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BR81S2 - The division between the observer and the observed is illusory
Brockwood Park, UK - 12 September 1981
Seminar 2



0:20 Krishnamurti: I think we have to make a resume of what we talked about yesterday. Is it loud enough? Am I talking loudly? That’s better. We started talking about education, how to educate one’s son or daughter to face this very ugly world, which is becoming more and more dangerous. What do we mean by that education? To help the child to conform to the pattern of the existing society, or face the future in a different manner, different dimension? That’s one point we raised yesterday morning. The other was to educate oneself so as to educate the child. What do we mean by that education? What is one educating for? To conform, or to transcend the present situation and go much further? That’s another point we talked about yesterday. The other was, also – wait a minute – human consciousness is more or less similar to all the consciousness of mankind. Our consciousness, one’s particular consciousness, is not different from the consciousness of a person who is a thousand miles away or nearby, because all human beings suffer, go through a great deal of anxiety, sorrow and all the travail of life. And so, we came to the point that we are actually not individuals. I know most of people will object to that. And also, we said if there is a change in the consciousness of a person, it affects the whole of consciousness of mankind. And also, we talked about not seeking a cause. The analysts are always searching for a cause and trying to alter the effect. The universe has no cause. Can human beings live without a cause? That’s where we left off, if I remember rightly. If I have not said all the things which we discussed yesterday, please, you correct it, you join in. Right? Do we proceed from there?
4:26 Q: The word ‘time’ was mentioned on a number of occasions yesterday.
4:30 K: Oh, yes, yes. Do we need time to change, to transform ourselves? To study ourselves, gradually altering ourselves bit by bit. Or, not thinking in terms of time at all, is there a possibility of immediate freedom from conditioning? That’s more or less where we left off.
5:09 Q: This poses a great difficulty. It implies that one has to enter into another dimension. That which speaks doesn’t seem to have any capacity to enter into this other dimension. The pheasant in the field over there is perfectly capable of flying. It’s rather like expecting one to depart into another dimension. This question of capacity creates an impasse: What is it that enters the other dimension?
6:03 K: Go on. The discussion is open, not for me alone.
6:10 Q: I seem to remember that we came yesterday to the end…
6:14 K: I’m not the Chairman, sir.
6:18 Q: We came to a point where you were talking about attachment and about going into attachment. Not with explanations, whys and wherefores, but you seemed to intimate or go into that. It’s the same sort of statement of the difficulty. A difficulty I have, too.
6:39 Q: Another difficulty is that we idealise the process of education as a panacea, as a means to salvation. Why do we have to emphasise education?
7:01 K: That was the subject we chose. We can change the subject.
7:07 Q: No, at least, we should define it, clearly.
7:13 Q: Could I ask that people lift their voice and project it because, otherwise, the rest of us don’t hear.
7:27 Q: I had been wondering why you were so much concerned with this matter of change with outside time. Then I thought maybe what you are going to come to is that education is not a process.

K: No, that’s just it.
7:47 Q: Then I thought, what does this mean? I felt that just as a transformation of consciousness is not likely to happen if one is heavily conditioned, it will also be difficult in a bad so-called educational system? So, correspondingly, if a human being is growing up in loving relationships with, say, their parents and teachers, based, from one instant to the next, on understanding and openness of mind, in that state of living, that relationship, it is more likely that thing can happen instantaneously. It would seem that true education can’t be separated from good living, that one is part and parcel of the other. If the parent or the teacher or any one human being or the other, in relating to another human being has this loving understanding, then that is all that one can do, to see what is there and to exchange one’s thoughts and to hope that one will have these instantaneous transformations.
9:54 K: Sir, but I don’t love. I’m a wounded person. I’ve got so many problems in my life. I hate people – not personally, I’m just taking it as an example – I hate people, I have battles with my wife, I’m selfish – in that state, how can I love somebody?
10:30 Q: Are you posing a question of somebody surrounded with conditions and problems, ‘What can they do?’
10:41 K: I didn’t quite hear, sir.
10:44 Q: You’re posing the question of a person surrounded with problems.
10:49 K: That’s right.
10:50 Q: Personal problems and malfunctions. And what can they do?
10:56 K: That’s the whole point.
10:59 Q: That is your question.
11:01 Q: What such a person normally does is try to short-circuit the education in time by means of prescriptions and prohibitions. This is normally the idea of an educational system from somebody who hasn’t enough time to devote to the type of education that Dr Wilkins was talking about.
11:37 Q: If education is to transmit information and experience, is it not a process of conditioning, therefore inhibiting the growth of the person who is being educated? If on the other hand, we consider that the educator is also learning, educating himself simultaneously, it becomes a more encompassing.
12:10 K: Sir, biologically there is growth. Is there growth psychologically? That’s the whole point. Do I become something? To become something involves time and values, comparative existence. To become something involves conflict, time and all the struggle that one goes through.
12:56 Q: Is education to make people become something?
12:59 K: That’s what is happening now. We are taking it as it is, not imagining what should be.
13:10 Q: That’s what I’m saying, that education is not education.
13:15 K: You may not think so, but it is. So, how do we parents or educators transcend all that? If that is what is right or true.
13:37 Q: Sir, I’d like to ask what is order? It seems that the question of order is closely connected with education.
13:53 K: Please, answer it.
13:58 Q: Krishnaji, I find this discussion difficult to follow because we seem to be talking at two different levels. Some of us are talking about the individual adapting to the pressures that society puts on him, and others are suggesting that maybe there is a way, that as individuals we can influence the way society operates so that ultimately we can change it, for one we approve of. It’s this difference between the two levels I find difficult to reconcile.
14:37 K: Let us stick to one level, sir, then, shall we?
14:42 Q: I’d be more comfortable with that, but I can see they do interact in ways that are unpredictable. As individuals, we want to change society. We understand certain characteristics of the educational system. We suggest that the current system of formal education seems to emphasise qualities in human conduct which are divisive and destructive, and from that we decide we want to change this. But as individuals we’re not powerful enough to make an impact.
15:29 K: That’s why, sir, we said yesterday too, the common ground of all human beings is self-centred activity. That’s a fact. And education is helping them to become more and more self-centred – specialists, surgeons – the whole system is helping each human being to become more acquisitive, more self-centred, and act from there. Is education now encouraging that? If so, is it possible to break through that, immediately? We are still remaining on the same level, not two levels.
16:33 Q: But is there another distinction? You talk about instantaneous transformation. For the individual consciousness, that makes it very meaningful, but if you talk about the whole social system, educational system, it seems one can’t expect that to change instantaneously. Only through individual transformations can the whole change.
17:10 Q: A lot of us aren’t sure that selfishness or competition is bad, because we’ve seen science prosper on the basis of individual striving. Through competition, we’ve had tremendous technological success. So, there is this question whether self-centred activity is all that bad at the individual level that you’re talking about. I don’t know if I make myself clear.
17:49 Q: Correspondingly, one can say that war is not all that bad, that in history war has been a useful instrument of foreign policy. But one doesn’t support war.

