Krishnamurti - Dreaming, meditation and laziness

BR74S6 - Dreaming, meditation and laziness
Brockwood Park, UK - 16 October 1974
Seminar 6

0:01 This is J. Krishnamurti’s 6th seminar with scientists at Brockwood Park, 1974.

0:09 Montague Ullman: I had expected to be called on at yesterday afternoon’s session and, if I had been, I would have spoken extemporaneously. But, having been given a reprieve, I decided to write down what I wanted to share with you, which I think is a very good example of Sudarshan’s Law, that papers are not written until the actual moment of their delivery.

0:36 Karl Pribram: This is after the moment of delivery. (Laughter)

0:39 MU: (Laughs) This goes beyond the Law. I felt drawn to the theme of this conference, as a consequence of three significant failures in my own life, which at the time I thought were due to my own failings but which I now feel are perhaps related, at least somewhat in part, to the limitations of science; limitations that each of us, in our own way, are trying to talk about. Now, before telling you about these three failures, I would like to throw still another metaphor in the hopper, in the hope that it will illustrate my way of thinking about the rôle of knowledge in the transformation of man and society. 1:22 We start out in this world as a more or less undifferentiated glob of protoplasm and our task appears to be to evolve into a human being, having a place in a complex technological society. Now, if we shift to a metaphorical mode, we are up to our collective necks in deep water. To save ourselves from going under, we reach out for support with our right hand – or with our right hand only – and grasp at what we think are a succession of solid structures. This is the master hand, the hand that enables us to master Nature, to see the world as object and deal with the world objectively. 2:02 This is the hand of science, as science has come to be practised. There is an awareness of the existence of a left hand and on occasion it flails about in the water. It is not seen as equal in strength and power to the right hand, rather it is seen in a somewhat negative light. It is labelled the ‘sinister hand’ and is simply regarded as not being the right hand. Using only the right hand, we do achieve a differentiated state but one that never quite gets us out of the water, so that we continue to struggle, atomistically, against the forces tending to pull us under. 2:37 Using both hands together in complimentary fashion, however, will not only get us out of the water but will also bring us to that state of differentiation where we will begin to be able to tackle the really important question of coming together on dry land, in order to get on the with the business of exploring and enjoying the universe together. That’s the end of the metaphor. Now, if you still want to call the use of both hands in getting us out of the water ‘science’, you can I suppose, but it would be quite a bit different from the science we now know. 3:10 It would move from its preoccupation with Nature as object to be mastered, to a concern as to what it is that has been mastered and, conversely, what it is that has been omitted: that is the sensuous aspect of man and Nature and the price that we have paid for this one-sidedness, in human terms. There have been various ways of noting this duality, apart from the right brain/left brain dichotomy implied in the metaphor. We’ve heard a number of these referred to in the course of this meeting: the way of science versus the way of mysticism, the categorising versus the contextual mode of information processing. 3:48 Others speak of objective knowledge versus sensuous knowledge, the active mode versus the receptive mode and so on. The terminology I find most congenial is borrowed from the formulations of a psychiatrist not too well known — Andras Angyal. He characterised the two essential trends in the human organism as the striving for autonomy – that is the self-organising, self-enhancing, self-determining tendency – and the striving for homonomy, by which he meant the need to relate to and feel a part of a larger whole. The methods of objective science appear to have evolved in connection with the former, whereas our capacity for love and our aesthetic expressions seem to be more related to the latter. 4:34 My point is that science has paid...

4:36 Julian Melzack: It’s not a question; just, could you repeat the word that you’ve contrasted with autonomy. I didn’t...

4:47 MU: Autonomy and homonomy. The methods of objective science appear to have evolved in connection with the former, whereas our capacity for love and our aesthetic expression seem to be more related to the latter. My point is that science has paid too little attention to man’s homonomous needs and there are too far psychoanalysts around to pick up the pieces. Now, the three areas of failure that I referred to earlier are areas where, presumably, the scientific method should work but where, in my experience, it falls somewhat short of the mark. 5:18 In each instance, my feeling is that the failure is traceable not to the flaws of the scientific method but to the lack of an effective, complimentary approach. Failure number one is the general field of psychiatry. I’m a psychiatrist by profession. A significant transformation occurred in my life when I allowed myself the realisation that psychiatry was not a part-time affair, that its practice was more of an art than a science and as such it demanded a total commitment and, at the level at which one pursued it, could not be divorced from the lifestyle of its practitioners. 5:59 I will not go into the evidence in support of this, except to call your attention to several beginning trends in this direction. As Ronald Laing’s effort to provide a total environment at Kingsley Hall, Maxwell Jones in his evolution of the therapeutic community at Dingleton Hospital and now in the States – among the young at least – a movement known as Radical Therapy. Failure number two has to do with the longest, unsuccessful courtship in history: the near century old effort, on the part of a handful of serious scientists and scholars of all kinds, to woo the interest of and acceptance by the scientific establishment, so that the romance could be legitimated and ultimately consummated between parapsychology and science. 6:51 While still in college, I discovered that men like William Crooks, William James, Charles Richet, Oliver Lodge, Henry Bergson and many others, took a serious interest in what was then called ‘Psychical Research.’ Add to that the fact that, in the course of experimenting over a two year period with some fellow students – and this goes back almost forty years – I came upon what I felt were rather remarkable and genuine paranormal phenomena, and you have what, for a young person, was the makings of a terrible dilemma. 7:24 The result, of course, was that I felt impelled to build a special, psychic closet in which to house this particular skeleton. Only in recent years, in a response to a changing scientific ambience, have I gently opened the door. Some day it may be possible to transform the skeleton to a full-bodied creature able to walk out of the closet by himself. Now, the final failure was linked to perhaps the most profound transformation, at least of my professional life. It was my realisation that Freud’s theory of dreams was wrong. 8:01 Less this sound both immodest – which it probably is – and disrespectful – which it is not meant to be – let me hasten to add that his was a magnificent theory, magnificently presented, and it did call attention to certain therapeutically useful features of dreams. Freud, in my opinion, in his determination to build a scientific psychology, approached dreams through the wrong mode. It was like trying to pick up a mixture of water and salads with a sieve: much is lost in the process. Unfortunately, the very magnificence of Freud’s work cast a long, paralysing shadow on the subject for well over fifty years, although Jung and others did sense a little of the nature of the stuff that was escaping Freud’s container. 8:53 Without going into details of an alternate theory of dreaming, let me emphasise that I regard dreams as creative and aesthetic experiences that depict, in the form of visual metaphors, the present state of our connections and disconnections with the world about us. What I would like to do, however, is share with you a kind of fringe benefit that I’ve picked up here at this conference. And I’ve picked this up from some of the things I’ve heard David Bohm say in the course of informal conversations between sessions. 9:27 For some time, I had been toying with the idea that what we experienced as a dream had an antecedent history in an event that was beyond time and space ordering, and that came upon us in something approaching an instantaneous happening at critical moments in the transformation of one form of consciousness into another. The onset of the dreaming phase is one such critical nodal point. Now, if you look at the rough diagram I’ve put on the board, the black dot at your left represents this event. It may be regarded as a kind of black hole of the psyche, containing an enormously condensed information mass. 10:13 Since this falls completely outside the realm of our ordinary information processing capacities, it is experienced as ineffable. We are forced to let it expand, as it were, or unfold and then deal with it in bits and pieces, ordered as best as we can in time and space. These are the visual images that make up the dream and they’re depicted by the various shapes on the board. This information is still highly condensed but less so than formerly, and is spread out, at least in some measure, before us. Now, a second transformation occurs when we reach the waking state. 10:58 Here we try to transform this private experience into a public mode. This requires a further unfolding of the information contained in the images and the translation of this information into a public medium of exchange, namely language. Here is where we get into trouble, because the information goes beyond what can be conveyed in the discursive mode. Much of the information is more readily felt than described. Moreover, the engagement with the information at a feeling level is an experiment in growth. That black hole contains with it our personal expanding universe, and we do ourselves and the universe an injustice when we try to reduce it to a play of instincts. 11:48 David Bohm’s comments have both provided me with a language fitting to this process, namely the successive transformation of implicate into explicate, but even more important, a sense of support from another domain in the world of physics, for what is simply an intuitive surmise on my part. What is implicate at one stage, becomes explicate at the next stage, through a process of unfolding; and what is explicate at this stage becomes implicate for the next stage. Now, if we use dreams simply as illustrative of a broader range of phenomena unattended to or inadequately attended to by the present focus of scientific inquiry, then four general features of these phenomena – this alternate mode – emerge.

12:40 One: they are more readily appreciated than interpreted. Psychiatrists should have courses in dream appreciation rather than dream interpretation.

12:52 Two: they share with all aesthetic experiences the quality of transcending space and time. Three: their specific domain is the connective tissue between people, the underlying matrix of human existence, the sense of contact or contactlessness between people. And four: they are all, in one way or another, the creative embodiment of an unpremeditated response to novelty. Dreams provide us with perhaps our most familiar experience with this in the way our dreams capture appropriate, socially derived images to express subjective events. 13:41 Now, I’d like to just dwell on this for another minute or two, because it’s a subject that fascinates me. What is the agency that provides this unending source of unerringly apt visual metaphors – because that’s what the images in our dreams really are? I don’t think we honestly know the answer to this question, but I do know how easy it is to gloss over our ignorance by attributing the whole process to some rarefied, internal demon, variously known as our unconscious, or simply our id. Perhaps a prior question would be: what is the nature of the process involved in the selection and organisation of the visual images with which we build the content of our dream consciousness? 14:32 If we look at the process simply, that is without an allegiance to deeply imbedded, theoretical biases, we seem to be involved in a rather intriguing process. We seem to be able to bring together a selected array of bits and pieces of past social data that have become known to us over the course of our personal life history, and then to arrange these data in a spatial and temporal ordering, bearing no relationship to their original time/space frame of reference, which on the other hand enables them, through the personal transformation we have effected, to rather precisely, dramatically and effectively express the particular interplay of feelings mobilised by a current, unresolved life situation. 15:22 Social reality makes a significant contribution to our dreams. It provides us with the very special kind of building blocks it takes to capture and express one or another aspect of our subjective life. When you stop to think about it, it takes a rather high level of creative and organisational ability to tap our own internal computer for the appropriate bits with which to solve the puzzle, and then to arrange them in a way that makes sense as a kind of emotional template, highlighting a problematic aspect of our immediate existence. 16:01 Having gone thus far, we are almost forced to admit that the powers displayed by our dreaming selves far exceed the scope of our waking faculties. The comparison is of course unfair, since each is supreme in its own domain, one is not better than the other. Each in its own domain is a powerful way of grasping different aspects of our existence. Our problem is that we have paid more attention to the one than to the other. This view of our dreams suggests that we are capable of looking quite deeply into the face of reality and of seeing mirrored in that face, the most subtle and poignant features of our constant struggle to transcend our own personal, limited, self-contained, autonomous self, so as to be better able to connect with, and be part of, a larger unity. 16:50 Just as someone once said that our eyes came into existence as Nature’s means of seeing itself, so perhaps our dreams may be viewed as an instrument created by society to see itself and its distortions reflected in one of its own creations. We cannot understand the level and range of creativity displayed in this manner, as having its source in the individual alone. It has to be understood as a function of the individual and society. More specifically, the dream comes about because, in the interest of reaching out towards this sense of unity, each of us has tuned our psyche to an exquisitely sensitive pitch in its capacity to store and use what we have seen, heard and learned intuitively of the world about us, as vehicles for expressing everything from passion to prejudice. 17:43 The world endlessly nourishes and replenishes these creative juices, although for some of us they only come out at night and for all of us they are far more discerningly honest at night. Now, I think I’ll stop here. I think I’ve used my time. I have a longer paper.

