an attempt to change.  If there is regret, my new state is a reaction from the old; I maintain a feeling of continuity, of time, and so I am still bound by my old way of living.  The “new” way we are talking about is altogether free from the old: it is a rebirth in the truest sense of the word.  It does not come about by any positive action on my part, but becomes a fact as soon as I have seen completely the falseness of the old, and have died to it all.

“Stopping the Mind”, Temptation and Let-Go

   Before proceeding any further, the author would like to dwell for a moment on a point of terminology which could easily lead to confusion.  Some readers may have noticed an apparent contradiction between the statement that through self-knowing the analytical mind is paralyzed, and a paragraph contained in a previous chapter where the “stopping” of the analytical mind was discussed.  The term stands between quotation marks, because it is a Zen technical term which by no means indicates purely and simply “cessation”.  One might say that the “paralysis” we have spoken of in this chapter is in the nature of a let-go, a release from a cramp-like state.  The “stopping”, on the other hand, is a seizing up of the whole works of intelligence with the intrusion of a self-concern.  Far from the mind falling silent, as the term might superficially suggest, it is the setting into motion of a spasm of cerebration.  Thought chases thought, but always within the limitations of the pattern, and so in this sense only–the imprisonment of thought within a circle of the self–there is a stopping or arresting, a psychological blockage.  Thus all energy is deviated and drained away in the vortex of self.

   To clarify this further, we may perhaps approach the matter slightly differently.  Some people think that the difference between liking the things that come their way, and chasing them,going out of their way to “get” them, is infinitesimal.  In the author’s view, there is literally all the difference in the world between these two attitudes.  As soon as we take the latter position, we feed the center, the “me”, and so “stop” the mind.  “Temptation” is this tendency of the mind to “stop”, representing the beginning of enslavement, the cultivation of likes and dislikes.  The moment the mind “stops”, it no longer regards all phenomena with an equal eye, but is caught by them; that is, it gives the illusory and transient phenomena some absolute existence–and the “fascination” it derives from “pleasant” ones is taken for happiness.  The same applies, of course, to “unpleasant” phenomena–but in this way the mind cultivates fear and sorrow.  When faced with a fact it does not like, the mind engages in furious thinking, as though through this activity it could change the fact.  It persists in weighing the fact in terms of hope and despair, comfort and discomfort, until it has drawn the last drop of comfort out of the disturbing fact.  We never squarely face the fact regardless of our personal predilections–and so thought has become a barrier to the perception of what is.  

Life, Existence, Nature–call it by whatever name you like–is really the fulfillment at any moment of an infinite number of possibilities, in which nothing is impossible that is not inherently a contradiction. It is therefore the expression of absolute freedom.  Yet, despite the endless combinations and permutations of potentialities, all realizing themselves and interacting randomly, certain patterns, regularities or “Laws of Nature”, become noticeable within the texture of this freedom.  Man has lost this dimension of freedom, because he is held in a pattern of a different kind, that of his self-imposed limitations, which has become his prison. 

Ideally, personal liberty should be like the freedom of Nature.  It should be, above all, the freedom to realize within oneself all possibilities, regardless of social evaluation as “good” or “bad”.  This implies the total abolition of any form of moral authority, any kind of external interference, so that the mind is completely fluid, without resistance.  Then, in that freedom there can be the perception of things as they are, without the distorting influence of fear; and this truthful perception brings its own action.  Because it is not based upon fear of punishment or reward for so-called goodness, it is wholly unself-ish and may therefore be called “right action”; thus the free person is the truly moral one.

Contrary to popular opinion, personal freedom is therefore not merely the freedom to do as one likes (for this again would be falling for the rewards, the fruits of one’s actions), but primarily the freedom from fear, which impedes true discrimination.  The important point is that the free person acts “morally” (in the true sense) while not being conscious of his righteousness.  He does not abstain from the non-moral act out of compulsion as the “respectable” person does (the very word “abstain” implies restraint, resistance).  The free person does not know “temptation”, nor does he know what is called “good” and what is called “bad”, he is innocent of all of that, and therefore does not and could not judge–yet all his actions are unfailingly right.  One might say that he comes to his correct action immediately, without thought, without prior elimination of alternative possibilities (all of which is implied in “choice”)

Man is ever increasing his outward freedom, which comes from technical capacity, but he has lost this inward freedom because he is bothered by his conscience (which faithfully reflects the arbitrary public morality of his background), his guilt and his insecurity.  Yet without inner freedom, the outer freedom has no meaning.

It will thus be appreciated that the patterns of safety, to which man clings through not knowing where his real Freedom lies, are of an entirely different order from the patterns which Nature displays, which are the very expression of that Freedom.  It is important to distinguish between these two kinds of pattern which, wherever there is an ego, are superimposed.

Importance of the Pattern in Nature

   The basic patterns observable in Nature give an impression of some underlying Intelligence, yet they are inherent in absolute freedom, and perfectly compatible with the interplay of random forces.  This situation often gives rise to considerable confusion in the mind of the dualistically thinking observer, who is induced to look for a teleological explanation.  Having spotted what he thinks is design, he starts searching for its creator–rather than ponder whether this “design” is perhaps not inherent in Reality, a manifestation of the Timeless into the world of time.

   Both in Nature and in Man’s mental functioning we can witness the repetition of a multitude of patterns; and we must be extremely careful not to be taken in by this superficial similarity.  Let us first look at some examples where Nature repeats a set pattern, which, as it were, it has hit upon and found workable.  There is, for instance, a striking similarity between the mode of the atom and that of the solar system; and, as I was informed recently, the model of the atomic nucleus may turn out to be similar as well (solar system within solar system!). 

  Let us consider here a practical application of the either/or principle in personal living.  Either I am totally nothing, or I am somebody–there is no in-between.  Feeling “unhappy”, I try to become happy by surrounding myself with psychologically favorable, “encouraging”, circumstances–that is what we are all doing.  However, such action necessarily presupposes that I am “somebody”.  (“Why should I not be ‘unhappy’, like millions of others; why set myself apart?  If I am totally nothing, then my ‘being unhappy’, looked at objectively, does not matter the least and my present state should not be meddled with.”)  So, since any “doing” is incompatible with the truth, which is that I am nobody, I cannot do anything.  Yet, merely doing nothing,, like the psychologically lazy, does not bring relief either–for this non-doing is really sleep and deepens the state of being unconscious of myself.  Therefore I must see why I cannot do anything.  Thus, enlightenment is brought about only within the tension of the equilibrium doing/non-doing, that is, when we fully and clearly see the either/or principle in operation in the depth of our psychological being.  It is hoped that this example has demonstrated that in the spiritual life we cannot expect to proceed through thesis and antithesis to synthesis, which is exclusively the way of the intellect, leading ever to further synthesis, further modifications, but never to mutation (transformation).

*Patterns in the Human Mind

    As already stated, human consciousness evinces, like Nature, many basic patterns ever repeated in endless variations.  Think only of the patterns of thought and speech which distinguish the different classes in our society; the patterns of thought which are implied in certain types of humor, when unfamiliarity with the patterns can make a joke completely meaningless.  Andis not Desire repetition of the pattern held up by Society?  Are not fashions the playing about with the pattern of Desire: a small substitution here, an extension there, and so on?

  Nature repeats a pattern if it suits her, it thus controls the pattern.  Man, on the other hand, is compelled to repeat a pattern mechanically for he has not recognized the pattern as such (seeing only the part but not the Whole)--therefore he is its victim.

    Only when there is complete perception of the impasse of the conditioned mind is there true intelligence and so a breaking away from the patterns of repetitious thought; the mind has then emptied itself of its “humanity” to realize its “divinity” (in the truly non-dualistic sense).  When that happens Man becomes like a child.  Everything takes on a fresh appearance and evokes an intense interest.  Beauty comes into being which does not depend upon form, in which the ugly may become beautiful and the conventionally beautiful may seem to contain ugliness.  

Man versus Nature

   Perhaps we have now made it clear that the basic schism postulated by many people is false, namely that Intelligence is the prerogative of the human intellect and Nature is blind, mechanical; and that the true position may be exactly the reverse.  It is because of this wrongful conception, springing from a dualistic outlook, that to see human intelligence reflected in Nature’s intelligence is to some people a perpetual source of wonder.  It has been suggested, for example, that the Creator must be a great mathematician, seeing that his planning runs parallel to that of the human designer.  But these curious correlations are curious only to the observer who is isolated, that is, who looks dualistically at the world and at his own mental “equipment”.  To the person who understands non-duality and realizes it within himself, the problems which these manifestations put to a dualistic analyser, do not arise; for him true intelligence is indivisible, wherever he finds it.

   The foregoing discussion seems highly relevant to the question of habit–this being a pattern of thoughtlessness repeated within thought.  To most people there are “good” habits and “bad” habits, but to the writer every form of (psychological) habit is pernicious (having a harmful effect, especially in a gradual or subtle way), because it creates a dependency, whether it be the habit of sex, of overeating, or of “doing good”.  We see here another example of the either/or principle; either we drop or all habits at once, or none.  To compromise, to abandon some habits while retaining others, is the same as to do away with none.

   And are we given to so many habits.  There is the habit of reading, gossipping, chatting, and above all the habit of fear, of anxiety.  And those “well established” relationships, such as the relationship to my wife, my family, my boss, my servant, are they not merely variations on certain well-worn patterns of traditional attitudes, preconceived ideas, handed down by generations?  If so, they are not true, living relationships at all, but forms of dependency, roles, which the mind has cultivated–because it affords the mind, that does not wish to be disturbed, some continuity of its thoughtlessness, which it considers its security. 

The Rooting Out of Habit

   Cannot we live in such a way that we do not know what we are going to do from one moment to the next?  This does not mean living thoughtlessly, nor does it mean that we forget to carry out the regular tasks we have in hand, but that beyond this routine part–and it is only common sense that can tell us what rightfully belongs there–the course of our life uncharted; and every movement, being unpremeditated, is an adventure.  This, to my mind, is living supremely with uncertainty, with true abandonment, the real “let-go”, and not indulging in “doing what you like”, the gratification at all costs in one direction or another.

   Sorrow is the forced disruption of the pattern in which I have been finding security.  So the question really is: Is it possible to live each moment as though I have never lived in this world before, in complete uncertainty of what is going to happen to me; that is, without my existing pattern and giving rise to a new one, and so wipe away sorrow altogether?  This is only possible, is it not, if I am so entirely awake, so mindful, that each movement of thought is perceived as the thread from which the pattern is knit, so that there is an immediate unraveling of the pattern.  This means, to see that,, psychologically, every thought is based on an idea, on “knowledge” which is part of the brain's conditioning and has no absolute validity in itself.  Only then is there a possibility of a fresh beginning, an action which does not belong to any pattern of past experience.  To achieve this, nothing short of a tremendous psychological revolution is necessary.  For is it not almost everything we do based on an idea, a continuity, laid down by Society?  And if we do not erect an external authority, we set up an internal authority, that of our experience,, which then becomes the habit, the routine.  Is it not significant in this connection that we talk about “following a routine”, which implies that the routine has “got us”?

Non-psychological Habits

   To be perfectly clear, it is not argued that every form of routine is necessarily harmful.  This is a difficulty which is often introduced in discussions on habit, but, as I see it, is a complete red herring.  An orderly mind will have worked out a number of routines for its convenience in the performance of certain chores which recur periodically, like personal toilet, daily exercises, etc.  This is only common sense since it increases efficiency and saves time, thought and energy which can thus be reserved for more important tasks.  The criterion is,, of course, whether or not the pattern represents a habit that binds, upon which we depend psychologically.  It seems to me that as long as we do not depend in this way, there can be little objection to streamlining and mechanizing some of the tasks which would otherwise b e rather tedious and bothersome.  What we are doing then is really nothing but a kind of personal “automation”,  the “programming” having been carefully worked out during our “learning” and tested by time.  We cannot help noticing a parallel situation between the type of pattern which man consciously usees to his advantage, and that which Nature appears to use.  In mechanical thought and in complicated skills acquired after extended periods of learning (walking, cycline) the entire pattern has become “part of us”;that is it is now completely unconscious.  How ridiculous therefore when mindfulness, not understood, becomes the unraveling of these complicated patterns, such as fixing the attention on the various muscles and movements performed in sitting, standing, walking, breathing, etc. (as is practiced, for instance by Buddhist monks in so-called mindfulness exercises or “Satipatthana”).  Concentrating the attention on any particular component of the pattern is tantamount to interfering with the pattern.  The situation is clearly brought home by the little story about the centipede which was asked how it move so many legs at the same time, and in trying to answer was effectively paralyzed.

   It is best to leave this sort of thing severely alone.  Nature has evolved and utilized the pattern, not just for the fun of it, as it were, but because it serves a useful purpose; in fact, without it life as we know it would not be possible.  Instead of interfering with mechanisms which have been developed in the course of biological evolution over millions of years, would it not be better to give our attention to the tremendous unnecessary burden that Memory has to carry, the many obvious and subtle traditions that enslave us, kill the life in us, and have been acquired over an equally long period of time?  Forit is in this sphere that the decision lies how man is going to use his biological and intellectual potentials, whether he is to continue strengthening his prison with useless, tyrannical thought constructs, or whether he is to reach out toward that which lies beyond the prison, beyond the realm of thought.  

___________

  6.  Experience, Habit and Freedom

Every experience leaves an imprint on the mind, whose strength is according to the intensity of pain and pleasure involved.  This imprint, the residue of the past, becomes the seed around which thought in the present crystallizes and grows.  This means that everything is immediately translated by the mind in terms of pain or pleasure.   The mind does not know how to be neutral.  Even an experience to which initially it is indifferent, like reading a newspaper, eating and drinking certain types of food, having one’s meals at the same place, listening to the radio, watching television, soon becomes either attractive or repulsive to an obsessive extent (although we are no longer aware of these things).  Then, with repetition there is habit formation and ultimately bondage, either positively or negatively.  Thus we see that the mind continually craves attachments, and if it drops on habit it soon picks up another.  

Even that mind which, through increasing awareness, has freed itself to a limited extent is soon driven back by the Void to attach itself to something, like a leech nourishing itself on the host.  To understand this particular propensity of the mind, let us look a little more closely into the whole background of a habit.  

Everything in nature happens by association, although this manifests itself to the self-conscious individual –perceiving within the framework of space and time–as cause and effect.  Association, on the physical level, means determinism, and determinism implies absence of freedom; a law of nature is a case of specialization where only one sequence of events is valid out of an infinite number of possibilities.  Just so is association limiting on the psychological level; when operating by means of Memory, association results in habit, which is the creation of psychological time, the very stuff of which Suffering is made.

Becoming aware of habit, the mind tries to overcome it, and in the very overcoming of one habit sets up another–the habit of repression.  Thus, it must be clear that within the pattern of duality there is no release from habit, and that there can be the cessation of it only when we go above and beyond the conflicts of duality.  Only through understanding the whole mechanism of habit formation–and seeing it in actual operation, which requires great alertness and patience–can thought free itself from habit.

