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RV84DSG1.2 - Why have I not radically changed?
Rishi Valley, India - 19 December 1984
Discussion with Small Group 1.2



0:18 K: What is the subject?
0:20 Pupul Jayakar: Sir, if you remember, three days ago, we had started discussing the ground of the mind from which a new mind can flower. And while discussing it, you had said that from the ground that is, which is conflict, fear, anger, the new can never emerge, and that something entirely new is necessary. You also spoke about the senses operating at their highest, simultaneously. I want to start with a question. I am a newcomer. I hear this. Where do I begin?
1:42 K: Probably, at first, you won’t make head or tail of it. You would say, ‘What the dickens is he talking about?’ So, one has to more or less establish the linguistic and semantic meaning. We must begin, I think, by being aware what relationship our senses have to nature. I would begin with that. How you look at nature, how you look at those rocks, and these hills, which are supposed to be some of the most ancient hills in the world, how you look at all the boulders, the trees, the dry rivers, streams, and those poor village people walking twelve miles a day to a school, not enough food, and so on, why there are no wild animals here at all. I would go into all that because if we lose touch with nature, of which we are a part, then we lose touch with humanity, with our fellow beings. I would begin there. I would find out what my relationship is with nature, how I look at it – the trees, the flowers, the rocks, the rivers, the snow-capped mountains and so on. What relationship have I to all that, and the beauty of all that? Then I would enquire what is beauty. Then it gets complex.
4:15 PJ: You’re saying that the starting point is in the outer, as we call it.
4:20 K: Absolutely. If I don’t have the obvious, common sense criteria, then how can I have clear perception of myself?
4:41 You understand?

PJ: I understand.
4:47 K: Because the outward is the manifestation of myself. I’m part of nature. Without understanding the beauty of the land, the rivers and all the extraordinary world we live in, and the brutal world we live in – the cruelty, terrorism, all that. What’s my relationship to all that? Am I blind to it all? Am I silent to it all? Or I have certain conclusions and those conclusions dominate, therefore, it is the product of thought, and nature is not the product of thought and so on.
5:44 PJ: Sir, we all think that we look at nature. We all think that we look at the tree, at the flower, at the rock. We all think that we look, we all feel that we look. We have eyes and so, we look. But there is something in the looking you’re talking about, in the relationship you are talking about, which obviously is not the looking which we are used to.
6:20 K: How do you look at it? Do you look at it only with your eyes? Is the perception of the shadows, long evening shadows, and the midday sun with its very, very small shadows, how do you look at all this, only with your eyes? Or with your whole being, as it were, with all your senses? How do you look at all this? How do you perceive all this? As though it was something outside you and you’re looking at it, or you’re part of all that? I know, theoretically, we say we are part of it.
7:21 PJ: No, I think one can actually say that there is a looking in which the see-er does not exist. I am saying it with a... but I don’t want to start there. That’s why I’m coming to you as a beginner, and I will tell you that I look with my eyes. I want to start from that point.
7:58 K: I would reply to that, ‘Do you only look with your eyes? Or do you hear the sound, also – the sound of the trees, the breeze, listen to the running waters, the whisper among the deep shadows of a tree? Do you listen, see and feel?’
8:39 PJ: Sir, if you are seeing, listening, feeling, then there is no listening, seeing, feeling, there is just a state where everything exists. I don’t know how to approach this, because I would like to approach it from the point of view of a beginning rather than any other way.
9:10 K: Would you agree human beings, even the most uneducated, have lost touch with nature?

PJ: Yes, completely. Because when they see, their eyes move over. They never look directly, never look. They consider it too trivial.
9:32 K: That’s just it. That’s just the whole point. They consider nature is something to be used, trivial and it can be exploited.
9:46 PJ: You see, sir, the mind has divided looking at a leaf or a leaf move as something unimportant. The important is something vast.
10:00 K: So, let’s begin. What is important? For the average man, for an ordinary person, what is important? Food, clothes, shelter – that’s all he’s concerned with.
10:19 PJ: Beyond that, the sacred, divine, and God.
10:24 K: Of course. I’m just beginning with that. He needs food, clothes and shelter. When he has that, then he begins to think about gods, something external.
10:36 PJ: He wants to think of it in a vastness.
10:40 K: Yes. He sees the evening sky, and the sun rising and sees the immensity of this marvellous world, and he says, ‘Who created all this?’ Right?
10:59 PJ: So, the capacity to see that the small and that vast at the same level of importance.

