OJ66T4 - Dying to everything known home
Ojai, California - 6 November 1966
Public Talk 4

Text-only version

0:00 This is J. Krishnamurti’s fourth public talk in Ojai, California, 1966.
0:08 Krishnamurti: this morning I would like to go into several problems, and to really grapple with them, to go very deeply and extensively in... comprehension about them, one needs a great deal of energy, not only physical energy but psychological energy. Generally one has, if one is fairly healthy, sufficient physical energy, impetus to investigate, but it’s much more difficult, it seems to me, to have psychological energy, the energy that will pursue the issue to its very end and not be distracted on its way. And to have this energy in abundance, one must understand the nature of conflict and effort. 1:49 We… one is used to… so much to this conditioning of effort. All our life from childhood till we die we are making constant effort, struggle. And where there is struggle, obviously, there is distortion. Where there is effort, there is no clarity of examination. Where there is effort, there is a strain, there is a desire to achieve an end which precludes every form of investigation, every form of understanding, delving deeply, and as we said yesterday, the desire to achieve is essentially based on comfort, pleasure, satisfaction, gratification.
3:15 And what we are going to deal with this morning does not need any kind of effort at all because effort exists only when there’s contradiction, contradiction within – though there is contradiction without, which can be understood, tolerated and perhaps go beyond. But there is this inward contradiction of various competing contradictory desires. And it is these contradictory desires that bring about conflict: the wanting and not wanting, ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’, the ‘what is’ trying to conform to a pattern of ‘what should be’, and so there is always conflict. 4:42 And apparently that’s part of our daily existence, from getting up in the morning, going to the office, struggling till we go back to bed, and from the moment we are born till we die there is this constant effort and battle. And to make effort to get rid of effort is still further effort.
5:21 Please, as we said yesterday, it’s no good merely hearing a lot of words and ideas. What we are concerned with is the understanding of the whole process of life with all its complexity, with its aggressions and miseries, with its sorrows and confusions and agonies. And to understand this vast field of life which is a constant movement, one must not only hear the words but also go beyond the words because the words, the explanations, are not the facts. But most of us are caught in words; To us words are extraordinarily important. like the word ‘socialist’ to an American is something extraordinary, or the ‘communist’. 6:38 And the word has become so extraordinarily important that we see the word first and then the fact after. What is actual is ‘what is’, not the word. and to go beyond the word, one must also realise, it seems to me, how slavish the mind is to word. Thought is expressed in words. Without words is there thinking? And without the word is there comprehension? And to understand something totally, to see the whole process of life, one must be free of the word – the word, the symbol, the idea, the conclusion. Then one can look; then one can listen; and that act of listening is really a miracle.
8:19 Perhaps it’s the greatest miracle when one can listen totally without any defence, without any barrier, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. which doesn’t mean the mind is open. On the contrary, the mind is extraordinarily alert then. So, as we were saying, the word is not the fact, and that’s a very difficult thing to realise. The symbol is never the reality. And the things that we’re going to discuss this morning, as I said, needs no effort at all. What it needs is a total perception of the whole process of life, and to perceive this whole phenomenon of life, one needs energy, and that energy is denied when there is this drive, this effort to achieve something. 10:02 You know, it’s only when the cup is empty that it can be filled. It’s only when the mind and heart are totally empty then it can comprehend, then it can live. But to be so completely empty is not a negative phenomenon. On the contrary, it is the highest form of intelligence; it’s the highest form of love to be so completely empty so that there is not a scratch of memory, not a word, not a conclusion that distorts perception. and what we are going to discuss or talk over together this morning demands a quality of mind that has no fear of any kind.
11:34 So one has first to understand fear because what we are going to discuss, talk over together, is this problem of death. But to understand it, to go very deeply into it, the mind must be extraordinarily subtle, sensitive, alert, full of attention. And to understand this enormous problem which has faced man from the beginning of time one has to be free of fear. There are so many forms of fear: fear of darkness, fear of what somebody says, fear of being hurt, fear of insecurity, fear of loneliness, and the ultimate fear, which is death. 13:00 And fear, as we said, is always in relation to something. It doesn’t exist by itself. I’m afraid of you or you’re afraid of me or I’m afraid of an idea, or I have committed myself to a certain activity in which I find great comfort and security and I am frightened that that security should be destroyed, that comfort should be taken away, that comfort in relationship, in a job or in ideals. So there are many forms of fear. And fear is essentially the result of time.