18:01 DB: Thank you.

18:02 MU: Give some time to...

18:03 DB: Can I just say about the word homonomous, there is a word used in mathematics, holonomous, which means essentially the same thing — the law of the whole. Now, does anybody want to ask a question?

18:14 Krishnamurti: We didn’t hear what you said, sir.

18:16 DB: The word is holonomous, holonomy, meaning the law of the whole; autonomy, the law of the self.

18:24 MU: Right. That’s the meaning.

18:29 Q: Could I ask a question?

18:31 DB: Yes, do you want to comment?

18:33 Q: Possibly I could begin by asking you a bit about this black dot.

18:36 MU: Right.

18:37 Q: The source of the whole process. Now, is that... do you consider that condensed body of knowledge is condensed from one’s own experience or is it... has it some mystical quality about it? Is it the shared knowledge of the community that is our present...?

18:59 MU: You’re asking questions that are very difficult to answer.

19:03 Q: Yes.

19:04 MU: If I put my experience in dream work, together with my parapsychological experience, including laboratory investigations, I would say that that black dot picks up information that goes beyond the individual. Even though that information is not always manifest – and perhaps is rather seldomly manifest – but that there is that capacity inherent in this information compacting process.

19:37 Q: Is there... have you evidence of this fact in the content of people’s dreams that in fact we dream about things that we can’t know?

19:49 MU: Well, it’s... this is, at this point, only a somewhat wild, imaginative inference. There is some perhaps indirect evidence. One of things that had puzzled me about dreams – mainly from my own experience because people don’t usually attend to it or report it and I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere in the literature but when I do mention it to others I get consensual validation that this is a fact about dreams – namely, that not infrequently in the course of our dreaming... at least I feel sometimes confused as to whether a sequence that I’m looking at came at the beginning or in the middle or at the end or both. 20:37 Or, in other words, as if there were some confusion as to what the actual sequence was, which suggests perhaps that we are creating the sequence and that it’s all given to us and we’re trying to make sense out of it. Now, the other bit of indirect evidence – it’s not really evidence and it’s only something that suggested this formulation – is that there is some discrepancy between the time element involved in dreaming. When this factor was looked at in a laboratory – how long do dreams take? Are dreams instantaneous or not? – the laboratory evidence seemed to suggest that the dream 21:25 in the dreaming takes about as long as you would expect that content to take in working itself out. On the other hand, there are anecdotal reports that dreams can, under certain circumstances, be almost instantaneous creations. That is, there’s a famous dream on record of a Frenchman named Mori, who awoke when a bedpost fell on his neck and caused a sudden awakening. (Laughs) Well, he awoke with a rather long, complicated dream that, in the course of what was happening during the French Revolution, he was arrested, he was thrown into jail, he was tried before a court, he was sentenced to be guillotined, he was taken out of prison, he was dragged through the streets, he was led up to the guillotine and then the guillotine fell. 22:26 (Laughs) Well, that suggests that perhaps that dream came about possibly in response to the bedpost falling on his neck. Well, these are only the bits and pieces. I became interested in the parapsychological question from my experience as a psychoanalyst and from an earlier experience as a college student, and felt that, from time to time, I was the recipient at the other end of the couch of what seemed to me to be telepathic dream from a patient. And this then led me into an effort to confirm this within a laboratory setting using the rapid eye monitoring technique, and I think our work has supported the reality of the telepathic dream.

23:15 Q: Excuse me. What do you call a telepathic dream?

23:17 MU: A dream that incorporates information that could not be known to the dreamer at the time, by inference, by any known means of communication, and so on.

23:29 Q: Do you have any evidence or any perhaps feeling about the possibility that the dreaming faculty could actually be used to extend our knowledge of this implicate order and the sort of nature of our being, as entities beyond the normal conventions of space and time? That’s rather a big one, but I’m just wondering if that’s the direction in which you would regard the proper use of the dream faculty as...

23:55 MU: Well, I’m afraid I can only give you a rather general answer to that, in the sense that in the past two years, for example, I have had a very gratifying experience in working with lay people who are completely unsophisticated and untutored in the theory of dreaming, in helping them move closer to their own dreams, and have felt that this kind of work does open their... their selves open, that is open their inner being in a way that is gross enhancing. 24:41 It does give them a sense of their own creativity that they had absolutely no awareness of before. That’s a very general answer to your question. But there is something – I hesitate to use the word spiritual – but there is something about working with dreams this way in a group, that does liberate a sense of excitement, a sense of growth, a sense of coming together, a sense of communality.

25:20 DB: Can we... first... Pribram.

25:23 KP: I think this is a very exciting turn of events you’ve described in your own interpretation of dreams, or... not an interpretation but whatever you want to call it. It calls up two things. I think that I have a question of David Bohm first of all, whether mathematically the implicate order is as concentrated as that. I’ve always thought of it as an extended thing, but that may already be the first quantisation – the holographic one – which I’m thinking of. As far as the neurology of dreaming, Freud himself felt that – at least, it’s hard to know just how to express this – but he certainly would have agreed with you that what is happening is that the association... that it’s, well, a primary process, which 26:20 is therefore an associative process rather than a cognitive, constructional process of that sort. And he would, I’m quite sure – from at least what’s said in the project – talks about the associative function of these bits and pieces which happen to lie near each other in the nervous system, but what he didn’t have is the fact that the bits and pieces are stored holographically, that is, that there’s a distributed store, so that there is... Well, the next thing that... the question that I would have to pose is whether the holographic 27:02 store is haphazard or not. When we take a look at a hologram, it looks haphazard. We know that we can – by doing another quantisation – bring it into an image, a formed image, but what determines where a bit of – quotes – ‘information’ is stored in the holographic plate or in the nervous system? Is this really haphazard or is it lawful? And if it’s lawful, what are the rules? All we know now is that it’s distributed. And what I thought – always have felt, in the last ten years or so – that dreams indicate simply the holographic organisation, and that’s sort of what you’re saying there. 27:52 It’s the first...

27:53 MU: I use the metaphor of the black hole, rather than the hologram.

27:57 KP: Well, no, the dreaming doesn’t get you the black hole, that gets you the first quantisation according to what a hologram is.

28:03 MU: Well, no, I use the black hole...

28:05 KP: That’s right.

28:06 MU: ...as a metaphor for the hologram, perhaps, or...

28:09 KP: No. No, let’s not get that confused. The hologram, according to what David has told me at this meeting...

28:16 MU: Well, maybe the second order hologram then, and that the dream is a first order hologram.

28:21 KP: Right

28:22 DB: (Inaudible) ...because, I mean, to answer your questions... You see, that as you were pointing out, that the hologram gives an implicate order of the first order, and when you carry it to a second order, it becomes possible to get these highly concentrated forms — what you talk about. And in physics I think the best analogy would be a very high energy process – you see it in a cosmic ray having... – tremendous energy comes in and produces a burst, out of which appear an explosion of particles, unfolding (laughs). And the... Now, was there another question you had?

29:00 KP: But which direction are we going? In other words, the second quantisation gives you ordinary...

29:05 DB: It gives you the possibility of a very highly concentrated burst of energy.

29:08 KP: But that’s what happens in waking. That’s what happens... I thought the second...

29:14 DB: I think that I would look at this dot as the concentrated burst of energy.

29:16 MU: Right. That’s... Exactly.

29:19 KP: Ah!

29:20 MU: Right, right. That’s my intent.

29:22 Q: So that’s the first quantisation.

29:23 MU: That’s my intent, you see; that’s why I didn’t know what you were getting at. That is the...

29:26 KP: Wait a minute, I’m confused now.

29:27 JM: You got the order of fit wrong.

29:28 MU: That’s right.

29:29 JM: In other words, your arrow is going that way and their arrow is going...

29:30 MU: Right; my arrow is going this way.

29:32 JM: Yes.

29:33 MU: That black dot expands. That’s the... You’re unfolding that black dot.

29:36 KP: That’s right, I agree to your order, but David has just told us the reverse order.

29:41 DB: No. We are agreeing on the order.

29:44 KP: We are?

29:45 MU: Yes, right.

29:46 DB: Yes.

29:47 KP: So that it starts out unfolding... is the first quantisation gives you the hologram, the second quantisation gives you words and images and objects.

29:57 DB: Well, no, the burst of energy... I think you should put them all together. The second quantisation allows this hologram to contain this highly concentrated burst of energy which can then unfold, as shown in your diagram.

30:07 MU: Right.

30:08 DB: Now, I think David Shainberg is next.

30:10 KP: I’m not clear.

30:11 David Shainberg: Yes, I wanted to say – just to follow up what Monty says – I think there is some evidence, at least it’s my feeling that the evidence that comes that we do go through 4-d cycles, that there’s some sort of transformation in the total body of... Supposedly the dream research has shown that we have four different... or that we go through different cycles during the night, and supposedly during some of those cycles there are more dreams – the so-called REM period – and that that might have something to do with the kind of total reorganisation of the organism, during which time it goes through some sort of undifferentiated phase. 30:54 In other words, where there is a... the organism supposedly is cycling during the night and if it comes to these disorganised moments – like somebody was suggesting the other day that there’s a kind of black hole in there, where we dip into an undifferentiated moment – that the reorganisation out of that, would be some dream or some sort of holographic first quantisation. In other words, if the body’s doing that, then it has to reorganise.

31:23 KP: But David is saying that doesn’t work unless you get to the second quantisation, brings about this burst...

31:34 DB: It makes it possible to have this burst, you see. If you merely took the hologram, there would be no easy way to get a very highly concentrated thing of this nature.

31:42 DS: If you merely took the hologram, you couldn’t get this kind of...?

31:46 DB: Yes. Well, not really, no.

31:48 DS: Yes.

31:49 KP: So what you are saying really is that you’re going in two directions from the hologram: one is toward objectifying and the other is toward this burst...?

32:00 DB: It can go either... both ways, you see.

32:03 DS: But where do you start?

32:04 DB: Well...

32:05 KP: What’s the whole of it?

