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Contents

Title Page

Introductory Note

PART I: SHORT PIECES

The Lake

To Die to Every Yesterday

The Garden

The Problem of Living

The Oak Tree

Freedom is Order

Intelligence and Instant Action

The River

What is Relationship?

The Mediocre Mind

To be Alone

The Pitcher Can Never be Filled

The Nature of Humility

Meditation and Love

Meditation and Experience

To a Young Man

Love is not Thought

What Does Relationship Mean?

Beauty is Dangerous

PART II: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Meditation and the Timeless Moment

Fear and Confusion

The State of not Knowing

Love, Sex and the Religious Life

A Television Interview

The Capacity to Listen

An Investigation into Friendship

What is Beauty?

Freedom from Attachments

If One is the World

Aggression

Will and Desire

Where Knowledge is not Needed

Do not Ask for Help

The Aim of the Krishnamurti Schools

Standing against Society

How to Meet Life

The Demands of Society

PART III: TALKS

What is a Religious Mind?

The Problems of Youth

A Quality of Mind That Knows No Separation

Love Cannot be Taught

The Understanding of Sorrow

The Unburdened Mind

The Light of Compassion

On Meditation

Freedom

Beyond Thought and Time

Time, Action and Fear

Is There a Meaning to Life?

A Quiet Mind

The Ending of Sorrow is Love

Beauty, Sorrow and Love

Introductory Note

The contents of this book are taken from the Krishnamurti Foundation Bulletins. The great majority of items were first published in the Bulletin of the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust in England, a few originally appeared in the Indian and American Bulletins, and then were reprinted in the English Bulletin. Issue numbers referred to are those of the English Bulletin.

The book has been divided into three parts. PART I consists of sixteen short pieces dictated by Krishnamurti. All but three of them are undated; they have therefore been arranged in the order in which they appeared in the Bulletins. This part also includes three longer, dated pieces written by Krishnamurti.

PART II contains Krishnamurti’s answers to questions put to him at the end of his talks or at small discussions. Since these are dated, except for two, they appear chronologically, irrespective of the dates of the Bulletins in which they were published.

PART III consists of talks by Krishnamurti in Switzerland, India, England and California. These, also being dated, have been placed chronologically.

PART I

Short Pieces

The Lake

The lake was very deep, with soaring cliffs on both sides. You could see the other shore, wooded, with new spring leaves; and that side of the lake was steeper, perhaps more dense with foliage, and heavily wooded. The water was placid that morning and its colour was blue-green. It is a beautiful lake. There were swans, ducks and an occasional boat with passengers.

As you stood on the bank, in a well-kept park, you were very close to the water. It was not polluted at all, and its texture and beauty seemed to enter into you. You could smell it – the soft fragrant air, the green lawn – and you felt one with it, moving with the slow current, the reflections, and the deep quietness of the water.

The strange thing was that you felt such a great sense of affection, not for anything or for anyone, but the fullness of what may be called love. The only thing that matters is to probe into the very depth of it, not with the silly little mind with its endless mutterings of thought, but with silence. Silence is the only means, or instrument, that can penetrate into something that escapes the mind which is so contaminated.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

There, as you were standing on the bank watching the beauty of the water, all human problems and institutions, man’s relationship to man, which is society – all would find their right place if silently you could penetrate into this thing called love.

We have talked a great deal about it. Every young man says he loves some woman, the priest his god, the mother her children, and of course the politician plays with it. We have really spoilt the word and loaded it with meaningless substance – the substance of our own narrow little selves. In this narrow little context we try to find the other thing, and painfully return to our everyday confusion and misery.

But there it was, on the water, all about you, in the leaf, and in the duck that was trying to swallow a large piece of bread, in the lame woman who went by. It was not a romantic identification or a cunning rationalized verbalization. But it was there, as factual as that car, or that boat.

It is the only thing which will give an answer to all our problems. No, not an answer, for then there will be no problems. We have problems of every description and we try to solve them without that love, and so they multiply and grow. There is no way to approach it, or to hold it, but sometimes, if you will stand by the roadside, or by the lake, watching a flower or a tree, or the farmer tilling his soil, and if you are silent, not dreaming, not collecting daydreams, or weary, but with silence in its intensity, then perhaps it will come to you.

When it comes, do not hold it, do not treasure it as an experience. Once it touches you, you will never be the same again. Let that operate, and not your greed, your anger or your righteous social indignation. It is really quite wild, untamed, and its beauty is not respectable at all.

