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SA68T8 - Looking at sorrow with the complete abandonment of silence
Saanen, Switzerland - 23 July 1968
Public Talk 8



0:00 This is J Krishnamurti’s eighth public talk in Saanen, 1968.
0:08 Krishnamurti: I think every human being asks for something mysterious, some experience that will be transcendental, some feeling or a state of mind that is not caught in the everyday monotony and loneliness and the boredom of life.
0:58 We all want something to live for.
1:09 We want to give a meaning to life, for we find life rather weary, full of turmoil, and apparently meaningless.
1:33 So we invent a purpose, a significance, and fill our life with words, with symbols, with shadows that are other forms of shadows, and most of us unwillingly accept a superficial life, giving to it a great mystery.
2:24 There is a mystery, something quite incredible, which is not to be captured through belief, through any experience, through any longing.
2:44 There is a mystery – really one shouldn’t use that word – there is something that cannot be put into words which has nothing whatever to do with sentiment, with an emotional explosion, but it can come only when we are not caught in the known, and most of us don’t know even what the known is.
3:32 So without basically understanding our nature, the crude animal instincts, the violence, the aggression, we try to reach out, mentally or through some meditative process, a vision, a feeling of an otherness.
4:15 I think this is what most of us – it doesn’t matter what we are, communist or Catholic or belonging to some stupid little sects as an entertainment – we all want or grope after something that is incredibly beautiful, inviolable, that is not in the net of time.
4:58 As we said, we are caught in the known, and that the known is so difficult to understand, the knowledge of ourselves, to look at ourselves, face to face with ourselves, without the mediation of any prejudice, any opinion, any judgment, to look at ourselves as we are.
5:44 We are the… we have inherited the animal, the ape, and all those instincts, reactions, traditions, the culture in which we have grown – those are the things we are unwilling to look, which are the known if we could only look into ourselves.
6:25 And most of us, unfortunately, seem unwilling to look, because we want to find something extraordinarily beautiful, something noble, and so… but we are unwilling to acknowledge actually ‘what is’.
6:52 That is the known, though most us don’t know it, that is the actual known, conscious or unconscious.
7:05 And we are so frightened to go beyond this known.
7:15 And to go beyond it, we must examine it, we must be completely intimate with it, familiar with it, understand the structure and the nature of it, so that the mind can go beyond the facts of the known.
7:46 But one cannot go beyond if one hasn’t completely, totally understood, lived with intimate contact, with all the movements of thought, feeling, with the brutality, with the animal instincts.
8:11 And then, only, we can go beyond and find something, which may be called the truth, a beauty that is not separate from love, a state, a different dimension, where there is a movement which is always new, fresh, young, decisive.
9:00 And so, first, why is it that we are so prone to accept?
9:18 It doesn’t matter what it is; we so easily acquiesce, say yes to things.
9:34 It is one of our traditions to follow – like the animal leaders, like the leader of an animal pack, all the other animals follow it – in the same way, we have leaders, gurus, teachers whom we are willing to follow, and thereby the authority of the known.
10:10 And where there is authority, there must obviously be fear, fear which gives a certain drive, energy to achieve a success, to achieve a certain promised hope, happiness, realisation, and so on.
10:47 So is it possible never to accept, but to examine, but to explore?
11:09 Because, you know, it is one of the most difficult things. When you are sitting there and the speaker is on the platform, to give him some certain authority; inevitably this position, high and low physically, brings about a certain quality of acceptance: you know; we don’t know. You tell us what to do and we will follow if we can.
12:05 It seems to me that’s the most deadly action, activity a mind could ever undertake: to follow anybody, to imitate a pattern set by another.
12:33 And a formula given by another leads inevitably to conflict, to misery.
12:45 And we have lived in this way. That’s our life: a system, psychologically a frame, in which we live, and part of the framework is the acceptance of ‘what is’.
13:22 And not being able to go beyond it, waiting for somebody else to tell us what to do – either the priest, the scientist or the psychologist or the – doesn’t matter who it is, they will offer another formula which you are willing to follow.
13:46 And to examine ourselves actually as we are, which is really quite fantastic, you need humility.
14:05 Not the harsh humility cultivated by a vain man, or the humility which becomes austere, that harshness of the priest or the disciplinarian.
14:32 You need humility to look; otherwise you can’t look.
14:43 And we are not, by nature, humble.
14:51 We are rather arrogant because we think we know a great deal.
15:00 And the older we grow, the more arrogant, the more assured we become, and therefore we are ready to die.
15:14 And humility is necessary to look at ourselves.