So we have seen that from pleasant and painful experience the mind builds its house of thought; and the continuity of this edifice in time gives rise to the entity, the “thinker”.  Once, however, a man has learned to look inwardly, and begins to study his habitual, mechanical reactions, he no longer strengthens the house of thought, which is his prison.  And if he can give his total attention to the isolating and identifying the individual elements of association that together constitute the prison, the latter collapses like a deck of cards. (It is very much lie the illusion of animation in a motion picture, which is interrupted as soon as-by lowering the film’s running speed–its elements, the individual frames, become identifiable)

In that destruction man finds a new Freedom, which is not a freedom from painful experiences, but a release from the scars these experiences used to leave on the mind.  

____________

  7.  On Grace

On rare occasions we see a human being, steeped in confusion and misery, suddenly undergo an unaccountable and almost miraculous transformation, an awakening, followed by a fundamental purification which sweeps away all unwholesomeness from the mind. 

Those who do not understand the essential things in life talk about “grace” when they see this happen to others–in the sense of some magic dispensation of suffering given by an outside Authority or Intelligence.  And of course there is “grace”, as it appears to the ignorant mind, but the phenomenon has nothing to do with favoritism or a benign act on the part of some personal God, but is the result of the inexorable laws of nature relating to individual consciousness.  To put it a different way: until there is Freedom, everything–which includes the moment of awakening as well as that of final and total liberation–is determined, because the individual is still bound within time and so dependent upon the law of cause and effect.  Because the mechanism of enlightenment is not understood, it is thought that the attainment of Freedom falls outside causality!

It is interesting to note how the modern, so-called civilized mind, whenever it lacks proper understanding, reverts to irrational thought which belongs to the pre-scientific era.  For however much Ignorance may change its face, essentially it does not evolve, it always remains Ignorance; for the mind is always seeking an explanation, some certainty, and it will cling to any belief, any form of irrationality whereby it can avoid facing Uncertainty, Nothingness.  This aspect of Ignorance may be seen as mental laziness, sloth, a shirking of the arduous work of facing the real world; and this human quality had, of course, been well exploited by all the various priests of that pseudo-religion which goes under the name of “organized religion”.

The problem of irrationality is a rather important one to clear our minds about, because there exists a common misconception that reason and science on the one hand, and religion on the other, necessarily stand in opposition to each other.  It has often been said, for instance, that Zen is anti-intellectual and irrational–affording a good example how a thing half understood is a thing not-understood.  Krishnamurti once stated that the religious mind comprises the scientific mind, but the scientific mind is not a religious mind.   The religious mind must be capable of astonishingly clear and accurate thought; it must be sharp as a razor blade–for only then will it be able to penetrate what lies beyond thought.

The pseudo-religious mind is an irrational, stupid mind; when for instance it indulges in prayer which is petitioning, it expects an answer, a reward.  Is there any difference between this attitude and a belief in magic?  In both cases there is the expectancy of a dispensation of the laws of nature, an elimination of cause-and-effect for the benefit of the petitioner who, obviously, must consider himself of some importance in the scheme of things.  This attitude of mind is therefore the very antithesis of the truly religious mind, for it strengthens the illusion of the unreal self, and that of the outside world as being different, being opposed to it. 

Then out of despair, from its isolation, the self projects its own antipode, 

The personal Diety.  Being miserable, petty, ignorant, helpless, the “I” invests its God with all that it lacks itself; therefore God is Love, All-Powerful, All-Knowing, All-Present, and so on.  And once Man has created this God he cajoles him into some kind of religious protection racked, courting everlasting favoritism by such tricks as prayer, good works, etc.  The reasoning behind this pseudo-religion is really something like this: “Never mind about the other chap, as long as my prayer is heard and my desire gratified, I shall worship thee . . . “

   The invention of this God who is Perfection is also very convenient from another point of view.  It becomes a marvelous excuse for complacency since man now absolves himself from any responsibility for his own imperfection; for the argument is that no mere man can be perfect, only God can be so (“by definition”, one would almost add . . . ).  Thus, blinded by this stupid playing about with meaningless words, concepts, when the ignorant man does meet an unmistakably perfect man, such as a Christ, a Buddha, a Krishnamurti or  a Ramana Maharshi, he immediately claims divinity for him, which of course he must do to justify his preconceived idea.

    The truly religious mind, on the other hand, is really a supra-rational mind.  Having pushed logic to the utmost limit, it no longer thinks in terms of “things” and “ideas”.  Only such a mind can look deeply into the miracle of “grace”.  For grace results neither from human action nor from divine action on human beings; it springs from neither the action of the human will that prays, worships, etc., nor the will of an outside Authority, a God, that doles out favors, rewards.  Grace is the action of Reality itself–not the action of Reality on something–for Reality is all-comprehensive, non-dual, indivisible.  It is therefore simply the manifestation, the play of God–if one likes to use that word.  When it is perceived by human beings howthis “pay” can fundamentally transform individual consciousness, it is called by them the mystery of “grace”--and which, for as long as consciousness dwells in duality, will always be considered a mystery.  Only when the mind itself has become part of this Reality, part of this play, will there be the end of this whole process of asking the wrong questions and being satisfied with the same old meaningless answers.  Instead of the helpless victim with whom Fate plays, the victim and Fate will then have merged, to become the Play.  

____________

  8.  Can Illumination be Transmitted?

One hears much talk these days about the possibility of obtaining initiation into a life of enlightenment by a direct transmission, silent or otherwise, from an “advanced” individual.  Now a few are considering a fare to Japan as a worthwhile spiritual investment, for–who knows–maybe some Zen Master may give them that for which they have been searching all their lives. 

Is not this way of thinking very similar to the prevalent outlook on grace?  A miraculous granting of spirituality by some external entity–and whether that benign entity is a God or a Master makes very little difference.  The ideal is basically to get something for nothing, and as in worldly affairs so here also there is the panting for “attainment”--as though it concerned the procurement of some merchandise–when in actual fact it is not even “something”.  Others are–a little less irrationally, but still thoughtlessly–pinning their faiths on “do-it-yourself” systems which are peddled by Masters and religious sects, without ever looking into the whole problem whether any system can ever do anything for them in the spiritual life.

Most of the so-called religious people are really trying to commit mental suicide, by killing off the ego through constant violent effort–by suppression, meditation, self-denial and various other pious practices.  But mental suicide is not death, it is only life at war with itself.  Mental suicide is an acute state of conflict; and while pretending to immolate itself, the “I” is fighting for its survival as strongly as ever.

The fundamental question is: can there be death without dying?  And can there by dying when there is still burning desire?--and whether that desire is for sexual or spiritual ecstasy is immaterial.

So long as there is a desire for experience, the experiencer is thriving.  Now dying is the very opposite–that begins when experience is seen to be void.  This Void is Death itself, and it is only Death that can make us die.  Life can only die when it willingly and lovingly allows Death to pervade it, since by itself it is incapable of ending.  For this life is continuity, and can continuity ever give rise to anything but continuity, can it ever break its own bond in time?

Continuity can never be broken on its own level; it can only cease to be when submerged in another dimension–and that dimension is the Timeless, manifesting itself on the level of continuity as Death.

___________

  9.  The Equation of Unhappiness

Judging purely by surface appearances, that is taking things on the relative level, it seems as though there is some basic entity which governs the body; and it has never occurred to us that it might be the other way around: that the body, through the functioning of the sense organs, is continually giving rise to the illusion of a controlling entity (and thus to duality).  Just as man, after many centuries of taking the appearance for the real, found it very difficult to accept that the sun is not revolving around a stationary earth, so it will require a revolution in his outlook–and one of far greater magnitude and consequence–to correct his mistaken notion that the self and the dualistic philosophy of life which results from it.

*Awareness of “self” has arisen through bodily sensation, and identification of thought, consciousness, with body–leading to the feeling “I am the body”. The notions of the “me” and “mine” have subsequently been maintained and strengthened by our use of language, which impresses on the mind , continually verbal memory images based on the “I”.  For example, when we use the word “thinking”, the grammatical construction of language implies the existence of an entity, the “thinker”, and something which is “thought”, separate and independent from the thinker.  We are so conditioned by this that we fail to see there is only thinking, in which both the thinker and the thought have their existence; that in reality the trinity of thinking, thinker and thought is a unity which does not allow any separate entity ash as the thinker or the “I”. 

Once, however, the “I” is established, a vicious circle, a self-activating cyclic process is born, the elements of which are self-protection (expressing itself in greed and all forms of grasping, clinging) and fear.  Then the “I” becomes the controlling entity, continually striving to act on its thought, to guide it in a particular direction, that of greater psychological security; this whole movement constitutes the life of the self.  Once this movement has set in, it also implies that the “controlling entity” is consciously or unconsciously concerned only with the search for “satisfaction” (and so it has come about that thought is almost always subjective, hardly ever impersonal).  This “search”, however, is futile, for is the mind never satisfied?  Maybe only temporarily in the stupor of satiety.  The normally active mind is never satisfied; in fact the mind is a state of dissatisfaction, and as such a blemish on what is, that which lies totally beyond the states of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction.  

Human relationship, which should be an aid towards exposing the self, has now become a ruthless exploration for “satisfaction”, mutual or otherwise; our very language, which occasionally expresses much wisdom, is a powerful give-away in this respect, as when we inquire about two persons’ dealings with each other in the following manner; “Well, did you get any satisfaction out of him?” . . . So whatever the mind does lies within a circle of its own dissatisfaction; and, obviously, in this process there can be no promise of liberation.

In this connection it is interesting to see a parallel mechanism at work in the striving of the scientist to find some new bit of information that will “satisfy” his equations, which result, he thinks, will bring him one step closer to the Truth, and the striving of human beings in general for some satisfaction of their psychological needs, which, they thin, will bring them closer to complete and lasting happiness.

Both, being based upon relativities, that is unrealities, are fore-doomed, for the relative can only give rise to the transient and incomplete, and never to the perfect and permanent (more correctly: the “timeless”)  which spring from the Real.  But whereas the scientist’s vain efforts simply mean the substitution of one hypothesis by another–thus keeping the wheels of science turning–human beings as a whole go on ceaselessly searching for some “satisfaction”--without ever considering whether there is such a thing at all–thus leading to an unending chain of struggles and frustrations.  Only by realizing that this tragic equation of unhappiness, although apparently soluble, is in actual fact false, can human beings hope to do better than the scientist.  

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  10.  Must We Have Religious Societies?

Anyone who has ever gone deeply into himself and come to grips with the fundamental issue in all its simplicity, all its beauty, will know that in the moment of confrontation he acts from his love of the problem–and he does not need another person to tell him how to tackle it.  The seeing of the problem obviates the asking how to solve it.  Not that it is easily solves, but even the thought whether it can be done in his lifetime does not occur to the man who is really serious.  In the first place, because he is totally un-concerned with the results; and secondly, because from the moment of seeing the fundamental issue, all his energies and all his intelligence are already fully engaged in the dissolution of the problem.  Such a person recognizes that Ignorance is a disease in which he is both patient and doctor at the same time, for no doctor can cure him but himself.

To the spiritually awakened, religious societies are utterly irrelevant, and worse: they form an enormous hindrance.  For that which he has found deep within himself has absolutely no points of contact with beliefs, doctrines, systems, worship and the like.  It is utterly beyond words.  To come to it one must be completely alone, without any form of coercion or influence.

If the spiritual aspirant has not found it yet, he is certainly not going to find it through joining any organization, however progressive and however much its doctrine may have been diluted.  There he will be exposed to various cross-currents of conceptualized thought; he will be offered comfort, moral uplift, stimulation, encouragement,, and acquire a feeling of “belonging”--all completely unspiritual, for these are essentially worldly values. He will blunt his critical faculty for lack of use; it is fashionable in these circles to accept almost any idea that is floating about, however ridiculous, as long as it lends support to existing prejudices.  (This deterioration of the critical faculty is, of course, also detrimental in a worldly sense, for in a way to be intelligent is to be skeptical, to have a sense of discrimination.)  After a while he will develop an attachment for “his” Society, which means that he has formed a liking for his crutch and can no longer walk without it.  The Society will further pander to his gregarious sense and the discussion meetings will stimulate thought, whereas what is required is not its stimulation, but the ending of thought.

Some office bearers in religious organizations will actually admit to one who can see through all this, that the above-mentioned facts are substantially correct.  They will agree that for the person who is actively inquiring, doctrines, beliefs and the like are irrelevant and Societies useless.  But, they say in justification of their existence, there are two kinds of people, the strong and the weak.  The latter need guides, help, and this the Society alone can offer them. 

But then, it may be asked, who is to ascertain who are the strong and who are the weak?  Maybe the very leaders of these organizations must be considered to belong to the latter category for telling their members, for example, of the necessity of straining their muscles to sit in a particularly tortuous position while “meditating:, before there can be any chance of so-called spiritual progress–or perhaps, that it may be advisable for students to journey to a far-away country to look up a particular teacher there who alone understands their special requirements and will put them on the so-called path?  

And is it not an insult to one’s intelligence, when Societies intentionally mislead their members in all sorts of ways and do not tell them the full, naked truth–the truth that there is no help but self-help?  Apart from the poor “junior” members who are being told lies so that one day in the future they may be mature enough to be permitted to hear the Truth, what about the members who claim they really understand?  * Do they actually see the irrelevance of doctrines, books and Societies, or are they merely repeating what they have heard from some Zen text, or possibly from a man like Krishnamurti?  Why are they then still in the Society and so personally responsible for the whole set-up?  If I know something is a lethal poison, do I still want to play with it?  

It appears to the author that, although intellectually we may be classifiable as the strong and the weak,, spiritually we are all equal, we are all weak.  To divide people into the strong and the weak, the individuals who are worthy of initiation and the “mass” who will always remain ignorant, is only another form of smug exploitation by one ignorant–albeit a little more intellectually clever–person of another ignorant person.  Yet this very form of exploitation lies at the bottom of all religious organizations, and it also sustains society as a whole. 

The saying “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” applies especially to people who have committed themselves to a particular religious “ism”.  They pick up a slogan here and there, a few doctrinal scraps, and this unholy mixture is adapted to suit their particular predilections: that is, accepting what suits them, rejecting what appears inconvenient.  It then becomes the main excuse for the ego to go on living as it did before, and above all not to be disturbed.  Far from uncovering the self, it is now even more firmly entrenched than before.

 For those who have really caught a glimpse of the Truth, and yet persist in paying lip service to that Truth but all the time denying it (if there are any such), the position is much more serious.  For betraying the Truth is worse than killing one’s own mother.  Sooner or later Truth takes its revenge–according to the laws of Truth–and the consequences will be terrible. 

And finally, there is always the very subtle effect that religious organizations have on the mind–even with those who are fully aware of all that we have discussed above, and use their Society merely for the convenience of its facilities.  It is that consciously or unconsciously there is ever the aim to achieve, to arrive, as indeed all preoccupation with religious problems tends to foster.  For it creates a wholly unnatural sphere in which religion is seen not as Life (even to say that it is part of Life would be false, for religion is not specialization) but as a subject in itself, with its own particular laws and jargon, in other words, as a “spiritual science”.  This outlook, which sees the spiritual life as something separate from everyday life, interferes with the life of naturalness (in which there is no trace of self-improvement), which is the only mode of functioning that can lead to “wholesomeness” or “wholeness”.  The consciously religious effort, on the other hand, can only lead to “holiness” which bears absolutely no relationship to “wholeness”.  After all, the ultimate peace is only when man forgets himself completely, which surely means forgetting also how to find that peace, which is a self-ish striving,  So long as we are thinking in terms of “my” peace, “my” enlightenment, “my” progress, we are defeated from the outset. 

