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BR74S4 - The brain, images in relationship, yoga
Brockwood Park, UK - 15 October 1974
Seminar 4



0:01 This is J. Krishnamurti’s 4th seminar with scientists at Brockwood Park, 1974.
0:14 Dr Karl Pribram: There are several things I want to talk about, that have happened in the last five to ten years.
0:23 By way of introduction, I might say that this idea of bringing Eastern, so-called mystical, thought together with biological knowledge and psychological knowledge in the Western world, is a very active field of endeavour, certainly around my university.
0:45 People are, for instance, looking into the bio-chemistry of some of the tantra doctrines and really exploring the possibility that, for instance, the pineal secretions do in fact control the pituitary secretions and therefore that the pineal is a master-gland of the master-gland, as it were and things of this sort, so that many very detailed studies are going on.
1:13 My own entrée into this whole field is somewhat different; it’s a little bit like David Bohm’s, that we’ve come at it from our own discipline.
1:30 I discovered Eastern philosophy, as it were, after my own science had, in a way, pushed me to a certain point and the need was to find out whether there was anything in other fields to support what I was finding in the laboratory.
1:55 And so I’m going to talk about two things: perception and knowledge. And with regard to perception, most of what I have to say deals with experiments in my field, some of which I’ve done but mostly other people’s work, and with regard to knowledge, some of the things that we’ve discovered in our own laboratory.
2:18 The important facts about brain function in perception – the critical fact – is that an input from the sense organs becomes distributed across the extent of the cortex to which that input system projects.
2:39 And this has caused an awful lot of difficulty in understanding just what goes on. The initial experiments were that one could remove big chunks of cortex and nothing would happen.
2:53 One would have to remove ninety percent, ninety-eight percent of the cortex and still the perceptual functions seem to be intact.
3:03 Now, if we were dealing with a random net type of organisation that would be understandable – if you take an highly interconnected net and have an input to it, that input could, at least logically, be distributed all over that network – but the brain organisation isn’t in the form of a random net.
3:29 It’s a highly specific, parallel processing system, with some convergences and divergences but basically a parallel processing system, which has at certain levels across it some interconnections but they’re not random; they’re lateral connections, sort of – if I can use my hands here – it goes across the input which I’ve drawn on the board in blue, if you pay attention to the blue parts of the diagram there.
4:02 So there are places where there are connections across these parallel pathways but there is no randomness to the organisation.
4:13 And so, for many years, everyone was rather puzzled of how the input became distributed and in fact whether there was such distribution of input or whether some other explanation might do.
4:28 And once electro-physiological techniques were available, we were in fact able to show directly that – using evoked potential techniques – that the input does become distributed across the extent of the receiving cortex.
4:45 Now, that led me, around ten years ago, to delve into the question as to how that input could become distributed, what kind of a mechanism might work, and just about that time, two things occurred.
5:03 One is John Eccles wrote a paper, in which he pointed out that one shouldn’t consider synaptic functions – that is, the connections between two neurons and what goes on at those junctions – as individual events, but that one should look at them in aggregate — a very simple idea and very obvious, once it’s been pointed out.
5:28 But what happens at the junctions between nerves is a slow potential, a kind of characteristic of nerve excitation which is very different from nerve impulses and most of us were brought up on nerve impulses, discrete events happening in the nervous system.
5:52 At the junctions between nerves, these discrete events degenerate into slow, non- discrete, analogue type events, and Eccles simply pointed out that if we look at an aggregate of such events, we might look at them as wavefronts.
6:15 And this idea had been proposed before, that there are waveforms, wavefronts in the brain – in fact, we talk about brainwaves – but there’s a difference between the kind of brainwaves that we record grossly, which are a sort of an aggregate of all of the excitation in the brain – at least beneath the electrode somewhere, some kind of a population of what is occurring there, or some kind of an envelope over the occurrences beneath the electrode – and looking at the waveforms that are made up of the actual synaptic and dendritic events, which are slow potentials.
7:02 And once we had that idea that in fact one could talk of a micro-structure of wavefronts of that sort, just about the same time it became rather more popular to look at optical information processing, and it occurred to me that the optical information processing systems – as opposed to computers which we’d been dealing with, which are digital discrete event types of information processing system – that the optical information processing systems, which work on an analogue basis, might be useful models or, at least initially, useful metaphors to think about brain function.
7:52 And when I went into this in some detail, it turned out that the metaphor was not only a metaphor but a good analogy, and finally were able to develop a real model, which I call the holographic model of brain function.
8:09 So holograms then became a way of understanding how the waveforms of the brain could function to distribute input across a part of cortex – and I don’t have time here to go into what a hologram is, but maybe we can do that in the discussion or some other time, if those of you who don’t know... or the physicists could do a better job than I can – but neurologically the important thing is that these lateral connections, which have been shown to be inhibitory for the most part and which do not work by way of nerve impulses, can in fact do exactly what a lens does in an holographic system, in an optical information processing system, or a mirror, or a diffraction pattern prism of some sort, so that we have analogues to optical information processing systems in the brain, and that’s why it works very well.
9:26 Well, what does this mean? It means basically that in the past we’ve – those people who think of some kind of isomorphism between how the brain functions and what there is out in the world – have been looking for pictures of the world in the brain.
9:50 And of course that seems sort of silly to a lot of other people. So some people say – and the Gestalt people especially – that brain electrical activity ought to represent the outside world and that the outside world that it represents, ought to look somewhat like it; it might be a distorted picture, but none the less a picture of some sort.
10:14 And other people would say, ‘Well, it’s absolutely ridiculous to try to find a picture of your face up in the head, you know; I mean, this doesn’t sound right.’ And this argument went on for a hundred years or so.
10:29 And once I had fairly clear in my mind, that perhaps the best hypothesis – at the moment, at least – was that the representation of the brain is holographic – that is, this distributed sort of thing, which looks sort of like a piece of moiré silk – then the next question came up: if that’s the brain representation and it’s formed from an input like – for instance, in the eye – an image on the retina, then what is the image in the retina representing?
11:05 And the question we batted around for a number of years: what [does] the external world really look like?
11:13 ‘Really’ being in quotes. And it occurred to me, with somewhat of a shock – and something that shouldn’t have shocked me, because people with whom I’d trained said things like this to me years ago, over and over again, and philosophers have certainly said this over and over again, and yet it was a shock – that maybe the world out there doesn’t look the way it looks, that is that it isn’t organised necessarily the way it appears to us.
11:49 And of course, I mean, you go back to (inaudible name) who says, you know, the world of an ant crawling on a tree-trunk is not going to look like the tree looks to us, and all of this.
12:01 Nevertheless, when you begin to really get into it and feel yourself, that what you’re looking at may not be the way it looks, you begin to ask some funny questions.
12:14 And this is what I call the illusion of direct perception. And the analogy that I can use there is that if one has a hi-fi set and used one speaker, obviously the music comes from that speaker and we say we have the direct perception of the sound coming from the speaker.
12:34 But now you twiddle the dials and you have a stereo system and you have two speakers and you arrange the phase relationships in such way that the music comes from in between, then you say, ‘I hear directly’ – in my case, I have a fireplace in between the two speakers – you say, ‘I’m hearing the...’ The direct perception is that the fireplace is emanating, so you go look up the fireplace and no orchestra are there and no speaker, so you begin to say it too.
13:03 There’s an illusion of the music coming from the fireplace. And this is the next topic – for which I have two minutes now – my own work, which is that of the importance of knowledge – and this feeds into, of course, what this seminar is all about, our getting together here – is the issue that knowledge does influence our perceptions.
13:34 And the way I came to this is that diagram up on the board. The classical way of thinking about brain function is that there’s an input to the brain, that input becomes abstracted in some way and organised and re-organised, and then there’s an output to the motor systems.
13:56 All of my own research has shown that this is not a fruitful way of looking at brain function.
14:03 What seems to occur – and there’s a great deal of evidence for this – is that there’s an input to the brain all right, but that there is from the brain itself – from what is usually called the association cortex or several areas of association cortex – there are outputs.
14:25 Now, these outputs actually act as filters or sieves onto the input.
14:34 They act as output mechanisms – those green and purple arrows there, to the red part – to the motor parts of the brain and the motor parts of the brain do not wiggle muscles around directly but alter the sensitivity of input functions.
14:56 So that we actually have evidence that the retina itself is altered when we stimulate the so-called association cortex.
15:09 And we have in other systems much more direct evidence that there are fibres going to the receptor organs and they’re altered, their sensitivities are altered, by the functions of the so-called association areas, higher centres of the brain.
15:29 And the higher centres of the brain, the so-called association areas, receive an input from all over; it is not specific, it’s an input from many, many different places.
15:40 And our own work has shown, essentially, two major – really three major – types of such output functions: one dealing with the motor system directly, the muscular system directly, and that one deals with the know-how of things.
16:02 Another one deals with the special sensory inputs, which we may call the know-what system, which categorises the properties of the input.
16:17 And the third one comes from the frontal lobes – the very forward parts of the frontal lobes – and I’ve suggested that it deals with the know-that system.
16:30 So we’ve got know-how, know-what and know-that. And knowing-that is the big problem of how to characterise what it is that we experience as knowing-that, rather than knowing-what or knowing-how.
16:45 And... I think it’s easy enough to know what the categorising of properties looks like, but what is this funny knowing-that thing?
16:59 And – again, to make a long story very, very brief – we think of the categorising of properties as being hierarchical and analytical and we have some evidence to show that this in fact so, that a finite mathematics will handle this, whereas the knowing-that deals with categorising relationships and this turns out to utilise infinite mathematics much more readily.
17:33 It is heterarchical rather than hierarchical in organisation. Other ways of talking, it’s holistic therefore because relationships are always holistic.
17:45 And another way of talking about it in computer terminology, type of computer programs, when properties are categorised, these are context- free types of constructions, whereas the categorising relationships deals with context-dependent constructions.
18:03 So we have these two major ways in which the brain operates: one to categorise properties, hierarchical system, the other one context-dependent – symbolic if you will – categorising relationships, infinite, heterarchical, and so on.
18:20 And of course that ties in with so much of what has been said here, but note that these systems work downstream to alter the way we perceive the world.
18:33 And so I think that if we alter our knowledge systems and if we begin to look scientifically at the heterarchical context-dependent, relational, holistic things and begin to admit those into our science, and not do it just in the hierarchical, analytic way that we have in the past, then we would make a difference in the way we perceive the world and therefore interact with it.
19:07 So in conclusion, I just want to suggest that what seems to be necessary for us to be able to communicate between East and West at this point is partly to accept what has been done, but perhaps more importantly is to make the holistic/subjective approach as hard-headed and precise – and I think it can be done – as the analytical/objective approach has been in the past.
19:40 And once we have that done, then there no longer will be this hiatus between the so-called mystical thinking and the so-called hard-headed, scientific thinking, because the two will merge.
19:57 I went two minutes extra. Questioner: From your talk, I take it you’re really saying that perception is not a passive rôle, but it’s an intentional rôle.
20:14 So in this sense we’ve been approaching a picture in which we’re all participators in the Universe, and in a sense we’re also... by perceiving we’re creating, and this creation takes place from some internal knowledge.
20:29 Now, if the knowledge is confused to begin with, if we are confused, then what are we creating?
20:34 KP: Confusion. (Laughs)