K: Quite right.
18:03 Q: But we also said that competition destroys a person psychologically. I don’t know how you can say that competition makes one… You may discover something through competing, driving yourself, but as a human being, one becomes destroyed at the end of one’s life, through that competition.
18:34 K: The two great powers, America and Russia, are competing, and we’re all going to suffer.
18:42 Q: But one of them will benefit.
18:46 K: How?
18:50 Q: I don’t necessarily believe in this but I’m just placing that argument that is so compulsive at times.
18:59 K: Let’s be clear, sir. Do we intellectually argue about all this – I’m not saying we should not – or examine the question much more profoundly? As we started yesterday, I have got several children. What am I to do with them, and what am I to do with myself? That’s the real question I’m talking about. I’m selfish, I have a tremendous lot of problems, – I’m talking generally – and my son and daughter have problems too. So, how am I to deal with all this?
20:04 Q: Yesterday, we began talking about the difference between just hearing or knowing some phrase and actually seeing it as a fact. The seeing of something as a fact was crucial to what a real education was all about. We just came to talking about what is involved in this truly seeing something as a fact when we moved away. Could we come back to that?
20:34 K: The ‘what is’ and the idea of what is. Is that it?

Q: How does on truly see ‘what is’? Otherwise, there is no real learning taking place, for my children or for myself.
20:52 Q: You spoke also of being aware of attachment, not through looking at the history or the time factor, but seeing it in a way that you equated with insight. The implication being that that kind of seeing, which is an entirely different order than the usual, was the factor of change.

K: That’s right.
21:18 Q: We ended on that note.
21:23 K: Continue with that?

Q: Yes.
21:34 K: We have to go into the whole question of knowledge. Right? What place has knowledge in human life? Will knowledge help man to be unselfish, not self-centred? And what place has knowledge in relationship? All that is implied. Knowledge being, all that. Need I go through all that? Knowledge being experience, whether it’s personal or inherited or traditional. From that knowledge, which is stored in the brain, in the human mind, and from that knowledge, memory, thought, action. In that cycle, we are caught. Experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action. This is the chain or cadre, framework in which we operate.

Q: Every moment of the day.
23:06 K: Every moment of the day. That’s what computers are doing. Wait, that’s what the computer is doing. Programmed. It can learn, unlearn, create a new machine, till it reaches the ultra-intelligent machine. Right? You know about it. I’ve talked to friends, so I talk about it glibly. I don’t know sufficiently about it, but I’ve gone into it a little. So, the computer can out-think man. We have become like that – machines. Education is apparently to continue in that pattern.
24:04 Q: Programming.
24:07 K: I’m a Catholic, I’m a Protestant, I’m British, I’m a scientist – whatever – I’m a guru. The whole thing is that. Now, taking the example of attachment – attachment to my wife, my belief, to my God, to my experience – whatever it is – attachment to my knowledge, attachment invariably breeds corruption. We’ve said that. We went into it a little. To transcend that, is it necessary to find out why I am attached? Which means thinking in terms of time. Time being, examining from the storehouse of my knowledge. So, I’m repeating the same pattern when I analyse and try to find the cause of something. I don’t know if I’m explaining this clearly or not. As long as I have a cause, that demands not only an effect but an end. Right? Insight, as we talked about yesterday, is not related to time or cause or memory. Having direct perception of it, immediately, and that immediate perception acts.
26:14 Q: Can we say that that perception looks at the actual thing as it is without going into any derivation? It’s what it’s doing in that moment in the human psyche, without any background. The background is unnecessary.

K: Is that possible? The scientists, the artists, all those people have a partial insight. My statement needs examination and doubt, questioning. Please, let’s talk about it and then we’ll go into it.
26:54 Q: But isn’t that partial insight, the result of a long preparation?
26:59 K: No, no.
27:00 Q: The scientist has years and years of preparation.
27:04 K: That’s why it’s partial.

Q: That’s right.
27:08 Q: Also, in ordinary, everyday confronting problems, don’t most people get hypnotised by the problem as they are involved in it. They can’t look at it differently except by trying to go behind it, and say why it happened, etc.? This quality of insight is totally different from the usual thing – people saying, ‘I’m afraid of this, afraid of that’, and there’s no insight in that. There is looking at the effect, the action in that moment, but without any changing quality.
27:45 K: So, what is the question?
27:47 Q: What is the quality of looking, which you call insight, which differs radically from what we all do, which is look at our problems? There’s the psychiatric way of trying to understand it, the roots of it, but without that, most people are stuck with it, looking at the problem. You’re talking about something entirely different.
28:15 K: Take a problem and let’s look at it.
28:18 Q: May I elaborate on that, Krishnaji? What you said just beforehand, ‘Attachment breeds corruption’. You talk about staying with that fact or statement or holding it. You’re talking about such a special thing. It’s not something simple. I can’t just say, ‘Just stay with the fact’, because it’s something quite foreign to me. To stay with a fact or to stay with a statement, to hold it in such a way that it becomes a fact…
29:00 K: Not becomes a fact. Let’s say I am violent.
29:05 Q: But one is transformed by the truth of that thing.
29:09 K: I understand. Let’s look at an example. I am violent. My reaction to violence is either to express it or various forms of escape from it, or say, ‘Why shouldn’t I be violent?’ and indulge in it.
29:37 Q: May I add another one?