Reality is not to be found where there is a particular pattern of thought and behavior, however exalted and however noble it may appear to conventional society.  What has to be faced is that there is no short-cut to wisdom; that it is not to be cultivated, not to be acquired in social organizations, in study groups and so on, in the same way that we learn other things–the things that depend on memorizing facts and on particular patterns of thinning, the various disciplines, in which the mind can be trained.  

People come to rely on any of the many so-called guides, often trying one after another, and finally sticking to that “teacher” who “satisfies” them.  Thus what is nurtured is the depending mind rather than the intrepid spirit who vigorously inquires of his own,  disregarding all the pressure and influences that are out to brainwash him. Far better were it for the person to throw themselves into some fresh form of activity (if they must be active in the outgoing sense), like sports or some new social or cultural interest, or to go for long walks in the country.  While the activity per se may not do anything for them spiritually * (since as long as there is an urge for experience, there is no self-inquiry), it does fare less harm than the intentional religious pursuit (which always tends to foster superstition and hypocrisy), and it does contribute to the life of naturalness which may eventually flower into the goodness of a fresh mind, a mind that has begun to look within itself and so has forever cut its dependence on externals. 

So let people realize, how important it is to be oneself, to be human (which does not necessarily mean “do as you like” but implies complete honesty with oneself), because any effort by the mind to change itself leads to unnaturalness, a basic dichotomy which, although it may be regarded as “respectability” by society, s in reality nothing but a tragic farce, the pinnacle of self-deception; for all cultivated virtue is no-virtue.  Yet is must be perceived with equal clarity that at change is essential, not for reasons of respectability or morality, but if there is going to be any true happiness at all–and that our present condition holds only the promise of continued suffering.  When all this is clearly seen, then the mind will for the first time be in a state that it can let go of itself, and thus spontaneously couple the “be oneself’ with see oneself- ruthlessly, yet un perturbed b what is observed and without any wish to interfere–and to  bring into being something from beyond the mind–the only factor that can possibly effect its transformation.  

In summarizing, we may say then that to enter a religious Society is to get entangled with personalities, ideas, intellectual arguments–all taking one further away from that essential Silence and Aloneness, to which one must come eventually, if there is to be any true inquiry.  To get entangled in any way is to lose freedom, to lose one’s very life, spiritually.

However, it must be emphasized that any reader who is contemplating joining a religious organization, must be careful not to be influenced by the author.  Because something is so to the present writer, because it is seen to be a fact beyond dispute by him, it need not be for another.  If the reader merely accepts and repeats the statement that Societies are useless and consequently decides not to join one,, he will sooner or later get entangled in something else.  What is suggested is that he should investigate for himself–not make up his mind to do this or that, but just inquire deeply without wishing for a solution–which requires great passivity–until the whole problem is clearly seen.  Such an investigation will imply in the first place a deep self-inquiry, because before the problem can be seen the attitude of the inquirer, who is disposed either for or against Societies, must be cleared up.  Only then, when every trace of prejudice has been wiped away, can the problem be approached.  But perhaps this is then no longer necessary, because at this stage the truth may have been seen as in a flash.

What has been said in regard to religious organizations applies likewise, of course, to the solution of any other problem.  It is to be hoped that the reader will not “accept” any statement made in this book on any subject, for if he does he acts against the whole spirit of the work.  In that case he would merely add another idea to his existing store–and ideas can always be countered by other ideas.   To this process there is no end and it has absolutely nothing to do with the perception of the Truth, which only comes when the mind is empty of all ideas.  It does not matter which particular problem the reader tackles; as long as there is vigorous inquiry, he is opening himself to the Truth, and that will bring its own action.  But merely to agree or disagree is to throw away a spiritual opportunity. 

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  11.  Approach to the Immeasurable

The following mathematical analogy might help us to understand the problem of man’s perpetual search for Truth and why this is forever evading him.  Neither the truth of Non-Duality, nor the geometrical center of a sphere (or circle) can be visualized, measured, or conceived of in any way.  For it is wholly intangible and, literally, altogether out of this world! We can make concepts, words, referring to it, but obviously the word, the symbol, is not the thing–just as the dot at the center of the Figure is not the geometrical center point, which is dimensionless and cannot therefore be seen or even imagined,

The analogy can perhaps be clarified in the following way: the Truth is like the invisible hub of a wheel (see Figure).  Its rim represents the shallow mind which approaches every problem intellectually and thereby always stays on the periphery.  When we become a bit more aware and the mind wakes up as to the inadequacy of all intellectualization, a new factor comes into being and we are coming a little closer to the possibility of discovering the truth, without however as yet being capable of dropping the intellectual process altogether.  At this stage of understanding, the spokes of the wheel may represent arrows pointing the way to the Center: thinning, feeling, emotions etc.--all the modes of consciousness inherent in Duality, but now awakened and tending towards self-realization.  

Now as long as my center point has any dimension at all, it is not the geometrical hub of the wheel, I have not found a Reality, Truth, God, or whatever you like to call it.  Only when I can jump across that last barrier and lose one dimension completely–which means to lose the self, the experiencer, the thinker–is there the dissolving of the observer-object relationship with its self-enclosing limitations.  For is not the experiencer but the sum total of his conditioning, and therefore his actions in the present not completely determined–that is, limited–by this residue of the past?  This is why the spokes of the wheel in our Figure can also be taken to represent the various so-called “paths” towards liberation, none of which can jump the final obstacle and attain the Unknowable, that which lies wholly beyond the mind.  These are doomed to failure from the start because they all have their point of departure in (and so are bound by) the thinker, who exercises will and desire to reach his self-projected goal.  Subsequent chapters will endeavor to clarify this situation further.

When I dig deep, when I inquire fundamentally with tremendous energy, only then I may hit upon the kernel of truth which is the unknown, the Unlimited.  

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SECTION TWO Symbological representation of man's endeavors to attain Truth,  p. 73

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SECTION THREE

  12.  Window on Non-Duality

“There is one alone and there is no second.”--Ecclesiastes 4, 8

“I and the Father are one”--John 10, 30

Non-duality is that which is neither the One as opposed to Two, nor Two as opposed to the One.  

Experience and the Experiencer

Let us begin our inquiry with the only thing we can state with certainty: “I think, therefore thought exists”, and proceed from this premise to find out what it was that made this statement.

In the first place, it seems to me an undeniable fact that thought is always closely interwoven with experience; for can there be thinking without experience?

Thinking is the reaction by memory to the challenge of the present.  I will illustrate this point.  When someone asks me:  “Where do you live?”, there is an immediate response, and it may not be so obvious that there is thinking.  But when I am asked:  “Where did you live fifteen years ago?”, I feel I have to think it out, which means there is a somewhat slower response, because it takes a little time before Memory, through a chain of associations, brings up the right answer. In both cases we are dealing with thought processes that have been made possible by knowledge, experience, that is, the imprint of the past–whether it be the immediate of the far-away past.  So it must be obvious that without experience there could be no thought, and that therefore thinking, being a purely mechanical reaction, is alway conditioned and never free.  Because it is always the response of memory, of the old, thinking can never be creative.  * Only in meeting the new as the new is there creative being–which really means the going beyond of all thought.    

Now there is another, most significant, point involved in this question of Memory and its operation.  Note that the writer very carefully stated: “Memory brings up the right answer”, and not “Memory is consulted to bring up the right answer”.  Thinking dualistically, it would only come too naturally to say: “I am using my memory to find the right answer”.  Put in this latter form, it would suggest there is some entity which handles the many memory images and sorts them out, in other words, a “rememberer”.

Such a rememberer manipulating remembrances would in actual fact have to have some knowledge about the remembrances and thus would be some kind of discriminating center.  One cannot keep a filing system in order without knowing at least something about the individual files, if only their labels, leave alone the art of labeling them.   Now, a discriminating center would mean a center that thinks and that would therefore in itself entail a rememberer, a discriminating center.  But then the latter would further entail the existence of a third discriminating center–and so on, ad infinitum. In other words, the assumption of an entity that remembers entails an infinite regression of “rememberers”; and however many “rememberers” there are, the series would still be dependent for its existence upon one further rememberer!  Thus, the postulation of the first entity that manipulates memories has only shifted the problem but has not in any way contributed to its solution; and so it must be rejected.

Memory operates through association, that is, one memory image activating another and not through activation by an independent entity which we call the “I”.  If there was activation by an independent entity Suffering would be non-existent.  For the “I” would then leave all painful memories severely alone–having a free choice in the matter–and wallow to its heart’s content in the memory of past delights.  

The reality, however, is different.  When there is acute suffering, the painful memories relentlessly intrude into consciousness; they also create the anticipation of future painful memories, which is experienced as fear.  Faced with these circumstances, Man thinks he can beat Suffering by taking tranquilizers or by engaging in some wholly absorbing activity, so that he may “forget”.  However, the troublesome memory images are not so easily forgotten; they are shifted to the subconscious, so that the pain is only temporarily alleviated, like a festering wound that, instead of being cut open, is merely covered over with a bandage.

Now one more important conclusion follows from our findings so far.  *If there is no “rememberer” and if thought results from the purely mechanical, automatic revitalization of the residue of past experience, then there is no thinker producing thought in spite of the fact that we say “I think”: there is only the resuscitation of certain engrams, memory images that have no life in themselves, which process is activated by the circumstances confronting the experiencer.  So what am I?  “I” is only a bundle of memories, brought into being and given continuity by experience; and the response of this bundle to the present is called “thinking”.

  Having now understood how thinking comes into being, and appreciated the basic position of experience in relation to individual consciousness, I next propose to examine in some more detail the mechanism of experiencing, and particularly how through this mechanism self-consciousness comes into being.  (Fig. 1) 

 Now, how does man experience? Obviously, anything he experiences is through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling–the action of his sense organs.  A child born blind, deaf, and with the senses of smelling, tasting, and feeling totally absent, would be just a lump of flesh, not a sentient being.  It must be realized, therefore, that the external world as we experience it is in a way also our private world–since it is an integral image of “external” stimuli and the particular way in which the sense organs and the brain translate these stimuli into a “picture”, which we call our experience of the world.

This world picture would fall away, would be non-existent, without the equipment of our sensing apparatus; therefore there is no “external” world apart from the “me”: “I” and the Universe are one and the spatial separation between the two is false, caused by ignorance of the process of consciousness. This means, therefore, that Space has no existence, absolutely speaking (see also the chapter “The Outer and the Inner”). Also, as a direct result of this, there is a misunderstanding of the significance of “time” (for without the concept of space, time is not).  There is the idea that I am not only limited in space but also in time, which gives rise to the division between life and death.  Since this way of thinking is based upon giving absolute reality to form, to spatial dimensions, i.e. identification of the “I” with the body—which is now seen to be false--our whole idea of immortality must undergo a fundamental change.

Now let us go one step further, and examine the mechanism of the individual sense faculties. First, let us take the process of seeing, that whole sequence of stimulation of the retina, eye nerve and brain, leading to a visual image.  This process is a continuous one, without interruption, without separation between the seer and the thing seen; it is therefore non-dual.  I would like to represent it diagramatically, that is symbolically, by empty space, signifying the unified field of “seeing”. (Fig. 2.)

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SECTION 4 Fig. 2–The non-dual “process” of “seeing”

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SECTION FIVE: 

 The above is an aspect of non-dual reality about which nothing further can be said, by virtue of its being non-dual: it just is–the world of neti-neti (“not-this, not-that)”. 

Now at this stage it is important to understand that there is as yet no awareness of the process of seeing, nor of the “object” perceived, for the object as such, as a separate “thing”, has not yet been brought into existence.  There is pure seeing which knows no space or time–in other words, thought is as yet unborn.  Because this consciousness is non-dual, it is not yet torn asunder by conflict; it is the pure bliss inherent in Reality.  

Thus far we have dealt with Reality in its absoluteness, that is, without the many forms of illusion manufactured by the mind.  As we have seen, then, this Reality cannot be described, defined or limited in any way and is therefore symbolically represented by Nothingness (Fig. 2)

Any lines and figures that will subsequently be drawn in this empty space represent, therefore, merely relative truth.  They are empirical, illusory; they do not replace Nothingness, but are superimpositions–or rather, impositions by the mind–on Reality.  

Factual Memory

The factor–in itself also illusory–which is the first cause of the illusory world, and of the mind which discriminates (which sees the Reality which is One as Multiplicity), is Memory.  Before we go any further it must be clearly seen that Memory in itself is unreal, a dead thing of the past, which has come into being in association with the capacity of what is called living matter to retain and reproduce certain sensuous excitations.  I did not state “resulting from the capacity of living matter . . . “ for this would imply that in some way the body would be a more primeval reality than thought, whereas in fact the body itself is only an idea, a thought. (see above p. 57)

Let us now proceed to examine what happens when this illusory factor of Memory starts interacting with the real, no-dual process of seeing.  “Interacting” is probably the wrong word, for can there be interaction between the real and the unreal, the factual and the illusory?  It would therefore be better to say that the first illusory cause starts giving rise to a whole chain of illusory entities and processes, thereby obscuring the real.

There is seeing, and Memory brings about recognition. Recognition brings about awareness of seeing through division of the field of consciousness into a seer and the object seen.  This is something which must be perceived quickly, without too much verbalizing.

For example,  I am confronted with the object “tree”.  Memory of a previous encounter with “treeness” now produces recognition.  This is also the stage where the conditioning influence of language begins to make itself felt; i.e. the coupling of the visual impression which the object makes wit the sound “tree” as well as with the image of the written word.  Through interaction of the actual visual impression of “treeness” with the various associated memory images, the word “tree” is brought up.

Also, as soon as there is recognition memory produces the “recognizer”, which is the remembrance of a previous recognition.  Therefore, it can be said that recognition of the process of recognition leads to a self-activating cyclic process which manifests itself as the self-conscious entity, the “recognizer”.  The recognizer also recognizes the apparent vehicle of perception, the “body”, and from early childhood it has been “taught” to identify (i.e., has been made to associate) itself, the recognizing center, with “its” bodily form and with the word “I”.  Then, just as memory brings up the word “tree” every time this object is perceived, it will bring up the word “I” every time there is recognition, that is,, in every act of perception.  Thus the process of recognizing, i.e. Memory, finally brings forward the sentence “I see a tree”. 

So we can see that the subject and object appear in the non-dual world of seeing, after the mind, that is this bundle of memories, has done its work.  Therefore, now, we can say that this the “this-and-that” have been created out of the world of neti-neti, of “not this”, “not that” (Fig. 3)

    On rare occasions we may have a direct experience of this process.  For example, has one not noticed how, when waking up from dreamless sleep, for a split second after the eyes have opened, the eyes see, but objects have not yet been recognized, and consequently the seer, the “I”, has not yet been brought to life?  As soon as the objects are recognized, the recognizer also becomes aware of himself and knows that “he” exists.  A moment prior to that, although physiologically no longer asleep, he was still submerged in non-duality–a state in which there was purely the consciousness of Being, of “I am that I am”, but not yet that of “I am”, which is the consciousness of Becoming.   