Q: Confusion. And it’s a real confusion...
20:37 KP: Oh yes, it’s a real confusion.
20:38 Q: ...not an illusion.
20:39 KP: And that’s why I think the clearer our knowledge is – and by clearer I don’t mean simplistic.
20:46 And I think that analytic thought in essence is been overly simplistic, and that when we get into the paradoxes of infinite mathematics, where a piece of a line of an infinite length – two pieces of line, one this and one this – are equal, because in an infinite system you see they’re both... you can...
21:10 I mean, there are many paradoxes, so paradoxical thought immediately comes out of some of the mathematics – the whole business of cyclicities and so on – all comes in to this holistic round.
21:26 But there are mathematics that handle it, and precise ways of thinking about it. David Peat: I think the kind of model that Karl has, which I think is a fantastically good model, accounts for why it seems to be so difficult for people to change.
21:52 And I think I can illustrate this with a clinical example.
22:01 People who are paranoid will often complain that other people are hostile to them.
22:10 And many people in psychiatry interpret this as a kind of faulty reasoning, that there are certain cues in other people’s behaviour and the paranoid person comes to a wrong conclusion on the basis of this faulty interpretation of the data.
22:27 But I would say – and I think many people would agree – that the paranoid person creates a perception, so that the other person indeed looks hostile, his very perception of the world, his direct acquaintance in his experience is that the other person looks angry.
22:46 It’s not that he’s making a misjudgment, the other person looks that way. So that when you try and argue with them and say, ‘Hey, they are smiling at you,’ he sees them as sneering.
23:00 And since we all base our behaviour on our immediate acquaintance, and he has relied upon it all his life, it becomes very difficult to deal with that kind of thing.
23:12 And to the extent that we create our perceptions – and these are based on passed conditionings – than it becomes, I think, quite difficult to... the very process of communication is blocked by the creativity of the perceptional act, and that creativity can be distorted on the basis of past conditioning.
23:33 DB: Any other comments? George Sudarshan: I wanted to make two remarks. One is that even in a linear system, where things can be made to flow from given conditions, when you have not a local description but an integral description, a global description, a differential equation which involves a delay – there is an integral differential equation, something in which the conditions’ response at the present time is not only the stimulus at the present time but also to the past and to the future or something like that – it is known that this system can create new modes which were not obvious for the system.
24:17 For example, a free particle in Newtonian mechanics moves only... the only possibility is for it to move in a straight line.
24:26 On the other hand, if you had a non-local equation which contains interaction of that with something in the past and something in the future, under special solutions it could go around in a spiral, in which the curvature at one time of its movement is itself influencing both its past and future and is, in turn, influenced by the past and future.
24:51 So by considering non-local interaction – non-local not necessarily in space but in time – you can create new degrees of freedom.
24:59 And in fact this method has been used in physics to invent basically new degrees of freedom, new objects.
25:09 And it can be pushed to the point in which you can say not only is the distant matter creating a reference frame, a centre... an inertial frame, but in fact matter itself is the presence of distant matter; you consider the interaction between things which are very far apart.
25:28 And these new degrees of freedom which are created by this one, themselves become crystallised into new objects and that all objects that you see can be made in terms of these things.
25:38 So anything non-local in time automatically creates new degrees of freedom.
25:48 The second point is that whenever you have a system which is non-linear, one mode of analysis of a non-linear system is saying that the output modifies the input.
26:01 If I have a linear wave then it propagates in a certain fashion. If I have a non-linear wave, the manner in which a small perturbation on that thing is going to move depends on how large the amplitude is of the initial wave.
26:18 So that one may say that in fact the already existing condition modifies the new condition that you happen to have.
26:27 Sometimes it acts as a means of preserving the integrity of the thing, sometimes it acts as a carrier, sort of like kangaroos carry their young or a carrier wave transmits audio information onto a radio frequency wave.
26:43 By having a modulation on an already biased situation, already stressed situation, you can in fact propagate new modes that you happen to have.
26:52 But if I understand Dr Pribram’s model, you do want to talk about feedback. It is not only a case of the condition altering it, but in fact there is a time difference also.
27:06 Now, if you had a finite system – a system which is like a volume of gas in an enclosure or water against a sea-wall – then of course automatically...
27:20 I mean, a wave which is going forward goes and hits and then comes back, and that can affect the modification of the thing. So it seems to me that in saying that you have holistic description, an integral description, already we have the potentialities for not only new kind of solutions but in fact genuinely new degrees of freedom for the system.
27:40 It is organically... it is created in – what is it? – like Virgin Mary’s conception.
27:50 I mean it is matter being created without in a sense matter being there. It is a case in which new degrees of freedom are created with immaculate conception... (Laughter) ...in which it is only the relationship which produces the matter rather than matter being there and then you sort of breathing the breath of life into it.
28:12 KP: What you said makes me realise how little we understand about the, what I call the frontal limbic system, which sets up there frontal, where we do get into the holistic relational aspects.
28:26 I mean, I just barely, you know, was hanging on while you were talking and trying to understand, because obviously what you were saying is very relevant to what kind of programming – if that’s the right word even for the frontal aspect of what goes on – what it must be doing, and the fact that degrees of freedom are involved may... (inaudible) ...good balance in me.
28:55 GS: At the risk of advertising my own things, some of this material is discussed in a textbook on classical mechanics, which I have left with Dr Bohm.
29:03 KP: Oh, I’d like to see that. Good.
29:05 GS: So maybe you could look at it. It’s called Action at a Distance. You wouldn’t expect it to have any bearing on the thing, but since you [have] already left psychology and got into physics, you might as well read about...
29:16 KP: (Laughs) All right; good. I might advertise too, and say some of these things have been written up – some of the more recent things – in papers that haven’t been published yet but will be, and we can send pre-prints around and a lot of the data in Languages of the Brain, which is published in 1971...
29:35 Q: Could I ask Dr Pribram how acceptable this type of model – I find this infinitely flexible and subtle and capable of handling an immense amount of information about the behaviour of organisms and brains – I wonder how receptive you feel the world of psychology, neurophysiology and neurosciences generally is to this type of model now?
30:03 KP: Well, it certainly is a lot more acceptable today than it was ten years ago when I first proposed some of the elements of it.
30:15 But this has been the history of when I first proposed there was such a thing as a limbic systems and so on, I was nearly asked to leave Yale; three years later graduate students were all doing their theses on it.
30:29 So when we wrote the book, Plans and the Structure of Behaviour which – 1959, 1960 – most of my colleagues read me out of science and said, ‘Well, he must be getting old and philosophical and all this model building is useless.’ The book today is used in almost all classes of psychology as a classic, and of course it’s completely outdated by now and we have feed-forward systems as well as feedback, parallel process — we never distinguished between those things; we didn’t have any parallel-processing in that book.
31:11 So I don’t worry too much that people... What I’ve said up there is based on now experiments on about fifteen hundred monkeys and very solid evidence for the monkey.
31:28 Now, whether it’s true for man is another problem and my present research program, in fact, is to try to reflect back to the human condition, to see whether man’s brain is organised in this fashion too, because I have no data – direct data – on man.
31:46 DP: The answer to your question, I think, is it’s not too well accepted.
31:51 DP: Right now, although...
31:54 KP: But, as I say, people used to laugh in 1964 when I said that I play, but...
32:00 DP: I think it’s fair to say that your colleagues have not been terribly sympathetic to the model and many have been critical, although I completely agree with you.
32:13 I think in not too long, I think people will be very sympathetic. But it’s been hard for people to understand that holistic way of thinking, because they think of digital impulses going, ‘Bing, bing, bing,’ and that’s the way they think.
32:29 KP: Right. Well, take the hologram, for instance, as perhaps a classical example of acceptance and non-acceptance.
32:37 It was considered to be pure nonsense in ‘64, ‘65, ‘66, except by a few engineers, today almost everyone in vision research is following Fergus Campbell’s lead and using spatial frequency analyses, gradings and so on — it’s the in-thing to do.
32:59 Whilst they wouldn’t ever call it a hologram, but spatial frequency is essentially the basis of holographic processes, and everybody in vision research is already doing this, including neurophysiologists.
33:15 So in ten years things change a great deal.
33:18 DB: If I could just make one remark, that I don’t think Professor Pribram has had time to really explain this model properly, that the notion of using the holographic ordering is really radically different from ordinary ways of thinking, in the sense that the totality is enfolded into each part.
33:37 And it is really very hard therefore for people trained in the ordinary, analytic approach to appreciate this.
33:44 But I think to go into that more is not appropriate here; it’s rather technical. I just wanted to call attention to that point and I think Joe wants to say something.
33:53 Q: Yes, I’d like to amplify something Dr Peat said on the subject of the conference — somewhere in our title is the word transform.
34:09 And it seems to me an important thing to focus our attention on is: how does the brain... you know, this person who is in confusion, who distorts the incoming data, transform to a condition in which there is no distortion.
34:27 Because, you know, in some sense that’s the important question because, you know, by inference we are all taking this conference and this data and distorting it, translating it, and doing something with it, making it... whatever we do with it, and in some sense continuing the confusion.
34:49 So partly, if these models help us out of that confusion then they’re fine.
34:53 KP: I think you’re asking too much to say that we shouldn’t distort at all or how to get out of all distortions, but let’s say at least that we have so many different ways of distorting that we can see that we’re distorting, and perhaps in fact can occasionally get in touch with a non-distorted situation.
35:16 K: Sir, are you saying in mysticism... it may not also be a distortion?
35:25 KP: No. It may well be, but it’s a distortion common to the human condition.
35:31 K: No. So... and they are creating more confusion.
35:35 KP: In some respects, yes. But if we can match these various distortions…
35:40 K: Various confusions?
35:42 KP: Various confusions, right.
35:45 K: And out of that, what do we get? More confusion.
35:50 KP: No, I think that one can gradually get a sense of...
35:56 K: Balance.
35:58 KP: ...balance – thank you. Something of this...
36:04 DB: Robert... Then Sudarshan.
36:07 GS: I was going to say that in the... it reminds me of the situation with regard to x-ray crystallography.
36:15 At one time, people wanted to do crystallography with using very good, well-defined crystals – it had to be properly clamped and properly aligned and any deformation of the crystal was going to distort what you were going to see – but then somebody had a very bright idea.
36:31 What you have to do is to do powder crystallography in which you take the crystal and powder it – deliberately powder it – the idea being that you then see all facets, sort of like a convex mirror which shows you all kind of things, that you have a powder and there is some part of the powder which is always aligned properly.
36:49 In the same sense, that if you are able to scan, if you are able to consider all possible distortions, if you’re able to travel and talk to different people, move from your professional field into a group like this and perhaps even beyond, you are able to see things in different distortions.
37:08 And then you say that, ‘Well, if these are all distortions, how do I get some feel for the thing?’ and you get balance, you get an abstraction, a possibility that in fact none of the things that you see is proper.
37:21 And to me mysticism or mystical experience has content only in that it enables you to move back and forth, that you don’t get locked on to the thing — then you are called a psychotic.
37:34 You must be able to move back and forth and retain the measure of insight that you have gained, the divisions that you have gained in one level into another level.
37:43 If you are a scientist and if you are going to look into philosophy, you can’t certainly convert philosophy into science but you retain some values.
37:51 In the same sense, that perhaps all these various alterations of condition and the world being so confused is in a sense a blessing, because you are able to perceive things under different conditions, different stresses; see if somebody arranges things for you.
38:07 K: But in human relationship, distortion makes a great deal of suffering, a great deal of misunderstanding, a great deal of sorrow.
38:23 And since we are talking about the transformation of the human being, can that distortion be ended?
38:32 David Shainberg: Well, I think one question that we’d have to come to, to there – and I think one thing that you’re suggesting – is can that transformation... or can that distortion be creative of transformation, is another way to ask the question.
38:52 In other words, we know we have the distortion but can, through the process of understanding the distortion, can we arrive at the transformation?
39:01 K: But do I know I am distorted in my relationship with somebody?
39:09 DS: You know you are?
39:11 K: Do I know or am I just ignorant of it, I’m unaware of it, and attribute my suffering to some other extraneous causes?
39:21 DS: Well, I think that would be the question: how to be aware of the distortion.
39:26 K: That’s just... that’s what I want to get at.
39:29 DB: Can I just say that we’re approaching the end of the period we planned, so make it a few more... otherwise we’re not... I mean, we won’t get to the others.
39:37 DP: If you’re...
39:38 DB: Just a moment, please, I think Melzack is next. Julian Melzack: No, I was just going to say there’s a paradox here, almost, because what some of us are asking is how can we get rid of the distortion, on the one hand, on the other hand Pribram is saying – and I think rightly – that there’s a sense in which we can never get rid of all distortion.
39:57 That is to say, we view the external world through these lenses, as you say, we must do so and therefore – well, I’m a bit confused; I’m not sure whether you were making a point about knowledge, an epistemological point, or a point about the world, an ontological point.
40:13 That is, I mean, underlying your view do you hold that there is a world out there, i.e. there are an agglomeration of facts that are bare, raw and uninterpreted, but in order to know them they must be in a sense distorted because they must go through our lenses?
40:28 Or are you saying, making I think a stronger point, that there really isn’t any such thing as bare or uninterpreted facts, that the world just is a whole collection of views and hypotheses that we, as it were, pile up due to the input that we have to filter through our lenses?
40:44 KP: My position ontologically is that there is something beyond us and that we have to provide the best match we can between what we perceive through our knowledge system and the so-called external world, and – but this is an act of faith, and I could go into that, of why I’ve made that act of faith.
41:12 It has to do with consensual validation between individuals and between various senses, that when enough coincidences of that sort come in, we make an act of faith and say, ‘It looks as if there is really something out there – quotes ‘really’ – and we’re trying constantly to match the organisations that are beyond us with the organisations that are produced by our neuromuscular, neurosensory apparatuses.
41:43 K: May I just... what is the central factor in human relationship that brings distortion?
41:55 In human relationship?
41:58 KP: In human relationship.
42:00 K: Not theoretically, not...
42:01 KP: No.
42:02 K: I’m married, I have children, I have this and that and all the rest of it, what is the factor at the core, at the heart of... that distorts and brings such misery, such confusion, such agony, such anxiety, in the relationship?
42:23 KP: I’m not the person to answer that. Our psychiatrist friends have ought to have the wisdom... (Laughter) ...to do that. My own simplistic answer is simply it’s hellishly complicated because the way another human being views a situation and the way I view the situation are different.
42:46 K: No sir. I’m married – I’m taking a very simple...
42:51 KP: Yes. Right. Sure.
42:54 K: I’m married, and there is a distorting factor in that relationship...
42:56 KP: Right.
42:57 K: ...which causes extraordinary... all the rest of it. What is that factor?
43:04 KP: Fact that we’re different.
43:07 K: Ah, just watch. Is my image of her...
43:13 KP: Yes?
43:14 K: ...the factor that’s causing damage? The image. That is, the hurts I’ve received from her, the dominations, the insults and all the rest of it, which has created an image and that image destroys my relationship.
43:30 And she has created... of course...
43:31 KP: That’s what I was going to say: it’s because of both directions. If it only goes one way, it’s salvageable.
43:38 K: But it is both ways.
43:39 KP: But when it’s both ways...
43:41 K: It is both ways.
43:42 KP: Right. Then it...
43:44 K: So can that image not be formed? That is the question.
43:46 KP: That’s the question. I don’t know. I mean, I turn to you all for answers to this, because...
43:57 K: I think it can, but...
43:58 KP: You can?
43:59 DB: I think Joe wants to say something.
44:03 Q: Yes, just one... You suggested that it may not be possible to get to a condition of no distortion, and I make a suggestion that the distortion, when you look at a distortion, it’s the attitude that there’s no way out of the problem, which is the distortion.
44:27 That is, to take the attitude that there’s no way out of the distortion may in fact put you in a condition in which you cease to look for ways out.
44:37 JM: No, I was just making a point that seemed to follow necessarily from any view which as it were approaches... (inaudible).
44:43 Q: Yes, but the point is a logical point, a point handled verbally and logically, according to rules of logic and verbal manipulations but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the point is true.
44:59 It may be a distorted point.
45:01 JM: Well, I think when Pribram uses distortion, he’s not using it in a pejorative sense.
45:06 KP: No, not at all.
45:07 JM: I mean, distortion simply means that the world...
45:10 KP: Different.
45:11 JM: ...yes, the world must, as it were, filter through something or other which will make it different. Of course.
45:17 K: After all, sir, the world is my relationship to my wife – that’s my world – and my neighbour, and if that is distorted I live in misery, and she lives in misery.
45:29 DB: Just a moment.
45:30 K: I beg your pardon.
45:31 DB: Dr Ferris is first. Can we just...? Elizabeth Ferris: I think I might be asking the same sort of question a different way round, which is what sort of thing happens when the match is not very good between what is – quotes – ‘really’ out there and what we perceive.
45:47 In other words, is there a way of our knowing, by virtue of what happens, that this match is not very good?
45:53 KP: Well, I think we’ve have already had the...
45:56 EF: So it’s the same sort of thing...
45:59 KP: We get miserable. If I try to walk through... and get out of this room, and I keep banging my body and head against the wall, pretty soon I begin to say, ‘Gee, you know, maybe there’s something funny here and that isn’t really a door.’ Whereas, if I can walk through easily then probably there is a reasonable match.
46:21 And the same thing in a relationship: if it causes always misery, if it gets nowhere and so on, something is wrong between what I consider to be ontologically out there and my own imaging of it.
46:39 EF: So if the match is good then we should experience some – I was going to say pleasure, but that’s not the right word – some … K