32:07 DB: We don’t really... This is merely a way of looking at the whole thing – you see? – you don’t start, but this is what goes on in there.

32:15 KP: Yes, but there are two models. Now, let’s get this on the table, because I think there are two models here: one would be going from – as you have it on the board – going from the black dot, black hole, to the hologram and then to objectifying. Well, your model...

32:30 DB: There might have been a process before that which brought about this energy that is shown here, you see?

32:38 KP: And that comes from the hologram going the other direction. So we must have two kinds of transformations: one from the hologram going to objectifying and the other one going...

32:53 DB: ...going inward, yes.

32:54 KP: ...going inward. And so what we’d look for during REM sleep is some kind of organisation very similar to the waking one, only very different at the same time.

33:05 DS: Right, right. Well, that was the next thing I wanted to say.

33:08 KP: That’s what you’re saying.

33:09 DS: Yes.

33:10 KP: That’s why I brought it out.

33:11 DS: Because I’ve been working somewhat in dreams in this... – following along with what Karl has been talking about – and there is some evidence, I think, if you look at dreams in some way, there is... – and you talk to people about their dreams in an intimate way – every element of the dream seems to mirror every other, very much as you see in a hologram. In other words, if a patient came in the other day and she talked about the fact that a friend of hers – who was also a friend of someone else’s that was working with me in analysis – she’d had the dream in which this friend had ruined a photograph that her mother had done. 33:52 Now, when you put it all together you found that everything about her feeling at that moment was ruined: the feeling about the friend was ruined, the feeling about the photograph was ruined, the feeling about working with me was ruined; everything in her life turned out to feel like it was ruined. So in a sense, the dream was kind of like a hologram, repeating itself continually, over and over again. And the third thing I wanted to say is that when you do work with dreams – some of the work that we do when we talk to patients – rather than analysing dreams, for instance, if you use the dream more or less as an illuminator to open up bigger areas. 34:34 For instance, a patient will say – let’s say this woman had talked about a feeling of ruin – if you ask her a question that doesn’t talk about information and say, ‘What is ruined? ’ you talk more about opening up her feeling of feeling ruined or ruining, in some way that kind of language opens up into this feeling of a kind of open energy, so that then she seems to make contact with wider and wider areas of her personality. So it’s almost like what you’re talking about: getting into a bigger energy flow.

35:06 DB: Do you want to say something? Yes.

35:09 MU: Can I respond to David? Well, I agree in part with what you say about different aspects having this holographic quality. As a matter of fact, this is the basis of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt approach to dreams, of course. He’ll just pick an element and push that element into a life experience and get corroborative evidence from everything else in the dream. But I think that’s only true in part and I don’t think it quite does justice to the range of metaphors as they are brought into interplay. You see, a dream is not just a presentation of a metaphor or the presentation of several metaphors, a dream is a presentation of metaphors, visual metaphors in motion, and that motion is the result of a dialectical process in which you have opposing forces at play. 36:04 I mean, this is what Freud’s sense of I... and I think this is basic, that you have – this is what I meant by the response to novelty – you have the impact of novelty on the existing system and the metaphors reflect that impact. So you can’t just say that one metaphor reflects all that’s going on, it reflects a range of information about something going on, but there’s also a range of metaphors that touch on other subjective aspects of the process.

36:34 DB: Yes, well, I think we’ll take Sudarshan’s point next.

36:37 George Sudarshan: Yes, I just wanted to point out that I feel exquisitely pained to hear holograms discussed in this rather loose fashion. I think the metaphors are getting mixed up. Hologram is a transformation from one optical image or optical item of information by a... (inaudible) ...transformation, which comes about by a natural process of passage according to the laws of wave objects. It is transformation from one set to the other set. And there is really no difference between the two; it is almost as if you translate from English to French. 37:13 There are some limitations of language that would be involved, so that if you re-translate it, part of the information would be lost. Now, this transformation is a consequence of the wave nature of things, as expressed in terms of ordinary quantum mechanics, in which the position co-ordinate is something that is seen as geometrical co-ordinate and the momentum is then related to the conjugate variable to this one. There are entirely different contexts in which you have abstract quantum variables, which are not seen in this particular fashion. 37:43 For example, in the notion of second quantisation when you introduce levels of a certain system, the variable which is conjugate to the thing is not often seen. Either you have one picture of seeing, in which you see many particles, many photons or many protons or many electrons, and in that kind of seeing you do not see the conjugate variable which is corresponding to the variable of coordinate or momentum, you see something entirely different. In the same sense, that if you are thinking about an ordinary oscillator which goes back and forth, if you see either position or coordinate... momentum then you see a certain kind of picture, 38:21 but if you see it in terms of excitation levels of the system then you see a different kind of picture. So it would be very... It seems to me it would be risky to elaborate a dream theory in terms of these loose metaphors. At the first quantisation level it is fine, because it says that instead of the information being in a certain visual fashion, when it gets transformed and seen on another screen it would look a little different and if you did not know the code you would not see any correspondence between these two. 38:51 But if you do know the code, there is absolutely no difference in the content of the information between these. All you have to do is to simply... (inaudible) ...transform this particular thing and you see this one. So it’s up to you to... For he who knows the code, there is no difference; for he who does not see the code, there is no correspondence. So there is no randomness in the thing, unless you have lost the key. If you have lost the key then, of course, it’s completely random — you would never figure out what happened. 39:18 It is not a case, like a jigsaw puzzle in which things are misarranged. It is like a secretary and her boss filing things according to different principles. It is... the same information that is here, is also here with regard to...

39:32 JM: And the key is where? In the hologram?

39:35 GS: Key is the wave propagation.

39:36 JM: Right.

39:37 GS: Therefore, if you re-transform, you simply take the picture here and then illuminate it. Then the original picture reappears on the next screen that you happen to have with regard to the thing. So it is not a case of randomness or information being lost from one case to another. Now, if you therefore use the hologram language with regard to dreams, then either one is meaning about the actual electrodynamics of the situation, in which you say the electrical stimuli go in a certain fashion. That’s of course an external observation of what happens with regard to the material called the brain. 40:15 Or one could talk about – I suspect that this picture was not about waves in the brain but rather in terms of... – or we can say that in fact in dreams you have a sort of imagery, a new kind of language, in which what is not acceptable is re-transformed, so that it gets past the sensors, in terms of transformation. But in that case, of course again, dreams contain no more information; there is nothing creative with regard to the thing, except that you are able to get it past the sensors. But if I were to follow what I have gathered from Dr Ullman, it is not a case of dreams being simply transcriptions of waking state things, but that they are more creative, because you say it is explicative-implicative mode; that there is more in the dream than there is the waking state. 41:07 It is not merely a transformation of something that would have occurred in the waking state. Is that right? If that is the case, then the hologram analogy with regard to the transformation between – not the process – transformation between these two is inadequate.

41:23 MU: Well, no... Well, I didn’t use a hologram – that was, I think, introduced by Karl or Dave or both – but to answer your question directly, I think it’s the same brain when we’re asleep and when we’re awake. We don’t introduce new experience when we go to sleep, so whatever it is we’re dealing with our accumulated experience. But we’re looking at it in a way that I think makes our creative potential more visible. 41:58 We are simply using a brain organised differently electrically, or in some way, and therefore able to reflect, in the form of highly condensed visual images, much more about our experience than is easily accessible to us in the waking state. The whole purpose of using dreams in therapy is to get precisely at that information, you see. You don’t create the information, you get at it.

42:22 K: Are you saying, sir – if I may ask – that there is a dreaming self separate from the waking self?

42:30 MU: No. I’m saying that you experience yourself differently while dreaming; you’re the same self but you experience yourself differently.

42:38 K: So if one is totally awake during the day – quote ‘awake’ – then would you dream at all?

42:50 MU: Yes.

42:51 K: Yes?

42:52 MU: Yes.

42:53 K: Why?

42:54 MU: Well, because all dreaming is is a form of consciousness that comes upon us when the brain reaches a certain level of arousal. It isn’t...

43:04 K: No, I’m just...

43:06 MU: Yes. Because biologically we know that at certain times during the night something, some input into our brain, wakes it up enough for consciousness to occur.

43:18 K: So you are saying dreams are necessary?

43:22 MU: I didn’t say that. I said that this happens. Now, if it happens, then perhaps there’s some...

43:29 K: So is it also possible not to dream at all? And, therefore, have much more energy?

43:39 MU: No.

43:40 Maurice Wilkins: Can I ask, is there any evidence that anyone never dreams?

43:46 MU: No. Not that I know of.

43:48 K: Ah, I would like to...

43:50 Q: Well, I think we have to make a distinction here between the experience of dreams and neurophysiological state which accompanies dreams.

43:59 MU: Yes, but before you hit that, I think the answer to Dr Wilkins’ question is – as far the laboratory evidence – I don’t think we know of any situation where dreaming is completely absent.

44:09 GS: That is to say that almost everyone who has been tested dreams?

44:15 KP: Yes.

44:16 MU: Yes, there’s a wide variability in the remembering of dreams.

44:19 K: What did you say, sir?

44:20 GS: Almost everyone who has been tested, even the ones who’ve claimed that they do not dream, apparently dream.

44:24 JM: Ah, but then Wilkins’ distinction becomes important because all that the lab work is showing...

44:26 K: No, I...

44:27 DB: I think we have to re-establish some order. Who wants to talk right now?

44:31 DS: Krishnamurti hasn’t finished.

44:33 DB: I think Krishnamurti’s been talking and hasn’t finished.

44:38 Q: Yes, you haven’t finished.

44:41 K: I would like to ask: if, during the day, my brain, my activities, physical, moral, ethical, psychological and so on, aesthetic, are in total order, complete order – and therefore a great deal of energy is realised, because there is no energy when there is disorder – when there is whole order, what is the necessity for dreaming?

45:15 MU: Well, the way you’re framing the question, I find it difficult to answer, because I don’t look upon dream consciousness as different than the experience of waking consciousness. It’s like asking, ‘What is the necessity for being conscious whilst we’re awake?’

45:40 K: No. No sir, I’m asking: are dreams the continuity of the waking stream?

45:47 MU: Not... There’s a certain element of discontinuity, because the stuff that goes to make up waking consciousness – or giving it a certain shape – is lacking: namely, stimuli from the outside world — that structures our waking consciousness.

46:08 K: May I...?

46:09 MU: But the capacity to be conscious is the same; we have the capacity to be conscious when we’re dreaming. The only difference is that the input that structures that dreaming is different, because the input is internal; it comes from our own fabricated images.

46:24 K: I understand.

46:25 MU: Now, I think I grasp the intent of your question, and that is that, if we were whole while we were awake...

46:30 K: Yes, that’s all my point.

46:31 MU: ...what would the impact of that be on the sleep experience?

46:34 K: Yes, yes.