    What has been explained for the sense of perception of vision, applies in an identical manner to hearing.  Thus there is also the creation of hearer (Fig. 4).

    But what has been said for the senses of sight and hearing, applies in an equal manner to the remaining senses of smelling, tasting and feeling, which leads us to the following composite picture of a consciousness molded into the duality of individuality (see Fig. 5A.)

   The diagram (Fig. 5A) now represents individual consciousness, and it can be seen that the “center” is completely isolated from the main stream of consciousness by the action of the five sense organs, or rather by the integration of the activity of the five sense organs with Memory.  Thus an empirical entity comes into being that has awareness of its perceptions, awareness of its physical separateness, and is capable of making meaningful statements (through the mechanism which we discussed earlier when it was seen how such an entity would come to the simple statement: “I see a tree”) and consequently capable of those actions conducive to its survival, which actions are therefore called “rational”.  

A,

Factual memory; man becoming conscious of his existence as a physically separate entity; capacity of “learning” and adaptability to changing circumstances

B,

Psychological memory; man becoming conscious of his “individuality”, i.e., his psychological isolation (self-consciousness); feeling of “loneliness” and “emptiness”, resulting in the many forms of escapism and distraction (“compensations”); desire for continuity; birth of “fear”; tendency towards separativism

C,

“Self-realization”; collapse of the impositions of the mind on Reality; seeing through all illusions (such as mentioned under B) and therefore total release of bondage; death of the “ego”; “rebirth” into the pure bliss of non-duality

The sides of the pentagon of Fig. 5A stand therefore really for deposits of memory images.  The figure summarizes, what has been the result of our discussion so far, how through Memory man becomes aware of himself as an “experiencer”, having self-consciousness, and being capable of learning, which is the accumulation of knowledge and experience,through the mechanism of association.  The much greater development of these faculties of self-consciousness and learning in man than in the other animals, has set man aside as a “rational being” and given him a high survival value through his greater skill in finding food, clothing and shelter.  There is learning which is both individual and collective;  this comprises not only the knowledge and experience of the individual acquired in the course of his lifetime, but also the accumulated experience and “know-how” of centuries on which the individual may draw.  As long as the individual is learning, the center produces an inflating movement of its own field of consciousness, due to the expansion of the deposits of memory images.  

It is also to be noted that the schism in consciousness as sketched above has given rise to the notion of “chronological time”, i.e., time by the watch, by the calendar.  The memory of experiencing–that is. Experience–we call the “past”. And by projection of the past through the present we create the “future”.  For example: “it has taken me time to come here; it will take time to return home.”

What has been explained so far concerned man as a sentient being, who is also a rational being and who through his discursive intellect is well equipped in the struggle for survival.  We have seen that through the action of the sense organs the feeling “I am the body” has arisen and that through this identification with form, man can consciously set about the satisfaction of his physical needs (which are not to be confused with psychological needs, i.e., desires).

Now it is important to understand that so far this sentient being which we have “constructed” from Consciousness, has a quiet, undisturbed mind, for the only thoughts that arise are those connected with his physical survival (and none yet with “success” or “failure”)--and there being no contradiction and resistance, and so no fear, in all this–they leave no residue from which conflicts can spring.  Where then does suffering come into the picture?  How is it that with the great majority of us the mind is everlasting turmoil, hardly ever knowing a moment of complete silence? To understand this, we shall have to go deeper still into the nature of memory.  What actually is the content of memory?

Since the matter is somewhat complex, I shall divide Memory into two different kinds according to its contents: there is factual memory and psychological memory.  The division is made purely for the sake of easier understanding by the discursive intellect, whose very being is division and that can only think in terms of classification and correlation.  In reality, of course, all Memory is one and the two types which the mind has arbitrarily chosen for distinction, are at any time closely interwoven.  This makes their clear recognition difficult, for usually where we find psychological memory there is also factual memory and where we see factual memory there lurks also psychological memory.  

By “factual memory” is meant the memory of facts and ideas that have purely utilitarian value for the body/mind complex , for example the knowledge I possess of my trade, of knowing the way to my house, how to play a certain game.  The memory of all this is useful to me in living in this world, in acquiring food, clothing and shelter, and in keeping the body and the mind in a healthy condition.  Never being an end in itself, this storehouse of information–which comprises the accumulated experience of centuries–does not leave a scar on the mind. The mind utilizes it for its needs but is not itself emotionally or psychologically affected in any sense; i.e., it is not incited to any compulsive action that is time-binding (which is the nature of “desire”), and thus contributes to the turmoil of the mind.

Through factual memory and the resulting self-consciousness a sentient being becomes capable of purposive action on the conscious level, which stands in opposition to the purposive behavior of animals, which takes place largely on the unconscious level (and whose behavior is therefore called “instinctive”.

Psychological Memory

It is the memory of thousands of yesterdays with their struggles, conflicts, miseries, little successes and frustrations–it is all that which I choose to call “psychological memory”.  It is the memory of all experience which has some emotional significance, the knowledge the mind depends upon for its psychological well-being, which it cherishes and cannot let go.  For example, knowing that I have an assured income, a bank balance, respectability, a permanently satisfying relationship with my wife, my children, etc.  For what would I be without all this, without my name, my title, my cherished education, my background?  I would literally be nothing, would I not?  So it is this sum total of psychological memory, from which the mind builds its imagined continuity, its security, in short the psychological center which we feel as the “me.”

We have seen earlier how the empirical entity, the self, as a purely biological entity (for it has not yet any psychological problems), is put together from factual memory.  We can now examine, along similar lines, how through psychological memory the self as a psychological entity is built up from its elements.  Let us again first examine the process of “seeing”.  In any seeing, through psychological memory there is retention of the psychological content of that experience, shaping the reactions to any future experience of “seeing”.  In other words, recognition of a past experience gives rise to comparison which contains in it “desire”.  Desire brings about the entity that wishes to direct the seeing, the “seer”.

For example, the eyes are seeing a beautiful sunset.  Now the moment the sunset is over, there is a certain psychological memory of it, namely, the pleasurable component of this perception.  Then there is there is the present experience of seeing, which is acted upon by the past experience.  For the sunset with all its beauty, all the delight that was in it, has gone–and so the present is felt as emptiness; and the moment the comparison has been made, “desire” has been brought to life--the desire to have more of this beauty, this pleasure.  Conversely, if the psychological content of the seeing had been painful, the desire would then be negative, for the less and less, for the annihilation of the memory of the experience–which is the desire for forgetfulness.  This is the reason why, generally speaking, the mind has a tendency to recall that which it experiences as “pleasant”, and to forget the “unpleasant”; hence we speak of the “good old times”!  But all the same, the unpleasant experiences are not really forgotten; they are only stored in the subconscious, from where they act in a more subtle, but also more insidious, manner.

The same mechanism is at work in the process of “hearing”.  The hearer arises only when there is comparison and thus desire is born in the hearing.  The entity that tastes, that smells, that feels arises in a similar manner out of the tasting, smelling, feeling.  It may be interesting to consider here the Buddha’s remarks about the state of enlightenment, when once again (as it was before we were born, or more precisely: before we were born as egos) “in the seen is only the seeing, in the heard only the hearing”, and so on.  Free from desire, this state does not give rise to the seer, the hearer, etc.

In the ignorant state, however, “the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (Ecclesiates 1: 8).  Thus the seer, hearer, taster, smeller and feeler have been brought into being, which together comprise the experiencer who feels desire in the act of experiencing.  This process, not being understood, leaves traces, psychological residues, around which thought processes take shape; hence the “thinker”, the “I”, comes into being.  The “experiencer” is subject to the same chain of cause-and-effects as described for the elements of composing it.  There is recognition, hence comparison of experience and finally desire (in reality, however, this is not a sequence of events that takes place in time; the three phases take place simultaneously, for recognition contains in itself comparison, and comparison contains in itself the element of “desire”).

 It appears then as though there is a center, activated by the pleasure/pain principle, from which all our thoughts and actions spring-a center that drives us on relentlessly, never permitting a moment of stillness and, therefore, clarity, that could lead to liberation–liberation from the center.

The center is the experiencer who continuously translates experience according to his past conditioning, giving rise to thought.  The center is also the process of thought shaping the thinner who tries to guide the thoughts in a certain direction, the direction of the “more” or the “less”.  It is this center, being the dead weight of past experiennce responding to the challenge of the present, which absorbs the present into the past.  For example: yester day I had a quarrel with my friend; its memory has left a scar on my mind.  When I meet my friend to day, it is with this past experience in mind that I react to seeing him.. The person I meet is a picture, an abstraction of what he was yesterday; therefore I do not meet my friend at all.  This example shows how the past always creates its own future which prevents the experience of what is, which is the present.  In other words, the experience of the present is displaced by memory of the past and its projections into the future,, which is the bondage of Time.  The greatest enemy of living in the present is, therefore, psychological memory.

This memory is always born of desire, it is the recurrence of the undigested thought of yesterday, the incomplete understanding of a past experience.  An experience in the present, incompletely understood, creates therefore the future; in other words, memory gives itself continuity, which is Time.  When I am not completely attentive, the full significance of my thoughts and emotions escapes me, and through this lack of awareness, I create my own suffering in the future.

  Let us look at the problem in a slightly different way.  Memory entails recognition, as we have seen, and therefore comparison.  But can we really see that comparison, in the psychological sphere, gives rise to greed and envy, and that they in turn give rise to suffering?  Comparison, in both the directions of time and space, coupled with the urge for a permanently satisfying relationship, for possession (which is really the guaranteed continuation of pleasure), leads to greed and envy.  When the mind compares (in the direction of time) its present state of emptiness, dullness, with a past moment of beauty, of pleasure, it wants to retain or recapture this past glory, it wants the “more”--thus we have “greed”.  In the direction of space: when the mind that “has not”, compares itself with others that “have”, there is envy.  All this must be fairly obvious.  Therefore the texture of Society, that is the relationship of one mind with another, also consists of greed and envy.  

Envy means that all my thought is collective, never individual, for all my objectives will reflect the scale of values of the Society in which I live.  For example, if I live in the materialistic West I may wish to accumulate wealth and power,, for the more I have of these things the more I shall be esteemed and so the more the ego will be gratified and thus inflated.  If, on the other hand, I live in a so-called “spiritual” community in the East where the highest ideal is to be a sannyasi, I may start giving away all my material possessions and go about in a loin cloth, and then I am caught in the urge towards the less and less in order to gain social approval.  In either case I shall have merely reacted to the values of Society and thus have ceased to be an individual.  

So we see that although we pride ourselves on our “individuality” (the word is here, of course, used in the same sense of “uniqueness”), in actual fact the “I” is always imitative, either positively or negatively, and thus merely part of the collective.  This collective consciousness is put together, molded and educated through the centuries, with as its main theme acquisitiveness.  It is this consciousness which acts on and through the particular body with which it is identified (i.e., seen dualistically), creating a body-mind center of self-protection, the “I”.  It is, as we have seen previously, through perception and identifying memory that this self-consciousness arises, and that the deception is brought about of equating self-consciousness with individuality.

We can now also see how false is the saying that “Death solves all problems”, for death of the physical body means merely a movement in consciousness, and not its transformation.  If it were otherwise, we should all be enlightened now, for Death is always there.  Consciousness, which is every grasping, accumulating, becoming, will go on creating mischief and suffering after the death of my body, and–translated dualistically–it will, to suit its own ends, identify itself with some other body.  So if we see clearly that “body” is not of primary importance, but only Mind, and that this body which we consider “ours” is also perceived in and by thought and is therefore ultimately part of Mind, then it will be realized that there is no liberation through death but only through the understanding of sorrow.  By destroying the tyranny of the collective with its false values, the body-mind entity may become truly creative and thus for the first time live as a real individual.  Then it will be seen that there is a “uniqueness” which transcends the limitations of space and time.  But this rebirth becomes possible only through the death of the “I” which like a mirror, reflects and focuses the collective consciousness.

A mind that desires the more and the more, or the less and the less, a mind whose simple needs have become mixed up with and given rise to desires, which craves continually for stronger sensations, must inevitably lead to pain and sorrow.  Such a mind is never free, never at peace with itself-its thought has become a slave of desire–although it has the illusion of being free through its creation of the thinker who is apparently free to think as he pleases.  But all the thinker can do is to recognize, to re-live the past, and act from that–which is therefore not action but reaction, giving rise to the interplay of the many desires with their contradiction and pain.  The thinker lives in a prison whose walls are composed of time–for the desire for the more is bringing into being of “psychological time” (just as our needs, through factual memory, brought about “chronological time”).  The mind that says: “I must practice meditation”, or “I should be more mindful” is at once caught in the net of time–which in this manner is its own invention.  There is a state of meditation, of mindfulness, but the moment the mind strives to attain it, its very striving makes meditation impossible!  The walls of memory that hem in individual consciousness form therefore an effective barrier from Reality, from that which is Timeless.  The mind as we have seen, represents a process of recognition, but the Real, the Unknown, cannot be so experienced, it cannot be recognized, for if it were it would no longer be the Unknown, the Eternal.

The Timeless State

I hope that out of all this, one thing has become quite clear: what is necessary is the breaking down of the walls of time, of the Old, for the New to be.  For that to happen, as Krishnamurti once put it, “the mind itself  must become the Unknown”.  This is, however, no mean undertaking.  For do we realize what is involved in this? It implies the complete dissolving away of all knowledge upon which the mind has built for itself as a center of psychological security.  It means the breaking of all habits, all ingrained ways of thinking, and of the emotional associations which words induce in the mind.  The task is so vast that, it seems to me,, the oft-quoted anecdote of Tao-hsin’s interview with Sen-ts’an has something unreal about 

it.                                                                                                                                                                    

If it were a simple matter of seeing that there is an artificial entity, the self, that binds us, then surely the simple understanding of what we have been discussing would be sufficient to make us all enlightened on the spot.  But seeing a thing in the abstract, impersonally, fragmentarily, in the conscious mind only, is not the same as living it personally, unreservedly, which means the total purification of both the conscious and the unconscious layers of the mind; and the moment the actual “seeing” is past, it has become “knowledge”, a dead thing that belongs to time and which can–if we are not careful–become another hindrance. For trying to recapture the moment of clarity, the mind comes in after it and so again gets involved in the process of becoming, of desire, thereby creating more psychological time.

You see, one cannot combat time with time, as little as one can wash off blood with blood, and so there must never be a trace left of the old for the new to be, however sublime the past experience may have been.  If I apply a religious prescription, either by living or trying to live up to the prescribed ideal (i.e., by being in a constant state of comparison and therefore of contradiction, for different parts of the mind pull in different directions so long as the individual has not the total integration of the enlightened man), or by doing spiritual exercises–all those strengthen the will and so memory from which the will acts.  Although everybody thinks that we can learn from experience, we can now see this to be a fallacy.  On the technical, factual level we can learn, but we cannot learn from past experience how to become peaceful, how to be filled with bliss, how to love. 