P: What the mystic says is there’s complete transparency when the match is perfect.
46:53 K: That is... Sorry.
46:55 KP: Go ahead. Please. Please.
46:58 K: That’s the whole point, sir. Whether in my relationship is it possible not to create an image at all, so that there is whole contact, whole relationship, whole responsibility, care, affection, love and all that’s involved in not having the image of you and you having an image.
47:23 KP: Right.
47:24 K: Is that possible?
47:25 KP: Well, I’ve been told it is.
47:27 K: It is.
47:28 KP: It has been rather difficult to achieve with certain people I’ve known. (Laughs)

K: Ah no!
47:31 DB: I think we should limit the number of people from now on. I think Robin is next. Robin Monro: Well, it seems to me that we’re talking about two different kinds of image and distortion.
47:48 One is rather sort of physical scientific about visual images, things like that, which I think probably will inevitably be distorted.
47:59 Someone who is blind, even if they are enlightened, will still not be able to see things, or if their eyes are, you know, need glasses they will always be distorted in a certain sense.
48:07 But direct perception... I mean, images in relationship and even seeing beauty, somehow... I think Krishnaji is talking about something different from this. And I don’t know what difference is. I mean, a mystic or someone who has this whole perception, if he is colour blind he still won’t see colours but he will see something...
48:30 Do you see what I’m trying to say?
48:33 K: I don’t know – if I may reply to him – what a mystic is. What do you mean by that word mystic?
48:42 KP: That’s why I put it in quotes when I first said it. (Laughs)

K: (Laughs) I know.
48:48 KP: I always said ‘so-called’ because I don’t see much difference between what a scientist does and...
48:54 RM: Well, I’m trying to talk about what do you mean by whole perception, direct perceiving.
48:56 K: Ah yes, that’s... Yes, yes. Maurice Wilkins: Could one simply use the dictionary definition of spiritual apprehension?
49:00 DS: What’s spiritual...?
49:03 DB: Spiritual apprehension.
49:05 DS: What is spirit?
49:08 K: Spiritual apprehension?
49:09 DS: Yes, well, what is spirit?
49:10 KP: Spirits, are they electrical...?
49:12 MW: Well, I suppose one simply goes from one definition to another, if one...
49:19 (Laughter)