46:35 MU: I can only answer that by comparing the dreams of my wife and myself, because my wife is a more whole person than I am, emotionally. She’s usually more there in the situation than I am; I’m more abstracted and more far-out and have too many hang-ups. (Laughs) Now, I’ve been comparing my dreams with my wife’s dreams, and my wife... Now, in the course of our daily experience there are ups and downs; there are differences in feeling tones. 47:00 There’s a variation; life is not lived at a uniform level. Now, those variations are reflected, in her dream, in very simple, direct language in terms of real people and real situations. In my dreams, I see flying minotaurs and so on... (Laughter) and there’s a difference – you see? – I think, that gets close to the meaning of your question.

47:23 K: If my life – sorry, I hate to talk about myself; sounds rather silly – if in my life there is order, in daily waking: no contradiction, no conflict, no disorder...

47:44 MU: Right, right…

47:46 K: ...therefore, during the waking hours, there is a great release of energy. Not the energy stimulated – you understand? – drugs, drink... I mean, pills and all... The natural order brings its own energy.

48:05 MU: Right, right.

48:07 K: No, wait; let me... And during sleep, is there a different form of energy? Or is it a continuation of the daily... of that energy of order, in a different level of consciousness? I don’t know if I am putting it... if I am making myself clear.

48:39 MW: Can I ask Krishnamurti a question? How can you say, postulate a situation in which there is no disorder in your life, when there is so much disorder in the lives of others?

48:53 K: Wait. In my life, I can bring order. I know people live in disorder. People around one are in disorder; can’t one be in order, though in spite of others who are in disorder?

49:14 MW: But how can you separate your life from other people’s lives? I don’t...

49:16 K: I am that... I am those people.

49:19 MW: But if they are in disorder...

49:22 K: What sir?

49:23 MW: But if you are those people and they are in disorder, there must be...

49:28 K: And I try to get out of it. You mean I can’t get out of my disorder, my conflict, my misery?

49:36 MW: Surely there must be a reflection of their disorder in your life.

49:41 K: Not necessarily, sir.

49:46 JM: If you are those people, there must be.

49:50 K: No. If I am those people, can’t I disassociate from that disorder? I admit I am those people...

50:01 JM: Then, in your language, you cease to be those people. As soon as you disassociate, you are no longer them; and therefore...

50:06 K: Obviously. If you are in order and I am in disorder, you have disassociated yourself, naturally.

50:13 Q: But is there something underneath which is...?

50:15 K: Ah...

50:17 JM: But then Wilkins’ point is right. I mean, then... It only makes sense in your terminology to speak of being completely ordered and structured, etc., if you completely isolate yourself from those people who are...

50:30 K: No, no. No, I don’t isolate myself.

50:32 JM: Well, then you must be in some sort of disorder.

50:34 K: My... I am associated with others in my relationship to others.

50:40 MW: You spoke of responsibility.

50:44 K: I take responsibility. I am part of... I don’t know if I am using the right language. I am society; the society is me. The culture in which I’ve been born is myself. And surely I can disassociate myself – can’t I? – from that culture; be free of my Hinduism, all the traditions, all the superstitions, all the... etc. Can’t I disassociate myself?

51:15 MW: I think it depends what one means by ‘disassociate myself’...

51:19 K: I mean in the sense free myself; free myself from the Hindu tradition, with all its superstitions, its unreasonableness, its deities, its orthodoxy and so on, so on... you can’t... If you don’t admit, that there is no freedom at all.

51:41 MW: You mean you can have a relationship and yet you can still be free.

51:44 K: I think so. Otherwise our life is utter misery, a continuous misery. So I would like to ask this question... May I pursue this, sir?

52:02 MU: Sure.

52:03 K: If, during the day, psychologically I bring about order in myself: no conflict, no battle in myself, contradiction, imitation, conformity — break all that, and thereby release a different kind of energy – which is really a form of meditation; I won’t go into it now – then is the sleeping state...? A different form of energy seeps in or comes in, which during the waking hours is strengthened. I don’t know how to... Sir, I have noticed – forgive me, I don’t like to talk about myself – I have noticed that in dreams there is interpretation going on at the same time — that’s one thing. 53:11 And I have noticed dreams progress... tell me the future; dreams that warn me: ‘Be careful, this is going to happen; that...’ – you know? I’m sure it’s happened to all of us – dreams that are a continuity of the daily activity of disorder; the brain trying to find, in that disorder, order, and I wake up say, ‘By Jove, I’ve solved that problem, therefore there is order,’ and all that’s going on.

53:49 Q: Yes.

53:50 K: And also, one has noticed in oneself – if I may... I put this as a humble... you know? I am not talking about myself – a state in which there are no dreams at all. And when I wake up, the brain is much more alert, which has been alert during the day. I don’t know if... I don’t think about the input, output...

54:25 DB: There’s a very large number of people who’ve asked...

54:26 KP: Well, I want to answer it. There’s a specific answer. There are two different types of dreams, at least, and one is the kind that you’ve just described, which is a continuation of the daily work, and then this other kind that seems more symbolic and more mixed up. So there are the two kinds, and no-one at this point – that I know of – has studied what the conditions are for producing one kind more than the other kind.

54:56 K: That’s what I want to get at.

54:58 KP: Yes.

54:59 K: Is...? May I introduce some subject which may not be...? Meditation – may I go into it, sir, a little bit? – meditation... You know the whole idea of meditation, sir, whether it is Zen Buddhism, the Hindu forms of meditation; there are many, many systems of meditation. I think on the... Generally, as far as I know, it’s based on control of thought or modification of thought, through fragmentation of another thought. So it’s all based on control. Now, the controller is the controlled. So you remove the conflict between the controller and the controlled, when there is the realisation the controller is the controlled. 55:58 I don’t know if... May I go on? So meditation is a form of – not a form – meditation is a movement, in which the contradictions, all that, is wiped out. I mean, this is... I have discussed this with so-called... people who have spent years and years on meditation – not a few days or a few months – who have given their life to this. I know a man who was a very high official and all the rest of it, in India, he gave it up and for twenty five years he practised meditation. Gave up everything – you understand, sir – it wasn’t a game with him. 56:56 And when we discussed – he came to see me and we discussed – he said, ‘I’ve realised something: that it has been a self-hypnosis. My projections of the visions of my deity and so on, so on, so on, is out of my own... which I never realised before.’ After twenty five years, for a man to say that... You understand, sir? Now... So meditation – it may be totally foreign to all of you and I hope you’ll forgive me if I introduce a subject which you are not familiar with – meditation is a form of emptying the mind, without control and all... so on, so on. 57:50 So during the day meditation is an act of order; not conformity to an order preconceived, to a pattern set by reactions or all the rest of it. It’s an order that comes with the understanding of disorder in oneself psychologically. And then the sleeping state gives a different quality of energy which is incorporated during the day. That’s all. I just... I don’t want to enter into...

58:47 DB: Yes. I think we’ll have to be careful about... I mean, I think we’ll cancel all previous reservations for... and we’ll have to start again.

58:51 MW: Can I just have a point of clarification?

58:52 DB: Yes.

58:53 MW: I mean, to get holograms clear – I may have misunderstood Dr Sudarshan’s account – I mean, it’s essentially a question of classical wave theory, isn’t it? I mean, I think you said something about quantum mechanics but you meant this in another connection.

59:08 GS: Yes. I mean, no, quantum is not necessary... I mean, when one talks about second quantisation of the hologram, obviously one is talking about quantum theory but... classical optics or classical acoustics.

59:15 DB: Yes. I wonder if... to leave the hologram aside. You see, I’ve just put an explanation... developing a different view of quantum theory, in which the hologram is being used as an image. But I think that we should leave this aside now because another question has come up meanwhile. Now, we have to start... Yes? Globus.

59:41 Gordon Globus: I think Krishnamurti is quite correct in what he is saying and I think a careful reading of Freud will support it. I think, there’s an important distinction to make here and that is between the neurophysiological state of dreaming, which is biologically determined and which we all go through, every night. We need it to live, if we don’t have it, we die – biologically determined – and the dream which is an experience associated with that neurophysiological state. 1:00:16 Now, if one lives one’s waking life in complete order, I believe that one would have a blank dream; one would go through the biologically determined state, but it would be without any content or experience whatsoever. And I think that would be a highly energising kind of experience.

1:00:41 K: But sir, doesn’t it happen before you sleep that you put things in order, your life in order, saying, ‘I should have done this; I shouldn’t have done that. It should have been said that way.’

1:00:55 DS: But that’s not order.

1:00:57 K: No, wait sir. I am... That is bringing about... taking a stock during the day.

1:01:03 DS: Yes, but that doesn’t order necessarily.

1:01:05 K: Wait, I’m coming to that. Taking stock. And the very taking of the stock brings order.

1:01:14 DS: Sometimes.

1:01:16 K: If you take stock, orderly, without condemning, just observing; not saying, ‘This is good; this is bad. This is right; this is indifferent,’ but just observing without the observer – if I can put it that way – the facts that have gone during the day. Then when you do go to sleep, the brain – if I can talk of the brain in front of experts – the brain then hasn’t struggled to bring order during the night. Then it has a different quality... it brings about a sense of deep quietness, a sense of deep relaxation. It becomes fresh, young; at least, I have noticed...

1:02:09 MU: That’s the content, but there is content. You see, I think what you said just doesn’t...

1:02:15 DS: What is content?

1:02:16 MU: Well, the dream doesn’t have to necessarily be in a visual mode, it could be expressive of any feeling in any mode. I think that the order that you might feel, would be translated into the dream at some feeling level. It would be... But, you see, what you said about a blank dream, I think is absolutely untenable. In fact, Bert Lewin wrote a paper about the blank dream, simply as signifying...

1:02:37 K: Ah!

1:02:38 GG: That’s a different...

1:02:39 MU: I know. But...

1:02:41 GG: But why is it... (inaudible) ...untenable...?

1:02:42 DB: Could we, please, have no interruptions, otherwise we’ll not get on to...

1:02:46 GG: Well, I was interrupted. I was in the middle... (Laughter)

1:02:49 MU: You interrupted me when I interrupted somebody else. (Laughs)

1:02:51 DB: Well, let’s cancel all that now. I think, could we ask Fritjof?

1:02:57 Fritjof Capra: I know of one man – I don’t know for sure whether he is real or imaginary; I think he’s real – but I know of one man who claims that he can use his dreams as an altered state of consciousness and move in them completely freely and have them under control. And if he chooses so he can dream or he can not dream. And when he dreams, the dreams do not have any elements that are not under control, which seems to be the common thing in our dreams, that we don’t know how they arise and so on. 1:03:35 But he can use them to go places, to do things, in an altered state of consciousness. Now, my question is: is there any evidence – either, Krishnamurti, in your experience or in your experience with dream work – is there any such evidence for people who have order in their lives that they can have then completely orderly dreams?