The point is that whatever comes from the mind, serves to strengthen the “I”, for we have seen that the “I” is but the crystalized idea of a dynamic process–Mind made static and given individuality by Memory and body awareness.  So, whatever the mind does leads to aggrandizement of the “I”, but however much this may expand, a finite quantity will always remain finite; the limited, the conditioned, can never become absolute and unconditioned, although its conditioning may become more and more subtly camouflaged.  Real freedom does not lie this way, for the mind acting from a motive–however noble this may be–is not engaged in the destruction of the prison but is merely decorating the bars of its cage. 

I mentioned earlier Tao-shin’s experience, and said that it appeared to contain an element of unreality.  I am not suggesting that such a thing could not have taken place, but for the text-book to hold it up as an example how simple it all is, to be emulated by anyone with singleness of purpose, is misleading–a dangerous half-truth.  More generally, I feel, this is the real difficulty which bedevils all the efforts of the student to get something from the intellectual study of books on Zen Buddhism–however classic these works may be, and however eminent the scholars who composed them. The student will be trying to become the book, as it were, implying a huge oversimplification and not at all the true way to understanding. 

It appears to the writer that what is required is a totally different factor–which does away completely with the intellectual approach: there must be in the individual a certain “tension” before there can be true self-inquiry.  This tension is not the tension of conflict, nor is it the tension of concentration, but it is the intensity of a mind that is completely relaxed but has full Attention, a mind that can be in a condition of seeing itself with clarity, without distortion, and it is only this total awareness--in which all relationship is utilized as a mirror–that will prevent the mind from falling asleep again, from living in the same old rut.

This unique “tension” is an inherent capacity of Mind but it gets lost through the constant movement of stimulation and relaxation–which are the spasms of another kind of tension (the tension of desire and conflict)--to which the mind subjects itself in the pursuit of its usual activities, i.e. so long as it is captivated by the many forms of destraction and does not know where the Real lies.  This unceasing process of stimulation and gratification, build-up and let-down of vital energy, leads to exhaustion and to dependence, and thus to habit; and when the mind has become dependent upon externals, the innate capacity of Attention, which of its strength, its virtue, as gone out of it.

It is like striking a key on a piano; if the string has no tension in it, it will emit no note when struck.  But when it has the proper tension, the slightest touch will make it respond.  When the mind is in this state it will know how to ask the right questions in the process of self-discovery.  A mind which has built up awareness–not–knowledge–will then spontaneously be in a condition that it can devote its whole life to pursing of what is True, regardless what the outcome of the search may be–for such a mind is no longer concerned with its own success or failure.  

Conclusion

Can anything more be said about that state which comes into being when the mind itself has become the Unknown?  It would be presumptuous to attempt such a thing.  We can only say that from the standpoint of the man who still lives inside the prison it appears as a state of complete Freedom, for there is total freedom from Ignorance which produces the shackles.   Whereas previously Reality could not be found because of the clamor of the individuality which covered and concealed it, in the enlightened state the impositions have been wiped away and Reality shines forth in all its purity. 

It seems to me that if we can understand the problem of Non-Duality fully, if only intellectually for the time being, that understanding will bring its own action, and we shall then be well on the way to the understanding of all problems, whether it be the problem of Suffering, the riddle “Who am I?”, or that of “life and Death”.  For all these are in essence the same problem, that of Consciousness,, which contains in itself Everything.

We have seen in the course of our inquiry how Suffering came about; we have also seen how with the death of the ego there is liberation from suffering and the return of the individual to the state of Nothingness whence he came (Fig. 5).  That is not to say that with liberation something new comes into being,, for the state of Nothingness is with us also in the intermediate state, between birth and death, only we do not perceive it–and if we do, faintly, we do not want to live with it.  Finally, if we have thoroughly understood the preceding we shall also see that the separation we normally make between life and death is caused by our ignorance, by the fact that we have never properly gone into the problem of Non-Duality.

Both what we choose to call “life” and “death” are contained in that greater Life which is non-dual, rock-bottom reality (Fig. 5C). The highest form of living is attained by the enlightened person while still in the body, for he has completely dispelled the trick which psychological memory played in creating the illusory “I”.  By virtue of the same understanding, the other trick, played by factual memory in creating the “experiencer” and in identifying thought with the body–giving rise to the feeling “I am the body”--is now also dispelled, and it is realized that there is neither birth nor death.

But we do not have to be enlightened to see the simple truth of all these things.  The ideal of seeking fulfillment in the future arises only when there is incompleteness in today’s experience, so there is the desire for continuity.  Self-consciousness, being brought to life by Memory and being in itself of the nature of Memory, a continuity, is therefore given substance by lack of understanding of action in the present.  By fully understanding every experience–which is to live intensely in the present–the mind is freed from the illusion of individuality, and hence from its limitations in space and time.  In my ignorant state I had identified myself with the body; hence I had also granted absolute reality to other bodies, and other individualities became “some-bodies” to me.  So I imagined I was born of my father and mother, but now I know this to be false.  I have always existed and always will, for that which exists is Timeless: there is no separation between God and man.  Is not Truth stranger than Fiction?

Even only intellectual understanding of all that we have discussed–if it is thorough–will place the reader at once beyond all the religious books; from this point he will need no more crutches, and the fear of death will have been completely eradicated from at least the conscious part of his mind.

Where previously Death had always depressed us, catching us unawares and forcefully reminding us of something deeply pushed away–our own transience and total insignificance–now, in the fulness of understanding, its manifestations no longer fill us with fear.  Before, when suffering a so-called “bereavement”, a most distressing feeling of emptiness descended upon us; now–living permanently in that Void having recognized it as both our natural substratum and habitat–there is quite a different experience when faced with the physical death of a close relative or friend.  It is clearly perceived that the pain formerly suffered was not sorrow for the deceased; the emotion not the final expression of a “love” so sadly ended forever–but that it was the acute psychological disturbance consequent upon the falling away of a relationship upon which we depended and from which we obtained some gratification, some shelter, in an otherwise ungratifying and hostile world.  As we then used to say: “The bottom has fallen out of my world”--but it was the unreal world of “I-consciousness” which has to break up sooner or later, in any case.

From the standpoint of Emptiness, i.e., Eternity, it is now apparent that the exclusivity of relationship is but another defense mechanism of the mind that cannot face its isolation and transience.  So the clinging, grasping activity of broken up, individual, consciousness, expressing itself as “attachment”, always strengthens the need for further attachment, because it is born of a primordial fear of Reality.  It is this vicious circle which prevents the integrated state of wholeness, the timeless state of Love, from coming into being.

When there is enlightened understanding, not only shall we be able to say confidently: “Death, where is thy sting?” but what is more:  Death will now be seen positively as our friend.  For if you love Liberation how can you hate Death?  The way to liberation necessarily involves death, does it not?

The man who fully understands can be said to have “love”--not just love of the Beautiful and the Light, but also of the Ugly and Darkness.  He loves Death. To be more precise: He loves, full stop.

When he has come thus far, he will already have gone beyond a more intellectual understanding which is still to be involved in the play of the opposites.  He knows that as long as there is a window on non-duality, as long as he is a mere onlooker at Reality, he is not of it, he is still lacking the Essential, he is still in Ignorance.  For him there is only one solution, one answer to life: to break the window and be free, for the window is none other than the prison wall.  

  13.  Second Thoughts on Non-Duality

This chapter is intended as a short postscript to the previous one, to fill out discussion on a few really difficult points that may not have been entirely clear to the reader.

  There is in the first place the distinction made between “individuality” and “uniqueness” (see pp. 88 and 167 *).  We have the idea that each one of us reacts in his own, entirely personal way to circumstances.  In other words, no two people react in exactly the same way.  This creates the impression of an independent “I”.

But in truth no two people are conditioned in exactly the same manner (not even identical twins, brought up together; and in this case behavior patterns resemble each other very closely).  There is the sum total of conditioning influences which not only comprises the individual’s experience–his whole life history to date–but also his glandular and neuro-physiological make-up.  It would be more correct to say, therefore, that each body/mind entity, a very complex bundle of conditioning factors, is unique in the make-up of its conditioning factors, is unique in the make-up of its conditioning.  The entity’s response has therefore a unique, “personal”, touch about it, although it is still only a function of its conditioning as defined in the broad sense given above.  Hence, despite the appearance of originality and uniqueness, it is merely a mechanical, completely determined entity that has no real freedom. 

True uniqueness, on the other hand, is the state which reveals itself when there is complete freedom from conditioning.  When in this state, the mind is totally transparent and without borders, functioning neither on the individual nor on the collective level.  It ceases to be an “entity”.  This brings with it, not complete annihilation of differentiation, total conformity–as some people seem to think the structure of non-duality to me–but the flowering of the rich diversity inherent in Reality.  What has been destroyed, however, is every form of imitativeness, of conformity to the patterns laid down by Society.   Such annihilation is essential if there is to be creative individuality or “character”.

A second difficult point contained in “Window on Non-Duality” came to the fore in the discussion which followed the reading of this paper at Cambridge.  One of the students could not easily accept the basic premise made in the middle of the article that all knowledge we possess originates from experience.  To the author it seems very obvious that all human knowledge must ultimately have been derived from experience (and thus been based upon  sensuous perception).  This is only difficult to understand if we think of experience as personal, obtained exclusively in the course of one’s own life, but this is not the case.  Knowledge is accumulative, including as it does not only individual memory but also social and racial memory, and thus represents the experience of mankind from its earliest beginning.  Thereforeit is based not only upon one’s own experience, but also that of others.

It is felt that we can do no better than to quote here a statement made by Krishnmurti at the Madras Talks of 1961, which seems highly relevant to the subject under discussion:  “What do we mean by experience?”.  Because, apparently, what guides most of us in the knowledge that we have derived from experience, either of our own or of the community or of the race.  Experience is what the race might have inherited, a certain knowledge, a certain tradition; that tradition, that knowledge is the derivation from experience, experience being response to stimuli and that stimulated response leaves a residue which we call knowledge.”

A third difficulty will now be discussed, which the author feels, could possibly be brought up by a reader whose prime concern is with logic.  The objection might be that the writer, in elucidating the nature of Reality as non-dual, has himself created a new basic duality: that of Reality and the Impositions (by the mind) on Reality.  The answer to this must be that this new duality is only apparent.  Absolutely speaking, the Impositions are illusory, although the mind takes them for real.  After all, who is talking about this new duality, if it is not the Impositions themselves?  Does not everything the mind seizes upon immediately become dualistic?  As soon as we say even one word about Non-Duality we have created Duality–and so the movement within the Impositions is Duality, Thought, Time, Suffering.

  Although ultimately, therefore, there may be nothing of the kind, it is we who experience existence a duality, who live in conflict; therefore to us, however much we may be living in illusion, duality is hard reality.  So relative to the human mind, we may say there is duality and non-duality, although it is a moot point whether we are entitled to make this discrimination–even if it is by inference.  For most of us only know the former state, which makes the state free from conflict merely a verbal projection.

This leads us finally to consider the question whether there is such a ting as an “approach to non-duality”.  It seems to me, before we can fruitfully discuss this, we should first understand how the separation between the everyday life and the “spiritual” life has come about. 

Many people are attracted to the state of Non-Duality, because they have heard about it–the promise of its bliss and so on.  Consequently their approach is to try to grasp Non-Duality–to understand it by analysis, speculation, etc.--rather than understand Duality, which is the everyday world.  Being fed up with this world, they have postulated another world, about which nothing is known but that it allegedly holds no frustration whatsoever; and so they are hotly pursuing the “other”.  But, contrary to what most religious people hold, it may well be that there is only this world; and that therefore the so-called other world–call it Non-Duality, or anything else, it does not matter-is still only this world.  And if that is so–and how could it be otherwise when whatever we know, whatever division we create and whatever concept we project, exists only within thought–then what matters only is this world, and our attitude towards it, our sense of values.  There being only one world, one life, yet two fundamentally different scales of values are possible.  Either we live with what is, or we escape into illusion because we prefer comfort to truth–the choice is entirely ours.  It is this choice which decides whether we are going to make heaven or hell of this everyday life.  To run away from it all and project a different world which we call Heaven, Nirvana, Non-duality, or some other high-sounding name is the most certain way of making hell of this, the real world.  

Not unlike the religious people, the intellectuals think that the attainment of non-duality is a matter of philosophy, of speculation, playing about with concepts.  But their approach, too, is doomed, because non-duality is the negation of every kind of concept, of any kind of certainty, that can be grasped by the mind for its security.  One cannot help but feel that if those who now profess an interest in the subject fully realized what is involved–nothing less than a dying, a complete giving up of Society–the majority would lose all interest at once.  For them the state of non-duality would appear as a mere “drifting”, “existing”, of a “living” which is an endless process of being helplessly jostled between the opposites.   

The state of non-duality implies that one is totally unconscious of oneself, not having any goals and thus free from self-concern. It follows therefore that to live in non-duality is incompatible with the following of a set path, a way of life, whether it be the Middle Way or simply The Way.

Any set way of life implies a model, an ideal.  It necessitates self-remembering and comparison with the ideal in order to adjust one’s behavior–what we have called elsewhere, a “psychological feed-back” system.  The latter may be considered the hallmark of the state of duality: the constant conflict between what is and should be.  It is therefore not so much thought that covers and obscures non-duality, as the “second-thoughts”, those after-thoughts which sneak in and cast doubt about the thoughts that have been and gone (e.g., “I should have done this . . . .”,  “What will people think of me now . . .”).  All this represents the feedback process of duality: always looking back, being preoccupied with the process of self-correcting, and thus incapable of living with the new, functioning in the present.  And when we are preoccupied–whether it be with sex, with politics or with the so-called “spiritual life”--we are stupid, dull, because we are not aware.  While thus “absent-minded” in the truest sense, we are incapable of giving Attention to anything, wholly absorbed as we are in the past.

The main reason for our obsession with the past is that, whatever we may say to the contrary, in actual fact we still cling in a childish manner to the hierarchical scale of Society with its ideas of the “superior” and the “inferior”.  So all the time we are weighing (comparing) our self on this scale, and trying to make it look more capable, more beautiful, more respectable.

I may be stupid, not quite so clever and quick-witted as others; but am I not being infinitely more stupid by trying to appear clever, that is, to be something which I am not, which can only give rise to all sorts of conflicts?  One major difficulty is that the whole trend of our education, with its cramming, its examination system and paper qualifications, tends to inculcate this attitude of stupidity, of “impressing people favorably”, which is the triumph of the sham, the phony.

And if I am greedy, say for earthly wealth, and I cover it up, am I not even more greedy, now hungering for social approbation as well?

And in both of the examples given I have brought into being a deep fear–the fear of not being able to live up to appearances, to be found out as stupid, greedy, or whatever the case may be.  It is through this kind of preoccupation that we create continuity and cause the self to be divided within itself.  

Thus far we have seen that all attempts to directly grasp Non-Duality by mind effort are doomed, because it can never be made a goal.  To be more precise: Non-Duality is not to be “attained”, as the result of some purposeful activity.  The latter always implies a motive, and every form of motive is self-induced and self-building.  Nothing that springs from the mind can bring about this state, for all effort tends to strengthen self-consciousness and thus leads away from it.