DB: Yes, I think...
49:22 KP: By the way, I just want to straighten out one thing.
49:30 I was using vision as a mini-model but it applies to other imaging functions: tactile images, olfactory, where we don’t have very good images, but...
49:40 RM: But does it apply to emotional things and things like that?
49:45 KP: Oh yes.
49:46 RM: But I still think there’s a problem then, because I don’t think we can actually do practical things in the world without images of the world.
49:56 KP: I agree.
49:57 RM: We have to have a model of the room and so on, but Krishnaji is talking about being without images. This is something radically different, I think, from modifying the images or improving them.
50:07 KP: I know. This is beyond... I mean, I think... I feel what he’s talking about, but that’s his...
50:16 K: Sir, I mean, I am married to you. You insult me.
50:20 KP: Right.
50:21 K: That’s recorded. That creates an image.
50:23 KP: Right. Well, it...
50:26 K: And my relationship with you then is distant.
50:30 KP: Right. But then, good things happen too and that changes the...
50:36 K: Ah, no, no. Of course, good and bad. I’m talking of direct relationship.
50:39 KP: Sure.
50:40 K: I’m distant from you. You say something pleasant, that creates... I’m nearer to you.
50:45 KP: Right.
50:46 K: These are images which I have built by your word, by your gesture, by your...
50:51 KP: By the knowledge. Those are the filters in red there.
50:55 K: Yes, I see that. I see that. And my relationship to you then becomes a trial, a pain, a hurt.
51:05 And how am I to love you – quotes – without all this?
51:13 KP: By getting rid of all that red system.
51:16 K: Ah no, no. Theoretically, here. I am talking actually. I have this image in me.
51:22 KP: You suspend knowledge.
51:23 K: Yes, how? Tell me; go into it.
51:25 KP: Oh, you mean how do you do this? Oh, but that... You see, I’m trying to analyse how the brain works.
51:32 K: I understand that, sir. I’ve understood...
51:34 KP: And I have to turn to you and to the psychiatrists for the operations that behaviourally and the interpersonal relationships that take place.
51:44 K: I understand that, sir. I understand how the input and output – I found that fairly simple; if you could put it simply, I’ve understood it – but the image still remains.
51:51 KP: Yes.
51:52 K: And it creates havoc. I’m a Hindu and you are a Muslim and it is death. I am a Jew and you’re an Arab, it is death; and so on, so on, so on.
52:06 And how am I, an ordinary human being, to remove this image?
52:13 KP: Well, once we... I think the first step simply is to realise that it’s there, that something in the brain is actually changing the perception.
52:25 K: But the verbal description is one thing but an actuality is another.
52:29 KP: Yes.
52:30 K: You understand, sir? I am... The description is not the described.
52:38 KP: Right. And so you have to suspend the description.
52:40 K: How do you bring it home to me, to see the dreadful things that are happening? Jew against Arab – you follow? – all the things.
52:53 And my world is the world of my relationship with my wife, with my children, with my neighbour — that’s all.
53:04 And if it is possible to remove that image there, then it is possible to enter into everything.
53:11 KP: But this is what I mean. If you realise that your perceptions... if everyone realised that their perceptions are in part filtered...
53:23 K: I realise it, but the image remains, because I take pleasure in the blasted image. (Laughs) (Laughter) KP: Yes.
53:30 K: It has... I’m used to it. I have become...
53:34 KP: It’s not just that, because you said yourself that passion comes only from sorrow.
53:40 K: Yes.
53:41 KP: And so the question arises whether in fact we want a passionless existence, which is therefore also a sorrow-less existence.
53:50 K: A sorrow... that’s... After all... Yes sir.
53:56 DB: I do want...
53:58 DS: I just want to say one thing. I have the feeling as you’re talking – and I don’t know if it fits – but if you build the image like this, around your wife and your child and yourself and your family, that circle is there.
54:13 There’s something about the only way that that circle ever breaks is because that circle is in relationship to your universal presence.
54:21 K: Yes sir. But this circle is much more intimate.
54:24 DS: Yes, but the way that...
54:25 K: Much more painful than that circle which is big.
54:27 DS: But somehow or other, the abuttment of the limitations of that circle against the bigger circle is where the break occurs.
54:36 KP: What we need is more degrees of freedom.
54:38 DS: You see what I mean?
54:41 K: Yes, freedom. Freedom from the image.
54:43 DS: Yes, but I think that comes when you realise the limitations of the image.
54:47 K: How do I realise it? How do I break it down? How do I...? This image that I have built for the last twenty years, because I’m married to you for twenty or thirty or forty... or ten days, that image is...
55:06 (Laughter)

DS: Ten minutes. (Laughs) K

P: Yes, ten minutes would be good. Oh...
55:13 DS: And I think that’s the question, is what is the relationship with that limitation?
55:17 K: No, I think... You bring the bigger relationship... in the understanding of the bigger, you lose the lesser.
55:25 DS: Yes. Through understanding the limitations of the lesser, you understand...
55:29 K: Yes, but the lesser is my whole concern.
55:33 DS: But you are, at the same time, in relationship to the bigger whether you know it or not.
55:39 K: Yes, but I don’t know the bigger, that’s what you tell me.
55:41 DS: No, I say that’s given.
55:44 K: (Laughs) That’s what you tell me. My question is: is it possible for that image to be completely wiped out?
55:52 KP: And I say yes, because – and I will simply turn your own arguments around and say that – once you recognise the problem and live with it and accept it...
56:05 K: That is, sir, at the moment of your insulting, your nagging, your...
56:14 I must be so alert, that it doesn’t take shape.
56:17 KP: That’s right.
56:18 K: That’s all.
56:19 KP: That’s all. Just recognise that we don’t want to go that way.
56:21 K: I don’t recognise... No.
56:23 KP: Oh, all right.
56:24 K: I want to get at something else, which is at the moment of insult – when the image is formed – at that second, I’m awake.
56:31 Then there is no image.
56:33 KP: Right.
56:34 K: I don’t know if I’m...
56:37 KP: I know what you mean.
56:39 K: I am... My intention... I see very clearly that any image is a distorting factor in relationship, and that is with you or with the whole world.
56:56 So realising that, my concern is to end that image and the image formation takes place at the second of flattery or insult, whatever, hurt.
57:09 KP: And changes it.
57:11 K: And watch it. Be alert to it. And it comes to an end. I mean, this... I’ve done it, so I’m not just theorising about it.
57:19 KP: Yes. No. I have done this too. I remember one hostile incident with my wife, in which I was looking at her and all this horrible hostility was coming at me, and somehow I was able to see through it and realise that she was really frightened.
57:36 K: Ah. No, I am not concerned for the moment [about] her.
57:40 Q: That’s another image. You’ve just replaced one with another.
57:42 KP: Yes, that’s another image. But, boy, it was a big step for me, really (laughs) let me tell you. I didn’t get to Krishnamurti’s stage of no image, but at least the image that I had was melting away and I saw something else.
57:59 K: I am not concerned about her, I’m concerned... for the moment.
58:03 KP: Right. You’re concerned about your own image.
58:07 K: About not forming an image in myself.
58:09 DS: Yes, but what if you’re committed to making images? How do you break that? In other words, your process is... that is you, making images.
58:17 K: Yes. I would go into the whole question of pleasure.
58:20 DS: Yes, but what I’m saying... but then I would come to you again with another question: how do you break that?
58:25 K: I mean, that we can discuss; we can go into it...
58:26 DS: Yes, but...
58:27 KP: Wait a minute. What is this about pleasure? How does that come in?
58:32 K: Because I like the images I have. I am a Catholic and I like it.
58:36 DS: And you’re committed to making images.
58:38 K: That’s my... I have got the image, not committed.
58:41 DS: No, but you like to make the images.
58:44 K: From childhood, I have propaganda: society, culture says, ‘I am a Catholic. Jesus is my God.’ KP: I think we’re using – I think you’re right – we’re using the word image in two ways.
58:58 I tend to think of image as a fairly raw thing, although filtered through a knowledge system...
59:03 K: Yes, yes, yes.
59:04 KP: ...and now when you say, ‘Catholic,’ that already is a knowledge statement which is the filter itself. And so what you want to suspend is these knowledge systems or programs that filter the more immediate thing that you call...
59:21 K: Yes, yes, yes.
59:22 JM: Now, you’re committed to saying that’s impossible.
59:24 KP: Completely, I think, except in rare, temporary things that the so-called mystics have described.
59:30 K: Ah, no sir, it is not temporary. I wouldn’t call it temporary.
59:33 KP: Oh, you won’t... you don’t think... I see. Well, this I didn’t realise. You can really do this?
59:37 K: I went to see a man, who has done terrible things.
59:45 And – I’ve known him for years – I had no image when I went there and when I came out.
59:51 KP: We had an image in my sense, but no knowledge system that filtered it.
59:59 K: I don’t know what... Yes, yes.
1:00:01 KP: Yes. I think you’re using the word image differently there. No programmed filter that...
1:00:11 K: So sir, that means I’ve no image of the world – you understand? – in the sense, ‘I’m a Catholic, I’m a Hindu, I am this or...’ There’s no image; it’s something quite different.
1:00:23 Well, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to...
1:00:27 KP: All right.
1:00:29 Q: I would like to ask Krishnamurti a question...
1:00:35 K: Ah... Yes sir.
1:00:38 Q: ...if I may. Once you reach this stage where you can be without making an image, are you saying that one should be able to shift from one stage or from one mode of consciousness to the other?
1:00:54 Because obviously, very often, it is convenient to have images and very practical for practical life; at other times it is not, it causes sorrow and confusion.
1:01:03 Now, do we have to be able to live in these two modes and shift from one to the other, according to the situation?
1:01:13 K: It all depends what you call consciousness, sir, different consciousness. I mean, I drive a car, there I have to have knowledge, images, watch and so on.
1:01:25 But in my relationship with human beings – which is the same consciousness, surely; part of that consciousness – is imageless.
1:01:35 Q: Always?
1:01:38 K: It must be, otherwise I live a stupid life, a hypocritical life.
1:01:47 I mean, that’s only...
1:01:50 KP: And so you switch from the mode of categorising, analysing, image building or of properties hierarchical, to the mode – the frontal mode – which is infinite and relational, and that I think is where I would say it comes in: the fact that mostly in our interpersonal relations, there are relational aspects.
1:02:16 K: That’s why, sir, one has to go into the whole question of the self.
1:02:21 KP: Yes.
1:02:22 K: The image of me, myself. Is it possible not to have an image of oneself?
1:02:32 KP: Is it possible not to have one?
1:02:36 K: Yes. We all have it: ‘I am a great man, I’m this, I’m that. I’m not this, I’m inferior, I’m noble, I am marvellous,’ or ‘I’m very clever,’ not to have an image of oneself.
1:02:47 KP: It’s possible. It is possible.
1:02:52 K: Ah, that includes then a relationship in which there is no image-making at all.
1:02:58 KP: At all.
1:02:59 K: That’s a different matter.
1:03:01 KP: I think that’s what I mean by the relational aspect, where that sort of hierarchical...
1:03:07 DB: Yes, but that’s the explanation you’re giving for this.
1:03:08 KP: That’s right.
1:03:09 DB: Well, I think... Do you want to say something?
1:03:11 Q: Could I just...? Well, I just want to note a point for taking up in further discussion later, and that was if I understood Dr Pribram properly, the... he said something to the effect that we wanted to make subjective, holistic approach as hard-headed as the objective, analytical science.
1:03:37 I was interested in what he meant by this. It sounded to me – maybe I’ve misunderstood you – but it sounded a little alarming.
1:03:43 KP: Oh. Well...
1:03:45 Q: But I don’t want to necessarily start another discussion on that.
1:03:48 DB: Could you say something in one minute? Then we’ll pause for discussion, right?
1:03:55 KP: I simply don’t want to alarm you unduly. I think it can be done and a hologram is one example of a holistic device which is as rigorously specifiable as any analytic mechanism.
1:04:15 And when we get into infinite mathematics there are techniques available to talk about relational things, as cleanly.
1:04:26 It’s not easy. It’s something that hasn’t been done too much of, but there’s no reason why it can’t be done. And once it’s done, then I think... I mean, it doesn’t really spoil... Maybe what’s alarming to you is it’ll spoil the beauty of things and things of that kind and I don’t think it would.
1:04:49 Q: I think the word hard-headed had wrong connotations. I really think you meant rigorous or disciplined, would be the more appropriate...
1:04:57 KP: That’s what I mean, yes. What does hard-headed mean to you?
1:04:59 Q: I’m saying wearing a hard hat and having...
1:05:02 KP: Oh, dear. No. (Laughs) (Laughter) Q: ...in science.
1:05:06 MW: Well, as I see it, you were concerned merely with an extension of science as it is, nothing more.
1:05:11 KP: I don’t think so. I think this is a... As David has said, thinking holographically is already a metamorphosis rather than just another transformation.
1:05:25 It’s very much... it’s a different dimension of science, as different as quantum mechanics was from classical mechanics.
1:05:36 In biology, I think we would go through quite a turmoil and revolution in our thinking.
1:05:44 MW: I don’t think these are the revolutions we need in science today. I think that’s the point I’m making.
1:05:51 KP: What kind of revolutions do we need?
1:05:53 MW: Well, I think we just get back to this point about science not having compassion in it. I think this is the revolution we must seek. All the others I think are irrelevant.
1:06:04 KP: I think once we understand the relational – as this dialogue or polylogue with Krishnamurti has just shown – this is the way to get it in.
1:06:16 Once we understand what compassion really is and have all of the steps... For instance, if we just talk about emotions and we have only descriptive things, it doesn’t really help, but if we can pin down all of the... we have as many biological and physical descriptors of what goes into an emotion, as we have as what goes into a visual occurrence, than some of the mystery and so on will not just disappear but at least we’ll have a different kind of understanding and we can have compassion in science.
1:06:56 K: Sir, I think, if I understand Dr Wilkins rightly, he says, ‘We have no compassion in science.’ Now, how do you have it?
1:07:09 We talk about it, and that is his whole point.
1:07:12 MW: I think Dr Pribram’s point seemed to be that if we would have scientific understanding of compassion we would then have solved the problem, but it seems to me a direct contradiction.
1:07:24 KP: Yes, I... No, I would say that if we have scientific understanding of, let’s say, compassion, that this is then admitted to science and it won’t be that world versus this world anymore.
1:07:40 Q: Karl, I think all the colleagues who were lined up against you may be teaching your theory ten years from now without compassion and that’s the problem.
1:07:49 You can teach the whole holographic model with no compassion whatsoever, which leaves science exactly where it is.
1:07:56 There’s no compassion built in intrinsically to that mode of thinking. I think that’s the point that Dr Wilkins is making.
1:08:05 KP: I tend to disagree. I think that once science says, ‘This is part of what we need to understand,’ it will also begin to accept compassionate ways of behaviour.
1:08:19 K: Sir, which way – sorry – which do you lean with science or compassion first?
1:08:24 KP: Both together. Always...
1:08:26 K: Ah, wait sir. Wait, wait. (Laughs) K