K: Yes, there is no vast and small. Now, will you go into it?
11:18 Kabir Jaitirtha: Coming back, would you not say that very often my looking gets circumscribed by my thoughts.
11:28 K: Louder, sir.
11:30 KJ: My senses have been very deeply dominated by my thinking. I see that in myself when I go for a walk, that I’m not really looking, I’m not really listening, I’m thinking all the time. From the thinking, I occasionally glance at something or other. So, there is no looking or seeing of the actuality of the tree or leaf.
12:04 PJ: You try to get someone to look at one leaf, and you find how difficult it is. If one does it oneself, one realises how difficult it is to just look at a thing, totally.
12:27 KJ: As you say, we glance and move away.
12:36 K: Sir, would you blame religions? The orthodox, established religions have prevented man from considering nature as part of himself. Would you say religions have said, ‘Suppress all your senses’. Don’t look out there, always look inside you.
13:19 KJ: Krishnaji, would you not say that the modern, urban man is not, to a great extent, influenced by the religions at all?
13:32 K: No, he’s not. I’m talking about – as we said from the beginning – an ordinary man, not necessarily an urban man, a citizen living in a big town, the ordinary man in a little village or a little town, he has seen the sanyasis, the monks, the Trappists who never speak. And they have always said, ‘Suppress desires, suppress senses, because they distract’.
14:15 KJ: Not only religions, society.

K: Of course, of course. There is the beginning of it. They don’t say to you, ‘Look at all the wonders of this world. Feel it, absorb it, be of it’. But they have created images made by the hand or by the mind, and that is more important than anything else. You have this temple near here, Tirupati, thousands go there, millions is spent on imaginative gods. So, if I were an ordinary man hearing all this, as Pupulji has pointed out, where do I begin?
15:24 Rajesh Dalal: But wouldn’t you say, Krishnaji, to even ask that question, the ordinary man must have seen somewhere that his world is limited?
15:34 K: Yes, he knows death very well.
15:39 RD: He has to be already a little bit discontented with his God, with his life.

K: I question that, sir. I question whether he is discontented or sceptical about his gods.
15:58 RD: Then what makes him ask the question, ‘Where do I begin?’
16:00 K: He doesn’t ask this question.
16:03 PJ: He does, when he is in sorrow.
16:07 K: He does when there is suffering. He does when there is death. He does when he sees a rich man go by in a marvellous car, and you walk ten miles to go to that village, then you begin to say, ‘What is all this? Why should I not be as rich as that man?’
16:30 RD: But that’s not the same question.
16:32 PJ: Yes, it is.

K: It’s part of that question.
16:37 PJ: Otherwise, how does one start?
16:40 K: At death, or when my wife quarrels with me.
16:46 RD: Sir, I was discussing with someone this morning, how is it that there are a number of people who have themselves experienced no... they have lived very happy lives, they have no sorrow which is so obvious to most people, and they come upon these questions, and go seriously into these questions.
17:08 K: Yes, sir, but those people are exceptional. We began by asking, if I was an ordinary man, fairly educated, so-called ‘educated’, where would I begin to understand the very complex problem of existence, all the activities of thought, suffering, pain, anxiety, all that. Where would I begin to understand the very complex society in which I live? That is the real question which Mrs Jayakar began with.
18:04 PJ: You see, we take it that listening to Krishnaji, the beginning must start within. We all take it that way. We have all taken it that way, that the beginning has to start within. As we have said through these years, discovery of what one is. We have never looked at the outside, and seen the outside as the same movement. Therefore, the callousness, therefore, the lack of...
18:53 K: Why have we neglected, discarded or despised all the things round us – nature? It means nothing to us.
19:07 PJ: Because we divide, Krishnaji, the outer world as the world of desire and the inner world...