But we never want it, for we have a feeling that it might be too dangerous. We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves – with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely. In the cage you can have anarchy or order, which in turn gives way to disorder; and this has been going on for many centuries – exploding, and falling back, changing the patterns of the social structure, perhaps ending poverty here or there. But if you place all these as the most essential, then you will miss the other.

Be alone sometimes, and if you are lucky it might come to you, on a falling leaf, or from that distant solitary tree in an empty field.

From BULLETIN 1, 1968

To Die to Every Yesterday

Death is only for those who have, and for those who have a resting-place. Life is a movement in relationship and attachment; the denial of this movement is death. Have no shelter outwardly or inwardly; have a room, or a house, or a family, but don’t let it become a hiding-place, an escape from yourself.

The safe harbour which your mind has made in cultivating virtue, in the superstition of belief, in cunning capacity or in activity, will inevitably bring death. You can’t escape from death if you belong to this world, to the society of which you are. The man who died next door or a thousand miles away is you. He has been preparing for years with great care to die, like you. Like you he called living a strife, a misery, or a jolly good show. But death is always there watching, waiting. But the one who dies each day is beyond death.

To die is to love. The beauty of love is not in past remembrances or in the images of tomorrow. Love has no past and no future; what has, is memory, which is not love. Love with its passion is just beyond the range of society, which is you. Die, and it is there.

Meditation is a movement in and of the unknown. You are not there, only the movement. You are too petty or too great for this movement. It has nothing behind it or in front of it. It is that energy which thought-matter cannot touch. Thought is perversion for it is the product of yesterday; it is caught in the toils of centuries and so it is confused, unclear. Do what you will, the known cannot reach out for the unknown. Meditation is the dying to the known.

Out of silence look and listen. Silence is not the ending of noise; the incessant clamour of the mind and heart does not end in silence; it is not a product, a result of desire, nor is it put together by will. The whole of consciousness is a restless, noisy movement within the borders of its own making. Within this border silence or stillness is but the momentary ending of the chatter; it is the silence touched by time. Time is memory and to it silence is short or long; it can measure. Give to it space and continuity, and then it becomes another toy. But this is not silence. Everything put together by thought is within the area of noise, and thought in no way can make itself still. It can build an image of silence and conform to it, worshipping it, as it does with so many other images it has made, but its formula of silence is the very negation of it; its symbols are the very denial of reality. Thought itself must be still for silence to be. Silence is always now, as thought is not. Thought, always being old, cannot possibly enter into that silence which is always new. The new becomes the old when thought touches it. Out of this silence, look and talk. The true anonymity is out of this silence and there is no other humility. The vain are always vain, though they put on the garment of humility, which makes them harsh and brittle. But out of this silence the word ’love’ has a wholly different meaning. This silence is not out there but it is where the noise of the total observer is not.

Innocence alone can be passionate. The innocent have no sorrow, no suffering, though they have had a thousand experiences. It is not the experiences that corrupt the mind but what they leave behind, the residue, the scars, the memories. These accumulate, pile up one on top of the other, and then sorrow begins. This sorrow is time. Where time is, innocency is not. Passion is not born of sorrow. Sorrow is experience, the experience of everyday life, the life of agony and fleeting pleasures, fears and certainties. You cannot escape from experiences, but they need not take root in the soil of the mind. These roots give rise to problems, conflicts and constant struggle. There is no way out of this but to die each day to every yesterday. The clear mind alone can be passionate. Without passion you cannot see the breeze among the leaves or the sunlight on the water. Without passion there is no love.

Seeing is the doing. The interval between seeing and doing is the waste of energy.

Love can only be when thought is still. This stillness can in no way be manufactured by thought. Thought can only put together images, formulas, ideas, but this stillness can never be touched by thought. Thought is always old, but love is not.

The physical organism has its own intelligence, which is made dull through habits of pleasure. These habits destroy the sensitivity of the organism, and this lack of sensitivity makes the mind dull. Such a mind may be alert in a narrow and limited direction and yet be insensitive. The depth of such a mind is measurable and is caught by images and illusions. Its very superficiality is its only brightness. A light and intelligent organism is necessary for meditation. The interrelationship between the meditative mind and its organism is a constant adjustment in sensitivity; for meditation needs freedom. Freedom is its own discipline. In freedom alone can there be attention. To be aware of inattention is to be attentive. Complete attention is love. It alone can see, and the seeing is the doing.