K: Add some more.
29:41 Q: There’s hearing that and saying, ‘Yes, I am violent’, and seeing that it is partially true but not seeing it so that it ends.
29:51 K: No, wait, wait. I am violent. I examine, I look at the word, which may awaken violence, the word itself. Which is to recognise from former experiences that reaction, which is called violence. Right? And I have been educated not to be violent. ‘It’s good not to be violent’. So, I’ve got two reactions now, violence and not to be violent. Now, which is a fact?
30:43 Q: Violence.
30:45 K: That’s the only fact. The other is non-fact.
30:50 Q: To be educated not to be violent, is violence.
30:55 K: I’m coming to that. I’ve only one fact, which is I am violent. The other is not a fact. Therefore, what I call fact is also part of my education, part of my upbringing, part of my social impressions and pressures and inhibitions – the whole of it. Now, can I remain with that fact without escaping? Just be with it. It’s a fact, I’m violent. Be with it. Don’t analyse. Don’t escape from it. Don’t seek the cause of it. Just hold it in your hand and look.
31:49 Q: Can we say more about that? Is there any more one can say about just being with it and holding it in your hand? Can we look at that?
32:02 Q: And how long?

K: For how long?
32:08 Q: The person who is obsessive or delusionary or consumed with anger or fear, is, in his sense, doing that. You’re talking about something else. They are in that fear, that delusion, that obsession.
32:27 K: I am not sure they are in that.
32:32 Q: In what?
32:39 K: In that state of awareness in which they are frightened, fear. They may be escaping from it, running, various forms of avoidance of it. May I ask, what is it we are talking about, now?
33:00 Q: I think we are talking about that particular instant of holding and being with a thing like our violence or our fear. What is the nature of that…?
33:19 K: …holding. I’ll tell you.
33:23 Q: We are talking about the nature of ‘what is’.
33:29 Q: But violence, anger is the way of life we live.
33:34 K: Yes, that’s the way we live. What is it you are trying to say?
33:40 Q: That’s where we have to penetrate.
33:45 K: We are trying to do that now. I am violent or I’m in sorrow. Something happens to my son or brother or my wife, and I’m in sorrow. When there is sorrow, I’m trying to escape from it, through comfort. I want some kind of comfort because I cannot face my loneliness. Right? I say, ‘Why am I lonely?’. I’m seeking the cause of it. That’s a psycho-analytical process. I don’t want to enter into that. I don’t want to seek a cause or escape from it or seek comfort for sorrow. So, I observe that sorrow. Right? I’m living with it. In that living, am I an outsider looking at sorrow, or I am sorrow? You understand the difference?

Q: Yes. How do I observe sorrow or violence or fear or even pleasure? How do I observe or be aware of my sorrow? What does it mean? Am I different from that which I call sorrow? Or I am sorrow, I am not different from it.
35:48 Q: So, sorrow has to observe itself.
35:50 K: I’m just going into it. No, no, no. Let’s go step by step into it.

Q: Generally, it’s the first case. Sorrow is going on but I am not sorrow.
36:05 K: What do you mean?

Q: Well, it’s going on but there are other things or I’m probably something else or I’m partially that.

K: No, just a minute. Of course, ordinary life is going on around you.
36:22 Q: I’m not totally that though.

K: Why not? Why? When my son dies, it is a great shock – right? – physical, as well as psychological. It takes time to get over that shock. Things are happening around me but I’m living in shock. Right? Now, that shock I call sorrow. How do I look at that sorrow? Things are happening – I have to eat, I have go to the office and so on – leave all that aside for the moment. How do I observe this sorrow?
37:21 Q: One’s sense of self seems to escape all the time further back, from a feeling like sorrow. It’s a continuous escape.

K: You want to withdraw from it.
37:37 Q: But facing the fact.

K: That’s what I’m trying to say. My son is dead. It is a shock, which I call sorrow, both physical and psychological, my reaction to that is to escape from it, avoid it, because it is indicating something tremendous to me, which I’m incapable, being presently in shock, of seeing the whole content of that.
38:11 Q: When you say stick with it…

K: I’m coming. Slow, patience. I’m in that state. Right? How do I look at this feeling?
38:28 Q: But this contradictory feeling also comes up so quickly...
38:33 K: I know all that.

Q: How is one to look at it?
38:41 Q: To see yourself as different from the sorrow is the first escape. And to see that you are the sorrow is...
38:50 K: That is the point. You are sorrow. You are not different from sorrow.
38:56 Q: That might be the beginning...

K: That is so. Not ‘might be’. You are not different from anger, from greed and envy. You are that.

Q: I resist that. I listen to you and say, ‘Yes, that is so’, but at the same time, there’s a resistance.
39:22 K: There is resistance because of our education, our tradition, because I’ve been told, ‘You are different from that. God is different’, all the rest of it.
39:32 Q: How do we stop the resistance?
39:38 K: You don’t stop resistance, sir. Forget sorrow. Wait a minute. Watch your resistance. Why do you resist? Don’t seek the cause. Why do you resist? I won’t say ‘why?’ – ‘why’ means cause. There is resistance. Right? Stay with it.
40:16 Q: Can we understand from what you say that the usual way of looking at…
40:21 K: It’s not what I – no – you said, ‘what I am saying’. Please, just a minute. I am not saying anything. I’m saying just watch.