1:03:55 K: (Inaudible)

1:03:56 MU: Well, I can respond to your question. What you’re describing is what is known as the lucid dream, that is where the dreamer knows he’s dreaming and then begins to manipulate the dream and his relationship to it, and this then borders on the feeling of being dissociated from your dreaming self, and taking off and travelling to other places even. I don’t think it has any relationship to the question of order or disorder. It can be a learned technique that some people have made a conscious effort to master and have, so that they can sort of inject this feeling of knowing that they’re dreaming and then actually rearranging their dream contents to suit their fantasy.

1:04:45 FC: And there’s no connection between their lives and...?

1:04:49 MU: No, it’s simply a technique that they’re...

1:04:52 FC: Is it easy to do that?

1:04:55 MU: Some people find it relatively easy.

1:04:56 KP: I’ve done it since I was four years old, so it can be.

1:04:58 MU: Yes, yes. Right.

1:05:00 DB: You want to say something?

1:05:01 K: Sir, control... You are using the word control in what sense?

1:05:05 FC: The fact that if, for instance, I dream that I’m in Paris, that I can decide to go and see some people in Paris or some places which I know, which I can’t normally when I dream. When I dream I can’t influence the content of the dream.

1:05:23 K: Surely control is the very essence of disorder.

1:05:27 FC: In what sense? I don’t understand that.

1:05:36 K: Who is the controller? Is he not also part of the controlled? The experiencer is the experience. So when we introduce the word control, it implies duality and therefore conflict and therefore the conflict is the very essence of disorder. Sorry, my language may be...

1:06:11 JM: No, no. It’s just I’m filtering what you’re saying through what Karl’s saying, and there’s a match...

1:06:19 DB: Can we proceed to David Peat next?

1:06:21 David Peat: I have a question about time, and it’s directed to you and it may be directed to... I mean, may be about what you’ve been saying. Maybe you could tell me as well. You say there’s the implicate, which is either a perception or something given; it just happens. Then after that, there’s the explicate, or the unfolding, and it seems – from what I’ve gathered, what you said – this act of unfolding is also the act of scanning or dreaming, and at this point time comes in. So it seems that there are two operations of the brain: there’s the direct presentation and then there’s something which involves either scanning things or trying to understand things or trying to play them out, which is something to do with time, is it?

1:07:08 MU: Right, right.

1:07:09 DP: And is this...?

1:07:11 MU: That’s what I was trying to say. Yes, exactly. We do two things with time during that dreaming phase: we try to play out this record in time as best as we can and at the same time the very images that we create use time and space as metaphors themselves.

1:07:26 DP: Yes. But we’re actually creating time in the dreaming, or in the scanning, or in the explication or in the...

1:07:32 MU: We’re not... I don’t understand in what sense we’re creating time.

1:07:34 DP: Are we not?

1:07:35 MU: We are translating something that we’re trying to latch onto within a given period of time; that biological clock that we have – that Dr Globus referred to as the biological control of dreaming – that biological clock says, ‘You’re going to be at this now for about ten minutes,’ or fifteen minutes or a half hour, and we have that much time available to us to unravel that implicate. And we use time...

1:08:04 K: Sir, is it possible to live a life without control – psychologically – of any kind? Because I think the whole of time is involved in that, if I may... The biological time, the physical time and the psychological time, and so on and so on. May I be a little personal, because I... I don’t want to talk about myself, it sounds rather silly. I have never controlled psychologically. Psychologically, I have never controlled. Does this sound odd? You’re all very silent (laughs).

1:09:05 DS: What do you mean by control?

1:09:08 K: I must control my desires. I must control my temper. I must control my sexual appetites. I must control my desire to be bigger, littler and all... In the sense, the moment the recognition that the controller is the controlled, then all this disappears. Not theoretically but actually in daily life. (Pause) Because conflict is the essence of disorder, whether between nations, between classes, between people, between families, between husband and wife — that is disorder. When I follow my guru that is disorder; psychologically, because I want to be like him, I want to experience something which he has... etc., etc. All that involves time.

1:10:33 DB: I think Harsh is next.

1:10:42 Harsha Tankha: I would like to speak from personal experience of dreams. And... Every night when I go to sleep, or most nights when I go to sleep, I seem to lie down in bed and thoughts have been running through my head all day, and I see these thoughts continuing to run through my head. And then this... I keep worrying about how I could have done things better and I think about what had happened and what this meant and what that meant. And that slowly fades away and I begin to see pictures. I begin to see these things as pictures, instead of thoughts. 1:11:26 I see again what happened to somebody and I see them talking to each other. And then the words disappear and the thoughts disappear and I still continue to see the pictures and at this stage I can still hold on to what I am seeing. And then finally, a kind of dance of images begins and then a point comes where I suddenly feel I can’t hold onto this anymore and it’s a very frightening moment. And then that passes and I’m still seeing things which are no longer meaningful. But one thing I certainly know is that I’m conscious and that I’m seeing those things. 1:12:07 And it seems that I’ve been seeing things like that all day, which were just still dancing around; while I was awake I was still seeing things like that, that I was conscious of, which I didn’t understand. And these are not images of those things that I was seeing all day, these are different things that I’m seeing now but I did see all day like that as well.

1:12:30 MU: When you say you did see all day, how do you mean? That when the images came at you they were familiar, as if you had seen them during the day?

1:12:39 HT: No, it was the kind of image that they are; they are the kind of image I cannot talk about, so during the day I do not talk about them. I do not refer... relate to people as if I was seeing that way, because I have no words to describe those images.

1:12:56 MU: Right.

1:12:57 HT: And I have no actions either to describe those images.

1:12:59 Q: But you see them in the day time, as well as...?

1:13:02 HT: But I see them in the day time, nevertheless. I see them in the day time in the sense that the continuity of consciousness assures me of that. And when I continue further beyond that point even those disappear and then it’s quite blank. And when this first happened to me I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not getting any sleep,’ but now I’ve discovered that I can get up the next day and go through a day which is just as energetic and it doesn’t really seem to have impaired my ability to rest. 1:13:39 And when people ask me, ‘What were you doing?’ I say, ‘I was dreaming.’ And then people ask me, ‘Did you sleep?’ I say, ‘Yes, I slept.’ But in another sense, and to somebody else, I might not say that I slept; somebody to whom I could describe those images because there is a commonality of experience, to them I could say, ‘This is what I saw,’ and then they would say, ‘Well, were you awake at that time? ’ and I would say, ‘Yes, I was awake.’

1:14:05 MU: Up to a point, what you seem to be describing is a not infrequent phenomenon known as hypnogogic imagery; that is, at the point where you are beginning to experience an altered state of consciousness, thoughts then assume a pictorial mode and that mode, initially, immediately reflects the thoughts that preceded it. The psychiatrist named Silborough wrote about this and offered a number of illustrations which showed this process from his own life. For example, he went to sleep one night – he’d trained himself to pick up the hypnogogic imagery – and he found himself preoccupied with something he was writing and the fact that it wasn’t flowing and it wasn’t as smooth and it had a lot of rough edges and he was dissatisfied with it, and then suddenly, at a particular point, he lost those thoughts and he saw himself in his workshop holding a plane, and planning a rough piece of board, getting the rough edges out of it. 1:15:21 Well, that was an immediate pictorial representation of the immediately antecedent thoughts. Now, from what we know usually about the cycle that these images follow in relation to dreaming, they don’t transform into actual dream images – in the sense of these independently moving, interacting images – until about three quarters of an hour, an hour or so later when you then enter another physiological cycle where you actually are dreaming. In other words, these images are relatively quiescent as compared to the activity of dream images later on.

1:16:07 HT: No, the point I was trying to make was that when I first started sleeping like this it seemed like... I thought I was very disturbed because I thought I wasn’t getting any sleep, and I need to sleep – I know I need to sleep – and when I discovered that it wasn’t doing me any harm, I stopped worrying about this and so this process now continues more evenly by itself. And I don’t have any dreams besides those and sometimes, if you were to ask me what my dreams were, I would describe those to you as my dreams. And I would have to describe them to you as my dreams because I know no other way in which I can describe them to you. But at the same time they might not be... I don’t think of them as dreams.

1:17:07 MU: They are not true dreams.

1:17:09 HT: And I’d like to take Fritjof’s point. He asked me the other day when do I prepare my maths lessons. I don’t prepare them; while I’m falling asleep like this I see what happened in the class during the day and, as I watch it, it sort of falls into a kind of shape, and the continuation from that point is as clear and apparent to me... it’s in front of me and it’s marshalled all my thoughts together. So next day when I go into a maths class, I just proceed. And I didn’t control it, I didn’t use my dream to think about what I was going to prepare, it just fell into place like that.

1:17:46 DB: Is it relevant to this point?

1:17:51 GG: Yes, it is. I think what we’re talking about is – and it’s relevant also to the questions Krishnamurti was raising before – the question of continuity between waking and sleep. And I have a somewhat different view from Monty – I think a different emphasis, perhaps, about this – because I think that there’s much more continuity between waking life and dream life than he’s emphasising; I wouldn’t sort of elevate dreaming to a special kind of state. Psychoanalysts sometimes say that if you understood the first thing the patient says to you at the beginning of eight years of analysis, if you really understood it, you would understand everything that you came to understand over eight years. 1:18:49 That is to say, folded up in a small piece of behaviour is all of that structure which is in the brain. That is, a piece of output from the brain conserves something of the imbedded structure within the brain, which is giving the person all his trouble. And I think the dream gives a particularly clear representation or conservation of that embedded structure in the brain, but any piece of behaviour does and any fantasy does. The more we let go and stop the world, the more that structure will be outputted directly without a lot of transformations on it, but it’s always present; everything that we do and every action that we do, every piece of behaviour contains all of it. 1:19:44 And I think in that sense it’s related very much to what David talks about in the holographic model, because the whole is contained in each piece of behaviour; it’s implicate there but we need the signal, the key, to bring it out and that may take many years.

1:20:05 DB: Right. As I say, I think we’ll use... draw on this question to...

1:20:09 DS: Well, I wanted to bring that – and I don’t know, maybe you can help me – but it seems to me, in some way or other, that’s related to what you were talking about yesterday, in the issue of effort...

1:20:20 K: Yes sir.

1:20:21 DS: ...in some way or other. That if it’s always, always there... And I agree with you; I mean, what happens when a student comes to me after ten years of working with his patient and he says, ‘Look, I don’t know, something is wrong,’ I say, ‘Bring me the notes on the first time you saw this person,’ and it’s all there — why they can’t go anywhere together. Now, somehow or other, it seems to me that’s what you’re talking about with effort, because if it’s all there then there’s no reason for effort.

1:20:51 K: Would you say, sir – if I may... May I reply? – that when you say, ‘It is all there,’ what do you mean?

1:20:59 DS: Well, I mean that...

1:21:01 K: You know, this is the old, ancient Hindu theory (laughs) also, that God or the wholeness is there inside you, all that you have to do is to peel off, like an onion skin, layer after layer, through effort, through concentration, through...