Desire and pleasure end in sorrow; and love has no sorrow. What has sorrow is thought – thought which gives continuity to pleasure. Thought nourishes pleasure, giving strength to it. Thought is everlastingly seeking pleasure, and so inviting pain. The virtue which thought cultivates is the way of pleasure and in it there is effort and achievement. The flowering of goodness is not in the soil of thought but in freedom from sorrow. The ending of sorrow is love.

From BULLETIN 4, 1969

The Garden

It was a very large garden of several acres just outside a sprawling town in the suburbs. There were very large trees and deep shadows – tamarind trees, mangoes, palms and flowering trees. There was colour everywhere, and a pond with lilies in it. And there were newly planted seedlings that would grow into great towering trees. The garden was surrounded by broken barbed wire and one had to chase out goats that wandered in and, occasionally, a cow or two.

The house was large, not too convenient and the room overlooked a lawn which needed watering twice a day, for the sun was too strong for the tender grass. And there were always birds – parrots, minahs, tits, crows, and a large speckled bird with a long tail which used to come and pick at the berries, and a very bright yellow bird which would flash in and out among the leaves.

It was quiet in that garden, but every morning around half past four there would be singing, radios blaring from across the river and snatches of chanting in Sanskrit – because it was a festive month. This chanting was beautiful, but the rest of the music was rather trying. One afternoon, a few hundred yards away in the poor quarter, they were playing a gramophone with cinema music, turned on as loudly as possible. It went on until the evening; it reached the climax at about nine o’clock.

There was a political rally and there were neon lights blazing and a political speaker was holding forth. Apparently he was promising the most extravagant things. He was as fickle as the audience, who would vote according to their fancies. It was really an entertainment, lasting for several hours.

Again in the early morning the religious music would begin; you saw the Southern Cross over the palm trees: and there was silence on the land.

The politician was seeking power for his party through himself. The desire to dominate, to compel and to be obeyed seems so close to man. You see this in a small child and in a so-called mature man – with all its subtlety, cruelty and ugliness. The dictators, the priests and the head of the family, whether it be a man or a woman, seem to demand this obedience. They assume the authority which they have usurped or have been given by tradition, or which they have because they happen to be older. Everywhere this pattern is repeated.

To possess and to be possessed is to give in to this structure of power. This desire for power, position and prestige is encouraged from childhood through comparison and measurement. From this springs conflict, the struggle to achieve, to become a success and to fulfil. And the man who comes with so much respect is showing disrespect to others. The executive with his big car receives respect, and he, in his turn, has great respect for the bigger car, the bigger house, the bigger income.

It is the same in the religious structure of priesthood and also in the hierarchy of gods. Revolutions try to break this down but the same pattern is soon repeated with the dictators on top. The showing of humility becomes an ugly thing in this way of life.

Obedience is violence, and humility is not related to violence. Why should a human being have this fear, respect and disrespect? He is afraid of life with all its uncertainties and anxieties, and he is afraid of the gods of his own mind. It is the fear that leads to power and to aggression.

The intellect is aware of this fear but does nothing about it, and so it builds a society, a church, where this fear is nourished and sustained, with its many escapes. Fear cannot be overcome by thought, for thought has bred fear. Only when thought is silent is there a possibility of fear coming to an end. The man who has power and is competitive obviously does not have love, though he may have a family and children whom he claims to love.

It is really a world of great sorrow, and one must be an outsider to love. To be an outsider is to be alone, uncommitted.

From BULLETIN 5, 1970

The Problem of Living

MALIBU, CALIFORNIA, 3 MARCH 1970

The mountains were full of solitude. It had been raining off and on for several days and the mountains were green with light. They had become almost blue, and in their fullness they were making the heavens rich and beautiful. There was great silence, which was almost like the sound of the breakers when you walked on the beach over the wet sand. Near the ocean there was no silence except in your heart, but among the mountains, on that winding path, silence was everywhere. The noise of the town, the roar of the traffic and the thunder of waves couldn’t be heard.

One is always puzzled about action, and it gets more and more bewildering when one sees the complexity of life. There are so many things that should be done and there are things that need immediate action. The world around us is changing rapidly – its values, its morality, its wars and peace. One is utterly lost before the immediacy of action. But yet one is always asking oneself what one should do confronted with the enormous problem of living. One has lost faith in most things – in the leaders, in the teachers, in beliefs – and one often wishes there were some clear principle that would light a path, or an authority to tell one what to do. But we know in our hearts that this would be something dead and gone. Invariably we come back to asking ourselves what it is all about and what we must do.

