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SA62T7 - The ending of sorrow and the intensity of passion
Saanen, Switzerland - 5 August 1962
Public Talk 7



0:00 This is J. Krishnamurti’s seventh public talk in Saanen, 1962.
0:08 Krishnamurti: The last time that we met here we were talking about fear and whether it’s at all possible to be completely free from that state when one is aware of danger and from which there is the reaction of fear.
0:46 And I would like this morning, if I may, talk about the ending of sorrow, because fear and sorrow and love always go together.
1:15 Without understanding fear we shall not be able to understand sorrow, nor is there that state of love without contradiction, without friction.
1:35 And it is one of the most difficult things to end sorrow completely; it’s always with us in some form or another.
2:01 And I would like to go this morning rather deeply into it, and unless each one of us goes within himself and examines it, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but actually observing the fact, then perhaps we shall be able to understand the enormous significance of sorrow and perhaps we shall be able to end it.
3:00 Because love and sorrow have always been, throughout the centuries, hand-in-hand.
3:11 Sometimes one predominates; and that state which we know as love is really a state which soon passes away and we are caught up again in our jealousies, in our vanities and fears and the beginning of sorrow comes.
3:39 It has always been like that throughout centuries upon centuries, the battle between sorrow and love.
3:56 And before we can go into this question of sorrow I think we ought to be able to understand what is passion.
4:10 And, if I may I point out, we are not verbally or as a privileged class, a group of people that are fairly well-to-do or not… have enough money to travel and to come to a place like this, to merely verbally indulge in intellectual amusement.
5:01 This is a very serious thing that we’re talking about and one has to be very serious to go into it.
5:10 I mean by that word serious, to have the intensity, the urge to go to the very bottom, to the very end of this thing called sorrow, and whether it is at all possible to end it completely and totally so that the mind is clear, without a shadow, sharp, capable of thinking clearly without illusion.
6:00 And we cannot do that if we merely live at the level of words, as most of us are apt to do.
6:13 To us, concepts, patterns, ideals and words and symbols have extraordinary meaning, and there we stop.
6:27 We cannot break through these words, concepts, patterns and penetrate beyond.
6:36 And sorrow is something that you… one has to go beyond words.
6:46 And as I will discuss it, as I will go into it this morning, I hope you will also pursue it clearly, with intensity and without sentimentality and emotionalism.
7:09 Without understanding passion I don’t think we shall ever be able to understand sorrow.
7:22 Passion is something which very few of us have really felt. We may have felt enthusiasm, being emotionally caught up in a certain state.
7:41 And for us passion is for something: for music, for painting, for literature, for the country, for the woman or the man.
7:57 For us passion is a cause or an effect.
8:06 When you love somebody you are in a great state of emotion, and that is the effect of a cause.
8:28 And what we are talking about is a passion which is without cause.
8:44 To be passionate about everything, not just for something.
8:57 And most of us are passionate about something, and I think one must be very clear about this.
9:07 There is a passion, there is an intensity, there is a great deal of drive and a pursuit in the state of passion without cause.
9:28 Where there is a cause for passion there is attachment, and it is this attachment that is the beginning of sorrow.
9:50 For most of us we try or we are attached to a person, to a country, to some work, some idea – we cling to it - and when that idea or that person, that pattern or that concept loses its significance we find ourselves empty, we find ourselves insufficient.
10:38 And being insufficient we try to fill that insufficiency by something, and the filling of that emptiness by something is our passion.
10:56 Please examine yourselves. We are merely pointing out; we’re merely as a mirror in which you are looking at yourself.
11:13 And if you don’t want to look that’s quite all right, but if you want to look, look at it clearly, ruthlessly and with passion.
11:27 Not in order to dissolve some pain, some anxiety, some guilt, but to understand this extraordinary thing called passion and sorrow.