P: ...come from both ends. I want them to come together; I don’t want a first. In other words...
1:08:38 K: Is my relationship with you a scientific relationship or is my relationship to you a compassionate relationship?
1:08:52 KP: I don’t know about yours with me, but mine with you...
1:08:55 K: No, I’m talking...
1:08:56 KP: ...but mine with you is both scientific and personal at the same time, because the moment you say something – as you may have seen me do here – I immediately wonder what in the world is going on in your brain and my brain and why is it... how do we suspend these filters and gates and what you call images, and what goes on.
1:09:15 In other words, I want scientific understanding of what you are accomplishing.
1:09:21 K: Yes. But am I a human being first and scientist afterwards, or I’m a scientist first and a human being afterwards?
1:09:33 This is the whole question, sir: the Yogi and the Commissar, the... the whole problem is...
1:09:38 KP: I don’t see the dichotomy. A scientist is a human being.
1:09:43 K: Ah, that... Then...
1:09:46 MW: Well, barely.
1:09:47 KP: That’s what I want... I finally want it to be that a scientist is a human being and that...
1:09:53 K: I didn’t quite hear what Dr Wilkins said.
1:09:55 KP: What did Dr Wilkins say?
1:09:56 MW: I’m sorry, I introduced the adjective barely when you said a scientist was a human being.
1:10:02 KP: Oh, very good. Today, that’s true.
1:10:04 MW: Sorry, I should address my remarks to the chairman. (Laughter) K

P: Today you’re perfectly right, but I think that can be remedied.
1:10:08 DB: Well, could we, I think, start on the next talk unless there’s something you really want to say?
1:10:18 Q: Not... (inaudible).
1:10:20 DB: Right. Dr Shainberg.
1:10:23 DS: Well, the laboratory changes a little bit, since I will use myself more as the laboratory.
1:10:32 I wanted to distinguish before I started the difference between knowledge, needing to know and knowing.
1:10:41 Just simply, knowledge I have in mind as some form, model or image of how an over-there objective, a so-called reality is shaped.
1:10:53 The constructions or consistencies are confirmed in tests, actions and interactions with the world — that’s what I’m going to use as knowledge.
1:11:02 For knowing, I define as an action of perception, something like an inner harmony described as an insight, an understanding or intelligence – as Krishnamurti has used it – and it involves a participatory process, having to do with awareness of our organisms as aspects of all of nature, not as examples of nature but as manifesting presence simultaneously with the birds, the trees and the transformations of energy therein.
1:11:32 Needing to know is a phrase which I hope will become clear as I go along. The model I’m going to use here is long distance running, a practice which has taught me, I think, a great deal about the place of knowledge in transforming.
1:11:48 I think it is a model that we could use for much of what we’re talking about and also a model for most of the kinds of transforming processes that we hope to be going into.
1:12:00 Now, the first question I ask here is: why does someone run distances which are not easily accomplished? Why do I, for instance, go day after day, five to six miles a day? Others may run as much as twelve to fifteen miles a day. For me, one part obviously is the memory of the results of previous running. Memory. Each day, that memory brings me back to do it again. I feel more intact and more firm of body and mind after a run. On approaching the situation, I also feel a desire to loosen my muscles, to get out the tightness, to be in the air, breathing and able to move in open space.
1:12:39 These results of previous runs and the anticipation that it will occur again – the past and the future – fall into a category we call knowledge.
1:12:48 They draw me toward a repetition of the action; they give certain definite informations. I know about the past experiences and the general category of a good run, as I know about the characteristics of an objective thing like that table or those chairs.
1:13:05 This knowledge is expected consistency amidst change and the consistency provides the possibility for change.
1:13:14 I imagine, as a result of my memory knowledge, that in this day’s run I will find certain possibilities for practice.
1:13:23 Now, I do not use the word practice as getting better, because for the most part while starting to run or while running a run, I do not try to improve.
1:13:35 If it happens that improvement occurs, it is an experience in which I recognise I feel better today – a bit stronger, perhaps – or I found it a bit easier to go up a hill or over distance.
1:13:50 I might find I can go further today, when I find at the planned end I still feel strong. This kind of feeling comes as a kind of addendum or coda; not sought — it sort of just happens.
1:14:05 This practice, however, is crucial. It’s an instantaneous exposure to fact. In my everyday life, I meet the demands of why something is being done. I know in terms of future and past plans why something is being done. All the connections that I have to other people demand form to concrete action and reaction and lead to responses with certain fixed parameters.
1:14:30 Around the perimeters of my action, other people will respond and thereby I have relationships which are specific. The definite, closed patterns are often a necessity to carry out the contingencies of existence.
1:14:43 Then there is a schedule I have to adjust to, and it means when and where can I do what I want. What I do is a response, often, to another’s wish. In all this why/when, I have to be on the alert to what is coming next, to respond to it in ways which consider further results.
1:15:00 In any such time, I often find I focus on what all this means for me, in the concrete realities of whatever it is that I am involved in doing.
1:15:08 As this goes on, I feel absorbed in the necessity of each action followed another action and I try to maintain some specific condition in my life: what I would want in my life or how I feel each necessity gets lost by the pulls of action/reaction in the multiplicity of situations.
1:15:28 But the practice of running experience is different. As I experience it, it is a sacred action; it is not done for any reason other than itself. Though, as I have written, the memory of previous events does contribute to my return each day; the actual doing, though, is not for the purpose of any specific result.
1:15:49 In the action, I am not object for another nor am I subject to another’s objectivity. My focus is on the totality of events, on the running, on what I am doing while I am doing it.
1:16:02 I pay attention to how I am doing it. I follow my muscles, my status as a moving, breathing thing, my feet, my arms, my sweat and the way I am moving.
1:16:14 I’m aware – or perhaps it is better to say what is in the floating awareness of events – of what comes up in the every part of the thing-self that is running.
1:16:22 KP: Aren’t you exhausted by this, David?
1:16:24 DS: Yes.
1:16:25 KP: All this awareness going on? (Laughs)