As one can observe, we have always acted from a centre – a centre which contracts and expands. Sometimes it is a very small circle and at other times it is comprehensive, exclusive and utterly satisfying. But it is always a centre of grief and sorrow, of fleeting joys and misery, the enchanting or the painful past. It is a centre which most of us know consciously or unconsciously, and from this centre we act and have our roots. The question of what to do, now or tomorrow, is always asked from the centre and the reply must always be recognizable by the centre. Having received the reply either from another or from ourselves, we proceed to act according to the limitation of the centre. It is like an animal tethered to a post, its action depending on the length of the tether. This action is never free and so there is always pain, mischief and confusion.

Realizing this, the centre says to itself: how am I to be free, free to live happily, completely, openly, and act without sorrow or remorse? But it is still the centre asking the question. The centre is the past. The centre is the ’me’ with its selfish activities which knows action only in terms of reward and punishment, achievement or failure, and its motives, causes and effects. It is caught in this chain and the chain is the centre and the prison.

There is another action which comes when there is a space without a centre, a dimension in which there is no cause and effect. From this, living is action. Here, having no centre, whatever is done is free, joyous, without pain or pleasure. This space and freedom is not a result of effort and achievement, but when the centre ends the other is.

But we will ask how can the centre end, what am I to do to end it, what disciplines, what sacrifices, what great efforts am I to make? None. Only see without choice the activities of the centre, not as an observer, not as an outsider looking inward, but just observe without the censor. Then you may say: I cannot do it, I am always looking with the eyes of the past. Be aware, then, of looking with the eyes of the past, and remain with that. Don’t try to do anything about it; be simple and know that whatever you try to do will only strengthen the centre and is a response of your own desire to escape.

So there is no escape, no effort and no despair. Then you can see the full meaning of the centre and the immense danger of it, and that is enough.

From BULLETIN 6, 1970

The Oak Tree

The oak tree that morning was very quiet. It was an enormous tree in the wood; it had a huge trunk and its branches were well above the ground, spread out in all directions – quiet, stable and immovable. It was part of the earth like the other trees that surrounded it. The others would be shouting with the wind, playing with it, and every leaf would belong to the wind. The small leaves of the oak tree played with it too, but there was great dignity and a depth of life that you felt as you watched. Ivy was clinging to many of the trees, going right up to the top of the highest branches, but the oak tree had none of it. Even the pines had this clinging ivy, which, if allowed, would destroy them. And there in that grove were seven or eight tall and massive redwoods which must have been planted centuries ago. They were surrounded by rhododendrons, and in the springtime the grove was a sanctuary not only for birds and rabbits, pheasants and small animals, but also for human beings who cared to go there. You could sit by the hour quietly with the daffodils and the azaleas and look at the blue sky through the leaves. It was an enchanting place and all these massive trees were your friends, if you wanted friends.

It was a place of rare beauty, quiet, isolated, and people hadn’t spoilt it. It is strange how human beings desecrate nature with their killing, with their noise and vulgarity. But here, with the redwoods and the oak and all the spring flowers, it was really a sanctuary for the quiet mind, for a mind that is as stable and firm as those trees – not from some belief, some dogma or in some dedicated purpose; the free mind doesn’t need these. Looking at those trees that were so extraordinarily still on that afternoon – for you couldn’t hear a machine – the road was far away and the nearby house was quiet; there was an utter silence. Even the breeze had stopped and not a single leaf stirred. The new spring grass was a delicate green; you hardly dared touch it. The earth, the trees and the pheasant that watched you were indivisible. It was all part of that extraordinary movement of life and living, the depth of which thought could never touch. The intellect may spin a lot of theories about it, build a philosophic structure around it, but the description is not the described. If you sat quietly, far away from all the past, then perhaps you would feel this; not you as a separate human being feeling it, but rather because the mind was so utterly still that there was an immense awareness without the division of the observer.

And if you wandered away a little distance there was a farm with huge pigs – mountains of flesh, pink, snorting, ready for the market. They said it was a very good money-making business. You would often see a lorry come up a winding, rough farm road and there would be fewer pigs the next day. ’But we must live’, they said, and the beauty of the earth is forgotten.