14:02 One is not afraid of the immediate. One is afraid of what will happen or what has happened. Please, examine what is being said. Not that you must agree with the speaker, which would be rather absurd, but rather use what the speaker is saying to inform yourself of your conditioning, of your ways of thought and… your thought and your ways of thinking. Fear is the product of thought. Fear in every form is thought in action with regard to the past through the present and to the future: I am afraid of what will happen and I’m afraid of something I have done in the past which I want to cover up, so thought… fear is the movement of time. 16:03 And it’s very important, if we would be free of fear, to understand this movement of time, which is essentially the process of thinking.
16:23 The now, the actual living present, the now is the result of yesterday and thousand yesterdays, so there is no actual now or the moment, but the moment, the actuality, the ‘what is’, is the result of yesterday, and that yesterday is the result of many, many, many yesterdays. And the now is the product of yesterday which is going to move to the future, to tomorrow. And fear is this movement of time which is the product of thought.
17:41 When I am confronted with something dangerous immediately, there is no fear. I act either foolishly, ignorantly, but there is action. But give time, an interval, then thought comes into operation; then I’m afraid. Look, this is not a mass psychoanalysis. We are not analysing each other. But I’m sure each one of us has various kinds of fears. Take one of them, bring it out into the open – don’t, please, don’t confess it to me... ...bring it out in the open and look at it. And how you look at it matters immensely. And we’re going to go into it step by step. As I said, how you look at it is very important. 19:34 First, do you look at it as though it was something outside of you, as something which is not you but something which is placed outside? So there is the observer and fear is something outside of him. Right? So there is this duality, this contradiction: I am not afraid but there is fear which I must overcome; I must do something about that thing which I call fear, so the observer is different from the thing observed. And is there a difference? There is no difference if you examine. The observer is the observed. Please follow this step by step. The observer who has… who says, ‘there is fear’, that fear is something external to the observer. 21:16 But for the observer to recognise it is fear, he must have already known it, and therefore the observer is the observed. I don’t want to go much more into it because that’s enough for the time being. Hence, as the observer, the thinker is the thought and the observed, any form of effort to rid of fear is the creation of another observer – right? – and therefore he’s caught in that vicious circle. I hope you are… we are going together.
22:20 That is, the observer is the centre of accumulated memory, experience, knowledge, information, and so on, the censor, the observer. He or it is aware outside of himself something which he calls fear, and he is making constant effort to run away or translate or transcend or suppress that fear. The more the tension between the observer and the fact of fear, the greater the effort, the greater the desire to escape, to run away, to cover up. And if you cannot run away, one becomes neurotic because the tension becomes so intense, and to live in that intense darkness of fear is a state of neurosis. 23:50 But, as we said, when the observer is the observed – not an idea but the fact – then there is no effort at all because then there is no contradiction. I am fear, and what can I do? Please follow this. When the observer is the observed and the observer has always acted as though the observed is something different from himself, then he could act, but when he realises that the observer is the observed, all action ceases on his part, and therefore all effort, and therefore there is no fear at all. This requires a great deal of inward inquiry, inward observation, step by step, without coming to any conclusion, therefore the mind must be extraordinarily alert and sensitive and swift. 25:33 And when there is no fear, because the observer is the thing which he has externalised as fear of which he is himself, then this action which was positive – that is, doing something about fear – then the observer is the observed in that state that’s complete inaction. And that complete inaction is the highest form of action.
26:33 Now… so there is no effort at all. It’s only the dull mind, the mind that’s committed, the mind that has… that is achieving, not achieving, that is in constant battle, struggle, effort. And this effort, this struggle, is considered the positive way of life. It is the most mischievous way of life. And in this total inaction, when the observer realises he is the observed, then in that total inaction there is an action which is not of effort. Let’s leave it there for the moment. I hope you understand some of it; if not, tant pis.