K:...is the real world.
19:26 PJ: The outer world is desire, to us.
19:28 K: Also, according to the Buddhists and to many Hindus, the outside world is Maya, an illusion, it doesn’t matter. We’re saying the contrary, therefore he says, ‘I can’t understand’. So I feel it’s important to understand one’s relationship to nature, to the outward world, to the world in which all the misery, confusion, bribery and corruption are going on – I would look at that, first. And from the outer move to the inner, not start with the inner, because you have no judgement then, you can’t see clearly. I think this is partly responsible for religious establishments – worship God, follow Jesus, or some other deity. And that’s what is called religion, their rituals, their paraphernalia, that’s called religion. Personally, one feels one must start with things that we see, hear, feel outside how I look at my wife, my children, my parents, and all the rest of it, which are outside. I see somebody carrying a dead body. In India, it’s very simple, not like in Europe with a hearse, all that. I see it here in this country – two or three people carrying a dead body, and death is there, outside of me. But I begin to say, ‘What is death?’ and I begin to enquire. I can’t just go off by myself into a mountain cave and say, ‘What is death?’ I can imagine all kinds of things. Or, ‘What is God?’ If I have not established right relationship with nature, with another person, whether wife, husband or whatever, or my friends, if you haven’t established right relationship there, how can you establish right relationship with the immensity of the universe?
22:34 KJ: Krishnaji, two things come to my mind. One is, in looking at the outer you’re saying the brain quickens. In looking at, in hearing the outside, the brain quickens.
22:50 K: Becomes more sensitive.
22:51 KJ: Therefore, it can look at the inner without distortion. Yes, but half the world, the West, has always treated the outer as very, very concrete. All their energies have moved outward. But that doesn’t seem to have brought about the inward movement, either.
23:18 K: So we come to a much more serious question. Would you allow it? What makes a man change? Right? Would you begin with that? I am this – brutal, violent, angry, jealous, hating people, envious, uncertain, confused, sorrowful, I’m that. I’m the result of 8,000 years, or 50,000 years. Why have I not changed? That’s one of the basic questions.
24:03 Q: Isn’t that too early to ask that question?
24:09 K: Yes, it is early.
24:16 Q: We have to come to it.

K: Yes, I’ll come to it. I have been through all this. I have read some books. Also, I see, by Jove, I’ve lost my appreciation, or my touch with nature. So I’ll begin, I look. But ultimately, I must ask myself why is it humanity, I, a human being like the rest of the world, with all the turmoil and confusion, why have I not radically changed? That is my question.
25:01 RD: Sir, it’s interesting that the ordinary man...
25:05 K: You, I.

RD: I’m moving into that. He’s much more concerned with gaining the object of his greed or running away from the object of his fear, than asking the question, ‘Why am I greedy?’, or ‘Why am I afraid?’.
25:30 K: What’s your question, sir?

PJ: What is the question?
25:37 RD: This question which you have raised, ‘Why have I not changed?’.