DS: It is that every thought, feeling and action is, and the sacredness is in the simplicity simply of that registration of all that is involved in the practice.
1:16:35 But what is important is that all this happening out there in the air, in the wind, is my finding some kind of relationship between all the parts of myself, the air and the ground.
1:16:47 It is that embroilment in the space of this relationship. Just in front of me, in every run, there’s more space and this makes a practice in finding what is present, just coming into being beyond whatever was before.
1:17:01 That edge acts like a magnet of intrigue. All that happens is electrified by the appearance of what lies on the other side of the moment of each step and each breath.
1:17:11 The continuous work of my feet, my muscles, my arms, my acts, express a constant moment of uncertainty, which is making a new relationship every second.
1:17:21 The sacredness of the practice is in the new beginning at the other side of the breath. The knowledge predicts that this practice will be available, that the relating of factors of action and elements, muscles and air, will produce forms.
1:17:35 All the things that happen come into this new beginning, in which all the action of mind and body are happening beyond knowledge into knowing.
1:17:44 One runner told me, ‘Most of the time, I live my life half in and half out. If things get too scary, I fade out. But in running I cannot fade out. To do this running, I have to be there. There is no ambling along to make it, I simply must be present. For the first time in my life’ – he told me – ‘I have discovered I can do it. I can be there and I can run three miles one day, five miles the next and seven miles next. I can do it and can depend on myself. I have always felt I could not depend on myself, that I couldn’t really do anything, but in the running I have discovered I can’.
1:18:24 Now, in the running, sometimes there is this sense of collapse. As you’re running along, you feel like the whole world has suddenly collapsed under you and there’s a certain weakness in one’s will.
1:18:38 At that point, I feel like, ‘Well, I’ll just quit. The bottom has dropped out and what’s going to keep it all together?’ But when I go into this and I really feel into the sense of collapse, then there’s somehow or other a sudden strength which brings it all together.
1:18:56 So it’s the experience of the collapse which then is the integrating factor, somehow or other, and that brings it together.
1:19:03 Some days, I might start this run in a state of confusion. I wonder if I can endure the stress, the duration of the time and the space while carrying this load of confusion.
1:19:15 On one day, for instance, I was quite angry because of certain things I had to do. I was angry and I was angry at the task and I thought to myself that I was angry at my wife because she was involved in this task, then I was mad at the colleague who had also been connected with it.
1:19:32 And for the first three miles that day I was carrying the load of all these thoughts. I did not know if I could go on carrying this package. And then as the running became the issue too, namely the needs of the work there and the involvement in the process of the work, the thoughts dropped away.
1:19:49 I’m reminded here of what the Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter said. When he comes to the twenty mile point in his twenty-six mile marathon, he’s never sure – quotes – ‘if his mind is ready to put his body through these next six miles.’ But we could ask, I think here, if it’s the other way around: is the body ready to put the mind through that kind of necessity, for the mind to give way and give in to the stress of focus on the body?
1:20:17 Or is the body no longer a will, and the will must come from the mind and stretch into the future of the six miles, as well as knowing that it has been done in the past, perhaps making it possible again.
1:20:29 Certainly, the body after twenty miles is exhausted of supplies and no-one really knows, biochemically, where that new energy comes from that brings the next six miles off.
1:20:44 And another interesting thing that happens, at a certain junction on my run I start having fantasies. One set is all about finishing a job. The job, on the run that day, may be four, five or six miles but it’s incomplete right down to the end, until about a quarter of a mile before the end.
1:21:03 I always feel there’s some question whether or not I can make it. So in my mind, I start finishing in fantasies all the jobs in my life that I feel are unfinished.
1:21:14 It might be the papers I’m working on, it might be an unfinished project, it might be the incompleteness in a relationship with a friend.
1:21:22 If there’s an uncertainty in a relationship, I may even have vindictive fantasies toward someone with whom I felt incomplete or uncomfortable.
1:21:31 The vindictive fantasy, or other forms, closes off the unfinished business in which I was left as vulnerable and as I feel in the run.
1:21:40 As I do this, I now realise I start to hold on to my breath. That’s very important, because as I’m going on in my head, I’m also holding on to my thoughts and now I’m holding on to my breath.
1:21:53 But at some point the circularity of all this becomes clear and I see that I’ve been running the last, say, hundred yards with my eyes, my ears and my senses all closed but how I will get revenge, let’s say.
1:22:07 The nature of my breathing suddenly made it apparent, though, as have the tenseness of my muscles, that something is out of kilter in this whole relationship to the air.
1:22:18 The discordant rhythm instantaneously lights up the fact that part of the discordance is the circular thought processes which have been my thinking.
1:22:28 It becomes clear that I have been trying not to run, to not be in an open relationship. I’ve been holding myself back, by trying to know something will be finished and complete.
1:22:40 When this closure becomes clear, I find myself immediately opening up to the relationship to the space and time and the air and the discovery of more air being available than such tight breathing gave me.
1:22:54 Now, sometimes along about half way – with say two miles behind me, for instance, and two miles to go – I might start to think about a relationship with a woman.
1:23:05 Sometimes it’ll be a pleasurable, sexual kind of experience, in the direction of some sort of completion.
1:23:12 Now, if I analyse this I find that at this point I feel strong enough to know how far I have come and am aware in my muscles that I have just as far to go.
1:23:23 But more than that, I am aware of being alone with still one half the distance and the time in front of me.
1:23:30 I have accomplished the warm-up period, I feel that I can make it and my attention to survival is no longer in the forefront of my concern.
1:23:39 The fears diminish and for a moment there’s nothing for me to relate to. I have the sense of simply being in the run, running, but the simplicity of this feels like something is missing.
1:23:53 My muscles, my action are flowing but it feels like only one half of a life is present. This feels vulnerable and my energy is in the run and I am unprotected — I must have something to attach myself to.
1:24:07 Before, it was the minute problems of the run and of getting warmed up but now there’s only me as a thing with this task.
1:24:16 I think some of it has to do with needing someone to keep me company in the openness of this relationship which is in front of me, so I don’t have to worry about my strength.
1:24:27 But as I feel strong in knowing as far as I have come and how far I have to go, than I can, so to speak, have the sense of the incompleteness.
1:24:36 So this strength is embodied in a further capacity to feel aware enough of how much I have to do.
1:24:43 The search for help through companionship reflects, I think, the fear.
1:24:50 Another way of knowledge is the way it blocks what it has helped bring about. The past awareness of memory of what I have been able to do, follows along observing the new ways.
1:25:03 I am in the relationship and make comparison about the new events in the old way. Say I feel pain in my legs, often I will immediately associate that this is the place on my daily route where I feel pain.
1:25:17 That is to say, this measure is translatable as: ‘I have done, say, two miles, the pain is as usual at this point, I will be able to go the rest since I was able to do so yesterday.’ That is, I measure the pain in relation to the position and I use my knowledge of yesterday to fix today in time and space for assurance.
1:25:42 I am needing to know also exactly what I can to do now. There are no chances to be taken. I’m always afraid that I won’t make it, as I said, and this sets it in a form and a connection which makes it more comfortable.
1:25:56 But there are other times when this does not occur. At those moments, this same pain in the legs is taken in a way which I can feel a recognition of it.
1:26:05 I feel myself accepting it and there’s a giving-in, almost a saying, ‘Yes,’ to it, which allows and develops into more strength.
1:26:14 That’s a sort of transformation that occurs through accepting and accommodating to the pain.
1:26:22 Strange, too, is how I feel new strength when I have done two-thirds of the day’s run. I have felt I was too tired to go on for the first four miles but suddenly, only two miles to go, I know I can make it to the end and I’m suddenly infused with a burst of energy.
1:26:39 It also happens that I have so far to go today, I came this far yesterday and that is all I can do today.
1:26:46 When I arrive at my usual limit for that day, I decide spontaneously to go on.
1:26:53 And this is very interesting. When I passed the mark that I’ve previously set for myself and which my knowledge of the past performances tells me I could do, I’m instantly short of breath, anxious and my thoughts begin to go about how am I going to take this chance.
1:27:10 I may die with a heart-attack from the strain. I feel moderately frantic the second I step over the measured distance. This time, knowledge obviously prevented me from going beyond its set. It blocks the transformation that might occur and has occurred when I let myself go on and do not get into this, ‘Hold back.’ I know one runner, for instance, who can only run a mile and a half in the city but when he gets to the country he can run three to four miles, quite easily.
1:27:41 Or another who runs very easily indoors when there are specific dimensions to the track and the space around and the surface on which he’s running.
1:27:50 For the first, running in the country gives air and the surroundings to extend his limits. Apparently, the seeing of the flowing aspects of nature and the less geometric forms gives him some support.
1:28:03 The other man is supported by the limits and feels he can be free to explore his capacity inside these protected limits.
1:28:13 Well, one other thing, sometimes I find myself breathing very hard and it feels very dangerous.
1:28:20 Listen to it. I can’t catch up with myself. I have no control and that makes me mad. I’m running and I’m certainly not going to stop and think it over. Even if I did, of course, I wouldn’t be breathing like this anymore. But this is bigger than me when I’m running. It’s not something I can watch and think about before I make my next step. The moves that are demanded by my whole relationship with the air are going on. In the running, I find the air only if I let the space give it to me, but to let the air in I somehow must cooperate by letting go of my position in a separate control and begin accepting the fact of my needs that appear in the run.
1:29:01 That is what is sacred about practice: recognising the facts of needs in relationship to the world.
1:29:09 That is what the running is all about: letting needs in this situation appear. In the relationship we have, my acting, the air, the ground, and when there is an acceptance of the fact of the way of my organism is in this event, there’s a harmony.
1:29:23 Then the air comes in. I feel the danger of all this rapid breathing is that all the control, all that can help me, has to come from going along with what is happening, that’s what running is.
1:29:36 I cannot do anything directly to fix it. Now, I think there’s something interesting about this, because this is the kind of thing that happens when a person is thrown into uncertainty also and feels the collapse of his previous model of what’s happening or what’s going to happen.
1:29:57 My patients often complain about the loss of control and the return of their experiences of anxiety.
1:30:04 One man said he had to see endings. In running, he’s afraid of moments like anxiety when he has no control and he’s breathing fast. He describes a green light which suffuses his whole being and he’s afraid he will erupt. Others speak of their fear of going crazy when they’re anxious and do not know what will happen to them. The similarity of the breathing in acute anxiety and in running clarifies both situations a bit more.
1:30:32 Inside the run, working on those hills and letting my legs go and letting the air in and out, I find that I’m making up myself as I go along.
1:30:41 I feel a capacity grow as I go into action. Each moment was and continues to be uncertain, no matter how much this capacity is developed.
1:30:52 And when I acknowledge I’ve been afraid of that uncertain moment, then there’s something else that develops.
1:31:00 But if that process is blocked and breathing is allowed to go into its course, then there’s a sense of restriction that there’s more air, and the short breathing is felt as an action which is my body working.
1:31:17 It’s as if previous to this shortness of breath was immediately a bad thing, something to avoid at all costs.
1:31:25 Short breathing was action in a moment of uncertainty, felt as bad because it’s a time of not knowing but now...
1:31:34 In other words, if I let it go on then I can experience it. If I don’t and I feel it’s bad, then things get turned around and get hung up in a circle. At the instance that I leave this behind – leave the knowledge that it’s bad behind – then the event is simply running and I leave knowledge behind and I am into knowing.
1:31:59 Now, my action is fragmented and cut off in measuring all knowledge. In anxiety reactions, the patients are always feeling uncertain and that’s when they hold back and they won’t let themselves into their experience of anxiety.
1:32:15 Well, to conclude, my action...
1:32:22 I discover I have to let go and I discover how to let go when I find myself holding my breath and then I feel the difference when I’m breathing in and out but with the running.
1:32:33 What survives in the way I run on any day, is what the work finds as it explores different kinds of relationship in the air.
1:32:41 I recognise, or it seems more appropriate to say the whole system recognises, that the knowledge I had was accurate – and there’s a word that I laboured over – that the knowledge I had was accurate to bring me to this practice, but now I’m learning something new and I have to see how this experience with being in the open comes out if I’m to go on learning.
1:33:08 In that, knowledge is teaching me how transformation occurs and simultaneously telling me that it only happens when I leave it alone.
1:33:18 That knowledge is the assurance that transformation will occur if the process of not knowing is available.
1:33:26 DB: Does somebody want to start the discussion?
1:33:27 Q: How many miles was that? (Laughter)

DS: A lot of miles. (Laughs)