27:48 Then let’s proceed to examine this question of what is death. There are three things one has to understand: living, love and death. They go… all go together. You cannot separate death from love and living. To us, living, as it is, is a torture, a misery, meaningless existence. The more clever, the more sensitive, the more intellectually, emotionally one is alive, it has no meaning at all. And seeing that it has no meaning, we invent a meaning, we project a meaning, and according to that meaning try to live, and… which is not living at all.
29:01 So one has to understand what is living. And living is not this battle between human beings; it’s not this battle of competition, of races, of ambition, and all the rest of it. I don’t have to go into all the details of it. We all know what life is: the torture, the sorrow, the endless misery and confusion. And that’s what we call living.
29:43 And love, as we know, is hedged about with jealousy, with suspicion, aggression, violence, and so we don’t know what that is either.
30:00 And obviously we don’t know what death is because we are frightened of it. We never… rather, we don’t talk about it. We talk a great deal about living, a great deal about love, but death is not… is something to be avoided, to be put away, don’t talk about it. And if we do talk about it, we rationalise it or out of our fear we invent beliefs that give us comfort as resurrection, reincarnation and innumerable forms of escape from that enormous and mysterious fact which we call death. 31:09 Various religions throughout the world have given hope, really essentially a false hope to man. The ancient civilisations lived to die. To them death was far more important than living. And these present generation, this present civilisation is concerned with living and not with the other, and this living is a torture with an occasional bright spot of affection, love and beauty.
31:58 So without understanding living and without understanding love there is no possibility of understanding what death is. And to understand it, not intellectually, not emotionally, nor escape from this really... a fact that must be… that is the most immense thing because it is something that has to be understood, felt. Now, we’re going to go into that. Again, the word is not the thing. The explanation which we are going into is not… if it doesn’t happen, if you don’t do it actually, then it has no meaning at all. If you merely treat it as an idea, then it has no value. 33:10 There are so many ideas, so many books published every week, thousands and thousands. Don’t add another idea to already what you have. As we said, it’s only the mind that is empty that can see, that can act totally.
33:41 First of all, there is the fact of physical death – body by constant usage and strain, and so on, gives up, dies, comes to an end, through accident, through disease, through modern life. And one may physically find various medicines or diets, and so on, that can give it another fifty years or more, but there is the inevitable end, like all organism must come to an end. And it would be good to keep it as long as possible, healthy, if you can, and so on.
34:55 But there is much deeper fact, deeper issue involved in death. That is, the psychological ending, the me, the accumulated experience as a human being with all the knowledge, with all the accumulated information, every form of memory treasured, cherished and despised, put away – all that is the centre which is the me, the ego, the person. And it is that centre, the psychological centre, that one is afraid of losing. I do not know if you have ever examined what that centre is. 36:03 Not only what we have said about tradition, racial inheritance and education, and all the rest of it, but also that centre is... there is nothing divine or higher self, and all the rest of the things man has invented through centuries, as the atman, the higher self, the soul. All those are repetition of words… in different words of an idea that there is something supreme in each one of us. And the communists would say what tommyrot all that is. And those who believe in all that hold on to it tremendously as though it was something everlasting. 36:57 And when you examine it, it is just an idea, a thought, a memory, a bundle of experiences with all its reactions. Please, we are going to it very slowly. Don’t say, ‘I am atheist’ or this or that, all that silly stuff. We’re just examining it. And it… that centre is the result of time, and that centre creates the space round itself, like all centres do.
37:50 This microphone exists in space and it creates a space round itself, which is fairly simple. And there is the centre of… as the me which has created a space round itself. That space can extend widely, expanded, but it’s still where there is a centre there is always a frontier, and within this frontier there can be no freedom at all. Though one can expand through various forms of mental tricks and drugs, and so on, this consciousness with a centre, in that space created by the centre there is no freedom. 39:10 And death to most of us is the losing of that centre – isn’t it? – the things that I have known: my family, my friends, my… All the things that I have accumulated, which is the known. The centre is the known. And death is something of which I don’t know at all. And what I’m frightened is losing the known, not of the unknown. And losing the known means I’m completely lonely, I am completely alone in a void. And that is what I am afraid of; that’s what each one is afraid of. And being afraid of that, 40:17 we take to various forms of escapes, a whole networks of escapes, and the more romantically spiritual you are – I don’t know whatever that word ‘spiritual’ means – the more romantically spiritual you are, the more fantastic your ideas.