Q: But the way we watch wrongly either involves escape or the idea of doing something. There is a separation from it. Out of this I want to escape or act or something, which is away from looking at the fact.
40:51 K: All that arises because there is division between sorrow and myself. That division is illusory. The fact is I am sorrow.
41:07 Q: But we’re not seeing that. Could it also be that we are too asleep, in a way? We have no energy. We are too asleep.
41:20 K: Yes, sir.
41:22 Q: There is no confrontation because there is no energy to make it.
41:28 K: As that gentleman said, we resist it, consciously or unconsciously.
41:34 Q: I’ve got the same problem, Krishnaji. If you say I am sorrow, I can accept it poetically.
41:40 K: Not poetically.
41:42 Q: But rationally it doesn’t seem to mean very much.
41:45 K: Sir, just a minute. You know what anger is? Anger. Are you different from anger?
41:59 Q: I recognise anger as a state of mind.
42:03 K: It doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s a reaction, isn’t it? Is that reaction different from you?
42:15 Q: It’s a part of me. It’s within me.
42:18 K: Part of you – admit that. So, you’re part anger, part envy, part arrogance, part this and that. So, you make a whole of that. So, you are anger. Right? Gosh, why do we resist this very simple fact?
42:47 Q: But when I resist, the whole of my conditioning is at risk.
42:50 K: Then examine your conditioning, live with it, say, ‘I’m conditioned to think that way’. Look at it, sir.
43:04 Q: But I’m not only anger, I’m also friendliness.
43:08 K: Of course. You are angry, you are friendly, hating, you do all kinds of things. You are all that.
43:19 Q: Isn’t it probably that first of all, when anger arises we’re not aware of it, even. We become aware of it, then separation take place.
43:29 K: Why should separation take place? I won’t use the word ‘why’. Separation takes place. Look at it. What is this? Separation takes place. Thought says, ‘I am different from what I am looking at’.
43:58 Q: That separation comes automatically.
44:06 K: So, what am I to do?
44:10 Q: It’s automatic from our education.
44:15 K: So, what then? You see, we keep on repeating, it’s automatic from my education, I’m conditioned that way, I cannot look at it differently. So, we keep repeating it.
44:29 Q: I wonder if we could go back to this ‘I am sorrow’. Now, I think there is a real difficulty there and some people will say they can see what this means poetically, but that means that in certain other senses, they don’t see what it means. Now, do you mean that you are overcome and at the mercy of the sorrow, that it envelops you and that you cannot regard it as just part of you? If we take conditioning, in general, conditioning is surely essential to human beings’ existence, but the trouble with it is that it takes you over and dominates one, and that’s when it is the trouble.
45:31 K: So, do I accept my conditioning?
45:36 Q: I think that one must accept it, in one sense.
45:40 K: In one sense, yes.

Q: As a computer, we must be like computers and have programs, but we mustn’t let those programs run us. That’s surely what you are objecting to.
45:52 K: Just a minute, sir. I have been programmed for 5,000 years as a Brahmin. I’ve been conditioned that way. I am that conditioning. That conditioning is not different from me.
46:13 Q: You are saying that every moment we continue that conditioning. You are opening my mind to a choice that says we don’t have to.
46:24 K: The language I speak has conditioned me. Right? The clothes, the food, at a certain level, in a certain way, it has conditioned me. But psychologically, I’m objecting to being conditioned. Is it possible not to be conditioned?
46:46 Q: But isn’t part of the program of that conditioning to protect itself? Isn’t that how the resistance comes about, that the conditioning doesn’t want itself to be destroyed or ended?
47:03 K: Does it protect one?

Q: Itself. The conditioning protects itself.
47:10 Q: A sense of security.

K: Does it? Or I am different from my conditioning and thought says, ‘I must protect myself’.
47:22 Q: Yes, but what is thought? It’s all conditioning.
47:26 Q: The very things we’re saying here, the language. We shouldn’t be dominated by the conditioning.
47:36 K: Maria, could we stop a minute?

Q: We’re saying we are the program.
47:40 K: What is it we’re talking about? Let’s come back.
47:47 Q: We talked about the shock of someone dying close to you and the sorrow. I’m not even clear that the shock is conditioning.
47:55 K: Sir, just a minute. My son dies. Right? Let’s start from there. I’m very attached to him. That attachment is born out of various causes, and when he dies it’s a break from that attachment – he’s not there to be attached to. But I’ve still got the memory of him and I’m attached to that. Right? Physically, I’m not, now he’s gone, burnt, cremated, whatever you like, but I have the image of him to which I’m attached and I carry that image for the rest of my life. Shall we go on from there?
49:17 Q: We’ve been talking about different categories of emotion. We started with the question, what do I do with my violence?
49:27 K: No, that gentleman wanted to start and also Professor Wilkins wanted to talk about sorrow, not violence, for the moment.
49:38 Q: I thought we were talking by analogy that the two are emotions and that the same way of dealing with them is to stay with them.
49:45 K: Not only emotions. The whole content of my memory of my son and all the memories connected with violence. Right?
50:01 Q: We seem to be talking about the world of reactions.
50:07 K: I don’t want to enter into reactions, sir, for the moment.
50:11 Q: You said that the sorrow was the image that you have of your son, the memories, the wanting him back.
50:18 K: I can’t have him back. But the memory remains.
50:23 Q: Yes. I can go with you that far.
50:30 K: The memory of my son being dead causes all kinds of emotional reactions. I am attached to this memory. Right? That memory is going to affect me all my life, which is the beginning of corruption.
50:56 Q: Why?
50:58 K: I’m glad. Somebody asked why.
51:05 Q: Do you mean you’ve become like a computer which is a fixed program and cannot change?
51:09 K: No, I’m also a computer, but something else is taking place. I’m unwilling to learn that any form of attachment must inevitably breed corruption, misery. You asked, sir, why? Right?
51:31 Q: Perhaps we could redefine the word ‘corruption’.
51:35 K: I mean by ‘corruption’ what the word means. ‘Rumpere’, to break. Right? Can’t somebody pick it from me, for a minute?
52:01 Q: It’s the beginning of breaking up this attachment. But it’s not clear what’s being broken up. And you’ve rather implied it’s a good thing to break things up because apparently we’re enslaved to so many programs.
52:17 K: Let me put it differently. All right, sir. You asked why attachment leads to various forms of disturbance. Right?
52:34 Q: I didn’t actually. I asked specifically in the context of the attachment to sorrow or memory. That particular example you chose.