11:43 Because if we don’t understand passion, which becomes lust when there is a cause, when there is a passion for something - for a person, for an idea - then out of that passion there comes contradiction and in that contradiction there is conflict, there is effort.
12:37 And when there is effort there is a striving after a state which has been or which you want to be.
12:58 But the passion of which we are talking about is not the result of conflict, is not the outcome of contradiction.
13:11 It is totally unrelated to a cause and therefore it is not an effect.
13:25 Please just listen to it. Don’t try, if I may suggest, to come to this intensity and to this passion without cause.
13:41 If you can listen attentively with that sense of ease, with that sense of attention which doesn’t come through discipline but merely with the urge to understand, then I think we’ll find out for ourselves what this passion is.
14:23 Because for most of us there is very little passion. We may be lustful; we may be longing for something; we may be wanting to escape from something.
14:35 And all that does give a certain intensity, but without understanding or feeling or feeling our way into this state of passion we shall not be able to understand the thing that we call sorrow.
15:08 Because to understand something you must be… or have passion, intensity, a complete attention.
15:22 And where there is a conflict, where there is a contradiction or an adjustment, this flame of passion cannot be.
15:47 And this passion, this flame, must exist in order to completely dissipate, end sorrow.
16:06 We know sorrow is a result; there is a cause and there is an effect.
16:26 I love somebody and that somebody doesn’t love me. And that’s one kind of sorrow. I want to fulfil and I’m incapable, I haven’t got the capacity; or if I have the capacity, there is always the shadow of fear of not fulfilling.
16:53 That’s another form of sorrow. There is the sorrow of a petty mind, the mind that’s always incessantly struggling, adjusting, groping, conforming.
17:20 There is the sorrow of conflict in relationship; and then there is the sorrow of someone dying.
17:36 We all know this kind of sorrow, and they’re all the result of a cause and an effect.
17:59 And we never face the fact of sorrow. We’re always trying to explain it away logically, rationally or materialistically, find a pattern which will satisfy our thought about sorrow and thereby hold to that pattern, or believe in some dogma, or take some form of drug to quieten the intensity, the agony of sorrow, take a drink, do what you will, or go to church and pray hoping to find some hope, something that will give us comfort.
19:06 All these forms of sorrow and the everlasting attempt to escape from sorrow is the lot of each one of us.
19:24 We have never thought about ending sorrow completely, totally ending it so the mind is never at any time caught in the shadow of self-pity, in the shadow of despair.
19:56 And not being able to end it we either worship it as the Christians do in their church - the agony - or we try to rationalise it away.
20:23 They are both the same whether you go to church and accept the symbol of sorrow or take a drink; both are escapes from the fact that there is… that one suffers.
20:43 I’m not talking about the physical pain - that can be dealt with fairly comparatively easily with modern medicine and so on – but we are talking about psychological sorrow, the pain that destroys love, that destroys compassion; the pain, the sorrow that prevents clarity, beauty.
21:23 And how is it possible, in what way – not the system, not the method – how is it possible to bring about an end to sorrow?
21:43 I think the ending of sorrow is related to the intensity of passion.
21:50 There can be passion only when there is complete self-abandonment.
22:09 One is never passionate unless there is this sense of complete absence of thought.
22:18 For thought, as we discussed the other day, is the response of the various patterns and experiences of memory; and where these responses exist there is no passion, there is no intensity.
22:50 And there can be intensity only when there is the complete absence of the me, the I.
23:03 You know, the sense of beauty - not what is beautiful or what is ugly; not that the mountain is not beautiful or there is not an ugly building, but there is a beauty which is not the opposite of ugliness.
23:48 There is love which is not the opposite of hate.
23:55 And this abandonment is that state of beauty without cause, and therefore it is that state of passion.
24:23 And is it possible to go beyond the result of a cause?
24:44 Please do listen to this. It may be a little bit… I may not be able to explain it very clearly, but do gather the meaning rather than stay with the word.