40:43 Now, is it possible to end that centre each day? Not having accumulated, then giving it up, but to die to that centre every day, every minute. That is, that centre is the accumulation of experience, knowledge, and life is a process of experience, a challenge and a response, and the more inadequate that response, the greater the conflict. And as we cannot, unless you are… one is highly enlightened and intelligent and sensitive, man is kept awake though experience, though challenge. And to receive every experience and not retain a shadow of it afterwards. Am I making myself clear? You have an experience, a pleasant or unpleasant experience, 42:30 dangerous or pleasurable, and to receive that experience and understand it and die to it immediately so that there is no memory as a centre which retains that experience. We often do this, naturally, but to be aware so intensely without any choice, and to be aware, so aware, so every experience is totally assimilated, understood and dissolved. That requires a great deal of energy, which means attention. That is, to die every day to every pleasure, to every thought, to every form of accumulation so that with the dying the mind is made fresh and the heart renews itself so that life doesn’t become a torture.
44:01 So in dying every day to everything that we know is to love, otherwise one cannot love. Love is not something to be cultivated. Like humility, the moment you cultivate humility you are… it’s a cloak of vanity. And it’s only when you die to everything, of every experience that you’ve had, that you are living. So living is a movement, fresh, new, innocent, every minute of the day fresh. And to die to the past is to live totally at a… altogether a different dimension.
45:22 Perhaps, if you’re interested, we might by questioning go more deeply or more… one can put into words in a different way what we have discussed or talked over together this morning.
45:48 Yes, sir?
45:51 Questioner: What then is the faculty which has the power to observe the mind?
45:54 K: ‘What then is the faculty which observes the mind’, the questioner says. Sir, first of all, if one realises the observer is the observed, which is one of the most extraordinary things when you realise, then in that state of attention there is no observer at all or the observed. Now, let me go into it a little bit. Look at that oak tree, actually look at it. You are the observer and the oak is the observed. There is a space between you and the thing which is the tree. In that interval of space is time – right? – the time that has to be covered to see that object. 47:30 And that object is always static. And what is static when observed is time. Now, the observer is watching the tree and in that interval of space there are all kinds of ideas: it’s an oak tree; I like, I don’t like; I wish it was in my garden; I wish it was this or that and ten different things, which actually prevents me from seeing the fact of that tree, the totality of it, because my attention is distracted by the words, by the name, by the knowledge… botanical knowledge of that tree which I have. So that distraction prevents me from looking actually at the tree.
48:45 When you no longer name, no longer thought functioning as knowledge about that tree, then is there a space between you and the tree? Then, if you go into it very deeply and observe all this, then the observer is the observed, which is not the observer identifies himself with the tree. Of course, the identification of the observer with the tree is absolutely silly; it’s not a fact; you don’t become the tree.
49:33 Q: Could you observe the vacuum...?
49:35 K: Ah, sir, sir, sir, do examine it, sir. Don’t ask... examine this fact. Look at a flower. Have you ever looked at a flower? Or you have looked at it, given it a name and passed it by. Or you say, ‘How beautiful. Let me smell it’. All these are distractive actions which prevent you from looking at that flower. Like human beings who have known each other, never look; they have the images of each other, and these images are in relationship. And if you observe very closely – and that’s one of the most arduous things and that doesn’t need effort at all – Just to sit of an afternoon whenever you have time and leisure, to look at it, to look at a flower, to look at yourself, to look at all the movement of your thought and your feelings and your reactions. 51:02 Just to observe without any choice, which is the beginning of self-knowing. And without self-knowing man is caught everlastingly in confusion and misery. And when the observer is the observed – and that can only be when there is total attention, not fragmentary attention, and that attention may be a second or a minute, but the urge to maintain that attention becomes inattention. So to ask who is the observer or what is that state of mind when there is no… when the observer is the observed, to put it into words what that state it is, is to deny that state. 52:24 One cannot communicate with another about something the other has not known… has not found. And if it is possible to communicate and if it is communicated, which is not possible, if it is, then you want to achieve it, and then you’ll say, ‘Tell me the method to get at it’, and then you are lost.
53:02 Q: Sir, what prevents me from seeing the tree is ‘me’, and I feel that I have to be willing to give up the ‘me’, give it up, let it go, before there’s the tree. Is that what you’re saying?