Non-duality comes from a fact, spontaneously, when there is an understanding of duality, our everyday life.  Again, it does not come into being through trying to understand duality.   There either is such understanding, or there is not; and the trying to understand is obviously a pursuit, a movement within duality, born of discontent with circumstances.  True understanding is an involuntary action; it cannot be bought by any means, nor can it be “helped along”.  Such perception is purposeless; it has no ulterior motive and is outside time, i.e. it occurs in a flash.  Yet it is not the outcome of an act of grace.  It is born of discontent of a different kind: not the will to modify the everyday world, to reform, so that there is a little less discomfort here or there.  What we are talking about is the discontent that can never be satisfied, that has no goal and so holds no conflict.  It is a discontent not with life’s circumstances, but with the very functioning of the mind that gives these external factors such undue prominence.  Such discontent gives a tremendous energy and it creates the intelligence not only to see that conflict in any form is a poison, but enables the understanding of conflict in its totality.  When one sees something in its totality (which includes the seer, the observer) all problems cease.  In this state there is no longer a seer and therefore there is Freedom-not the freedom from, which still indicates the presence of a center that that wills, chooses, etc., and so is in potential or actual conflict with its circumstances.

Do we ever see anything totally? Perhaps only in a crisis, or when faced with an emergency, with acute danger to life, when we have absolutely no time.  To see is not an action which needs time.  It is not a matter of seeing one aspect first, then another, and so on, finally obtaining the whole picture–that is merely the summation in memory of the various aspects, the way a machine operates, like a television camera.  Then it is always possible to go on seeing further aspects of the problem and therefore the seeing is never finished, never complete.  Such seeing is always a fragmentary act, an extrapolation of what is already known, and so no seeing at all.  To see totally is to find oneself completely in the present; such seeing is therefore timeless–and from this seeing there is an immediate action. The action is immediate  not in the sense of being an extremely fast response to the pressure of the moment--but, not being the result of thought at all, it is an unpremeditated and unprecedented action; therefore it is not a re-action which breeds further re-actions.  It is in this doing without sense of doer-ship, in which one is completely unconscious of oneself, that the state of non-duality finds consummation.   

  14.  Memory Without a Cause

The conclusion arrived at on p. * that memory images come forward on their own account when challenged may seem a little strange at first sight.  We are so accustomed to thinking in terms of cause and effect that we feel lost when we see something happen without apparent cause.  But it must be realized that, coming right down to fundamental level, something like this may be expected to occur: the appearance of an effect which is its own cause (cf. the postulate of a “space-time barrier” in “Zen and Reality”).  And does not the search for an underlying cause imply that the event was not fundamental?  If a cause is found then obviously the event was an effect and could therefore not have been fundamental.

This confusion in our minds has arisen partly because, brought up in the Christian tradition, we tend to look for a First Cause, a Prime Mover, without ever asking whether such an animal can or does really exist.  Another factor is that the mind cannot see events otherwise than as bound by time, i.e., in a cause-and-effect framework, for the mind itself is the product time (being the bundle of memories) and it can therefore never grasp the timeless, the unconditioned.  A similar problem in classical philosophy is that of the body-mind relationship.  For many hundreds of years philosophers have searched for a causal relationship–either body shaping mind, or mind shaping body–and have found none.  At last they have come to console themselves with the postulate of “psycho-physical parallelism” (whatever that may mean).  All these difficulties crop up so long as we cannot see through the illusion of duality; and this illusion is imposed on us by the limitations of the mind, the very tool that is used in the endeavor to find a solution to the problems. 

But perhaps it may be possible to see directly–without intellectualizing–that the notion of causality viewed from outside time, is simply reduced to one of “association”, for it is the discriminating mind which cuts up that which flows eternally, into the static units of “cause” and “effect”.  For without the mind that abstracts, classifies and pigeon-holes, where does cause end and effect begin?  Then, ultimately, we may see that even the notions of “association” and “flow” are reduced to simple “being” in the timeless state, the fundamental level of reality.

However, of far greater significance than the above considerations, which although interesting in themselves are only of academic import, is the tactical recognition that individual consciousness has a built-in self-cleansing mechanism, which is capable of automatically digesting psychological memories, so that at no time a harmful residue is left.  This becomes operative in a spontaneous process of meditation when there is full attention to what one has “on one’s mind”.  This verbal expression in itself is telling, because it implies that there is a certain psychological tension which has to work itself off.  Unfortunately we live such hurried lives nowadays, and we are all the time trying to “concentrate”, planning and calculating our future actions, that we have destroyed this innate capacity of mind.  

Thus the torturing thoughts, constituting the turmoil in the mind, fulfill a definite purpose.  They arise so that we should accord them full attention, and not opt out by repressing them or trying to become oblivious of them.  In this way only is catharsis to take place.  People who think that the spiritual person is one who is always serene, never disturbed, or who have made that state their ultimate goal, will not be able to understand this, for they have made the search for serenity another escape.  The truly spiritual person, on the contrary, is continually being disturbed; every moment is a new crisis.  

What does all this add up to in practical, everyday life?  It means, does it not, that I don’t have to do a thing, as long as I am integrally aware of outward impressions and my reactions towards them.  It also means, when I have a problem that recurs again and again, that I look at the problem–not in the narrow sense, as when trying to solve a mathematical problem which only requires a certain answer–but in the fullest sense, which comprises inquiring into the relationship between the problem and the problem-maker.  The latter is the conditioned entity whose undigested past is always giving rise to further thought–thought which is ever driving, compelling, stirring, preventing the state of serenity in which there is not a single problem.  Then going deeper still, there is the realization that in actual fact there is not even a relationship between “me” and the problem, for I am the problem. Thus there is no longer any need to do anything about it: in fact, the trying to find a solution to the problem is the avoidance of the problem (and because, more subtly, the very seeking is the problem). The seeing of the “I” as the collective reaction of past memories, creating complications in the now, reduces all problems to the one, and at the same time it reduces this one to Nothingness. 

  15.  Knowledge and Language–
A Metaphysical Interlude

What do we mean by knowledge? And who is it that knows?  To answer these questions and to fully understand the problem–as in fact, any other problem–it seems to me essential that first we have some insight into non-duality (see pp. 77-78*).  Having gone into non-duality and examined the mechanism of perception, it will then come quite naturally to introduce an element of relativity and define “knowledge” as an “observer object” relationship.  

As is now generally known, in the beginning of this century Albert Einstein destroyed the then prevalent concept of an absolute framework of reference in which to observe phenomena, and established as the only so-called “absolute” reality the relationship in space and time between an observer and an object.  Now it has always been a subject of some wonder to me why this revolution in physics has not suggested to thinkers to extend the principle of relativity to the actual act of observation itself, that is, the mental act of cognition.  Perception and the resulting “knowledge” would then be seen simply as a relationship between observer and object quite regardless of frames of reference.  This would therefore be true even in an absolute universe, as was thought to exist before the advent of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and so would represent a truth of a more fundamental nature, being independent of considerations of space and time. 

Seen in this light, “knowledge”, instead of being absolute and static, becomes relative and dynamic.  If we cling to the accepted meaning of the word, knowledge is subjective.  For each observer a specific picture of the “outside” world exists, different from that of any other observer, because his knowledge is literally “unique”.

Having come this far, the next logical step is to draw the inevitable conclusions from the above statements, which resulted naturally from our understanding of non-duality.  These could, for instance, be formulated as follows: “there exists a continuous process only, viz., that of knowing, experiencing; and there are no clear-cut entities such as the knower and his subject (and the “act” of knowing), since the delimitation (and so the definition) of these entities is also the subjective and arbitrary.  This ultimately signifies the end of all verbalizing to express philosophical Truth.

At this stage, a number of difficulties might crop up, and the reader might well be loath to accept the above thesis because they see to conflict with his everyday experience. The pont is that it is not subjective knowledge which makes a common language possible but rather the other way round: it is only language which makes possible the communication of subjective knowledge.  

All knowledge is relative to the observer.  If as a result of our newly acquired insight we now extend the semantic significance of the terms “knowledge” and “know”, we can then state that there is no difference between the “thing in itself” and the thing as it appears to us–as we “know” it.

Our final conclusion may be summarized aptly yet accurately by stating that the knower, the “knowing” and the known are one.

16.  Self or Non-Self?

If the present writer were asked to deal with the question, self or non-self?--he would begin to say that in one sense there is a self, but, paradoxically, it would also be true to say that in another, there is no self; it all depends on what level we are thinking.  

Superficially there is a self because:

1.       Thought has associated and identified itself with the apparent           permanence of the body, as well as with the terms “me” and “mine”.

2. Thought, which is transient and impermanent, has created the thinker so that it can run away from the Void, the realization that it is totally nothing. 

   So the idea of the thinker, the “I”, exists within thought, and is therefore also transient, but it is given the appearance of continuity by Memory.  This deceptive mechanism, creating duality, may perhaps be demonstrated by way of an analysis of a simple act of perception.  Let us consider in a slightly different the example given on p. 85* in which the eyes are looking at a sunset.  There is perception of the sunset by a human observer, so that there is an “experiencing” of the sunset.  As long as this is a fact, there is no entity that reflects on its experiencing, that sees itself “seeing” (for as soon as this happens there is an end of the seeing of the sunset, and the replacement of the sunset by the “seer”; and we may then say that during this experience there is no entity that reflects on the seeing of the “seer”! And so we could go on, of course, ad infinitum). 

   The analysis of this simple example clearly demonstrates that perception is always a non-dual “event” which in retrospect we call an “observer-object relationship” but in which there is in actual fact neither an observer nor an object, as a separate entity. The sunset would not exist but for the observer, now would the observer exist but for the sunset.   

17.  The Question of Thought

To get into this question of thought at all fruitfully, there must therefore be an element of non-thought, i.e., love; we must be fascinated by the problem for its own sake and we shall then see that in its unraveling lies great beauty.  We shall, however, miss this beauty if we go into the problem without real love, such as when we expect a result from it, whether this be freedom from suffering or simply an enrichment of our intellectual store of ideas.  This love gives us the capacity for Fundamental Thought, implying direct perception, which is obviously required for an examination of thought, if we are not to go round and round in circles within thought. 

First, it may be useful to look at the relationship between love and Fundamental Thought.  Obviously fundamental thinking can exist on all levels.  After all, what is fundamental thought if it is not thought in the broadest categories?  Is not that thought fundamental which moves from the general to the particular, thereby seeing each thing through its matrix, which is placing it in a larger frame of reference?  But what we are concerned with is Fundamental Thought, with capital letters, and this must be thinking in the very broadest categories possible; this means that ultimately the terms of reference of thought itself are left behind, and thought is eliminated–and maybe then love is born.  After all, thought is always divisive, isolating, and love is the total elimination of all barriers. 

Thought is the stuff of which the manifested Universe is made, and we shall have to examine the relationship between the thinker and his thought, the observer and the Universe, in order to ascertain whether these much discussed relationships actually exist, or whether perhaps the thinker and his thought, the observer and his World are one.

Experience, which involves memory and so the activity of the brain cells, and the possibility of being communicated, can only be in this dualistic form, like computer language.

Thus man’s natural habitat, the material universe, when reduced to its simplest and most fundamental terms, exists in his consciousness as ultimate entities which are designated “elementary particles”--just like the ultimate elements of his psychological universe are “pleasure” and “pain” (Heaven and Hell). 

So the really creative physicist is he who can “forget” the limitations of duality in his contacts with non-duality; that is, he can use concepts like “particle”, “wave”, “mass”, etc. purely as working tools, all the time remembering that they are merely working symbols, thoughts, thus never allowing them to become blockages in his understanding.  

Now if all “things” are of Thought, then Thought is entirely on its own, and it is thus impossible for Thought to be related to any thing.  Therefore the “relationship” between thought and matter is a false one; it is not that there is no “matter”, but there is no matter as opposed to thought, nor is there thought as opposed to matter, for the two are one.  And that One, which in certain writings is sometimes referred to as Mind, is itself neither thought nor matter; neither is it composed of both, nor is it the absence of both.  From it all “things” and all “thoughts” emerge, and to it all things and all thoughts return; is not this the greatest miracle conceivable? 

Because thought occupies such an important position in relation to Mind, is it not surprising that we devote so little time to its understanding?  It seems to me that the key to a realization of Mnd in oneself is the understanding of thought; and at the same time, that without this comprehension, we cannot fully understand any problem at all. 

Happiness and the Death of Thought

One more important conclusion follows from our discovery that all things are within Mind; it is that there can only be Happiness by having order within one’s mind, and not through power without or within.  For any action I take outwardly to change my environment with a view to increase my happiness–and that is what most of us are busy with most of the time–is futile, since it can only result in a movement within thought, a rearrangement of mental pictures.  And any action which I undertake inwardly, to work upon my thought, is equally futile for the driving force is again thought–and thought as a driving force is the very cause of sorrow.  There will be the end of sorrow only when there is the dying to this driving force, the evaporation of the Motive that implies a Purpose whose realization is made a necessary condition for happiness.  The mind that has died to all that will be a Happy one, and it will also be an orderly mind, in which there is only place for “functional thought”, that is, thought which has no such Purpose lurking in its background and in which there is no involvement with pain and pleasure.  This mind is of the essence of simplicity, without wants or ambitions, ever agile, yet never growing beyond its own emptiness. 

Beyond the utilitarian sphere, is thought really necessary?

There is also thought which is not functionally essential, but is only psychologically a necessity to us–this we shall henceforth refer to as “psychological thought”.  In this kind of thought there is a direct movement of the psychological “me”, whereas in “functional thought” there is not.  To give a simple example, thinking how to obtain food when hungry would be a case of functional thought, but thinking how to obtain a particular kind of food–because the mind (and not the stomach) has a special appetite for it (due to conditioning, habit, est.)--that would, in our present terminology, be called “psychological thought”.  The difficulty is, as can be seen from the above example, that one type of thought can flow almost imperceptibly into the other.  Yet it is only psychological thought that makes up the entire texture of Suffering as a mental phenomenon.  Although I may suffer physically when starving, I only suffer mentally through the thoughts: “what is going to happen to me; there is worse to come”, and so on.  Similarly, when I have a bad toothache, or am suffering from some other painful physical condition, there is physical suffering which may or not be–but usually is–superimposed by conflict in the mind.  Once Krishnamurti made a remark to the effect that, having suffered from bad physical health for many years, yet not once his physical condition had given rise to conflict.

What we are concerned with in this discussion is psychological thought, in which and through which we suffer. We want to know its modus operandi, its birth and death, and perhaps knowing that, we shall be in a position to effect its prevention so that there is only functional thought left which gives no problems.

First, what does the general landscape look like in which there is both functional and psychological thought?  Just as a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, so purely functional thought is the shortest associative distance between two propositions.  It is truly a “straight and narrow path” this “thinking to some purpose” without entanglements and problems.  For any deviation I make takes me through the fields of pleasure and pain lying on either side of the path, giving rise to that “discrimination” which in future will make further straight functional thought more and more difficult and bringing with it the cultivation of an ego.  Still holding to this same picture, one may say that meditation consists in the process of seeing where functional thought derails on the embankment of psychological thought.