25:05 You see, we’re always reacting; our whole pattern of life is a reaction; so is sorrow a reaction.
25:21 And by trying to find out the cause of sorrow, sorrow doesn’t end.
25:30 Sorrow can only end if you can face the fact that… not only of the cause but the effect, but also go beyond.
25:41 Merely to be free of sorrow, to end sorrow by any particular process, by deliberate thought and the various ways of escaping from it, doesn’t make the mind understand the extraordinary beauty, the vitality, the intensity of that passion which is sorrow.
26:19 What is sorrow? Please listen to me. What is sorrow? And your mind immediately says or tries to find out the cause, tries to find an explanation, awakens the pain that one has had.
26:47 So it is always reverting or going forward verbally through a cause and effect which we call sorrow.
27:01 But I would like to go beyond all this.
27:10 We know what gives us sorrow: poverty, ill-health, frustration, lack of being loved - you know?
27:19 - the various innumerable causes that bring about this sense of sorrow.
27:31 And when has understood all this and perhaps one has ended sorrow, one hasn’t really grasped the enormity and the extraordinary depth of sorrow, any more than one has understood that state which we call love.
28:08 I think the two are related together, sorrow and love.
28:18 And to understand, to feel the enormity - probably I’m using the wrong word, enormity, but it doesn’t matter - the immensity of sorrow.
28:41 The ancients have talked about the ending of sorrow, and they have laid down patterns, a way of life that will end sorrow.
28:55 And one has practiced the way of life that will end sorrow.
29:02 The monks in the East and the West have tried that, but they have hardened themselves; their minds and hearts have become enclosed, live behind walls of their own thought or behind the walls of brick and stone.
29:28 But they have not gone beyond; they haven’t really, I don’t believe, have felt the immensity of this thing called sorrow.
29:48 And the ending of sorrow, if one can end it, that is, to face the fact of loneliness, of attachment, of our petty little demands for fame, for being loved - you know?
30:15 - self-concern and the puerility of self-pity.
30:27 When one has gone beyond all this and perhaps one has ended sorrow, there is still the immensity of sorrow.
30:45 Not the sorrow which you and I feel, not because you want failure or because you want… it’s none of those things.
30:55 All those have gone, put away, forgotten.
31:03 There is the individual sorrow and the collective sorrow, the sorrow of the world.
31:13 One can put aside one’s own sorrow - not by escaping, not by seeking its cause and destroying the cause and all the rest of the childish immature attempts - one can end sorrow by facing the fact of the cause of sorrow.
31:40 And that must take place for a mind that would be completely free.
31:54 But being free from that sorrow, there is this thing called sorrow. What is sorrow? What actually is sorrow, a sorrow that has no cause, a sorrow that is not the effect?
32:14 There is this extraordinary ignorance - not the ignorance of books and information, not the clever intellectual arguments or the clever acceptance of belief, but when one has finished all that there is this ignorance that exists in the world, the ignorance about oneself, the oneself that is so complex and yet so extraordinarily simple to comprehend.
33:28 And that is… the lack of understanding of oneself is the essence of ignorance.
33:36 And when one has finished with all that there is this collective ignorance of man that exists throughout the world.
33:51 And that’s part of this immensity of sorrow.
34:04 So one, after going through all these devious complex ways and has finished with them, one comes to a point when one asks not for an answer - which is so stupid to seek an answer - but to feel, to comprehend the state where this feeling of sorrow.
34:55 So one says: what is sorrow? Not what you and I feel; that’s all trivial. We’ve gone beyond all that. What is actually sorrow? You see, there are no words to explain that.
35:27 There are no words to explain what love is. Love is not attachment; love is not the opposite of hate; love is not jealousy.
35:47 And when one has finished jealousy, envy, attachment and all the conflicts and the agonies that one goes through when one thinks one loves, which is not love at all; when one has gone through all this there still remains the question ‘What is love?’ as there still remains the question of what is sorrow.