K: All right, let’s go into that. I’ve created the image of my son and I’m attached to that image. The image is unreal. Right?

Q: It’s a real image and it corresponds to a real son, who did exist.
53:09 K: But it is not actual.
53:16 Q: But why not? If you experience it as an image, you’re saying it’s only a real image…
53:21 K: I have a memory of my childhood, if I have, an image of being very happy at that time, and I’m pursuing that image, that I have been happy, I’m not now happy and I hope I’ll be happy.
53:39 Q: Is the image saying that? The image might just be saying I was happy in my childhood. A memory.
53:46 K: Yes.
53:48 Q: Does it necessarily imply anything more than that?
53:52 K: Why should I carry that memory? Why should it continue?
54:00 Q: You mean why dwell upon it? We can’t avoid having memory, surely?
54:07 K: This raises quite a different problem, sir.
54:11 Q: One of the problems with any image is that it’s incomplete. If I remember my childhood as being only very happy, it’s actually a distortion of what really took place.
54:25 K: Explain to him.
54:26 Q: As long as I am operating on that as a memory, I’m operating on something that just wasn’t so.
54:35 Q: You may remember particular happy incidents, or particularly unhappy incidents. It seems you can’t avoid memories of things. We can avoid dwelling on them and thinking about it.
54:49 K: Would you talk louder, sir, because we can’t hear.
54:53 Q: We can avoid dwelling on memories, perhaps, or thinking about them. We can’t avoid having them. It’s part of our nature.
55:00 K: Part of our nature.
55:03 Q: But it’s possible those memories represent a distortion of the original and that they are selective.

Q: Of course. It has to be. We can’t remember the whole of our past all the time. We can only remember bits of it. So, the attention to memory is inevitably selective. And no doubt memory involves a certain amount of distortion. But that’s something we have to live with. There’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t chop off memory, surely.
55:30 Q: Perhaps there is a suggestion that memories become burdens.
55:36 Q: Presumably memories can become burdens. They needn’t do, surely.
55:41 Q: But they generally do become burdens.
55:45 Q: Do they? There are several kinds of memories, surely. All our experience with which we react, is based on memory. All the skills we have, like riding bicycles and playing pianos, doing mathematics, useful skills based on training, conditioning and memory.
56:03 Q: But those are factual memories. When I learn how to add, it’s a factual memory. But when I think about a hurtful thing that happened to me twenty years ago and I’m carrying it all my life, then I’m carrying a burden.
56:22 Q: The specific thing being talked about was an image of a person. If I have an image of myself and I think I am that or my son was that, it’s probably a distortion of the reality. The person was probably much more complex. One would chose to remember only the nice or convenient parts.
56:48 Q: The answer might be to have a better memory.
56:51 K: Louder, sir.
56:53 Q: Whether the memory is pleasant or unpleasant, isn’t one an acting out of an unreality, which is an image? The son is dead, the happy or unhappy childhood is gone, yet it continues to generate a psychological action within us or in our actual actions, which is based on a phantom, an idea and not a fact, at that moment.
57:23 Q: I find it difficult to grasp the idea of facts. The idea that the real world is really there and only things that are really there are things present to your senses, whereas an image or a memory is not real. It seems to be a strange distinction.
57:40 Q: They have their own reality, obviously. If I thought I was Napoleon that would be a fact for me, but it would still be a phantom.
57:54 Q: But a memory of what you did, is not a phantom. To call it a phantom doesn’t add or subtract from the fact it’s a memory.
58:03 Q: Could I possibly have a go at this one? It seems to me that images and memories are very important, useful, and in fact essential to us being human beings. But the trouble is that they tend to be over-obtrusive and block our capacity for open seeing in the present.
58:38 K: That’s all, sir, quite right.
58:41 Q: They are conditioning you, psychological memories. If I’m meeting you for the first time, I’ve never met you before, you’re in a hurry and you’re rude to me, I would have that memory next time of meeting you. I would have a distance because you were rude to me. But when I’m running in the forest, standing over a tree or branch, the next day I see that tree, I don’t have a bad memory of it. I don’t know why there’s such a difference between those memories.
59:21 Q: I’d like to suggest that computers help us to understand what memory is. A computer has have to have a view of the outside world.
59:33 K: I think Dr Wilkins has made it very clear.
59:40 Q: This whole question is that we’re here now, physically, and we’re not totally with the potential of this moment because we’re all still locked in various memories, in the past. Presumably, that’s the corruption.
1:00:06 Q: If your brain is occupied with the burden of memories all the time...
1:00:13 K: Louder, please.
1:00:16 Q: If your brain is occupied with the burden of memories and hurts, it hasn’t got energy to be present, it’s not empty to explore potential.
1:00:37 K: Would you say, sir, the whole of me is memory?
1:00:47 Q: I don’t think I’d go that far, no.
1:00:50 K: Just a minute. Why not?
1:00:59 Q: There’s a certain structure to the way we order our memories which is not contained within the memories of specific events. Nor can it be made simply out of the composite of past events. There’s a certain structure to thought and experience which exists before specific memories of specific events.
1:01:19 K: If I am a carpenter, I have that memory. If I’m married I’ve all the memories of my relation with my wife. If I’m – what? – with my son, I have all those memories. And the memories of my father, the memories of my country, the tradition of the country, aspirations, hurts, arrogance – all that vast quantity of memory is me. So I am memory.
1:02:06 Q: But not only memory.