From BULLETIN 8, 1970

Freedom is Order

If you are a city dweller perhaps you have never experienced the strange menace of an unfrequented wood. It was a deer sanctuary, quite close to the ugly city with its noise, dirt, squalor and overcrowded streets and houses. Very few people came to this wood. One very rarely came across anybody except a villager or two, and these were quiet people, not conscious of their own importance. Worn out by work, retiring, they were thin and rather starved, and had pain in their eyes.

This sanctuary was surrounded by high posts with barbed wire, and the deer in it were as shy as the snakes. They would see you come along and gently disappear into the bushes. There were spotted deer, full of gentle charm, with infinite curiosity, but their fear of man was stronger than their curiosity. Some of them were quite big. Then there were black ones with horns that curled straight up. They were even more shy. And beyond the fence there were others who were quite tame. They would let you come quite close. Of course you couldn’t touch them, but they were not really afraid. They would stop several minutes to look at you with their ears straight up and their short tails switching. Those inside the enclosure would gather of an evening in a little meadow. You would see perhaps a hundred or so. In this wood nothing was killed by man, neither the birds nor the snakes and, of course, not the deer.

One rarely saw the snakes but there were plenty of them there – the very dangerous varieties and also the harmless. One day, as we were walking on a little mound made by the ants, we saw a snake. We went up to it, quite close, perhaps a couple of feet away. It was a large, long snake, shining in the evening light, its black tongue shooting back and forth. Some labourers passing by said that it was a cobra and that we should get away from it.

The first evening that we were in this sanctuary the strange menace of the wood was felt very strongly. The sun had set, and it had become quite dark. You felt this menace enclosing you, and it went with you along the path. But the second and third day you were quite welcome there.

The sane need no discipline; only the unbalanced need the restraint, the resistance, and are tempted. The sane are aware of their desires, their urges, and temptation does not even occur to them. The healthy are strong without their knowing it. It is only the weak who know their own weakness, and so enticement and the struggle against temptation come. There really is no temptation if you keep your eyes open – not only the mental eye but also the sensory eye. The inattentive become entangled in the problems which their inattention breeds. It does not mean that the sane and the healthy have no desires. To them it is not a problem. The problem arises only when desire is made into pleasure by thought.

It is this search for pleasure against which man sets up resistance, for he is aware that there is pain involved in it, or else the environment, the culture, has bred into him the fear of continued pleasure.

Resistance in any form is violence and all our life is based on this resistance. Resistance then becomes discipline. The word ’discipline’, like so many other words, is heavily loaded, interpreted according to the various families, communities, cultures. Discipline means learning. Learning does not mean a drill, an imitation, conformity. Learning about behaviour, the way of action in relationship, is the freedom to look at yourself, at your conduct.

But this seeing of yourself as you are is not possible if freedom is denied. So freedom is necessary to learn about anything, about that deer, the snake, and yourself.

Military drilling and conformity to the priest are the same, and obedience is resistance to freedom. It is strange that we haven’t gone above and beyond the narrow field of suppression, control, obedience, and the authority of the book. For in all this the mind can never flourish. How can anything flourish within the darkness of fear?

But yet, order one must have; but the order of discipline, of drill, is the death of love. One must be punctual, considerate. But this consideration, if it is compelled, becomes superficial, a formal politeness. Order is not to be found in obedience. There is absolute order, as in mathematics, when the chaos of obedience is understood. It is not order first and then freedom later, but freedom is order.

To be desireless is to be disorderly, but to understand desire, with its pleasure, is to be orderly.

Surely, in all this, the one thing that does bring about an exquisite order – without the will, which arranges, complies, asserts – is love. And without love the established order is anarchy.

You cannot cultivate love, so you cannot possibly cultivate order. You cannot drill love into a human being. Aggression comes out of this drill, and fear.

So what is one to do? You see all this; you see the infinite mischief man is doing to man. You don’t see how extraordinarily positive it is to negate; negation of the false is the truth. It is not that you replace negation with truth – but the very act of denial is the truth. The seeing is the doing, and you don’t have to do anything more.

From BULLETIN 10, 1974

Intelligence and Instant Action

It was very early in the morning and the valley was full of silence. The sun was not yet up behind the hills and the snow peaks were still dark. For many days now the sun had been clear, strong and rather hot. It wouldn’t last, and yet this morning again the sky was very blue, the sun began to touch the snow peak, and to the west there were dark clouds. The air was clean. At that altitude the mountains seemed very near. They stood aloof, alone, and there was both that strange feeling of nearness and a sense of vast distance. As you looked at them you were aware of the age of the earth and your own impermanence. You passed away and they remained, the mountains, the hills, the green fields and the river. They would always be there, and you with your worries, your insufficiencies and sorrow would pass away.