1:21:20 DS: Yes. No, that’s not what I mean. Yes.

1:21:24 K: ...until it’s all there.

1:21:25 DM: No, what I mean is that – as Gordon was just saying – that what you’re seeing... the experience now – the controller is the controlled, the experiencer is the experience – it’s all going on...

1:21:37 K: No. No sir. If (the) experiencer is the experience, then the desire for further experience has no meaning.

1:21:46 DS: But that’s part of the experiencer at that time.

1:21:49 K: No...

1:21:50 DS: The experiencer is – at that moment, let’s say – the desire for more experience. That’s what he is.

1:21:57 K: No. No sir; let’s understand, if I may... What is the desire, the urge for experience? Is it... – psychological experience; I’m not talking of other kinds of experiences. Experience implies a process of going through. The word... go through; that means not retaining the memory of that particular experience — to finish with it. That’s generally what it means, doesn’t it? That I have an experience and it’s over. Not carried on. And if I carry it on, it becomes a problem. So if I understand that properly, then I see the experiencer is the experienced, there is no division, then my urge for psychological experience – as God, as... all kinds of other experience – becomes a very small affair. So what is the question we are discussing?

1:23:27 DS: Well, the question we’re discussing is that, in as much as that is the case, what is the place of effort in there?

1:23:36 K: Sir, when we use the word effort: effort to gain something, to be something, to achieve something.

1:23:47 DS: To go on, so to speak, beyond the experience.

1:23:50 K: Yes, become something — go further, further, further, better, better, better, make more and more progress.

1:23:59 DS: That’s what you would call effort. Right.

1:24:02 K: Or trying to be something, all the time.

1:24:06 DS: Well, but are you...? What about trying to be the experiencer is the experience?

1:24:13 K: Ah! You cannot make an effort to see that: either it is so or it is not so. Either you – not you – either you see the truth of that, that the experiencer is the experience, the thinker is the thought... It is so or it is not so; you can’t make an effort to be that.

1:24:37 DS: That, I think, is where we... that’s where, somehow or other, there gets to be some sort of hang up there, in most people’s experience. That in the... Let’s say, suppose the experience is the experience of trying to get somewhere?

1:24:55 K: No. No sir. Look, thinker is the thought, isn’t it?

1:24:59 DS: Yes.

1:25:00 K: Without thought, is there a thinker?

1:25:03 DS: No.

1:25:04 K: Ah, be a little bit more... (laughs)

1:25:06 DS: No, I think thought does create the thinker.

1:25:09 K: No, thinker is the thought. Thought is non... If there is no thought, is there a thinker?

1:25:20 DS: No. Without thought... there might be some sort of ambience of a thinker, some sort of feeling of...

1:25:31 K: No, one can see. You express something in words; words which have a content according to the thought. The thought is expressed by the thinker, who has memories, experience and knowledge, and that knowledge is part of the thinking. The whole of that is thinker and the thought. That’s a fact. I mean, that is obviously so.

1:26:06 DS: Right.

1:26:07 K: And what is the effort? To change thoughts, to control thoughts?

1:26:11 DS: No, no, no, no, no; because the thinker... The thought... (laughs) The thought becomes one of effort or the thought becomes one of desire, let’s say.

1:26:24 K: No sir, wait... I desire...

1:26:27 DS: Suppose it is thought of desire.

1:26:28 K: Look sir: I see a nice car. Impact, sensation; contact, sensation.

1:26:35 DS: Yes.

1:26:38 K: Then, from that sensation, there is desire: ‘I’d love to drive that car. It’s mine’ — the pleasure of possession and all the rest of it.

1:26:50 DS: Okay.

1:26:52 K: Now, in that there is effort – isn’t there? – not to possess, possess, all the business of earning money, bother of looking after the car and fuss and all that. But...

1:27:06 DS: You’ve got to go from... now, you’ve got the sensation, you’ve got to go from here and get the money to get the car.

1:27:12 K: Oh, for God’s sake!

1:27:13 DS: You got to.

1:27:14 K: Yes (laughs).

1:27:15 DS: That’s your effort. Okay.

1:27:18 K: Can desire – I look: there’s perception, sensation, contact, desire – end there? Not with an effort to end there – it’s... what? – because then I have to go into the whole question of attachment, and then the bother of... – you follow? So effort to be something is contradiction. I observe what I am, not what I should be. I have no ideals. It is so. I am that: I’m angry, I’m jealous, I am brutal, I am this — that is so. Not... I don’t want to change it to something else. But if I remain with that – with what is – there’s a transformation of what is. That’s all. It is not: ‘I want to transform,’ there is a natural transformation.

1:28:34 DS: If I remain with that.

1:28:36 K: With that — what is.

1:28:39 DS: But now, if I remain with that, that means I had to have stopped it before I got to the attachment, or I have to remain with the attachment.

1:28:48 K: That’s right. Remain... watch it and it unfolds.

1:28:50 DS: Unfolds.

1:28:51 KP: (In a whisper) And God gives you the car, or the girl. Elizabeth Ferris: Can I...? I was interested in what Harsh was saying about your experiences, because it seemed that for your maths lessons the next day, you could have... if you hadn’t had these experiences you would have had to have thought through your lessons for the next day, which would have involved some effort; that would have, as it were, been the active way of deciding what you were going to say in your... 1:29:19 But by in some way having these experiences, you managed to bypass from the problem, or the question, to the solution without going through the active or effortful activity, if you like, of deciding what they were going to be. Now, presumably, the fact that you could have used rational thought to have got there meant that the information was all in your head anyway, but using a sort of more passive or psychic pathway, you got to the answer without going through the effort.

1:29:51 HT: I don’t think it happened that way at all. There was a time when I used to prepare my lessons very carefully, and take the effort, and then when I went into my classroom it would be an effort; I would take the effort to explain things to my students. And then they wouldn’t understand, and then I’d try and explain it to them. And I thought I was doing very well: explaining things to them and they wouldn’t understand what I was saying and I’d try and I had it all clear what I was trying to say — that was when I prepared it. 1:30:26 Now when I just let it drift through me like this, when I go into my class that morning, as I sit down in front of them, I have very little idea of what I’m going to say, but when I do say it, they understand it; there’s communication between us, they’re ready to talk, they know what I’m talking about, we see things together. Things come up and we seem to be at a liberty to chase them, and they seem to understand better.

1:30:57 FC: Can I just make a very short point?

1:30:58 EF: So do you think, then, that the effort that you put into preparing the lessons in the past creates more effort in having to communicate that rational thought?

1:31:07 HT: Yes.

1:31:08 EF: And that that creates a division, because you’re not, as it were, on the same level as the students who you’re trying to communicate with.

1:31:15 HT: Yes. Before I was explaining the rational thought to them. Now we just do it together, the rational thought, so they know how to do it.

1:31:20 DB: I think you just have a point. Right.

1:31:25 FC: Can I...? Just a short point. Yes. I find it very difficult... very hard to believe that you can do this all the time, especially with mathematics. I’ve given mathematics lessons to children and if I want to explain differential calculus to, say, a fourteen year old child it takes me about two hours to prepare this. And there are many ways you can do it, but there are some ways which are much easier than others. It’s a question of which examples you choose and so on, to put them on their level. And I find it very hard to believe that you can do it just intuitively, without rational thought; to find good examples, to go into the concepts in the right way and so on. I find that very hard to believe.

1:32:11 HT: Well, I think my answer to that is that I know them very well. I live with them, I eat with them, I dance with them, I play with them and, since I’m with them all the time like that, I do know – because we have this large shared experience – I do know where to pick up the examples and things instinctively.

1:32:34 K: That means – may I just... – that means you are with yourself all the time; you’re not trying to be something else.

1:32:42 HT: Yes, I suppose you could put it like that.

1:32:45 K: That’s it. That’s the whole art.

1:32:47 DB: Yes, there’s several people... I think Bryan Goodwin would... you had something, no?

1:32:51 Bryan Goodwin: No, it’s been clarified.

1:32:53 DB: Then, Julian?

1:32:54 JM: Yes, I’d like to, I mean, take up this point that’s been skirted around by most people, about how what’s been said links up with effort. Again, I share Fritjof’s... not scepticism, but I don’t understand how what you said could be true. I mean, if one lives with a group of people, then you’re doing something which I suppose could be called belonging to the practical realm. I mean, you eat, you... just you have all sorts of various types of social intercourse with these people. But teaching mathematics is something... well, it’s different. 1:33:34 I mean, if you want, it belongs to the theoretical realm. I mean, you have to impart propositional knowledge to people. And all I... I mean, the only thing I can say is... give you my personal experience. I mean, when I’m lecturing to students about something that’s abstract, I make an absolute shambles of it if I just come in and let it flow. I mean, I’ve got to sit down and prepare it carefully and structure the argument. Now, the other related question is this... I mean, it concerns... well, it concerns Krishnamurti’s statement that if I make an effort to be... 1:34:11 to make an effort to be something is a contradiction. I mean, let me put my difficulty in the form of an example. Let’s say that I’m slovenly. I’m very messy, I can’t get my house in order; you know, in the very straight forward sense of there’s always clothes and garbage all over the place. It’s not true, but it’s just an example. (Laughter) Now, I resolve – because of pressures from within me and from without – to become non-slovenly, neater. Now, I am what I am – okay, I’m slovenly – but I want to be something else: non-slovenly. 1:34:48 Now, I don’t understand what it means to say that I can’t make an effort to become non-slovenly. Of course I’ve got to make an effort to become non-slovenly; I’ve got to take steps to... first of all, take steps to clear the place up but, more important, I’ve got to take steps to get my mind in the sort of condition that I’ll always be neat and non-slovenly.

1:35:12 K: May I answer that question, sir?

1:35:14 JM: Yes.

1:35:16 K: May I answer that question? Is it physical slovenliness, laziness, or is it mental laziness?

1:35:25 JM: Say it’s both.

1:35:27 K: Wait. So if it’s physical slovenliness, it has come about because you haven’t enough sleep – I’m taking... – ate too much, played too much, indulged too much — all those are contributory causes to being tired, slovenly. Why...?

1:35:47 JM: No. Say, no, I’m not tired; I’m very alert but I’m slovenly.

1:35:52 K: Yes, but you’re... Ah, no... That’s what I said, sir.

1:35:55 JM: And I haven’t indulged, really, that’s...

1:35:57 K: No, I said physical slovenliness and mental laziness.

1:36:02 JM: All right.

1:36:04 K: I’m only taking physical laziness.

1:36:07 JM: Right.

1:36:08 K: Be lazy. What is the...? All right, be lazy for that day. What’s wrong with it?

1:36:14 JM: Because I know that being lazy is not conducive to...

1:36:19 K: Ah! To be something else.

1:36:21 JM: That’s right. That’s right.

1:36:23 K: That means we... our education has been to compete with somebody, to gain some...