K: Ask yourself, sir. Ask yourself. I’m not being personal, or disrespectful or impudent. Ask yourself why, after 30 or 40 years, why you’re exactly as you were a few years ago – modified. There has been no radical change. Why? I’d suggest any rational, thoughtful person would ask this question. You understand what I mean by ‘change’? Not drop Hinduism and accept Buddhism, that’s the same pattern being repeated over and over again. I don’t mean that.
26:49 RD: We don’t see the same pattern, we see it as a different pattern.
26:56 K: One is envious. That’s a common factor for everybody, and it has produced a great deal of trouble in the world, division, class division, scholastic division, religious division, so on. And we’re still envious. If I perceive myself being envious and see the consequences of envy, why is it I don’t radically wipe it out of my brain? Don’t make it complex, ‘What’s the brain? Who is ‘I’?’ – wipe it out. Why is it not possible? Why haven’t we done it? We talk about it, endlessly.
28:04 G. Narayan: With most people today, there’s a kind of a scientific outlook which deals with the outer. Obviously you’re not implying that alone, because the mere scientific outlook seems to go somewhere else, not bring about the relationship between the outer and the inner. And especially after education, one gets caught in this. The other thing, which seems to be a kind of a paradox, is that suffering seems to be necessary, in some way, and when you suffer and keep on suffering, it blunts you. What is the approach when one is caught in these two modes, when an average human being is caught in these two modes?
29:00 K: First of all, there is no division between the outer and the inner, they are one. Do you see that, not agree, do you see that fact? The outer, the society in which we live, we have created that society. So, I’m part of that society. Society is not different from me. That is one of the most fundamental facts. Do you recognise that fact? That’s one thing. Secondly, why is there this division between people? Because there is division – between you and me, you belong to one group, one community or one religion, I belong to another, this division is created by thought. So it gets tremendously complex. Right? At the end of it all, you say, ‘Now, I suffer’. You suffer, the rest of humanity suffers. And one never says, ‘Can this suffering end?’
30:36 Radhika Herzberger: Are the two questions, ‘Can suffering end?’ and ‘Why have I not changed?’ the same kind of question?
30:44 K: It is the same question.

RH: It is the same thing. Is the answer to both that we don’t have enough energy?
30:55 K: I wouldn’t say you haven’t got enough energy. One has plenty of energy when one wants to do something. Right? When you want to have money, you work tremendously to get that. So, I don’t think it is a matter of energy.
31:27 RH: Is it that we do not want to change with our whole being? Why is that desire not to suffer, to change, so easily dissipated in us?
31:47 K: Is there no profit in that? We’re profit motivated, right? We want a reward.
31:59 RH: So, we are mixed.

K: Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Our brain is conditioned to reward and punishment. Right? I will work like blazes if I can have a reward at the end of it, money, position, status, whatever it is, happiness.
32:30 KJ: Which, in itself, is a process of time.
32:33 K: I don’t want to enter into time yet, sir. Just see the fact.
32:38 PJ: Sir, I think we have moved away, slightly. We were talking of the senses and their operation and nature.
32:52 PJ: The senses are energy. That which is outside, growing, is energy.
32:59 K: Tremendous energy. Have you seen a blade of grass grow in the cement?
33:06 PJ: What is it that thwarts the energy of the senses? There is a thwarting of the energy of the senses, which comes in the way of their really bursting.
33:20 K: Is it our conditioning? Is it our education? We’re told to control.
33:28 PJ: There must be some seed there which leads us to be very careful, and to channel our senses. The whole of life, whole of education is a channelling of the senses. Perhaps that, in itself, is an incorrect approach.
33:50 K: Yes.
33:54 PJ: What is necessary is a conservation of energy. How does one conserve energy? How does one create...?
34:05 K: Just a minute, Pupulji, would you conserve energy? Or the more you expand energy, the more there is?
34:16 PJ: But you can also let energy fritter away.
34:21 K: That’s just it. For a person like K, there is no distraction or attraction. There is no distraction.
34:41 PJ: This is the magical thing, if you come to see it, this no distraction in the human mind, no triviality, no distraction.
34:50 RH: Also, no preoccupation, being preoccupied with something.
35:00 K: That’s right, that’s right.
35:04 KJ: Also, the very saying, ‘I will conserve energy’, is the channelising of energy.
35:13 PJ: It is said with a different view point – we see that energy disperses. Whatever energy a human being has, he’s dispersing all the time, so there’s nothing. There must be something at the root of it.
35:31 K: No. Pupulji, just look. I’m conditioned from childhood on this idea of reward and punishment. Mother and father say, ‘If you do this, I’ll give you a sweet. If you don’t do that, I’ll punish you’. You go to school, the same principle is carried on – better marks, better examinations. Our brain is conditioned to reward and punishment. Right? I’ll expend all my energy to avoid punishment and to gain a reward. That reward gives me energy.
36:19 PJ: Yes, of a different quality.