Then, this question of thought is further tied up with something else, the question of life and death; and the two may well be the same problem in different guises.  To most people there are only two fundamental states, life and death; but to the writer there is a third state, which lies beyond the aforementioned two, although it comprises both of them.  To him this is the only really fundamental state, and it is identical with the state that obtains when we have died to thought–and he does not care whether this occurs before or after the body’s death, for this is irrelevant.  To die to thought it is not necessary to die bodily first; and also, who knows whether after death of the body, there will be any such opportunity?  After all, we suffer now, and that is why it is important to investigate whether we can die to thought today, and not tomorrow.

Although most religious writers consider the body with contempt and a nuisance, may it perhaps not be its main function to give us the opportunity to find liberation–not from the body as is supposedly to happen at physical death, but fro the mind which is the real trouble-maker?  What I am driving at is the following: no problem in this world has ever been solved by its avoidance.  Similarly, the ego can only be transmuted by becoming acutely aware of itself, of its whole complicated machinery and of the impasse in which it finds itself.  This requires a firmly crystalized ego so that the strong forces which keep it intact can be utilized for its explosive shattering.  Now the body is, as we have explained elsewhere, the necessary agency through which this crystallization takes place. 

The paradox in this matter is that the center of individual consciousness must first be fully grown before it can disintegrate.  It cannot disintegrate half-way through its formation, for at this stage full understanding is not yet to be obtained.  This is reflected in the life history of the individual where the child’s personality must first be fully developed and the various outward urges and desires must have their sway, before all this energy is turned inwards in the confrontation of the center with what is.  Such is Nature’s law that the young will yearn for the world, because as yet all psychic energy is flowing outwards.  Only after this outward movement has completed itself, will the tide turn and will self-revelation commence; or so it should be, but the tragic part is that most of us remain caught in the outward movement throughout our lives, looking for the unknown treasure in the wrong direction.  

So we see that although body in itself is not important, it has a very significant part to play in the process of spiritual emancipation.  After this deviation let us now return to the consideration of this all-important question of the dying to thought. 

Occasionally we do die to thought, as when we fall into a dreamless sleep.  When we come out of this state, how wonderfully refreshed we feel; if only we could sleep like this every night!  This is an example of what the death of thought can do for us and how a total renewal of the organism can only take place after the mind has had a complete holiday.  Considering this blissful experience, is it not surprising that our greatest fear is to die, to take leave of the known and break continuity:  It is particularly strange what we have this terror of coming to an end when each night we go to sleep without so much as a qualm, and seeing that we spend so much of our lifespan sleeping.  This shows that our fear concerns not so much the state of oblivion and the desire not to lose the known.  Could it further be that the event of death has been over dramatized, and this is exerting a powerful conditioning influence?  

It may be objected here that the state of sleep differs in two important aspects from the state of death. First, in sleep the body carries on; and second, we have the knowledge that there is a very great probability that we shall wake up next morning.  But from the point of view we are considering here, that is, the dying of thought to itself, there does not seem to be a very great amount of difference between the two states.  ?As to the first point, in deep sleep there is no awareness of the body’s functioning.  If we died in our sleep, we would not know it.  The fact, therefore, that physiological functions continue seems irrelevant when there is psychological discontinuity.  Second, the knowledge that we shall wake up in due course is, consciously or subconsciously, with us to the last moment before loss of consciousness in deep sleep or complete general anesthesia.  However, at the actual moment of losing consciousness there is a dying even to that knowledge because there is an ending of all thought. We may remark that nobody has ever come to grief through the ending of his thought, but that on the contrary all psychological pain is the result of an inability to end thought.  Yet subconsciously, we realize the need for its ending, witness the many ways of modern man seeks oblivion, such as through drugs, sex, and the innumerable other forms of escape.

In the above example we have seen how occasionally man dies to all thought.  Let us now consider two cases where there is the dying to one thought or one complex of thoughts.  I do not know whether the reader has ever noticed how one fear can supersede and completely wipe out another fear?  For example, I have a fear of meeting a certain person, of confronting a certain situation.  However, suddenly I receive word that after having left my house in the morning a disastrous fire has broken out and there has been considerable damage to property.  Now there is only one thing that weighs on my mind: I do not yet know all the details, but I fear to have lost everything.  The other fear, the recurring thought which caused my earlier anxiety has completely disappeared. Where has it gone? Apparently the greater fear, the thought which has the stronger emotional significance, always ousts the lesser one.  And is not the same “displacement effect” noticeable with desire?  Apparently it is always the thoughts most closely involved in the “I”-mechanism, which are absorbed by Memory; in fact, it is this bundle of meaningful knowledge (i.e., meaningful to the “me”) that reacts as the “me” to outward challenges. 

The other case is the common knowledge that “Time heals all wounds”.  Memory of the sorrowful thought has, of course,worn thin and is being replaced by fresh engrams.

Although the dying to one thought is of an entirely different order from the dying to all thought–since it is merely a movement within thought and not a going beyond–it has been brought up here for showing so well the unreality of thought, and the mechanism by which it is the creator of all illusions.  Another significant pointer may be the fact that in all the examples given above the dying to thought took place involuntarily.  Just like we cannot will ourselves to fall asleep, so the mind cannot end its harassing thoughts by direct conscious action.  If “effort” is not the way, then maybe the whole thing is far more subtle than we imagined!

Although this chapter–and in fact the whole of this work–is primarily concerned with the question of how to end thought, it will obviously help us in our task to examine in detail how thought came about in the first place.  Subsequently we shall discuss how thought, once come into being, maintains itself; and finally, we shall see if there is a possibility of putting an end to thought, the desirability of which we have already discussed.

The Unfolding of Individual Consciousness

The birth of thought in the individual is, as it were, a recapitulation of its birth in Consciousness, which took place in some early phase of man’s biological evolution.  The tiny baby, soon after he is born, reacts to his having left the uniformly congenial conditions of the womb.  The equilibrium is crudely broken: he has to start breathing, the temperature of the outside world may not suit him, and there is a periodical need for food.  Once a certain threshold value of uncongeniality, of “discomfort”, has been reached, the organism reacts instinctively by crying, which is a purely physiological reflex at this stage.  Thus, through the shock of birth, with most babies the first action after gasping for breath, is to cry.

Consciousness is still an undifferentiated continuum; although physiologically very much alive and kicking, psychologically the baby is like the dead; in fact he is a mere biological automation consisting of not much more than a tube which ingests food at one end, chemically transforms it, and eliminates the decomposition products at the other end.

Soon, however, a fundamental change takes place.  Because his physiological needs are always relieved by action in the outside world, together with the capacity of memory afforded by his developing brain, the baby becomes aware of himself as distinct from the outside world.  This is the birth of thought and the real birth of the baby, his beginning as a psychological entity, which knows the “me” and the “not-me”.  Soon he will know (i.e. “recognize”) his mother and discover that he can achieve certain results by the action of crying.  Such crying is therefore no longer physiological, but a mentally induced action which, in a primitive way, may be the first stepping-stone of the incipient “cunning mind”.

Later still in his development the child’s consciousness will merge to an increasing extent with collective consciousness.  In addition to his own private conditioning through his sensing apparatus, i.e., his experiences of the physical, factual aspects of the world, he will absorb the multifarious ideas about the world. Whereas the former process signifies the building up of factual memory necessary for functional thought, the latter process represents the corruption of the child’s innocence by thought. 

How the child’s formation is a matter of his “own” conditioning throught sensuous perception plus the psychological conditioning by his environment, can be seen, for example from his tastes in food.  Although he partly discriminates according to his own pleasure/displeasure principle (which not only comprises the reaction of his taste buds, but also texture, smell of the food and the emotional circumstances prevailing during his first acquaintance with the particular food), the basis for much of the child’s likes and dislikes in eating is laid by his educators.  It is therefore only natural to find the child’s tastes and eating habits reflecting those of his environment.  And what applies to food, naturally applies to anything else; every possible experience the child could have is very soon labeled “nice” or “not-nice”, and thus a basis is laid for rigid good/bad mentations, from which he can subsequently free himself only with the greatest of difficulty. 

The child there is the consciousness of belonging to a particular family and the emotional security which this identification brings.

All this, however, has only been the preparation for the dualistic world picture in which the child is being “educated”.  For next he has to accept that he belongs to a certain country, is a member of the white or the “colored” race, is a Protestant, Catholic, Jew . . . or any of the other nonsense which obscures to the child the plain fact that he is simply a human being–moreover, who, but for his many labels, would be psychologically nothing.  The truth he actually is nothing becomes only apparent with the understanding that there is no such thing as individual thought, (psychological) thought.  To illustrate this further, how the child psychologically grows upon the substratum of collective consciousness we may consider here his incipient sexual development.  

Although sex is physically determined at conception,, psychologically the child is nothing at birth, that is to say sexually neuter.  This remains so until the pattern which the environment imposes has established itself,, which means the child has been made to dress, behave and function as a boy or girl,  whichever the case may be.  Thus in most cases the little boy or girl is identified with one of both sexual groups,, by falling in line with the various behavior symbols, before even knowing what it is all about and upon what physical characteristics the discrimination has been made. 

Once this basic sexual identification has occurred, further conditioning in the male or female role takes place as a matter of course.  This will come to include the notion that the opposite sex is “desirable”, and through this, together with the fact that the “female and male psychologies” are complementary as well as forming a pair of opposites (cf. the Yin and Yang in Chinese philosophy), a basis is laid for sexual attraction which is not merely (physically) functional.  This attraction is one more example illustrating the unity of opposites in consciousness, which manifests itself by the tendency to overcome their separateness and become one Whole.  

The important point is to see the primary part which conditioning plays in the establishment of the desire; therefore, as we have stated elsewhere, “all psychological desire is a conditioned reflex.”

Thus it is that “individual” psychological thought–which is desire–is always repetitive, never original, for it is part of the great conditioning steam of collective consciousness.  Only after the death of thought can there be true individuality.  

So we have seen that the first hesitant stirring of thought occurs as soon as the undifferentiated field of consciousness–the Nothingness–has split asunder in the “me” and the “not-me”, thus creating Thingness.  From thereon the course of events is completely inevitable.  The physical “me” leads to the psychological “me”, and hence to the basic schism in which numerous mental images exercise their power to fascinate and urge on this “me”. In the young child this interplay of symbols may be confined to a few basic ones, such as attention from the Mother, the fascination of the Toy, etc.  Later in life duality proceeds to an extraordinary degree with, concomitantly, a virtually unlimited number of ideation symbols (fixed ideas, one might say), all capable of exciting and pummeling the “me” into some action. 

It is this interplay of thought, which is the magnetism of the symbols for each other, that keeps the world turning.  Call it whatever you like, desire, ignorance, the search for fulfillment, it does not matter–but what matters is that it is a totally blind force which is inexhaustible.  It came into being with the first split in Consciousness, leading to the duality of “I” and the “not-I”, and will not end before these two have merged again.

This whole marvelous and fantastic world is thus within the field of thought, the storehouse of symbols, which comprises the observer and the observed, the thinker and his ideas, the striver and the striven for.  Because of this basic duality, the play of illusion will go on forever, for combinations and permutations amongst the dualities are infinite.

Man continually creates his own attractions for fresh symbols, the new excitements.  And whether this symbol be the image of naked woman, the idea of Death, or a word like Communism or Atheism, fundamentally its power to excite is as irrational and unreal as–to us–the proverbial red rag to the bull.  All this goes to show the tremendous potency of conditioning, particularly in early childhood.  It is hence mainly in this period that the basis is laid for the various neurotic conflicts which abound.  This occurs when the conflict in collective consciousness-i.e., a basic contradiction with which intelligence cannot cope–is imported to the growing psychological memory of the child.  Because there is a continuous merging between the individual consciousness and collective consciousness (so that it becomes unreal to speak of “individual” as opposed to collective consciousness) this transference of conflict occurs all the time.  

To give two very simple examples of such contradictions: Sex is represented at once as something highly desirable and highly reprehensible; killing is considered evil, but it is “glorious” when it is for the sake of some symbol, such as the nation, the race or some ideology.  The damage which these contradictions impart is untold, not in the least because it forces the unformed simple mind of the child to mold itself after the sophisticated and unreal pattern of collective consciousness. In this pattern everyone is assigned a certain role and woe betide the individual who wishes only to be himself and refuses to conform.  The “role” is really a rigid pattern within a pattern, all held together by tradition, the reign of the past. This role-playing has become so important in this age that even a commercial company “of repute” must project its “public image”, i.e., it is personalized, and usually expected to play the role of a successful, aggressive yet paternal type of individual!  Thus we see that the diseased mind of the Collective loses no time to infect the young mind, and that therefore the real crisis lies within consciousness. 

Maintenance of the Thought Momentum

A few serious-minded persons may ask themselves how this whole unreal structure perpetuates itself, and may wish to step out of it, if only they knew how.  These people form, however, such a small minority and, what is more important, even they still seek a solution within thought, that almost imperceptibly the Unreal–for that is what this whole psychological panorama represents–is taking increasing hold over us.  Not only does the momentum of thought proceed unchecked, because the fundamental thought structure is never challenged, but it is ever increasing like an avalanche rolling down the mountain-side, carrying everything with it in its destructive path. This is because duality can only give rise to more duality, and it is impossible for it ever to lead to non-duality.  As we have seen before, duality, which is thought, is not related to non-thought, which is non-duality.  Therefore thought will ever give rise to more thought, and so the mind is its own prison; this is also the reason why every problem we tackle in this world appears to give rise to further problems.  Furthermore, readers may have noticed how thought, notwithstanding its infinite possibilities as to content and depth, is very limited in scope and too often extremely petty, and how in the individual it is restricted to variations on only a few ever-recurring themes.  Yet we are still a long way off from the time that people will begin to recognize that thinking will now solve their many problems, as long as man has not got the capacity to keep his functional thought uncontaminated by psychological thought, and so free from the tyranny of the Collective.

Now we have examined the birth of thought, it may be instructive to examine in some greater detail the process of thought continuity, the inexorable mechanism through which we are the effective prisoners of thought.  It seems as though we are the victims of a Law of Inertia, which prevails throughout the Universe and governs not only the physical but also the psychological world.  Thus the momentum of thought all the time engenders more thought-energy; and one thought is sufficient to set the whole process going. 

To understand this we must first of all recognize that thought which is psychological and not functional has a counterpart on the level of sensation; that is, it is either pleasant or painful, and in this respect there is no neutral thought.  As we have already seen in the chapter entitled “Windows on Non-Duality”, the driving force behind the mechanism of thought association (which is the modus operandi of its continuation) is the pleasure/pain principle, which aims at the overall increase in pleasure and reduction in pain content of the thoughts.  

So let us suppose that to begin wit there is a thought with which pleasure is associated, i.e., its content or coloring is gratifying.  This will then bive rise to further thought with a view to perpetuate, intensif or safeguard gratification.  On the other hand, had the first thought been painful, this would have engendered a though concerned wit reducing the pain and transforming this into pleasure.  This process is thus self-activating and b its very nature destined to go on ad infinitum.  Thus there is a continuos swinging between painful thoughts (caused by the impact of reality, of facts, or our onions and interpretations of these facts) on theone hand; and pleasant, and pleasure-projecting (“hopeful”) thoughts to “compensate”, on the other.  Since the pain always wants to turn into pleasure, and pleasure always wants to continue, which is the mechanism of the “less” or the “more”, there is never an end to thought, which is an eternal oscillation between despair and hope.  Even at night, in dreams, this movement continues.  Man dreams about the things he has not got, but wishes for (dreams as wish-fulfillment) or fears (anxiety dreams or nightmares).