15:24 And where there is a judgment, evaluation, a hypothesis of what we should be, or an ideology, a formula, there is no humility.
15:46 And one of our greatest problems is sorrow.
15:56 We have accepted sorrow as the way of life, as we have accepted war as the way of life – war, not only on the battlefield but war within ourselves, with our neighbours, this everlasting struggle, both inwardly and outwardly – we have accepted that as the way of life.
16:35 And also we have accepted as the way of life, sorrow.
16:45 And we have never asked if it is at all possible to end completely sorrow.
17:07 I would like this morning to go into that and to go into the question of time and death.
17:25 I wonder why we suffer at all.
17:41 We suffer perhaps because we are physically unwell. We have a great deal of pain, and that perhaps there will be no remedy, or the pain is so excruciating, so penetrating, it drives away all reason, and in that there is a great deal of sorrow – the whole physical disease, physical incapacity, physical, physically growing old, with all the pain of old age and the fear of old age.
18:46 Then there is all the ache and pain in the field of psychological existence, the sorrow that comes when we have no love, which is indicated when we want to be loved.
19:25 When there is no clarity, when we cannot look at ‘what is’ with clear, unspotted eyes, there is the sorrow of ignorance, not of books, not of technology – the computers can be extraordinarily informed but they are ignorant machines.
20:08 We are using that word ‘ignorance’ with regard to our lacking, with regard to the lack of understanding of oneself, actually what one is, and that ignorance causes great sorrow, not only with oneself but with the whole community, with the race, with people.
20:37 And the sorrow of accepting time – time as a means of achieving, gaining some future hope, future benediction.
21:08 So time also gives great sorrow and of course there’s the sorrow of a life coming to an end, which is death, not only the death of another, but also the death of oneself.
21:40 All that brings sorrow: the sorrow of physical pain, the sorrow of having no love, and the frustrations of self-expression, the sorrow of tomorrow which never comes, and the sorrow of living in a world of the known and being always frightened of the unknown.
22:37 And we live that way; we have accepted that way of life.
22:47 And the very acceptance of it makes, creates a barrier to go beyond it.
23:05 It’s only when the mind doesn’t accept, always questioning, doubting, demanding, finding out, it’s only such a mind that can face actually ‘what is’, both outwardly and inwardly.
23:42 And perhaps it’s possible then to go beyond this mans’ everlasting suffering.
23:59 So let’s find out, explore together if it is possible to end sorrow, not verbally, intellectually, or through reason.
24:21 Thought can never end sorrow.
24:29 Thought does breed sorrow.
24:36 To think is to invite sorrow.
24:45 Thought, intellectual capacity to reason, however sanely, doesn’t end sorrow.
25:04 So we must have a totally different capacity.
25:16 Not capacity that is cultivated through time but the capacity to look.
25:41 As we said, why do we suffer? First, let us look at the psychological suffering – the ache, the loneliness, the pain, the anxiety, the fear, the loneliness, the passing enthusiasms which again breed their own troubles – those psychological sorrows, if we can understand those, then perhaps we shall be able to deal with the physical pains, with the physical disease, with old age, with the old age that…
26:30 in which there is the incapacity, the failing energy, the lack of drive, and so on – we’ll go into, first, the psychological sorrow, and then as we understand that, in the very act of understanding, the physical thing will also be understood.
27:02 What is sorrow?
27:11 What would you say is sorrow?
27:19 You, surely, you must have had sorrow.
27:28 If you looked into yourself and asked that question, what is sorrow, when you have felt this sorrow which expresses itself in tears, in the sense of isolation, the sense of having no relationship, a sorrow in which there is an abundance of self-pity.
28:07 So if one asked what is actually sorrow, I wonder how each one of us would answer.
28:23 We are not asking what physical sorrow is, physical pain, but the feeling of grief, the feeling of utter misery, helplessness, a blank wall that one faces.
29:05 I wonder what sorrow means to you.
29:38 Or, we have never come into touch with it at all, but the very avoidance of it is another form of sorrow, which only we know.
30:15 Take death, dying: the very avoidance of that word, never looking at it, never facing the inevitable though the scientists are saying eventually there will be an immortality of the physical, but that’s – the very avoidance of that…
31:11 is, is it not, a form of sorrow, a form of fear which breeds sorrow.
31:28 So, what is sorrow? Please, don’t wait for a definition.
31:38 You can look it up in the dictionary and it will give you a definition.