1:36:30 JM: No. No, it’s not competition. I mean, look...

1:36:34 K: Of course... Why should I be...? I am lazy. Look sir, this morning I was lazy – just a minute – because I had to do too much yesterday, so I was lazy. I said, ‘All right. I’m lazy,’ I just didn’t do any yoga. That is not laziness…

1:36:55 JM: No, you decided not to do yoga.

1:36:58 K: No, no! My body said, ‘Don’t do it.’

1:37:00 JM: All right, your...

1:37:01 K: I’m just as awake as yesterday or when I woke up. The body said, ‘Please, leave me alone.’ (Laughter)

1:37:08 JM: Yes. Sorry, but my... No... Well...

1:37:12 KP: May I make a point here that I think applies to both of your questions and Krishnamurti’s answer, and the example of mathematics. I think when you reach a state of grace...

1:37:22 K: That’s it.

1:37:23 KP: ...everything becomes graceful, but until you do that you have to prepare your lectures, you have to learn to put your shoes on, and so on and so forth and a great deal of…

1:37:36 DS: You’ve introduced time. You said, ‘Reach a state of grace,’ that implies I’m going somewhere from here. I don’t... I’m not...

1:37:43 JM: Also, Karl...

1:37:44 DS: He said, ‘You’re there. I’m not reaching for anything. I am in a state of grace, always.’

1:37:47 KP: No, wait a minute; wait a minute. I’m saying that if in any particular endeavour, once you know your subject matter really well, you can in fact go in completely – you know? – as I do in physiological psychology, at eight o’clock in the morning, my eyes are hardly open, neither is anybody else and we just rap, but it comes out in a fairly decent, orderly fashion. However, when I was preparing those lectures initially, and you went through that period of initially mastering the subject, and so did Krishnamurti originally learn how to dress himself and go to the bathroom...

1:38:27 K: (Laughs) Yes.

1:38:28 KP: ...and not pee in a corner and all of these things. And I’m not so sure in those periods of time – and I think this is what is missing from the doctrine, as I hear it – that in those periods of time there wasn’t some achieving, effort and all of these other things going on. So if we want to be different and so on, it’s a matter of accepting, again, that even... simply that to achieve, you have to have effort.

1:38:55 K: Sir, that implies competition.

1:38:56 KP: Not necessarily.

1:38:57 JM: No, it doesn’t.

1:38:58 KP: Sometimes cooperation.

1:38:59 K: May I just...?

1:39:01 KP: All right.

1:39:03 K: Our education system is comparing A to

1:39:07 B: marks, exams — all that. So when you’re comparing A with B, you are destroying A. ‘Destroying’ in the sense, quotes. So that system has... making us all the time compete, compete, compete, compare, compare, imitate, conform — all that follows.

1:39:31 KP: But there’s also some simple cooperation.

1:39:34 K: Ah, that’s a different matter.

1:39:35 KP: If you’re living with someone, for instance, and they’re slovenly and you’re not – or if you’re slovenly and they’re not – that causes tension.

1:39:43 K: Of course; of course, sir.

1:39:44 KP: And now how do you get around those cooperative...?

1:39:47 K: I see you are tired today. You stay in bed, I’ll look after all the detail.

1:39:52 KP: Oh, wonderful! (Laughter)

1:39:54 K: I’ve done it. I have done this.

1:39:56 KP: Yes, yes. You have to really do that. Yes.

1:39:59 K: I have done it.

1:40:00 KP: Yes.

1:40:01 K: You stay in bed. I’ll get all the breakfast ready. For God’s sake, don’t let us fuss about it. There is no tension.

1:40:06 KP: This is what’s called an adult. (Laughter) I really agree.

1:40:09 JM: Karl, I reckon that... I mean, I probably know as much about, let’s say, the first order of propositional calculus as you know about basic physiological psychology.

1:40:17 KP: Sure. Can’t you just go in and...?

1:40:19 JM: Not teach it. I mean, I could, but it wouldn’t be as ordered and as structured...

1:40:24 KP: Maybe you shouldn’t teach it; maybe you should educate them.

1:40:27 K: But my... Sir, why shouldn’t I be lazy?

1:40:32 JM: Well, because I don’t want to be lazy.

1:40:34 K: But... what...

1:40:35 JM: You see, you refuse to, I think – this is how it seems to me – you refuse to allow a distinction within people of being in state A but not wanting to be in state A. You feel that that is, in some way, not possible: if you’re in state A, just let yourself be... But I don’t want to be in state A. I don’t want to be lazy.

1:40:51 K: No sir. No, no. On the contrary, I say if you are in the state of A, don’t compare, don’t force, watch that state of A. Be with it.

1:41:00 JM: But... No, I...

1:41:02 K: Look at it. Let it inform you. Let the map of A unroll, and it’ll tell you all that...

1:41:08 DS: But he’s telling you that state A includes both state A and not wanting to be in state A.

1:41:15 JM: That’s right. In other words, I have looked at it, I’ve ridden with it and I don’t like it; I want to get off.

1:41:19 K: Wait. Wait. Now, why do you want to...? What is the other state you want to get into? Not to be lazy?

1:41:25 JM: Okay. Now, I won’t fall into the trap... I won’t say, ‘B,’ because than you’re going to say, ‘Ah, you’re comparing it...’

1:41:31 K: No, no, no...

1:41:32 JM: I’ll just say, ‘Not A,’ that’s all. (Laughter) I don’t want to be in state A.

1:41:35 K: Why?

1:41:36 HT: Why reduce it to propositions? (Laughter)

1:41:38 JM: Sure.

1:41:39 HT: You’re in state A. That’s where you are. You don’t want to be in state A.

1:41:45 K: That’s where you are.

1:41:46 HT: Now you’re in state A and you don’t want to be in state

1:41:48 A: this is state B.

1:41:49 JM: Not necessarily. Because B might be described in such a way that it is neither...

1:41:56 Q: He just described it. He’s right; you just described it.

1:41:59 HT: I just described it. State B is the state of being in state A and not wanting to be in state A.

1:42:04 GS: No, I think this is unfair, because if you give a lecture... I mean, several of us have lectured and different people have different standards of how a good lecture goes. One person might decide that if you get caught halfway through in the propositional calculus it is a disaster; another person may say, ‘Well, that just shows that if you’re sloppy, you will get a sloppy result.’ But it is... If you’re unhappy with your bad lecture that is not the same as giving a good lecture.

1:42:30 K: No....

1:42:31 GS: And some of us are feeling that you must prepare.

1:42:34 EF: Responsibility to the students is another thing.

1:42:36 GS: Pardon me?

1:42:37 EF: A responsibility to your students to give a good lecture.

1:42:42 GS: Right.

1:42:43 EF: And we were talking about responsibility in another context.

1:42:44 GS: Right. What I’m saying is that if you say that you are giving a bad lecture, and you feel that you have not prepared and that is a bad state of affairs, that recognition is not enough; that is probably the prelude but it is not enough to be giving a good lecture — you must go and prepare. Now, I can quite explain the kind of situation that Harsh finds himself in, that very often you have worked a number of steps which are necessary for orderly presentation of the subject, under almost all possible conditions, not as preparation for the lecture but in terms of just what has bothered you. 1:43:20 You ask the question, ‘Suppose you did not know this and this, and you wanted to understand this one, where would you go?’ If you have most of these things, sort of, worked out for yourself then I can see that this contact with people together with – what shall I say? – letting yourself go prepares the lecture. Sometimes – I mean, I don’t know whether other people have this – I prepare a lecture very hard but then go and give an entirely different lecture. It would be a very ordered lecture and you wonder why you spent several hours preparing this one hour lecture it turns out that you have not given. 1:43:52 But in a sense that was necessary because after seeing the thing your mind has decided, in its own wisdom, that maybe that is not such a good presentation; it can come up with... So it may be that the state of letting yourself go only sorts out the steps that you have already worked out; that you had... it’s not only the preparation for the thing but a number of different steps may have come through at a certain stage. But I would also very much like to hear an answer to his question from you. 1:44:23 It seems to me that you have given us the slip and discussed something else which is quite important: namely, if you are in a certain state and you are unhappy with that state...

1:44:33 K: Remain...

1:44:34 GS: ...you are dissatisfied with that state, you have already changed the state because you are a sloppy person who does not want to be sloppy. That is different from a sloppy person who is completely relaxed about it.

1:44:44 K: No. Sir, as we said... as you say, ‘I’m unhappy with something. I am unhappy with my laziness.’ I remain with my unhappiness. I don’t want to be happy; I remain with that. I say, ‘Yes, I’m unhappy with it,’ and I go into it. I say, ‘Why?’ I see it.

1:45:11 GS: But then doesn’t one get up and clean yourself up?

1:45:16 K: Ah, I may not. I may not.

1:45:19 JM: Yes, but I may. I mean...

1:45:21 K: You may or may not. But I am just saying, if I am lazy in the morning, I’m lazy in the morning. I say, ‘Yes,’ I remain with it. I am not unhappy with it. If I...

1:45:29 JM: When I said lazy, I meant a general character disposition, not just lazy at a particular discrete bit of time.

1:45:34 K: Ah, now you’re entering into quite different thing, sir.

1:45:35 JM: Well, no. I mean...

1:45:37 K: When you said sluggishness...

1:45:38 JM: Slovenly meaning a general...

1:45:40 K: Ah, that’s a different matter.

1:45:41 JM: ...disposition that I have to be slovenly.

1:45:43 GS: No, it seems to me that there seem to be two different directions in which you can... If you are slovenly and unhappy about or dissatisfied with the thing, you are in disorder and misery. There seem to be two directions to go: one is to say, ‘Well, I am slovenly and I am unhappy about it, but I am slovenly and that’s it,’ then you become...

1:46:02 Q: But you’re not unhappy about it.

1:46:03 GS: Pardon me? And then you decide that you are not unhappy about it. That’s the way of the pig.

1:46:08 K: Ah!

1:46:09 GS: There is the other way... (Laughter)

1:46:11 K: Ah! I am not quite a pig. (Laughter) I won’t admit that yet.

1:46:15 KP: Well, pigs are very loveable, they’re very loveable creatures.

1:46:17 GS: The other way for me... The other to go is to say, ‘By God, I’m going to do something about it,’ and...

1:46:22 JM: That’s right. And make an effort – with a capital E – big, strong effort and get out of the state.

1:46:28 K: I understand this, sir, very well.

1:46:30 GS: And not have a tension or repentance about the fact that I was slovenly but then decide that I’m going to... and then I have gone to the other state, then again I am reasonably happy. Sometimes I’m unhappy, but reasonably happy saying that, ‘Well, now I am reasonably...’

1:46:43 K: So what is the question, sir, we are...?

1:46:46 GS: So then there seems to be some amount of effort. Now...

1:46:51 K: In what?

1:46:52 GS: In deciding to shake myself off my slothfulness and then go and clean up the mess.