K: Wait, wait. That reward gives me tremendous energy to work, work, work. You come along and tell me, ‘Reward and punishment is conditioning and there is no freedom in that’. Heaven isn’t a reward, enlightenment isn’t reward. But I have been trained from childhood to seek reward, so there is a battle, and I waste my energy in that battle. I don’t know if you follow. I want happiness, I want peace, and I do everything to accelerate that.
37:25 PJ: Life is so complex and if I try to solve that, I’ll never solve it. But you have given a key, which is this total operation of the senses. If I get caught in that complexity...
37:43 K: No, don’t. I understand that.
37:46 PJ: The key is this total operation of the senses. Can we explore and go into that?

K: Yes, let’s do it. Shall we?
38:01 PJ: Because that wipes out, there’s nothing to be done.
38:11 K: Is seeing, perceiving, which is the same, and hearing, are they separate, or are they one? You understand my question? We think... Wait a minute. When you hear the statement, or this question, ‘Are the seeing and the hearing separate?’ you begin to think about it. But the moment you think about it you are not listening to the question. Will you see, perceive, and hear at the same time? Not two separate things. Just a minute. I was talking to a scientist, last year. He is a biologist, concerned with nature and so on. He asked me, ‘Do you hear the sound of a tree? Not when the tree is moving with the wind, but when the tree is quiet, absolutely quiet – early morning when there is no breeze, or as the sun is setting, without any breeze or wind, the tree has a peculiar quality of a sound’. I said, ‘Yes, it has this peculiar quality of sound’. Now, do you hear that sound and see it at the same time? You follow what I’m asking? Or are they divided?
40:31 PJ: I follow, sir.
40:37 K: I don’t want to go into that more – if one may point out, it’s not worthwhile going much deeper into the question of sound. Sound is an extraordinary thing by itself, because music is sound. I don’t want to go into that. Can we see something without division? That’s all I’m saying. See, hear, feel, smell, taste, it’s as though you are completely involved in it.
41:15 GN: Sir, you have frequently said that meditation, I’m asking in this context, meditation is a sixth sense or a seventh sense, if you don’t have it, you’re missing a lot. What exactly is meditation for you, the essential nature of meditation?
41:38 K: The essential nature of meditation is never to be conscious that you’re meditating. You understand what I’m saying? If you attempt, say, ‘I’ll meditate’, sit in a certain posture, quietly, breathe, and all the rest of those tricks you play, then it’s like any other business. Business says, ‘You must do this and this, in order to get money’. They want to achieve. Meditation is not an achievement. If you meditate according to a system, method, so on, it is an achievement, at the end of it, ‘Ah, at last, I have got peace!’ As you say, ‘At last I’ve got a million dollars in the bank’. So meditation, to K, is something that cannot be consciously achieved. This goes quite contrary to everybody.
42:58 PJ: Is it separate from the state of seeing, listening?
43:07 K: Is, in itself, meditation.
43:10 GN: When you say, ‘in contact with nature’, there seems to be meditation going on, in a very sensitive way, when there’s a contact with nature – the kind you describe. For many people, however intelligent they may be, posture, an approach, is very relevant to meditation.
43:38 K: I know.
43:42 GN: If you talk about meditation, eliminating all these things, one is lost.

K: Be lost!
43:52 GN: Not the kind you mentioned.

K: Be lost, be lost!
43:55 GN: Lost in confusion?

K: No. When you’re doing all this, that is confusion!
44:11 GN: I don’t know if what I’m saying is relevant. How would you further guide or point out, so that meditation becomes an actuality?
44:29 K: I don’t know what you mean by ‘meditation’ and ‘actuality’. Sorry, I’m not being facetious. But I really don’t know what you mean by those two words. What is actual? This microphone in front of you is actual. You can touch it, you can feel it, perhaps its own smell – oiled, and all the rest of it. That’s an actuality. You might have an illusion and say that’s an actuality. But it’s not actual. You’ve invented, escaped and created... What do you mean by the word ‘meditation’? Perhaps, we’re going off from what Pupulji is asking.
45:31 GN: I asked that question in relation to the full operation of the senses. That is, one in which the quality is very different from the scientific, technological attitude. The scientist or technologist is concerned with the outer, but it’s of different quality.