31:49 And as most of us have felt sorrow in different ways – the demand for self-expression and its fulfilment, and not being able to achieve that fulfilment breeds sorrow; wanting to be famous and not being, or having the capacity to achieve fame, that also breeds sorrow; the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of not having loved and wanting always to be loved; the sorrow of a future hope and always being uncertain of that hope.
32:56 Do look at it, please, for yourself; don’t wait for a description from the speaker.
33:09 We know, most of us, what sorrow is: a tortured emotion, a loneliness, an isolation, a sense of being cut off from everything, a feeling of emptiness, the utter incapacity to face life, and the everlasting struggle – all that is sorrow.
34:04 And we realise that and we say: Time will cure it, I’ll forget it, some other incident will take place which will be more important, an experience which will be much more real.
34:40 And we are always escaping from this actual fact of sorrow through time.
34:53 That is, the memory of the pleasant days that one has had in the past, pleasant experiences, recollections – one lives in that, which is in time.
35:16 And also one lives in the future: the avoidance of the sorrow there, actually, and you live in some future ideology, future hope, belief.
35:42 And from this cycle we have never been able to escape, never been able to end it, break through it. On the contrary, the whole Western world avoids or worships sorrow.
36:01 Go into any church, you will see sorrow worshipped.
36:09 And in the East, they explain it by various Sanskrit words that have really no meaning at all: cause-effect and therefore you suffer, and so on and on and on. When you realise all this, see it very clearly, factually, touch it, taste it, one asks oneself is it possible to go beyond all this?
37:14 And how is one able to go beyond it?
37:22 This is really a very important question which each one of us must answer.
37:38 You know, when you first see those mountains – distant, majestic, completely aloof from all the ugliness of life, the beauty of the line and the light of sunset on it – the very magnificence of it makes the mind silent; you’re stunned by it.
38:23 And the silence that those hills, mountains and the green valley produce is quite artificial. It’s like a child with a toy.
38:41 The toy absorbs the interest of the child and when the toy has been sufficiently played with and broken up, he loses interest in it and then becomes wandering, mischievous, and all the rest of it, and so are we by something great – a great challenge, a great crisis, makes us suddenly quiet, and out of that… and when we come out of that silence, which will last a few minutes or a few days, we are back again.
39:39 Now, there is this enormous fact of sorrow, which man has never been able to go beyond.
39:51 You may escape from it through drink, through all various forms of escape – that is not going beyond, it’s just avoiding it.
40:02 Now, there is this fact, as the fact of death and the fact of time.
40:21 Can you look at it with complete silence?
40:28 Look at it: your own sorrow, the sorrow that comes when you have never been loved, when you don’t know what love is, and always groping after it.
40:46 Can you look at it with complete abandonment of silence?
40:56 Not that the thing is so great, of such magnitude, such complexity that it forces you to be quiet, but the other way around: to look at it, knowing the magnitude, knowing how extraordinarily complex life and living and death are, to look at it completely, objectively and silently.
41:34 I think that is the way out. I use the word ‘I think’ hesitatingly, but really that’s the only way out.
41:54 If the mind isn’t silent, quiet, how can you understand anything? How can it grasp, look, be completely intimate, familiar with death, with time or with sorrow?
42:24 And what is that, says, ‘I am in sorrow, I am miserable, I have spent days in conflict, in misery, in hopeless despair’.
42:48 What is that thing that keeps on repeating this? ‘I can’t sleep, I have not been well, I am this, I am that, I am unhappy, you have not looked at me, you have not loved me’.
43:14 What is that thing that keeps on talking to itself?
43:30 Surely, it is thought. We come back to that primary thing.
43:43 Thought which has sought pleasure, and being thwarted, complains.
43:59 ‘I have lost somebody whom I loved and I am lonely, I’m miserable, full of sorrow’, which is this self-pity, pitying oneself – again, thought. The memories of companionship, the memory of pleasant days, which all hid the loneliness, the emptiness within oneself.
44:43 And when that is gone, thought begins to complain, ‘I am so unhappy’, which is the very nature of self-pity.
44:59 And so, can you look at yourself?
45:08 Yourself being thought, with its self-pity, with its pains, with its anxieties, fears, aggressions, brutality, sexual demands, urges, the whole of that complex entity.
45:34 Can you look at yourself completely silently?
45:46 And when you have looked at yourself, then you can perhaps ask, what is death?
46:05 You see…
46:17 Did you listen to that marvellous sound of that plane, the roar of it?
46:34 And can one listen with that same beatitude of silence to the whole noise of life?
46:53 If you can look, listen, then one can honestly ask, what is death?