1:46:57 K: Look, this morning I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to come down (laughs) and the body said, ‘All right, lie down for a while.’ I lay down for an hour – not thinking, nothing, meditation, all the rest of it – just absolute... Then I got up, there was no effort — I got up.

1:47:22 DS: What would have happened if you hadn’t? Well, that’s all right to say... I mean, what would...?

1:47:25 GS: Why did you get up?

1:47:27 DS: Suppose it got to be ten forty five and you didn’t get up?

1:47:32 K: Well, because I would keep you all waiting and I don’t want to keep you waiting. All right, yes; courtesy, consideration, affection, all the rest of it — I just got up.

1:47:42 GS: But the body still says, ‘Look, I’m...’

1:47:44 K: Ah no! It didn’t.

1:47:46 DS: Never said... never felt an effort.

1:47:47 JM: But, you see, don’t we want to transcend giving each other – and we’re all doing it; and this is a particular example – giving each other bits and pieces of autobiography. I mean...

1:47:56 K: No, this is not an autobiography. I just... I don’t want...

1:47:59 JM: No, no. I say that, you know, with respect and non-pejorative... in a sense. I mean, I could have been in your sort of situation and, you know, I’d then say, ‘Damn, I’ve got to get up,’ and I have to make a big effort, so I get up. In other words, I could put myself in exactly the same sort of situation that you just gave us, but I would describe the way I got out of that state in a different way. I didn’t sort of gently flow out of it, without making an effort. I made a big effort, explosive big effort, and jumped out of bed (laughs). I mean... But it seems to me that that’s not, you know, there’s some...

1:48:30 KP: That’s your problem: that you make an effort, and the making of the effort...

1:48:33 JM: Why is it a problem? No, I...

1:48:35 KP: ...and the wanting is, I think...

1:48:36 JM: But what... But, you see, that...

1:48:38 KP: ...what’s being said here.

1:48:39 JM: Yes, but right now I don’t understand what it means: ‘That’s my problem’ – you know? – I’ve succeeded in doing. I’m here.

1:48:48 KP: Then you have to understand...

1:48:49 BG: It depends whether one feels there’s a problem or not, partly, doesn’t it? If one feels there’s no problem then it’s not an issue, whether one does this or not.

1:48:56 JM: Well...

1:48:57 KP: Yes. Well, I think that... I agree with you in this sense, that the Eastern philosophy is extremely useful and gets us to a certain way of living.

1:49:11 K: This is not Eastern philosophy, sir. (Laughs)

1:49:15 KP: No, no, I know. But whatever, it’s close enough; why mince your words.

1:49:17 K: Don’t...

1:49:18 JM: Karl, who are you agreeing with now? Sorry.

1:49:20 KP: You.

1:49:21 JM: Oh. (Laughter)

1:49:23 KP: But...

1:49:24 DB: Maurice Wilkins wants to say something. Could we break in, please?

1:49:26 KP: Yes.

1:49:27 MW: Could I...? I wonder if the following helps to clarify it at all. I mean, Krishnamurti spoke earlier about the possibility or non-possibility of teaching people to love. Well, I think that one would agree that it isn’t possible to love by making an effort.

1:49:55 K: Yes sir.

1:49:56 MW: Now, I think the psychoanalysts would also agree that the patient, oppressed by the most terrible problems, cannot solve these in spite of all his individual effort. Now, is it not true that in all really important things in our lives, we don’t make these changes by effort?

1:50:21 K: Quite right, sir.

1:50:22 JM: Can I reply, because it seems to be there’s a bit...?

1:50:23 DB: Well, if it’s... (inaudible). Yes.

1:50:26 JM: I would say – and it’s going to sound paradoxical to most of you here, probably – that I think you... it does make sense to make an effort, even when one speaks of loving someone. And the effort – in this case, for example – would come... I mean, you meet a person, you begin to get to know him well, or her well, and you realise that she or he has a lot of character traits, some of which attract you, some of which you don’t like so much. 1:50:49 Now, you could definitely make an effort to – if not ignore – then lessen the importance of, yes, the very nasty traits in that other person and, perhaps... and come to accept the sort of neutral ones, and... etc. So in other words, I would suggest that there’s even... that it makes sense to speak of effort, even in this case.

1:51:11 MW: So you feel you can love your wife, although you think she has very nasty aspects?

1:51:16 JM: Of course. Of course.

1:51:19 Q: He’s not thought about it. (Laughter)

1:51:25 MW: Sorry, I’m not being personal; I mean, I have this problem too.

1:51:29 EF: Can I answer that? Because I happen to be his wife. (Laughter) Now, the thing is, I want to talk about this because actually what Julian’s talking about when he gave this example of being slovenly, he’s actually talking about me. (Laughter) He’s not talking about him, he’s talking about me. Now, the fact is that this was... I wouldn’t say it was a great problem but I am naturally – not naturally, that’s not the right word – I have a habit that I’ve grown into, of being untidy. 1:51:59 I wouldn’t say I’m particularly happy about it but I am also, when I’m on my own, not particularly unhappy about it either. The fact is that when it... I come into contact with someone else – i.e. Julian – who I love and who is at the other end of the spectrum, in that he is overly tidy, then something has to happen – right? – something has to happen for us to be able to cooperate. And what has happened is that I have made an effort, through my love, to be more tidy and Julian has made an effort, through his love, to be a little less obsessional, if you like. 1:52:38 (Laughter) And I think, the thing is that we have both approached each other in a cooperative way. There are still a few problems but they’re not as great as... But there was an effort involved and the effort was in the cooperation needed to show that I in fact can love him. Now, you might say, ‘It shouldn’t have been an effort because the love should have made it possible for you to have done this without any effort. The fact that you love that person or want to express your love should have been enough, so that you tidied up all your papers and everything was a joy because you wanted to express your love through doing that.’ 1:53:17 Well, in a sense that might be right, but I think there was still a certain effort involved.

1:53:23 KP: I’d like to finish my statement now – it was beautiful what you’ve just said – I think this, what I would call an act of will and effort, is necessary to accomplish, to achieve. Now, you have said over and over again accomplishment and achievement and these things, let us not do them, you see? And I’m saying that the Western culture, in fact, is built on achieving and so on and I don’t want to...

1:53:50 K: I’m afraid Indian culture too, sir.

1:53:51 KP: It is now, yes.

1:53:52 K: Oh, even before.

1:53:53 KP: Even before.

1:53:54 K: ‘I want to achieve nirvana,’ (laughs) all kinds of...

1:53:57 KP: Well, all I’m saying is I feel that there is a place for both things but that maybe we’ve become too lopsided on the side of achieving and effortful ways of going about things and that we haven’t really – in our everyday education – been exposed to the effortless ways of getting to the same place.

1:54:28 K: Quite.

1:54:29 JM: Yes, but I think... I mean, why...? I mean, I agree with you but I don’t even think that the link between effort and achievement is as strong as you’ve just stated. I mean, in other words, I think one could meaningfully speak of effort without having to speak of achievement. And then the other position, it seems to me, from my point of view, becomes even less tenable. If one severs some of the threads that link effort and achievement. In other words, one could make efforts to get out of certain states which don’t necessarily have anything to do with achievement.

1:54:59 K: Sir, as Professor Wilkins has pointed out, in great things... if you make effort it’s lost its perfume. It is finished. That’s what we are talking about, aren’t we, sir?

1:55:12 JM: But that’s an empirical point which may or may not be true for some, but not other people. That’s all...

1:55:17 DS: No.

1:55:18 K: No, no, no.

1:55:19 KP: I think... I think I’ve grown to see...

1:55:23 DB: You want to speak now?

1:55:24 MU: Well, just to put this discussion in the frame of reference that I started with... (Laughter) If you can remember that far back.

1:55:33 HT: Well, we’ve been dreaming all this time.

1:55:36 MU: I don’t think that we’re ever engaged in any kind of undiluted activity. I think all of our activity is a combination of autonomous strivings and homonomous strivings. And I think what characterises autonomous strivings, for the most part, is effort because it’s synonymous with mastery. I think what characterises our homonomous strivings...

1:55:56 KP: Holonomous. Let’s change it to... Homonomous sounds too much like a homonym.

1:56:01 MU: ...our holonomous, homonomous strivings are basically and in their fundamental nature effortless, otherwise they’re nothing at all.

1:56:10 GS: I had a technical question to ask. With regard to your black dot...

1:56:17 KP: Very nice.

1:56:18 GS: Is this... could it be cognition, could it be response, could it be reception during the state of no dream at all — what is technically, in Indian culture, known as deep sleep?

1:56:32 MU: Well...

1:56:33 K: Ah, that’s what I wanted to come to, sir.

1:56:36 MU: The only evidence we have for what’s going on at that point that we can recover – because we’re at a disadvantage, we can’t zero in and know directly; you know, we recover certain information – and there what we tend to recover is something more akin to waking thought, fragments, sometimes imagery, not the disconnected and emotionally laden imagery of the real dream state but something approaching that sometimes, and sometimes just what sound like residual, stray thoughts from a waking state. 1:57:14 So my preference at this point is to just put a big question mark around that black dot and say we don’t know where or how it relates to what we’re talking about, that it may be a strange phenomenon that’s connected with some kind of disconnecting process. In other words, that our transitions from so-called deep sleep to dreaming sleep to a waking sleep may not be a continuum. It may be a discontinuous process that for a moment opens up a different kind of universe.

1:57:43 KP: That’s very good.

1:57:44 DB: Can I just say, it’s five minutes to one, so we should have at most one or some brief questions. If there’s any... You have... Is it a brief point?

1:57:51 HT: A brief one. I just wanted to take up the question of the instantaneous dream, because I think that brings up something. You gave an amusing example of someone who was hit on the back of the head and he thought he had been guillotined, and from that you concluded that it was an instantaneous dream. But that conclusion was drawn from some preconception that you had about time, because if you didn’t have that preconception, you could have instead come to the conclusion that he had a precognition in his dream of that thing going to hit him, and so in fact his dream did start five seconds earlier.

1:58:38 MU: Right. All right, I think that’s an interesting alternative explanation. I certainly would consider it.

1:58:42 DB: Right. Is it brief?

1:58:44 JM: Just tiny. I mean, the dot shouldn’t really... needn’t worry you too much. I mean, it could function like any other theoretical construct in... You know, you have an apparatus, you have to... so you posit it, to do the sort of job that a starting point would have to do but... I mean, one doesn’t even have to, perhaps, you know, in logic terms, quantify over it. It’s just... it’s a posit that you... it may even be just a heuristic device.

1:59:09 DB: Right. Then we’ll... This afternoon is free, as we have the outing, and tomorrow morning we start the same time.

1:59:19 MU: What time is the outing?

1:59:20 Q: Two o’clock, sharp.

1:59:21 DB: Where will the bus be?

1:59:22 Q: Entrance hall, at two o’clock?

1:59:23 DB: Yes.

🢁