36:22 You will be able to find out only if your mind has stopped all explanations, if your mind is no longer seeking the cause, indulging in words, going back to your own pleasures and pains, no longer imagining.
36:52 You will find out when your mind is completely quiet, that quietness which is without a word, without a symbol, without an idea.
37:18 And then you will see for… there will be that state which we have called sorrow and love are the same.
37:38 And out of this comes that state when there is no death.
37:46 But we’re not going to discuss this morning death; we’ll do it another day, if there is time.
38:02 So there is no division between love and sorrow and death.
38:16 And as there is no division, then there is beauty.
38:24 But to comprehend, to be in this state of ecstasy, there must be that passion which comes from total abandonment of oneself.
38:45 (Pause) Sirs, don’t please take photographs.
39:08 This is not a meeting of that kind.
39:22 You ought to know better than to take photographs.
39:30 This is not a political meeting; it’s not a meeting or a gathering for entertainment, and it’s a pity if you reduce it to that level.
39:49 Shall we discuss or ask questions about what we have been talking this morning?
40:07 Questioner: Is passion or intensity… (inaudible) is so necessary for seeing, is it a quality?
40:28 K: Is passion or intensity necessary for seeing, for listening - is that right?
40:36 Q: I mean, is it intensity that is necessary… (inaudible) is that a quality?
40:48 K: I can’t hear.
40:51 Q: Is it a quality, she asks.
40:57 K: Would somebody who has heard it explain, sir?
41:03 Q: Krishnaji, she asks is passion or intensity a quality?
41:14 K: Is passion, intensity a quality. I wonder what we mean by that word quality. I don’t know what you mean by that word quality.
41:31 Virtue? A state? A feeling? A thing to be acquired through practice, through discipline, through denial, sacrifice and so on?
41:55 Q: (Inaudible).
42:02 K: Sir, I haven’t heard; I must finish this question.
42:12 Look, the lady has asked a question, and most… perhaps some of us have other questions.
42:22 We are so occupied with our own question that we don’t listen to somebody else. That always happens in life, we are caught in our own problems, in our own despairs, hopes and ambitions that we never see beyond our little selves.
42:43 And that’s what’s actually taking place here. Don’t be so, if I may respectfully suggest, don’t be so occupied with your question; you’ll have time.
42:59 Is it a quality?
43:07 You see, I don’t like to use that word quality. Don’t you know that when you are passionate about something you don’t ask a question whether it’s a quality?
43:21 You are in that state. When you’re angry, when you’re lustful, when you’re venomously brutal about somebody, verbally, in a gesture, you don’t ask at that moment, ‘Is it a quality?’ You’re in that state of flame.
43:44 But there later comes the moment when you say, ‘By Jove, that was a beautiful moment’ - or an ugly moment to be avoided, or to be held.
44:03 Then you proceed how to cultivate it. Then what you cultivate becomes artificial; it is not the pure thing.
44:19 So the passion, the intensity of which we are talking about is not cultivable; it’s not on the market for sale; you can’t get at it by practice, discipline.
44:37 But if you listen, if you have ever gone into yourself, wrestled with, you will know what it is.
44:49 It has nothing whatsoever to do with enthusiasm.
44:58 But as I said, that passion can only be when there is a complete sense of not being the me and the mind, the ‘my house’, ‘my property’, ‘my country’, ‘my wife and children’ – all that is left behind.
45:21 Then there is that passion. You might say, ‘Well, it’s not worth having that passion.’ Perhaps it’s not worthwhile.
45:32 But it is worthwhile if you’re really trying to find out what is sorrow, or to… trying to find out what is truth, what is God, what is this whole ugly, confusing business of existence.
45:51 You must go into it passionately. But you can’t if you have tethered to your family. Though you may have a family, though you may have a house, if you are tethered to it you can never go beyond.
46:10 Q: (Inaudible).