So it is that, at least most of us, do not know the existence of a pause in the thought process; this thought-pause is therefore a state beyond the opposites, free from Time (which is the pressure of the “next” thought).  And all that because we have never gone into the question of thought, never meditated!  For if we had, we might possibly have realized that we ourselves have initially caused this schism between (psychological) pleasure and pain, that there are only facts, but that it is the conditioned mind, which has colored these facts, and so has created its own gratifications and frustrations. 

Perhaps it may now be appreciated that the spiritual life represents a process of disengagement from the tyrannical thought symbols which dominate our life and actions.  This disengagement is not, however, the giving up of one enslaving thought habit and its substitution by another, as so often happens with those who practice mind discipline, or try to “be good”.  Nor is it what is popularly called “renunciation”, which is no renunciation at all, in the true sense of the word.  But it is rather to be conceived as the release from the tight grip of thought generally.

If I can come to an understanding why I am held by Sex, Money, Ambition, and so forth, then the waking up to the entrancement produces a relaxation all round in the compulsive forces of the mind, for the mechanism of enslavement is identical in each case.  Since all addictions have their roots deep in the mind, and have grown in strength as a direct result of our lack of understanding of thought, a clearer and sharper vision of the thought process in ourselves has at once a freeing effect on the mind.  It would therefore be true to say that “to understand the prison is to destroy the prison”.

The disengagement from the various driving forces will further induce the individual to cut out several of his unnecessary commitments, which will lead to a more relaxed life and give him time just “to sit and stare”. *

Thus far in this chapter we have dealt with the many varied aspects of thought, which were considered to be important for its understanding.  In the course of our discussion we have dealt with the birth of thought, its continuance, and we have dropped hints about the possibility of its ending.  We have seen that this ending is absolutely essential for the ending of sorrow.  In the final section of this study of thought we shall look particularly into the matter of its ending.

The Problem of Ending

Having seen that there is not a single psychological problem that cannot be resolved through thought,  I wish to rid myself of it; and so my question is: “how to end thought?”.  But is this stating the problem correctly?  Does not the “how” immediately lead to the continuation of thought?

So, obviously, this question is out; I must forget it completely and immediately, otherwise I shall create more food for thought.  Also out, as we have already seen, is the endeavor to end thought forcefully, for the only force I can apply is the force of thought itself.

This leaves me with only one thing, to remain with the thought but not in the thought.  This now is the crucial point upon which everything depends, to understand fully that there is literally all the difference in the world between direct perception of thought, and thinking along with the thought (which is to be absorbed in thought).  The two are mutually exclusive.  Since thought maintains itself only because of the blind driving force behind it, the perception of the thought process in action, and the seeing of how it is based on self-interest, insecurity, and so on, destroys its momentum.  (Compare the “paralysis” of the analytical mind, discussed on p. 47*)  Whereas thought leads to an “answer”, to no such answer, but to freedom, which is the cutting of continuity and so the destruction of thought.  

This is really the exact point at which the “spiritual life” begins.  Ordinarily these words are used very loosely, but in the author’s view the underlying state can be indicated fairly precisely.*  The spiritual life becomes only a reality the moment we step out of thought. Anything else is self-deception; it is merely the lay of the intellect, however much this may be disguised by the use of high-falutin terms.

So, if in meditation, we re-act to what is observed by producing more thought, at that moment we are lost to the life of the spirit, and back to the level of ideation. * Are not the newspapers full of solutions to the problems of an unhappy world, and is not everyone of them based on idea and so doomed to failure?  Even psychoanalysis, which “employs” perception (of repressed thought) as a means of purification, is concerned only with the perception of certain thought symbols within the framework of other socially well-established thought constructs; therefore it is still altogether within thought and so it can never lead to perfect freedom but only to an adjustment to Society.  But to adjust to Society, to “fit in” better, is, in a subtle way, to get more entangled.  Furthermore, because psychoanalysis proceeds within thought, that is within time, there is no end to it; one can go on everlastingly analyzing the dark recess of the Unconscious, with its many conflicts, but who is the analyser? Unless the analyser himself is totally free from darkness, he is not qualified for the job, because his analysis will reflect his own being and so inevitably introduce an error.

What we are concerned with here is the perception of the limitation and unreality (“emptiness”) of every kind of thought structure, which is to reject thought in toto, so that now even one thought will arise.  This frees one altogether from Society, yet at the same time maintaining normal relationships with that Society.  The stepping out of thought is therefore not a stepping out of Society; the latter could only be a reaction against Society, and the person who is free no longer has any need to react (“to be in the world, yet not of it”).

So what is required is to see the thought as thought, without merely going along with the thought, at the same time perceiving the subtle ways it touches on the interests of the ego.  That is all; this sounds simple but it is extremely difficult–or maybe “difficult” is not the right word because this implies effort, and one should rather say that it is highly elusive.  Perhaps our main difficulty in right meditation is this very habit of making effort, which is the first natural reaction when we try something new.  Only after having mastered something, do we seem to function effortlessly in its performance. 

Now in learning any technique on the material level, effort is obviously required because there we are concerned with the cultivation of memory, and with implanting a certain pattern of skill, of “know-how”, on the mind.  But this cannot hold true for meditation which is not mind training; perception and comprehension are always involuntary and therefore effortless.  Yet the habit is so strong, the structure of the mind is such, that effort always creeps in somehow.  In this connection the effort may take a very subtle form.  For example,, we become aware that in a personal relationship the attachment has begun to grow.  We may then be inclined to “watch” this relationship with a view to prevent the attachment from taking roots.  But even this implies a subtle sort of effort, does it not, for we have singled out this particular situation for our attention, which action represents a dualistic act of discrimination, which in itself binds.  Then what do we do?  This is hardly the right question, is it?--for the word “do” is not the correct operative term.  This should demonstrate to us once again that no single problem can be solved in isolation, on its own level.  Yet that is what everyone in this world is trying to do.  We seek to solve the “sexual problem”, the problem of war, of poverty, and so many others–without first solving the problem of man himself.  But the latter requires a total revolution in consciousness, and so it is much easier to fiddle with these individual problems, all on the level of words, and much less disturbing!  Only when there is a mindfulness in all directions, which is therefore choiceless, is there a release; and because it is directionless such mindfulness is completely effortless. 

Need for Passivity *

To do absolutely nothing is so essential in the spiritual life because “to do” and “to observe dispassionately” are mutually exclusive.  Because we are “doing” something all the time, in the process of re-action, we can never purely and simply look at anything; and if we do look, it is with one eye on the possible result of our action on the fact. Therefore the total significance of that fact eludes us, which is a pity.  For it is only through living totally, intensely and passionately with the facts–however “unpleasant”--that the transforming and liberating factor can work through the mind, and this will bring its own action which is not a re-action from thought.  

When there is a ruthless perception of facts without fancy, an observation no longer coloured by our desires, then a strange quietness comes into being.  In that quietness the usual ingoing movement from the outer to the inner, which is the acquisitive process of the ego, has come to an end; and in its place there is now a movement of a different order: an outgoing feeling, which may be the beginning of Love.  

So we have seen that total passivity is of the very highest importance, an essential factor, in the ending of thought.  Agitation in the mind there is and will be, but this only becomes pernicious when it is acted upon.  As long as there is agitation without re-action, the center remains unmoved, and there is no further accumulation of psychological memory; thus the energy of agitation must spend itself.  

The moment, however, thought is acted upon, reality (i.e., continuity) is given to the unreal (for psychological thought, being I-oriented, can never be the Real, which is neither personal nor impersonal).  This acting from thought, which is therefore re-action, ca be in the form of some physical action, leading to more “experiencing” and so to further thought; or, it can take the form of thought opposing the original thought (repression), superseding the original thought (escapism, sublimation), or increasing its momentum (indulgence).  However, whatever form the reaction takes, the result is always a further re-action; and this in turn will give rise to one more re-action, and so in ad infinitum.

Because of this mechanism, there is no chance at all for the agitation in the mind ever to come to a standstill.  This can only occur when the endless belt of thought images is ruthlessly intercepted and cut by the onset of meditation, that is when thought itself is passively directly perceived and exposed.  Then for the first time this thought–however socially unacceptable it may be–is left to its own devices, so that it does not give rise to re-action.  In this way only is real freedom possible.   

Freedom and Morality

Conventionally, absolute freedom is considered to be the possibility of unlimited, unfettered action and/or the total freedom of thought; but all this is really merely the opposite of slavery.  From our point of view, Freedom is neither the possibility of unlimited physical action, nor even the freedom of thinking, but it is the freedom from thinking (nor is it the freedom from any one particular thought, but all thought).  This Freedom is neither non-slavery nor slavery; (i.e., “total freedom” in the conventional sense) there may not lie Freedom at all. 

The totally revolutionary principle of the spiritual life thus lies in its non-interference with thought; this is the core of its difference from the conventionally “religious” life.  It follows that a society or community, which merely holds on to a moral or ethical code to live by, is fundamentally irreligious and, paradoxically, in a subtle way perpetuates that which it fights as “immoral” or “unethical”.  In fact, we can see that the very act of “moralizing” is a socially accepted way of vicariously indulging in the immorality, since, because it is a reaction to the immorality, is not free from it itself.   It is obviously not the author’s intention to deny or decry moral codes, but it is shown here that without anything further, i.e., without meditation, they are less than useless, for all life is then firmly imprisoned within the opposites, that is, within thought.  Therefore such a society will always live in the unreal, and it can never know what Love is.

Meditation and the Tyranny of Thought

The vision that all is empty, our whole world being within and from thought, and that thought itself–if we allow it–will everlastingly move from despair to hope and from hope to despair–this perception alone wipes away our denseness, worries, and provides the most wonderful mental tonic in the world.  It brings with it a sense of freedom which lifts us completely out of our usual troubled existence; this is pure Joy and however short-lived it may be, one feels quite literally “out of this world”, to use a much abused expression (for normally, when using it, we are very much tied up with things worldly).  However, for it to be of full value one should come to it standing in the midst of life, rather than in the “splendid isolation” of physical aloneness (which could betray a withdrawal from all relationship).

But let the reader experiment; if he does this and remains alertly passive, he will know what it is to meditate.  Is not this an experiment, which the world today needs more urgently than any amount of experimentation in scientific or technological laboratories, however spectacular and however expensive?  In a sense, of course, we may consider meditation the most supremely scientific of experiments, for is is not the most “fundamental” of them all?  Moreover, it is an investigation in which each of us needs to be a pioneer, in the truest sense of the word, there being no falling back upon the findings of others, no easy referring to text-books.

And the “results” of meditation, are they not much more far-reaching than any scientific project, whether it be going to the moon or the discovery of fundamental particles?  Whatever we do in science, we cannot get away from the “observer” who measures and correlates, and by his very presence vitiates, to a cern extent, the experiment.  On the human level, we cannot escape from the “self” that struggles to achieve and suffers in that process, but in meditation the limits of space and time–and so of the “self”--are altogether transcended.  Thus comes into being a different state of consciousness and so a different mode in which man functions. 

If the reader has come thus far, and experienced all this in his own meditation, let him be warned for the final trick which the mind can–and, undoubtedly, will–play on him at this stage.  It is, that thought will immediately endeavor to appropriate the “stepping out of thought” for its own purposes, since it is now literally fighting for its life!  That is, it will not mind when the thinker extracts himself from a painful situation by ending thought, but when pleasure comes along, it will encourage the thinker once again to stay within thought in order after all not to miss the many benefits and delights that only thought can offer him.  Perhaps this last snare prepared by thought has been appropriately symbolized in different religions by the accounts of temptations offered to the Savior by the Devil.

So, how do we measure up to this tricky situation?  It weems that ultimately we have the choice between the pleasures and the excitements of emotional involvement afforded by thought, and the lack of all that but the freedom which is born when we have died to thought.  It is again the Law of INertia, the magnetism of pleasure, that holds us back from attaining psychological death.  Even spiritually, man wants to have his cake and eat it.  Although we used the word “choice”, this is somewhat misleading, because in actual fact there is no choice–and if there were, who is it that chooses?  Would it not be thought that is the chooser?  This process has to work itself out and will only do so when there is the fullest understanding of the emptiness of all the various movements possible within thought; the recognition that there is no other way and no compromise, because–one might say–Nature rigidly applies the either/or principle.  According to this, something either is a fact or it is not, which leaves no scope for the mind’s usual bargaining and compromising.  After all, one does not bargain with Death, or with Sex, does one?  However much we like to “suppress” or cover up certain disturbing facts, they are there; and no amount of cerebral activity is going to make the slightest difference to them. 

It seems to me that, if it came to the point, very few people who profess an interest in the matters discussed in this work, would be prepared to live in this utterly revolutionary way.  To “take an interest” is something, but it is not enough; as Krishnamurti once said “it is not a matter of attending a few Talks”, nor is it a matter of continuing to read the latest books on Zen, orgainzing discussion groups, and so on.  What matters only is that we are sufficiently serious about these things, and such an attitude necessarily involves a clash with Society, thereby even further strengthening the forces of inertia.  

To be deeply serious means to thin fundamentally, and to be a “fundamentalist” in the proper sense of the word, is so very difficult because it requires the utmost simplicity.  To listen to the words such as God, “Buddhahood”, Truth, Live, Death, and to realize that each is just a thought–one only out of an infinite possible number of thoughts–and nothing more, not to be used as a basis for philosophy-building, but just left alone as thought or concept, requires a simplicity of mind which almost borders on idiocy.  This seems almost impossible with most of us,, because theWord holds an extraordinary power, it hypnotizes us so that we must react, we must spawn more thought.  The momentum of the mind is thus maintained by the continuous impetus of the Word; and so long as this mechanical process is not understood and therefore unbroken, there can be no meditation.  But to take just one idea, one thought, and to look at it, to play with it, to go into it thoroughly, so that its whole background is seen in relation to the thinker–which can only be done when there is the freedom from thought–that is true mediation.  That brings with it its own clarity, a unique blessing, which no amount of thinking-activity, however subtle or however noble can give us.  

However, the truth with most of us is that we live wholly within thought, and the saddest part of it is that we are not even aware how “intellectual” (in the sense of “cerebral”) we are.  When we think of love, it is only another thought-habit.  We love “because of”, but never “regardless” or in “spite of”.  To think of the beloved is to us love.  The beloved is simply a picture of an idealized entity that we worship.  We are in love with this thought-structure because it is complementary to the thought-structure which represents our own inadequate “me”, and so it gives us a feeling of security and comfort.  But the moment the other refuses to give us what we want or the idealized picture of the beloved is seen to be not according to reality, it crashes and love is no more.  Thus the personal and exclusive love relationship is at present one of the main avenues through which thought pursues happiness and fulfillment.  But happiness can only be when love is no longer thought, and thought is no longer seeking continuity; that is, when we no more depend for our happiness on another, or are crushed by circumstances.  

18. Thinking about Thought

It s