K: Wait, wait.
1:02:09 K: I won’t say, ‘Not only’. I only know I am memory. The tradition, the religion, the superstition, the illusions, I am a Brahmin, I am nobody, I won’t touch anybody, I’ve inherited those tremendous memories. I’m all that. So, then you’re saying there’s also a memory I’m not all that.
1:02:40 Q: I don’t think it’s a memory, I think it’s a present sense that one’s not all that.
1:02:46 K: That may be also illusion.

Q: It may be, it may not be.
1:02:50 K: I’m not criticising. We’re just examining.
1:02:53 Q: Yes, so am I.
1:02:55 K: So, my illusion is my memory.
1:03:03 Q: Is it?

K: Isn’t it?
1:03:08 Q: I don’t see which illusion you’re thinking about now. Are you saying that the illusion that I exist now, I have access to memories, I am conditioned by memories, and yet there’s a sense of existing here and now in the present, which isn’t itself a memory.
1:03:27 K: Sir, I’ve been told from childhood there is something in me which is totally different from all things outside me. That’s part of my memory. There is memory that there is God in me – etc., etc. That’s also a memory. So, from what I have observed, I’m an entire structure of memory, even though I say there is something in me which is totally different. I carry this memory all along my life. As Dr Wilkins pointed out, it’s a tremendous burden. There’s no freedom in that.
1:04:29 Q: Is it not true that this store of memories is only a burden, if you allow them to interrupt your further development and your further progress and understanding?
1:04:45 K: All that memory is my image of myself.
1:04:51 Q: But your statement…

Q: You’re still thinking.
1:04:59 Q: Your statement when you said, ‘All I know is memory’.
1:05:03 K: And the image that memory has created. I am that memory.

Q: That stops me in my tracks. I don’t know where to go from there.
1:05:12 K: Wait! Don’t go anywhere from there. You want to go somewhere. I don’t. I say I’m all memory. I’m looking at the extraordinary fact.
1:05:27 Q: Do you mean that the ‘I’, the ‘me’, the centre that’s watching the memory is memory too?
1:05:32 K: Of course. I don’t want to go away beyond this extraordinary revelation to me, to realise, ‘My God, I’m all memory!’ The image about myself as being somebody, is still an image, a memory. So I say, ‘All right, let’s look’. Am I looking at it as an outsider looking in? You follow what I mean? Or, I am that. The observer is that. The observer is the observed in this case. So, I see the fact – it may be illusory, I’m subject to correction – but I say, ‘I am all that’. I won’t move from there. Because if I move, it’ll be another memory. We’re all saying to ourselves, ‘What shall I do next?’ I don’t want to do anything next. If I do, it’ll still be born out of memory and the action will be part of memory and back again to the same cycle.
1:07:18 Q: That is the burden of sorrow.
1:07:21 K: No, just a minute. That is what I am. I’ve learnt mathematics, biology, I’ve learnt science, I’ve learnt a dozen things. All that learning is memory.
1:07:41 Q: But in place of that there is the freezing of the learning. We freeze the moment.

K: I am nothing but that. I am the observer, the observed. I am all that. That’s what I mean. If I can stay with it and see what happens. We don’t. What happens when I realise that the division between the observer and the observed is illusory? All movement stops. What do you say, sir?
1:08:31 Q: Well, I’m wrestling with the idea. The sense that one is more than that comes from feeling that one has choice and the capacity to act. The feeling that one has the choice to act in different ways gives one the idea that there’s a doer, not just a conditioned memory, which can chose and select among memories, and that there is a centre which is more than memory. Now, you’ll tell me that the centre that says it’s doing is in fact only a memory itself.

K: Yes, sir.
1:09:03 Q: I don’t know if I accept that.

K: Don’t accept it. Don’t let’s accept it.

Q: You might be able to prove it but, intellectually, that’s not how it feels.
1:09:14 K: It may be my conditioning to say I’m not that.
1:09:18 Q: And it may not be that. We may have a direct intuition in how it really is which is not a matter of conditioning.
1:09:33 Q: I’m worried by the fact that we’re all sitting here listening to what you’re saying and thinking about it.
1:09:39 K: That’s right, sir. You have hit the nail on the head.
1:09:50 Q: You started to tell us how it was that sorrow led to corruption and we’ve diverted to talking about memories and images.
1:09:59 K: Sir, corruption is the image. The question is, is there an end to sorrow? Man has suffered for a million years and we’re still suffering.
1:10:25 Q: And you’re saying that insight is the end to sorrow and insight has nothing to do with memory.
1:10:37 Q: But how is this insight possible if we’re nothing but memory?
1:10:43 K: To stop moving from that fact.
1:10:49 Q: That means we fully have to understand that…
1:10:51 K: No, there is nothing to understand. There is nothing to understand. There is no action. Non-action is positive action.
1:11:06 Q: But if somebody is pointing out to me that all I am is memories and I’ve never heard that before, that suggestion…
1:11:14 K: How do you listen to that? Just take that, for a minute. It may be a silly statement, it may be true. How do you listen to it? Are you listening or arguing?
1:11:41 Q: One thinks about it.

K: Therefore you’re not listening. I’m telling you – not you – I’m telling someone, ‘I love you’. You don’t say, ‘I’ll think about it’. I love you. You might say, ‘Why do you love me?’ I don’t know, I just love you. I have no cause. I don’t want anything from you – your body, sex, money, nothing – I don’t want anything, I just love you.
1:12:25 Q: But it seems that instead of the mind stopping, it goes…
1:12:31 K: Please, if I come to you and tell you I love you, do you think about it? You throw a brick at me and say, ‘I’m married already’.
1:12:46 Q: A better analogy would be if you came to me and said you loved me. Because you said you are all memory. If you say you love me, I actually would think about that. I would think, ‘Is it true? What does it mean?’ If you said, ‘I love you’, that’s different.
1:13:03 K: That’s all I’m saying. It has no cause. Memory has a cause. Love is not a memory.
1:13:34 Q: No.