46:11 K: Un instant; je vous empris.
46:13 Q: This capacity for passion… (inaudible)?
46:16 K: Sorry, I haven’t heard.
46:18 Q: Have we all got the same capacity for passion?
46:31 K: Have we got, all of us, the same capacity for passion – is that it?
46:43 Have we all of us the same capacity for passion. I don’t think passion is a capacity. You may have a capacity to write a book and another to write a poem, another to play the flute, other to do various things, as a capacity is to be cultivated, to be maintained and added to.
47:11 But passion, intensity, is not a capacity. On the contrary, if you have a capacity, you must die to that capacity to be passionate.
47:25 For then capacity, if you don’t die to capacity, it becomes mechanical and you can add more and more, become more clever.
47:34 You see, we are still thinking in terms of capacity, in terms of acquiring, gathering and protecting that feeling of intensity, passion.
47:51 Q: (Inaudible).
47:54 K: Un instant, je vous empris.
48:03 Q: (Inaudible).
48:06 K: (French).
48:09 Q: (Inaudible).
48:12 K: Somebody who hears, please tell me.
48:16 Q: She’s saying that we have got to get rid of sorrow.
48:28 Q: (Inaudible).
48:30 Q: And that yet sorrow remains and is a beautiful thing.
48:31 K: I’m afraid I haven’t heard. Would somebody who is close by explain it or repeat it clearly and briefly?
48:41 Q: You have said that sorrow is a beautiful thing.
48:56 You have said that we have to get rid of sorrow, and that yet it remains and is a beautiful thing.
49:06 K: Ah. I have said, apparently, that we must get rid of sorrow, and yet it remains a beautiful thing.
49:14 I did not say you must get rid of sorrow.
49:25 I said you have to look at it, understand it, go into it. You can’t get rid of it; you can’t put it away.
49:38 Look, I have sorrow if I love somebody and that person doesn’t love me, and I suffer.
49:56 Why? Why should you be loved? Why should you, if you love somebody, and that somebody doesn’t return your love, why should you suffer?
50:09 What does it mean?
50:18 Analyse it; go into it; find out what it means. You are thinking about yourself – that’s a fact.
50:29 And the more you think about your own little self, to be loved and not loved - you know? - all the ugliness of all that. Naturally out of that you have what you call sorrow. I want to be a big famous man; I am not, and I suffer.
50:51 But I if look at it brutally, psychologically, go into it inwardly, the urge to be famous, which is so utterly immature, superficial.
51:09 But if I’m satisfied with that, it’s all right. But if I want to understand, go beyond all this.
51:21 So there is no getting rid of sorrow. There is an understanding of sorrow which is the beginning and the ending of sorrow.
51:34 And I said when one has gone beyond all these you will find that love and sorrow and death are one.
51:49 And that state is of great beauty; not the beauty put together by man or by nature.
52:05 Q: In our talking about passion and intensity, does it not imply a desire to know?
52:27 K: Talking about passion and intensity and intensity, the questioner asks, does it not… is there not behind it the desire to know.
52:40 I wonder if you’re all playing with words.
52:48 You may go to the moon; you may want to know what is on the moon or on Mars, Venus – and then what?
53:00 In the same way, the urge to know is still part of becoming and therefore conflict.
53:34 But we’re not talking about knowing.
53:41 I don’t want to know about God, about what is beyond – I don’t. I don’t want to know about anything; you can pick it up in an encyclopaedia.
53:55 But I want to find out and go to the very end; find out, understand, go to the very end of sorrow, find out what it means; and that doesn’t mean that you must know.
54:10 Knowing, as I very carefully explained the other day, is one thing and learning is another.
54:24 Knowing implies accumulation, and when you have accumulated, from that you experience, and from that experience you acquire more knowledge.
54:36 But in that acquisition, adding knowledge through experience, there is no learning.