K: No, sir. They’re also asking, as I told you the other day, we were invited to Los Alamos where they are creating all kinds of atom bombs and so on, also investigating into cancer, mathematics, and all kinds of things, the National laboratory of America. Their concern was, not only meditation but what is creativity in science. They’re going beyond a merely technological approach to life.
46:41 PJ: There can be no other ground of the creative but the operation of the senses. The operation of the senses are themselves the ground of the creative.
47:06 K: May I use a word without going away from the main subject? I’m rather shy of using that word, but let’s use that word. When you’re watching this whole universe – watching, not seeking any reward or punishment, just watching all this, watching the suffering of those villagers, those little boys walking 12 miles a day to the school. You’re watching all this. In that, there is great affection, love, care. So, watching is not merely with the senses only, but in that watching there is this quality of love.
48:05 PJ: Now we are getting to it. What awakens, because... – I’m speaking for myself. I think there is a possibility of observing with all the senses, and I am saying it.
48:32 K: In the awakening of all the senses and the fullness of it, there’s a quality of something totally different.
48:43 PJ: This is what I want to come to. There must be something missing, because that explosion of the heart – let me put it in other words –
49:03 K: That’s a good phrase, ‘explosion of the heart’.
49:06 PJ: It does not happen. I can say, ‘Yes, the other I know’ but the explosion of the heart does not take place. That’s really the crux.

K: I’ll tell you. Would you say the brain is the centre of all our nervous, electrical responses? It is the centre of all thought. It is the centre of all confusion, pain, sorrow, anxiety, depression, aspiration, achievements, reward and punishment. It is a great activity of confusion, contradictions. Love is not that. Therefore, it must be something outside the brain. Just follow it, logically. We look at nature, or other human beings, from inside the brain. We were walking yesterday with some of these people here, and there was complete silence, even the bullock carts, children, cycling, nothing existed. Just immense silence. Right? It was not silence out there, it was silence – the entire world was silent. And you were silent. And you felt the whole earth as part of you – love. Now, this is... you see?

PJ: You see, sir... – this is your statement, and I’ll listen to it very carefully.
51:32 K: It may be silly nonsense.

PJ: No, no. But the fact is, l do not wipe the tear of another. Therefore, the senses working simultaneously gives the brain great clarity, a living, germinating, ‘creative’ even, ground. But it doesn’t wipe the tear of another. So, I am concerned with what it is that wipes the tear of another. Because unless that quality enters...
52:21 K: Not social activity, not going to villages and wiping tears.
52:26 PJ: No, that you can do. It’s necessary to do that.
52:30 K: Can the brain – that is my question – can the brain be so quiet so that the activity of thought has completely ended at that second or at that period? Or is it always chattering away?
52:58 PJ: Is it that the only thing which is legitimate... is to be totally awake, for the senses to be totally awake? And then, never even query the other.
53:20 K: No, of course, you can’t. You don’t even know about it. How can you question about it?

PJ: What is outside the skull?
53:27 K: All I know now is what is within the skull. Right? You come along and say, ‘As long as you’re in there, you’ll solve nothing. You point that out to me. And I listen to you, because I see the logic of all this, the common sense of all this, and I say, ‘You are quite right’. So, I want to know what it is to make the brain quiet, though it has its own rhythm. What will make it quiet? We have tried everything – fasting, not talking, taking vows, celibacy – we have done everything. But the brain has never become quiet. Meditation is not quietness. Right? You try to bring quietness to the mind through control, through tricks, but that’s not the stillness and the beauty of silence. So, where do we end up?
55:01 PJ: Everything else is man-made, only that is divinity. And we just don’t know how to touch it. That is why you can take the senses right to the end.
55:18 K: I met a man the other day. He was a great painter, well-known. He said, ‘What man has made is the most beautiful thing’. That was the end of it – for him. I pointed out, ‘What about that tree, you haven’t made it’. He began to say, ‘That’s an interesting question’. Is it half past ten?

PJ: Yes, half past ten.