47:08 What does it mean to die? This is not only a question for the old but also for every human being, as one asks, what is love, what is pleasure, what is beauty, what is the nature of real human relationship in which there is no image interfering?
47:44 So one must also ask this fundamental question, as love and beauty: what is death?
47:58 We daren’t ask it probably because we are very frightened.
48:05 We say to ourselves, ‘I would like to experience that state of dying, to be really conscious as one dies’.
48:21 So, one takes drugs to keep awake, watch the very moment when the breath ceases, because one wants to experience that extraordinary moment when life is not.
48:53 So, what is death, the dying, coming to an end?
49:02 Not what happens after; that is so irrelevant. There you can invent so many theories, beliefs, hopes, formulas.
49:19 To die. Not with old age, disease, when the whole organism comes… wears down and one slips off, not at that last moment, but actually as one is living, full of vitality, energy, intensity, capacity to explore.
50:00 What is it to die? Not tomorrow, but today, to find out.
50:07 Which is not a morbid question, because don’t you want to know deeply for yourself, through all your nerves, brain, with everything that you have, don’t you want to know what it means to love?
50:32 Don’t you want to know what it means to have that extraordinary blessing?
50:43 Or don’t you want to know with the same eagerness, vitality, to find out what death is?
50:52 And how are you going to find out?
51:01 To die. You know, that implies, doesn’t it, the quality of innocency.
51:19 Because we are not innocent people – we’ve had thousand experiences, thousand fears.
51:36 It is there in the very brain cells themselves.
51:44 Time has cultivated aggression, brutality, violence, the sense of domination and, oh, so many experiences. Our minds aren’t innocent, clear, fresh, young.
52:14 It’s always been spotted, tortured, twisted.
52:24 So, in the very asking of what is innocency – not the symbol of the lamb or all that stupid stuff, but actually to find out and to live with it.
52:47 To find out, one has to ask this question, what death is.
52:54 For surely, it’s only when you die to everything that you know, psychologically, inwardly; die to your past, not tomorrow; die to it naturally, freely, happily, then out of that death, there is innocency, there is a freshness, eyes that have never been spotted.
53:38 Can one do that? Can one put away easily without effort the things that one has clung to: the pleasant and unpleasant memories, the sense of my family, my children, my god, my husband, wife and all that self-centred activity that goes on and on and on?
54:18 Can you put all that away voluntarily, not through compulsion, through fear, through necessity, but with that ease that comes when you look at this problem of living, a living which is full of strife and a battlefield, to end all that, to step out of it, to be an outsider of all that?
55:08 Can one do it? Do listen to me. Can one do it?
55:15 You’ll say, ‘No, I can’t, it’s not possible’.
55:25 When you say it is not possible, you mean it will be possible only when you know what happens when all that ends.
55:42 That is, you will give up one thing when you are assured of another thing.
55:54 You say it is not possible only because you don’t know what the impossible is.
56:04 And a mind that is aware of both the possible and the impossible and goes beyond, then you will see it for yourself that all that accumulation psychologically that you have gathered can be put aside with such ease, only when you know what living is.
57:03 Living is to die. To die every day to everything that you have fought with, gathered, the self-importance, self-pity, the sorrow, the pleasure and the agony of this thing called living.
57:28 That’s all we know, and to see it all; and to see it you must…
57:41 the mind must be extraordinarily quiet. The very seeing of this whole structure is the discipline; the very seeing disciplines.
58:09 So then perhaps we’ll know what it means to die, because one knows then what it means to live. Not this tortured life but a life which is entirely different, a life that has come into being through deep psychological revolution, which is not a deviation from life.
59:20 Anything you want to go over?
59:32 We’ve got two more talks, that is, on Thursday, on Sunday.
59:47 I would like to talk next time, if I may, a thing that is really as important as love and the beauty of love, and the significance of death; it is meditation.
1:00:23 We will go into it perhaps on Thursday morning.
1:00:31 So don’t please ask that question now.
1:00:41 What we should, if it is possible, to go into this question, how to live totally differently, how to bring about this immense psychological revolution so that there is no aggression but intelligence.
1:01:22 Intelligence can both be… is above aggression and non-aggression, because it understands the way of aggression and violence.
1:01:45 So I live a life of highest sensitivity and therefore highest intelligence.
1:02:00 If we could – perhaps there’s no time this morning; we may go into it during that week of discussion that are to follow after these… after Sunday – but I think that’s the only question: how to live a life of great bliss, of great intensity, so that the very structure of our being which is rooted in the animal, in the ape, knowing the very nature of it, go beyond it.
1:03:14 Basta? All right, sirs.