K: Exactly, sir. It’s not desire. It’s not pleasure. So, as it has no cause, it’s enormous. Memory says, ‘What do you mean? Tell me all about it’ – you follow? – ‘Let’s wallow in it’.
1:14:02 Q: Well, I don’t know. After hearing that everything we do is an illusion and conditioned, I might begin to think, ‘Maybe love’s just a matter of conditioning’ – we’ve seen all these films and read about it.
1:14:20 K: Quite, quite.

Q: I could easily doubt that. You might tell me that it’s just… I’d be inclined to think that love is something that exists. Now I’m beginning to think, ‘Maybe that’s memory too, we’re conditioned, our terrible educational process...’

K: Sir, sir, wait. I come to you and say, ‘I love you’. Do you think about it?
1:14:53 Q: I might wonder what you meant.

K: I’ll tell you what I mean. I love you. I don’t want your money, I don’t want a thing from you, and I mean it.
1:15:11 Q: Then I would accept that gratefully, as a fact.
1:15:19 K: You accept it. Then you don’t think about it.
1:15:25 Q: But with this other thing, that all I am is memories…
1:15:29 K: Wait. I’ll come back to that. I say, ‘I love you’.
1:15:38 Q: But I might wonder why.
1:15:46 K: I have stated it, I don’t want a thing from you.
1:15:50 Q: Period. I could accept that this is a fact, I might still think, ‘What is this love…?’
1:16:03 K: I go into it with you. I say it has absolutely nothing to do with desire, or with pleasure. I’m not even attached to you. I love you.
1:16:27 Q: But there is only love when there is no return to me.
1:16:38 K: When I say, ‘I love you’, it means I love. It’s not ‘I’ love ‘you’ – don’t mix up the word ‘I’ and ‘you’.
1:16:49 Q: There seems to be something very simple at the end of it, but again, there’s an irresistible…
1:16:58 K: You see… We’re all so very clever, that’s what it is. A man comes to me and says, ‘I love you’. What an extraordinary thing, ‘I don’t want a thing from you’!
1:17:20 Q: It doesn’t seem to be very meaningful, if he just says that.
1:17:24 K: Sir, I mean it. I don’t want a thing from you.
1:17:30 Q: If you say to someone, ‘I love you’, you’re expecting a form of response. Unless you say it in the same way as you would say to anyone, ‘I love you,’ in that you love everybody, perhaps. But if you say it to an individual, there must be some particular reason.
1:17:49 K: So, you attach reason to love.
1:17:55 Q: No, one could say that one can accept love as something which is not necessarily part of memory. There might be a reason for saying it. You might love somebody. You might not feel any reason to say it. But if they seem disturbed and worried, you might think it would help them actually to say it, so you might have a reason for saying it. There may not be a reason for loving them. It may just be a fact.
1:18:22 K: Yes, sir, I understand all that.
1:18:26 Q: If love is not memory, what is love? Where does it come from? You’re saying we’re all memory.
1:18:39 K: Love has nothing to do with memory. Of course, if it has, what does it mean? Desire, pleasure, fear, attachment – all that we generally accept as love.
1:18:59 Q: It seems to me that we are talking about memory all the time. It seems that one hundred percent…
1:19:05 K: You see, sir… That’s right, sir. I beg your pardon, I was talking to myself.
1:19:14 Q: A hundred percent of our time is memory. But it is not so to me. The small fractions of time when we realise a problem, or have an idea, in that very minute moment, it seems not to be a memory. Is it? I don’t know.
1:19:36 Q: But we all seem to deal with this general structure of memory, so making it complicated. Somebody says something simple and we want to complicate it most of the time. It appears to work like that.
1:19:58 Q: You were asking us…

K: No, I’m not asking anything.
1:20:03 Q: You were saying when something is said like, ‘I love you’, do you just listen to it? And you talked about sorrow. Can you just…?
1:20:16 K: Look, Scott, just a minute. I’ve known you for some years. We’ve talked considerably. And one morning, when you are in my room, I say, ‘Scott, I love you’. What happens to you? What actually happens to you, when I say that to you? Do you say, ‘Let me think’?

Q: No.
1:20:51 K: Or, ‘Why do you love me?’

Q: First, there’s just a listening.
1:20:54 K: What happens to you when a man comes to you and says, ‘I love you’, and says, ‘I don’t want a thing from you’?
1:21:06 Q: Well, it’s very humbling. One listens and one hears it, one reacts, however one reacts.
1:21:17 K: How do you react?