It is always this impermanency that has made man seek something beyond the hills, investing it with permanency, with divinity, with beauty, which he in himself has not. But this doesn’t answer his agonies, allay his sorrow or mischief. On the contrary it gives new life to his violence and cruelties. His gods, his utopias, his worship of the State do not end his suffering.

The magpie on the fir tree had seen the little mouse hurrying across the road, and in a second it was caught and carried off. There was only a sound of distant cowbells and of a stream rushing down the valley, but slowly the quiet morning was lost in the noise of trucks and a hammering across the road where a new house was going up.

Is there individuality at all? Or only a collective mass of varied forms of conditioning? After all, the so-called individual is the world, the culture, the social and economic environment. He is the world and the world is him; and all the mischief and misery begin when he separates himself from the world and pursues his particular talent or ambition, inclination and pleasure. We don’t seem to realize deeply that we are the world, not only at the obvious level, but also at the core of our being. In fulfilling a particular talent we seem to think we are expressing ourselves as individuals and, resisting every form of encroachment, insist on its fulfilment. It is not the talent, the pleasure or the will that make us individuals. The will, whatever little talent one has, and the drive of pleasure are part of this whole structure of the world.

We are not only slaves of the culture in which we have been brought up; we are also slaves to the vast cloud of misery and sorrow of all humanity, to the vastness of its confusion, violence and brutality. We never seem to pay attention to the accumulated sorrow of man. Nor are we aware of the terrible violence which has been gathering generation after generation. We are concerned rightly with the outward change or reformation of the social structure with its injustice, wars, poverty, but we try to change it either through violence or the slow way of legislation. In the meantime there is poverty, war, hunger and the mischief that exists between man and man. We seem totally to neglect paying attention to these vast accumulated clouds which man has been gathering for centuries upon centuries – sorrow, violence, hatred and the artificial differences of religion and race. These are there, as the outward structure of society is there, as real, as vital, as effective. We neglect these hidden accumulations and concentrate on the outward reformation. This division is perhaps the greatest cause of our decline.

What is important is to consider life not as an inner and outer, but as a whole, as a total undivided movement. Then action has quite a different meaning, for then it is not partial. It is fragmented or partial action that adds to the cloud of misery. The good is not the opposite of evil. The good has no relation to evil, and the good cannot be pursued. It flowers only when suffering is not.

How is man then to extricate himself from this confusion, violence and sorrow? Certainly not through the operation of the will with all its factors and determination, resistance and strife. The perception or the understanding of this is intelligence. It is this intelligence that puts away all the combinations of sorrow, violence and strife. It is like seeing a danger. Then there is instant action – not the action of will which is the product of thought. Thought is not intelligence. Intelligence can use thought, but when thought contrives to capture this intelligence for its own uses, then it becomes cunning, mischievous, destructive.

So intelligence is neither yours nor mine. It doesn’t belong to the politician, the teacher or the saviour. This intelligence is not measurable. It is really a state of nothingness.

From BULLETIN 11, 1971

The River

AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND, MAY 1968

The river was especially wide here, deep and clean. Higher up was the very ancient city, perhaps one of the oldest in the world. But it was a mile or so away, and all the filth of the town seemed to have been cleansed by the river, and here the waters were clean, especially in mid-stream. On this side of the bank there were a lot of buildings, not particularly beautiful, but on the other side was freshly sown winter wheat, for the river rises twenty or thirty feet during the rainy season and so the soil on both banks is rich – and beyond the banks were villages, trees and fields of wheat and a kind of nourishing grain.

It was beautiful country, open, flat and spreading to the horizon. The trees especially were very old – the tamarind, the mango – and in the evening, just as the sun was setting, there would come upon the land a sense of extraordinary peace – a benediction which you never find in any church or temple.

On this side of the river bank there were four sannyasis, monks, each selling his own wares – gods. They were shouting and a crowd gathered round each of them. But the one who shouted most, repeated Sanskrit words and was covered with beads and other insignia of his profession, attracted most people, and presently you saw the other monks slip away, leaving only this one with his gods, chants and rosaries.