Q: You could have run it in that time.
1:33:40 DB: Joe?
1:33:43 Q: I think I got captured in your story and I lost track of what you were saying.
1:33:55 Is this transformation you’re talking about...? I mean, would you prefer to run, to just run, without all this happening?
1:34:04 DS: Well, I think eventually what happens is that you do begin to... more and more you discover that you can run without all this happening, but what I’m trying to describe is the fact that this always happens when you run, in the sense that you always somehow or other are developing a relationship like this and this will occur.
1:34:28 I mean, in other words, that in the act of developing it you have these kinds of thought processes which evolve to block your relationship to just running – if you want to call it that – and the transforming is in the letting go of the blocks.
1:34:44 Q: So the transforming you’re talking about is to transform from having these things happening when you’re running, to not having them happen when you are running?
1:35:08 DB: David?
1:35:09 DP: I mean, could I sort of follow on from that question. I found this very subtle and I didn’t fully understand what you were saying, but in choosing this path of running and discomfort – now, maybe you can clarify this for me – if you ran from a need or by an act of will, then are you searching for some sort of energy and you’re setting yourself in opposition to yourself, and is your running done without any will at all?
1:35:24 DS: Well, I think that’s one of the problems that I think comes into anything like this, which is that you do... there is an act of will to put yourself into the situation, which I consider the part of...
1:35:38 I mean the subject we’re discussing is, ‘What is the rôle of knowledge in the transformation of man?’ Here the knowledge that this act of will of putting...
1:35:48 I mean, for instance, if I were to transfer the model over to the scientist in some sense, I would say the act of will that takes the scientist back to the laboratory every day is the sense that, having gone through his experiences, he might have a sense someday of contact with a reality, his experience in reality.
1:36:05 He might go through a number of hypothesis but eventually he would come to some contact with the world, and his relationship in the world.
1:36:13 So the act of will.
1:36:15 DP: Is it not a disposition to run? That you would dispose yourself to run and then you run? But when you’re continuing to run, that you call upon your will to keep you going, then you’re in conflict.
1:36:29 DS: Well, no, you’re in conflict only when you’re... You’re not in conflict except in as much as you are... this relationship is developing.
1:36:41 Now, there’s a conflict in the sense that your act of will has put you into an event – if any body-mind process somehow or other is involved here – where you put yourself into a situation where your mind will drop away.
1:36:58 You put yourself in the situation where you would... I mean, I’ve had the experience, for instance, in doing yoga where I’ve gone to yoga classes and I would come from my office and go to yoga classes and my mind would be going like mad, and I would participate in the yoga experience and I would say, ‘I’ll never come back to this experience.
1:37:17 I’ll never do this again. This is terribly boring, boring, boring, boring, boring.’ And then I walk out and I feel fantastic. It’s like the whole thing had dropped away.
1:37:26 K: Sir, may I...? Without running, if you learned right breathing, would this happen?
1:37:36 DS: I can’t answer that. I can’t answer that. I think maybe it would.
1:37:43 K: I mean, the whole question in yoga – I’ve done it for forty years or more – the whole question in there is to breathe without will.
1:37:55 At least, I translate it as that. Without effort. The moment you bring in effort, you cease to do yoga.
1:38:08 If there is any kind of activity of the will to force the body, to achieve a certain result, then it’s no longer yoga.
1:38:22 So would you come to the same thing, without running, but learning what breathing is, the right... – pranayama as they call it in India – in which there is no action of will whatsoever?
1:38:42 DS: Yes, but what’s going get me to the... to learning it?
1:38:47 K: No. Your natural instinct to be healthy. Your natural intelligence of the body that says, ‘For God’s sake, be healthy.’ DS: Yes.
1:38:59 My answer to that would be, ‘Yes.’ If you could do that...
1:39:01 K: Yes, but you’re introducing, if I may – if I’ve understood it rightly, subject to your correction – you are introducing effort and conflict in this.
1:39:13 DS: Right. I’m introducing the notion of effort.
1:39:16 K: Effort. To me that is the crux of our whole civilisation.
1:39:22 DS: Exactly. That’s why I introduced it. (Laughs)

K: Whether you can do things without effort.
1:39:28 DS: That’s it; that’s the whole question, is: can you do the thing without effort. Would you get in...? Would I learn to breathe...?
1:39:37 K: Sir, you would learn to breathe if you saw, intelligently – not you – DS: (Laughs) I’ll take it.
1:39:48 K: ...the necessity of breathing, of right breathing.
1:39:53 DS: Exactly. But would I...? Yes, you mean if I knew the necessity, I would immediately know...?
1:39:58 K: No, see... Say, for instance, eating wrong food gives you tummy ache, then you stop eating wrong food.
1:40:11 In the same way, if you saw breathing is necessary for the body – the right kind, not stupid – then naturally you do it.
1:40:19 There is no effort, there is no control, there is no urge. It is part of your whole movement of living.
1:40:27 DS: But there’s something there… and, you see, there’s something different about the running, in the sense that as you run you feel stronger.
1:40:35 K: Ah... You see, you’re... Of course. In the breathing, too, you may feel stronger.
1:40:40 DS: Okay.
1:40:41 K: On the contrary. If you do it properly, it is supposed to generate all kinds of things, which I won’t go into.
1:40:53 There, they say, if you breathe properly you have more oxygen going to your head, into the brain and so on, and keep it healthy.
1:41:04 And if you saw that as important as having meals, then you’d naturally do it without effort.
1:41:15 JM: I’m afraid I don’t understand what you... Either I don’t understand what you just said... I mean, there are certain activities, let’s say, which may or may not relate to bodily functions, which I might be persuaded by anybody that they’re very important, they’re crucial to my continuing to live, say.
1:41:37 Yet what I don’t understand is... it doesn’t seem to follow that it’s thereby going to be a very easy task, I’ll do it effortlessly.
1:41:45 It might be a terribly hard thing for me to do.
1:41:50 K: Wouldn’t you, sir, see the danger of ill health?
1:42:01 And therefore you would take the right steps...
1:42:03 JM: Well, certainly. Yes. But the steps might be very difficult.
1:42:10 K: Would you consider the difficulty at all? Would you consider it difficult, or just flow into it, do it?
1:42:19 JM: I would consider my determination to try to do it effortless. I mean, I could resolve to do it, and that resolve or reaching my resolve, may be a very easy task but once the resolve had been reached...
1:42:32 K: No, I don’t know if have you have done any yoga. I’m not...
1:42:34 JM: I find that’s... – okay, use that as an example, because I find it terribly difficult. I mean...
1:42:40 K: No, no, no. According to what they say, the yogis say, is do it effortlessly, begin very slowly.
1:42:48 Take time. Take days, take months, take years but do it very, very, very, slowly.
1:42:56 DS: Well, what’s going to do it? I mean, but wait a second now. I haven’t had the experience now of knowing that it’s going to help me. What’s going to get me to do it at all?
1:43:07 JM: That’s a different question from mine, actually.
1:43:11 K: Yes.
1:43:12 JM: I was saying... I mean, you could persuade me that I ought to do it, and I’ll resolve to do it. But then there might be something, if you want, I mean... I can’t think of the word.
1:43:22 K: A reward.
1:43:23 JM: Well, a mechanical problem.
1:43:24 K: Yes, a reward.
1:43:25 DS: Yes, a reward; pleasure.
1:43:27 JM: Yes, there... All right...
1:43:29 K: That’s my whole point.
1:43:30 JM: But I might agree to all that, yet not be able to do it.
1:43:32 K: No, it’s not a question... You’re mentally agreeing...
1:43:36 JM: Sure.
1:43:37 K: ...but that’s not agreement. You see... Like seeing a danger, you act wholly. You don’t see mentally first and then react, you see danger and there is instant response.
1:43:53 But if you saw the same way the danger of ill health – mettons, suppose that; or mental ill health, whatever it is – if you saw the real danger of it, it’s finished.
1:44:05 I mean, if I saw the real danger of nationalities, with their wars and so on, so on, I’m no longer a national.
1:44:15 JM: Yes, I... I mean, I’ll give... Let’s take yoga and myself as an example. I mean, I used to be a skier, so my muscles were developed in a way that’s actually opposed to what one has to do.
1:44:27 K: With yoga.
1:44:28 JM: Yes. In other words, I didn’t stretch them, I sort of tightened them in a bulky way. So I find it terribly difficult to even sit on my heels, terribly difficult. Now, I know yoga is good. I mean, I... and let’s assume that you take fifteen minutes and really persuade me that it would be marvellous for my health, and I’m persuaded.
1:44:47 Yet the mechanics of the thing I’ll find difficult.
1:44:50 KP: Very simple: small steps.
1:44:54 JM: Oh yes; I mean, sure, but that’ll take effort. That’s my...
1:44:57 K: Ah no...
1:44:58 KP: No, I don’t think it takes effort. I agree here, and these things seem so simple to me. I mean, my parents told me, ‘When you’re thirty-five years old, that’s when you begin to get fat and have to worry about it.’ And just naturally, I started cutting down on sugar in my coffee and things like this.
1:45:13 But I didn’t start... I didn’t say, ‘Gee, I’ve got to give up sugar,’ or anything else. I just – you know? – instead of taking three teaspoons’ full, I took two and a half, and after a couple of weeks or a month or whatever it was, I took two, and one and a half... finally gave up coffee entirely, you know?
1:45:28 I just... But all of these things seemed very effortless.
1:45:30 JM: You teach me the secret of it.
1:45:32 Q: Well, if I may take just...
1:45:33 KP: Smoking, I would say the same thing. You just... you know? I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t know why people have trouble with this sort of thing.
1:45:44 That’s not your running thing, however.
1:45:47 JM: No, it’s different.
1:45:48 KP: That’s different.
1:45:50 Q: Go ahead...
1:45:51 JM: Well, I’m having trouble understanding what even... I mean, I know what you say, but I don’t have... you know, it doesn’t grab me in the same...
1:46:00 KP: Isn’t that interesting? It may be a difference in people, too; some people can and some people...
1:46:13 (Pause) Q: I might just illustrate Julian’s point, by an experience in my own life. My wife persuaded me to take a course in yoga, or a class in yoga, rather.
1:46:19 K: Oh, poor yoga. (Laughs)

Q: And the selling point, of course, was the fact that it should be effortless and you’re not in competition with anyone and you go to your own capacity.
1:46:30 Well, I went to this course and the instructor spoke much this way to the class. But then, when it got down to the practical thing, she would say, ‘Well, those of you who can bend and touch the floor, do so.
1:46:45 And those of you who can bend and can’t touch the floor but can touch your ankles, do so. And those of you who can’t touch your ankles and can touch your calves, do so,’ and she even got up to the knees, but she never got as far as where I was, which were the thighs.
1:47:02 (Laughs) (Laughter) And so I dropped out.
1:47:07 Q: I wanted to take up the issue of running from a little different framework and tie it to what Karl was saying, because I think you’ve presented a nice illustration of what I think is a broader class of activities, which has to do with providing ourselves with unfamiliar kinds of inputs.
1:47:32 And I think providing ourselves with unfamiliar kinds of inputs has something to do with transformations, because I think it’s our ordinary, habitual inputs which maintain those filters that Karl talks about, which maintain our images of the world.
1:47:48 And I think it’s wrong to think of them as entirely autonomous images up there in the head which, once they’re there, function independently.
1:47:58 I think that they need some maintenance by the ways that we surround ourselves, to provide stimulation which maintain those filters.
1:48:09 It’s the way that we hold on to our image of the world by providing ourselves with confirmatory data.
1:48:17 So to the extent that we can dis-habituate by running, by meditation, by travelling, by contemplation and equation, whatever it is, I think these things allows us to disengage from our characteristic filters and begin to transform ourselves.
1:48:37 JM: Disengage Karl, or would you rather say give them a rest? I mean, that was important when I was listening to you. I mean...
1:48:45 KP: Trying to think in terms of frontal lobe function. When you take off the frontal lobe, you really disinhibit and everything is novel from then on.
1:49:03 I mean, all inputs become reacted to as if they were novel, so it may be a real disengagement — you have to shut off the frontal mechanism or something of this kind.
1:49:14 But I’m not clear on this. I mean, I don’t think we have enough evidence exactly how this works yet. We’ve got the location – I can tell you which system is involved in the brain, but I’m not sure how it works.
1:49:28 MW: Could I ask Dr Shainberg, do you know that delightful film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner?
1:49:38 DS: Yes.
1:49:39 MW: It’s a marvellous thing about the tragedy of the working-class boy who doesn’t stand a chance in the system and then tries to find fulfillment in the running.
1:49:54 DB: I think...
1:49:57 Q: I just... I think I heard in your statement that you’re essentially saying that you feel that new experiences can assist in a transformation.
1:50:10 Q: Yes.
1:50:13 DB: Is that what you wanted to say?
1:50:18 Q: That’s all what I wanted to say.
1:50:20 DB: I think you’re next.
1:50:21 GS: You wanted to respond to this? No. I just wanted to say, I don’t run. I walk, usually, or fly. (Laughter)