54:47 And you can only learn when you’re no longer seeking, acquiring knowledge. Sir, look, I don’t want to know about sorrow.
55:03 We all know; we all have sorrow. Don’t you have sorrow of some kind or another? Do you want to know about it? If you do, you can analyse and find out why you suffer.
55:20 You can read books, go to church; you will know something about sorrow. But we’re not talking about knowing about sorrow. We are talking about the ending of sorrow. Knowledge does not end sorrow.
55:43 The ending of sorrow is the beginning of facing facts psychologically, being totally aware of the fact, all the implications, the whole depth and the height of that fact that one is in sorrow.
56:06 Which means never to escape from it, never to rationalise it, never to offer an opinion about it, nor try to escape and all the rest of it, but to be completely live with that fact.
56:20 You know, sir, to live with those mountains, with the beauty and the shadow of the valley, to live with it, and not get accustomed to it, is very difficult.
56:38 You have been here for nearly three weeks. You have seen those mountains, heard the stream and seen the shadows in the valley day after day, and you get so easily accustomed to it, say, ‘Yes, I’ve seen it; it’s quite beautiful,’ and you pass it by.
57:07 But to live with it without becoming accustomed to it, without forming a habit, requires enormous energy.
57:19 To live with an ugly thing requires enormous energy, an awareness so that it doesn’t dull your mind.
57:29 In the same way, sorrow dulls the mind if you get used to it; and most of us get used to it, which is time destroys, makes the mind dull.
57:50 But to live with sorrow and understand it, go into it. Not because you want to know more about it. There is nothing to know more about sorrow; it is there.
58:05 And to live with it you must love it. And then you will see, as I was pointing out, that love is sorrow and death is sorrow.
58:25 Je vous empris.
58:26 Q: I would like to ask is there no love without passion?
58:32 K: Is there no love without passion.
58:46 I don’t know what we mean by that word passion and love.
58:55 You love somebody; if you’re a man or a woman, you love somebody. Don’t you have passion, at least for the two years, three years, whatever it is?
59:09 And then you get bored, you get accustomed.
59:16 But that passion is lust, attachment, jealousy, envy.
59:26 And you call love jealousy. It’s like a flame in the midst of smoke, and gradually the flame dies and you have the smoke left, which is jealousy, envy, ambition, greed and all the rest of the business.
59:52 But I do not see perhaps if jealousy, envy and all the things that make for smoke and conflict, which we call passion, when all that has subsided - not through time and habit - because one has understood it, one has gone into it, one has seen the depth and the height of it, then love is not, and then love is something which may be passion without cause.
1:00:35 I’m not talking of the passion of the missionary that goes out to convert the heathen because he loves Jesus.
1:00:45 That’s all so… That’s not passion of which we are talking about.
1:00:57 It is the denial of all this without motive; and out of this denial the clear flame comes into being.
1:01:16 Q: Is it for a human being possible to be in a permanent state of complete understanding?
1:01:26 K: Is it for a human being possible to be permanently in a state of understanding.
1:01:40 I think it is important to understand the word permanent. I don’t think you can ever be permanently in anything.
1:01:55 If you are permanently in something, you are dead.
1:02:05 And that’s all what we want: we want love, passion, understanding, God, truth to continue permanently, everlastingly.
1:02:16 Which means what? That we don’t want to be disturbed; we don’t want to be sensitive, alive.
1:02:25 Sir, as I explained, truth, understanding is in a flash, and that flash has no continuity; that flash is out of time.
1:02:44 Do see it yourself. When you understand something it is instantaneous; it is not the continuity of something that has been.
1:02:55 What has been cannot bring you understanding.
1:03:02 So as long as one is seeking a continuity, wanting permanency in relationship, in love, in all the rest of it, to find peace everlasting, then you are merely pursuing something which is in time and therefore doesn’t belong to the timeless.
1:03:45 Is that enough for this morning? I think it is, don’t you?