Imagination and romanticism deny love, for love is its own eternity. Man has sought through various gods, ideologies and hopes, something that is not bound by time. The birth of a new baby is not the indication of something eternal. Life comes and goes. There is death, there is suffering and all the mischief that man can make, and this movement of change, decay and birth is still within the cycle of time.

Time is thought; and thought is the outcome of the past. That which has continuity – the cause which produces the effect and the effect which becomes the cause in turn – is part of this movement of time. In this trap of time man has been caught and he uses every device of romance and imagination to bring about a counterfeit of what he calls eternity. And out of this comes the desire, with its pleasure, for immortality, a deathless state which he hopes to experience through the images of the mind.

Religions have offered a counterfeit of the real. The most earnest are aware of all this and of the mischief that has come through the false. There is a state which is not imagination or romantic fancy, which is not of time nor the product of thought and experience. But to come upon it, all the counterfeit coins which we have treasured must be thrown away – buried so deeply that another cannot find them. For the other thinks that he must go through those things which you have thrown away, and that is why what you throw away must never be discovered by another. For out of this comes imitation, and false coins are minted. To deny them needs no effort, no strong will nor the attraction of something greater; you put them away very simply because you see their futility, their danger and their inherent nuisance value and vulgarity.

The mind cannot manufacture the thing called eternity – as it cannot cultivate love. Nor can eternity be discovered by a mind that is seeking it. And the mind that is not seeking it is a wasted mind. The mind is a current, very deep at the centre and very shallow at the periphery – like the river that has a strong current in the middle and quiet waters at its banks.

But the deep current has the volume of memory behind it, and this memory is the continuity that passes the town, that gets sullied, that becomes clear again. The volume of memory gives the strength, the drive, the aggression and the refinement. It is this deep memory that knows itself to be ashes of the past, and it is this memory that has to come to an end.

There is no method to end it, no coin with which to buy a new state. The seeing of all this is the ending of it. It is only when this vast volume ends that there is a new beginning. The word is not the real; the measurement of the word denies the actual.

From BULLETIN 12, 1971–2

What is Relationship?

The announcement said that the flight had not yet left Milan because of fog and would we all wait patiently for an hour or more; and we waited. We were all going to Rome and there was a large crowd in that waiting-room, the very smart, the long-haired ones and the short-haired; a boy had his arm around a girl, completely oblivious to all the others, and another boy with a guitar began to strum on it. Some smoked and there was considerable drinking. It was hot in the room and there was a strong smell of cheap scent.

What is relationship? What relationship have that boy and girl, or that smart woman with her husband, that older woman with her son who looked bored and was being taken abroad to be shown the ancient towns of Italy? How can there be relationship between a man and a woman, or anybody, if one is ambitious, self-absorbed in that ambition, utterly self-centred? You can see the hardness in the faces of those whose whole activities go round the ’me’ and the ’you’. There may be a physical contact, and probably all relationship, the superficial or the so-called deep, remains there. How can you be related to another if you are suspicious, if you think you are always right and never admit the feeling of being wrong? That man with ancient pride of race or imagined importance, what can his relationship be except physical or superficial? How can two neurotic people, living in the same house, calling themselves husband and wife, have any kind of relationship? There are couples seemingly happy together who have grown close through trouble, sorrow and pain, with many regrets and failures – you would say that they were happy in their relationship, both physical and otherwise, but how can one have any relationship with the other if the ’me’ is all-important, if one is jealous, arrogant, the other yielding? Obviously, good relationship cannot exist with any of this.

There are people who are completely absorbed in each other, who do things together with very few outside interests, satisfied to live in the same room, not going out of an evening. Such relationship is perhaps very unusual, but life isn’t just good relationship. It is something much more, vastly beyond the self-satisfying movement of happy relationship. To be really related to another is possible only when ambition, suspicion, competition, the sense of possession, with all their bitterness, anger and frustrations, are totally absent.

Such relationship is rare, but without that rarity life is caught in trivialities. Life includes death, love and the understanding of pleasure, and something far beyond all these. The ’truth’ of the analyst or the myth in which the religious people wallow has obviously nothing to do with reality. Without coming upon that reality, however good the relationship may be, it must remain superficial, casual, or yielding and resisting. Without that sense of the beauty of the real, relationship becomes inevitably a narrowing process.

But the people in the waiting-room, bored, annoyed at the delay, would not want any other kind of relationship than that which they had.

13, 1972