Q: One takes it in.
1:21:22 K: What does that mean?
1:21:24 K: Wait a minute, what does that mean?
1:21:27 Q: Like an arrow. It gets warm, burning.
1:21:35 Q: Don’t you have a feeling when somebody tells you that?
1:21:42 Q: One will be pleased.
1:21:46 Q: I’d say, ‘Thank you’.
1:21:49 K: Is that all?
1:21:51 Q: ‘I love you, too’. That’s a normal response, if there is a mutual feeling.
1:21:59 Q: It’s quite a shock, isn’t it? Usually when somebody says that, implied is that they want something. Usually when you say that you want something in return.
1:22:12 K: So, are you all thinking in terms of something to return?
1:22:20 Q: I would be nonplussed. I would feel quite nonplussed.
1:22:27 K: Has anybody come and told you that they love you?
1:22:38 Q: Krishnaji, in trying to listen to what you’ve been saying, I had an insight into this whole dialogue now. There’s just an understanding in silence. Nothing more. There’s nothing more to it. There’s an understanding in silence when there is a listening without thinking.
1:23:13 Q: There’s a feeling of oneness.
1:23:20 K: So, what place has memory in love?
1:23:29 Q: It depends what kind of love you’re talking about and in what language you consider the meaning of the word ‘love’.
1:23:37 K: I’m speaking English.
1:23:40 Q: In English, you love coffee, the garden, your wife.
1:23:44 K: I love coffee, I love my ground, I love my wife, my job. We’re not talking of that, are we?
1:23:55 Q: There may be some connection between love and memory, an implicit connection. There must be. Because I mean, you tell me you love me...
1:24:05 K: What an extraordinary audience this is!
1:24:11 Q: But if I love you and I don’t want you to fall over something, I act on you. I say, ‘Don’t go there’.
1:24:18 K: Yes.
1:24:19 Q: There must be some connection. I remember that that’s dangerous.
1:24:27 K: If somebody said, ‘I love you. I don’t want a thing from you’, it has done something tremendous to me. Nobody has said that to me before. They always wanted something out of it, either my body or sex or money – they wanted something. Here you come and tell me, ‘Look, I love you but I don’t want a thing from you’. What a tremendous thing. You understand what it’ll do to me? So, what relationship has that love to memory? If you say, ‘I’ll think about it’, then you are back.
1:25:33 Q: So, it has no relationship, if that is the case.
1:25:42 Q: It’s based on the conception of the ‘you’ that is loved, which is a construction put together by memory, experience, by evaluation of qualities, perceiving that person as a unique individual, and therefore, discriminating qualities and virtues in him.
1:26:06 Q: There’s a commonalty of consciousness.
1:26:09 K: Also, love has no choice. I mustn’t go into all that. If you say, ‘How will it act? You say, ‘I love you’. All right, Old Boy. What do you do about it?’ Right? Right, sir? I can’t answer. I don’t know. I just love you. I’ll see what happens. But if you say, ‘What will you do when you love me?’ then what is your reply? Obvious. ‘Give me something’.
1:27:07 Q: If you say that it would give one a strong feeling for the universal consciousness of humanity, I think this is the kind of effect it would have on me.
1:27:27 Q: You really disappear and become the other.
1:27:32 K: I don’t know. That’s a theory.
1:27:35 Q: No it’s not a theory.

K: Maybe.
1:27:39 Q: Krishnaji, the atmosphere in this room, there is a basis of love here, and we are not falling apart or ripping each other. It is just a feeling here.

K: That’s not important. Where are we now?
1:28:02 Q: Sir, what happens if there’s no you to tell me that you love me?
1:28:18 K: If I tell you what happens to me, if somebody came and told me this, I can’t tell you what happens. You will say, ‘Let me capture it. Is this right?’ We’re off into something terrible.
1:28:36 Q: What happens when there is no-one, when one is by oneself?
1:28:44 K: That is, has love to be told to somebody, ‘I love you’?
1:28:50 Q: Yes, that is the question.

K: I’m saying that, sir. Suppose you have loved… I won’t discuss it any more, it’s too silly.
1:29:07 Q: Before we get too far, I’d like to pose an obvious question here, since the topic has been the topic of education for the last two days. If we had to create an educational environment, would we include in the content of that education all this that we’ve been discussing?

K: Yes, sir. How am I going to convey all that we have discussed so far to my son. I am an educator – how am I going to convey all this to him? He comes to the school already conditioned. He’s already using terrible words, violent. He’s like the rest of us. So, what am I to do? What’s my relationship to him? Am I also like him or like the rest? Or I have seen something which I want to transmit to him. Will he listen? Will he play the game with me?
1:30:26 Q: Will that transmission mode be the same as this one? Or one to one?

K: Maybe, it all depends. If you feel very strongly about something, that feeling of vitality, that intense feeling is communicated. But if you’re merely intellectually discussing what education is...
1:31:02 Q: And it doesn’t have to be just a verbal communication.
1:31:09 K: What is non-verbal communication? Thought transference?
1:31:15 Q: Actually living it.

K: Yes, sir. If I don’t live what I am talking about, what value has it? What is the point of talking about it?
1:31:26 Q: It becomes theory.

K: Then, there is a feeling. Suppose I’m absolutely, irrevocably non-nationalist, non-tribal, and my student is full of that. Right? What’s my relationship to him? He wants to be completely British or French or some other rot. He wants to be completely that and I am totally opposed to that. What happens?
1:32:17 Q: At first, there is conflict.

K: No. I’m immovable but he is movable. Sorry!
1:32:33 Q: That doesn’t create conflict?
1:32:38 K: What do you say? Please, let’s discuss it.
1:32:40 Q: It creates conflict in me because I may have a feeling for what you’re saying and I want to get there.
1:32:53 Q: First of all, I’d show him the destruction nationalism has caused.
1:33:02 Q: It’s something more than that, isn’t it?
1:33:07 Q: You’ve got to show him that you understand why he takes this attitude.
1:33:12 K: Of course, I go into all that. But I stand – you follow? – I’m immovable, but he is movable.
1:33:24 Q: What if he is immovable, also?

K: Then we are together.
1:33:30 Q: But it’s not for me to move him.
1:33:35 K: No.
1:33:39 Q: You mean you’re not strengthening his conditioning anymore because you’re immovable.

K: No, sir. Say, for instance, you are free from conditioning and I come to you as your student, full of conditioning. To you, it is absolute, burning reality. And I face you, I begin to criticise you. I say, ‘What nonsense’. But you explain to me, step by step, the rationality of war, the creation of war and nationalism, and if I’m at all intelligent, I absorb what you’re saying. You’re not talking to me only at a conscious level but also at the deeper levels.
1:34:41 Q: Yes, in sharing a perception of something that one sees as true is there a lot of this sharing or communicating that goes on despite the words or subject?

K: Obviously. Must.
1:34:56 Q: If one is looking at something.
1:35:11 K: It’s one o’clock. We’d better stop. We meet tomorrow morning, don’t we? Isn’t it at eleven?
1:35:21 Q: Half-past eleven.
1:35:28 K: Is it all right?