DS: He flies.
1:50:31 GS: But occasionally I get... I mean, do some exercises, like bike riding. And I have been told to ride the bike for three minutes or five minutes, and I know that if I get past the first minute then I have done it, but there are some times when getting past the first minute is so excruciating difficult that all the rewards that are there are really not relevant because I know that the worst that would happen is you would die ten years younger — it’s alright; I mean, who cares about that?
1:51:00 But here, I mean, the motivation is not sufficiently strong. But I find exactly the same kind of difficulty if I have to write a paper for a conference or prepare a lecture.
1:51:11 If you have two weeks you don’t prepare, you wait until sort of you get into the mood and it’s no use avoiding getting tense because it seems to me, for me to do something I have to get tense and I become very efficient as the time becomes smaller and smaller.
1:51:29 But I do know that the last but one day before you have to take the trip, you feel there is a possibility that you could do it.
1:51:37 If you get past ten o’clock at night – you know? – if you can spend one hour at the desk getting furious with yourself and with everybody else, then you can make it.
1:51:48 But if you don’t do it on that night, you can certainly do it on the next night because by this time you have to finish it. You have to... (Laughter) So as you go along, you can almost keep watch over the thing as a game-play in which you are struggling with the thing but you’re not a hundred percent convinced that you have to write it tonight.
1:52:07 But once you have gone past that stage – and I mean, I’m talking only about myself – I get past the stage and I start writing, then even if I stop, I could come back twelve hours later and then continue from that point.
1:52:19 So there is some transition point at which you’re really committing yourself, and once you have gone... And it requires a considerable amount of stress and strain, tug-of-war. Once you go past this point, then it becomes almost automatic writing. It is not that you have not worked for the thing but you cannot get yourself to this particular point. And watching this does not interfere with doing it. I mean, you can say... and all the knowledge that you are going to have to do it, either today or tomorrow, is not going to convince you that you must write it before ten o’clock.
1:52:49 You must get past this one hour of struggle before you can get into this... And in a certain sense I sort of enjoy this also, to see the struggle. It’s always advisable to sleep well before you take a transatlantic flight, but it never happens because it always happens that the previous day is the day when you have to do all this work.
1:53:12 And it never seems to end and it seems to me that it’s all right; I mean, what difference does it make? Because, well, finally you get there, sooner or later. I wonder if you feel the same about running, that you do know that you’re going to run, even if you feel that the world is going to collapse.
1:53:26 DS: Right.
1:53:27 GS: You do know? So in a sense the anxiety is a sort of game. You’re really not anxious; you don’t expect to die of heart failure.
1:53:36 DS: Well, I would say this, and I think what Gordon was saying too, is that the very... Well, that’s really in part what I’m getting at, is it’s not so much a game... I think one of the things about running is that you actually do have the experience of... I mean, the real experience of knowing you’re going to do something, knowing you’re going to run under whatever conditions there are, that the physical experience carries you beyond such a thing as a game.
1:54:04 In other words, you might know you’re going to do it but you are having the feeling of breathing hard, you are actively doing it.
1:54:12 And I think what Gordon brings in there – and I think what you’re raising here – is a thing that I really wanted to get into in terms of the theme, because in as much as we do get into uncertainty – which is what that is – then we’re always in the process, as...
1:54:26 I mean, what Krishnamurti says, it’s the pleasure, so to speak. If the direction is towards pleasure, then we’re going to make forms or images, as Krishnamurti says, which will in some way or other limit that uncertainty.
1:54:39 Whereas in contrast, if we go on with the uncertainty then we begin to open up new kinds of...
1:54:46 I call it exercise capacities, exercise of our integrating capacity.
1:54:53 In other words, we open up this ability to make new organisations. Now, the difference between that and an image, for me, is the fact that an image stops it. In other words, if you get hooked on an image which is made in the service of pleasure, then that becomes a circle in which you stay.
1:55:13 In contrast to another kind of direction – which is what I was suggesting here is in the open relationship – then there’s a kind of flow: you make this form, you make that one, you make this one; you don’t take any of them...
1:55:23 I mean, I don’t take the one about the woman very seriously, I don’t take the vindictive fantasy very seriously, I don’t take... They pop up and I recognise them as part of my thing, but they come and they go from that direction.
1:55:36 And in that sense it’s a practice. That’s why I think the practice gives you a feeling for it.
1:55:40 GS: No, but are there any cases where you have stopped have running because you say, ‘I just can’t make the next mile’?
1:55:44 DS: I have done that, yes.
1:55:45 GS: What happens in such case? Do you feel like a heel?
1:55:49 DS: Well, usually... Yes, usually – not a heel – but I mean, I feel like... it’s something... it feels very flat. In other words, like I haven’t be willing to try that experience that day. I’ve stayed in my filters, to use the...
1:56:03 Q: Does it happen often?
1:56:04 DS: No. Rarely now, but it used to happen more frequently.
1:56:07 EF: I’ve had an experience which may also help to clarify this; it clarifies it for me anyway.
1:56:18 I was a diver, so in a sense I really did fly. And all the time whilst I was diving – I was springboard diving – every dive I did was a new experience, in the sense that if one took off in a slightly off way, you had to make an adjustment in the air in order to land properly, otherwise you’d land and might hurt yourself.
1:56:42 But the new experience came in the sense when I had to learn a new dive. Now, we took it step-by-step, in the sense that if I was going to do two and half summersaults, I wouldn’t just go straight from doing one summersault to two and a half, but one would train at one and a half summersaults and then two summersaults.
1:56:59 But when the time came to do the two and a half, and there was nothing in between two and two and a half, it was always a huge effort, a very nerve-racking build-up to the time when I was going to do it, because I knew that the experience was something I had never had before and I couldn’t know what it was going to be like.
1:57:21 And that was the uncertainty. Now, the pleasure came when, having got through that and practised and practised the dive over and over again, one became confident that you could do it, and then the thing to do was to go on and do something else.
1:57:34 But I often wondered why I got such pleasure out of this exercise.
1:57:43 It was a marvellous feeling flying through the air and it was very... the most marvellous thing was when I landed right, not wrong.
1:57:50 But I’ve often wondered and I’ve asked myself what is it that I enjoyed so much about this, that I did it for fourteen years, every day.
1:57:59 And I think what we’re talking about is something about this uncertainty and moving towards pleasure and gaining, achieving something, in a sort of transforming way.
1:58:08 It was certainly an experience which had nothing to do with anything else I did.
1:58:14 K: Sir, is it – I’m just asking; I mean... – that we’re all geared to success...
1:58:25 DS: No, I...
1:58:27 K: ...to achievement, to conquer, to be on top of things?
1:58:34 DS: I don’t see it that way. I see...
1:58:38 K: I’m just asking, I’m not...
1:58:39 DS: I see what we’re talking about here now as more that we’re geared to a sense of feeling ourselves in a harmonious integration with the world.
1:58:52 KP: Effectance.
1:58:53 DS: Effectance. You want to use that word.
1:58:55 KP: But that’s... It’s almost the same thing, not quite. Success is very often measured...
1:58:58 DS: That’s an external value.
1:58:59 KP: ...as an external value, whereas effectance is...
1:59:04 K: Affect...?
1:59:05 KP: Effectance. Being effective somehow; it’s an ethical, aesthetic sort of measure of being able to do... to do.
1:59:14 Period.
1:59:15 K: Because... I’ve done yoga quite a bit. I’ve never made an effort. In my life, living – not... (inaudible) – I’ve never made an effort about anything.
1:59:34 To be, not to be; to achieve, not to achieve. In other words, to be something.
1:59:44 Which eliminates all sense of control – I don’t know, I won’t go into all that. I mean, if you’re interested, we can go into that – but I mean, the whole problem is to do something easily, without the least effort.
2:00:02 I used to do – at the beginning, when I began yoga – forcefully, because I didn’t understand it.
2:00:13 They didn’t tell me, teach me properly. And I discovered the less effort, which means no success, no achievement, no something, ‘I must conquer my body.’ Or conquering and the experience of that conquering and what is beyond that experience, and so on.
2:00:38 DB: Yes. I just would say that I think that it’s also possible to write papers without effort.
2:00:46 (Laughs) Leave that aside for the moment, but I think you...
2:00:50 Q: Yes. I just wanted to say that it seems that David regards the absence of an image as a necessary condition for transformation, but it’s not very clear whether that’s sufficient.
2:01:06 Whereas Krishnamurti regards the absence of an image as a sufficient condition for transformation — if you can free yourself from the image then you will transform.
2:01:17 But going back to the discussion we had after Dr Pribram’s talk, I was a bit worried about this notion that one must use images in relation to operations in the physical world, the mechanical world, because that surely is what holds the scientist back from a totally compassionate relationship with the world, which involves the absence of image in any situation.
2:01:46 Because after all tables and chairs are also beings – consciousness is we can see them that way, I think we must – so that to eliminate the image totally is what we must strive for.
2:02:00 But then it’s as much of a puzzle to me, as I think to others, to know how to attain this state of functioning totally without images.
2:02:09 K: Do I answer it now?
2:02:14 DB: Yes, do you want to comment on it?
2:02:22 K: Sir, first of all, is it possible to be aware of one’s images?
2:02:33 Not only the image I have about myself but the image I have created about others, and the images of my culture, the tradition, all that.
2:02:54 And is it possible to be aware of that choicelessly? Just to be aware without any choice, without choosing any of it – ‘This is better, this is good, this is bad’ – just to be aware, as I’m aware of that tree.
2:03:14 (Pause) Then... which means I am totally attentive – isn’t it? – both consciously as well as unconsciously.
2:03:34 Can I go into all that, or is...?
2:03:39 DB: I should say that it’s getting on for five minutes to one, and it’s going to take longer...
2:03:43 K: Ah, I’d better stop. I’d better stop.
2:03:45 DB: We’ll return to that later, I’m sure.
2:03:46 DS: I wanted to make one point, was on... into it, I think the question comes up too, is what you were saying, if you’re aware of your images, are you aware of your image-making process?
2:03:57 K: Yes. Both are implied.
2:04:00 DS: Yes, okay. We’ll come back to it, but I just wanted to raise that because it’s the direction into image-making process that we want to talk about.
2:04:09 K: Of course. Process, as well as the making, as well as the image.
2:04:15 DS: As well as the image.
2:04:18 K: Of course.
2:04:19 DB: Well, we’ll meet again at... (inaudible).
2:04:23 DS: I think that’s important before... Is there effort?
2:04:27 K: Ah, then you are finished.
2:04:28 DS: That’s right.
2:04:29 Q: That’s right. I mean it can’t be effort.
2:04:31 DS: But how do you get to the point of...?
2:04:33 K: Ah! No...
2:04:35 DS: If you use your...
2:04:36 K: Meditation means...
2:04:37 DS: Always.
2:04:38 K: Always, not just...
2:04:39 DS: Twenty-four hours a day. But... so there’s no effort, there can’t... You’d be worn out if you did...
2:04:45 K: No sir. No, this... One must go into this very carefully.
2:04:49 DS: Yes.
2:04:50 K: On the contrary, there can never be effort.
2:04:51 DS: Never wear out. Because... it’s a different form.