53:19 K: Now, who is the thing that’s going to give it up?
53:23 Q: The me.
53:23 K: Oh, sir, sir, the ‘me’ cannot give it… give up… give it… the ‘me’ cannot give itself up. All that it can do is to be quiet, and it cannot be quiet without understanding the whole structure and the meaning of the ‘me’. Either that structure and the meaning can be understood totally, immediately – and that’s the only way, and there is no other way. If you say, ‘I’ll practice, I will gradually work at it till I… till the ‘me’ die’, then you have fallen into the different kind of trap which is the same ‘me’.
54:22 Q: If I attend to a tree in the way that you describe, so that the observer is the observed, the tree is still there.
54:33 K: Of course, sir.
54:36 Q: But if I attend to my fear in the same way, won’t my fear also still be there?
54:39 K: No. You see… First of all, I don’t want to get rid of my fear. I want to understand it. To understand something I must care for it, I must love it, I must be careful with it. And if I say, ‘I must get rid of it’, I’ve already acted most foolishly because I have to understand the structure and the nature of fear, and to understand it, I must look at it, and I cannot look at it if I say, ‘I must…’ if I want to get rid of it or suppress it or sublimate it. I must actually look at it, come into contact with it, not through a word, but with the fact, with what actually is. Yes, sir?
55:52 Q: Sir, you say that when mind is empty and the heart is empty, you can really understand, but how to make heart is empty?
56:03 K: How can the mind, which is so crowded, so everlastingly chattering, how can that mind be emptied. I’m afraid there is no way. Any method is the most impractical way. I know we think a method will… by following it, will help us to clarify the mind. On the contrary, the method produces its own results but not free the mind from its own accumulated traditions, knowledge. That’s why, sir, I said, we said at the beginning, what is important is to listen, and to listen needs attention, care, a certain quality of affection in which there is communion, and then you’ll find without an effort it has come into being.
57:36 Q: In aloneness sometimes there is clarity, but in living with people chaos. Can you tell me something about that?
57:49 K: When one is alone there is… at times there is clarity; it’s only when one gets together with people that then one becomes confused. I’m afraid one cannot always live by oneself and to live by oneself requires the greatest form of intelligence. To live by oneself is comparatively easy; there you can develop your particular idiosyncrasies, characteristics, tendencies and crystallise and become rather heavy in all that. But to live alone requires immense sensitivity and intelligence. Sensitivity – to be very sensitive is to be intelligent, and in that state there is clarity. And is it not possible, the questioner asked, to live in this world with people... in office, and so on, 59:04 with that aloneness, with that clarity? Obviously it is possible. But, you see, it all… you want somebody to give it all to you, take a pill and all the thing is solved. So, you see, sir, we are so used to being told what to do, we worship authority and we have lost all capacity in the world, all intention to find things for ourselves. And this… in this what we are talking about there is no teacher, there is no method, there is no practice. There is only a perception of what is, and when there is that perception, then the problem is resolved.
1:00:22 Q: Of what significance is hope and faith to living?
1:00:27 K: What significance is hope and faith to living? I hope you won’t think me harsh if I say there is no significance at all. We have had hope, we’ve had faith – faith in church, faith in politics, faith in leaders, faith in gurus, because we’ve wanted to achieve a state of bliss, of happiness, and so on, and hope has nourished this faith. And when one observes through history, through our life, all that hope and faith have no meaning at all because what is important is what we are, actually what we are, not what we think we are or what we think we should be, but actually what is. If we know how to look at what is that will bring about a tremendous transformation.
1:01:49 Q: If one is able at times to get clarity, yet lives in the family, how does one keep one’s sons from each other’s throats? There must be a way of helping the young to live at peace. It’s the same with nations as…
1:02:14 K: The questioner says how is one to educate children? The educator must first be educated. And modern education gives such terrific importance to technology, to acquiring knowledge, and neglecting the whole field of life; cultivating one tiny little part and that’s what is called education, and neglecting the whole field of love and thought and death and anxiety. And is it possible to educate in a different way so that one is concerned with the whole of life? And that’s only possible when the educator is also concerned and the educator… such an educator is a rare entity in the family or in the school. I think that’s enough, isn’t it?
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