18. The Only Revolution

Meditation is a key theme in The Only Revolution, it is referenced in almost every chapter. It is the essence of living: freedom of the mind from attachment and separation.

First published in 1970, the book is based on Krishnamurti's writings. An inspiring book, it sees K talk about his encounters with people and explain the reasons behind the divisions that create violent groups within humanity. He encourages readers to see themselves anew and solve their problems by deeply transforming their minds and hearts through meditation.

The book opens with the beautiful statement: "Meditation is not an escape from the world; it is not an isolating, self-enclosing activity, but rather the comprehension of the world and its ways. Meditation is wandering away from this world; one has to be a total outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of heavens and the earth is constant".

In the first story, a wealthy lawyer visits K and compares his teachings with Vedanta. K rejects this idea, stating that the concept of Brahman is merely a theory invented by an imaginative mind. It can be experienced, he says, but that does not prove a thing.

The world is not an illusion, but a terrible reality. All theories –including those of Vedanta – are man-made constructs with no meaning. Only a free and innocent mind can grasp the measureless movement of truth.

This must be understood without creating a new theory.

Finding God with a Gun in Your Hand

In the second chapter, K states that the mind is never innocent through experience. It is the negation of experience that brings about the positive state of 'innocency', which cannot be cultivated by thought. Thought is never innocent.

Meditation is the ending of thought. Without meditation, we are like the blind in a world overflowing with beauty, light, and colour.

A martial arts teacher says he wants to find God. K responds:

"You cannot find God: there is no way to it. The misery of search is that it leads to some fancy of the mind, to some vision which the mind has projected and measured by things known. You cannot have a gun in one hand and God in the other."

An empty heart can be filled with words, philosophies, and theories, but truth is where we never look.

In the Midst of Beauty

In the third chapter, K recounts watching a man praying in an old Mughal garden. He had closed his eyes, and his lips were moving. He sat cross-legged with his bicycle beside him and a rosary in his hands covered by a piece of cloth. He sat like this for half an hour.

Every day, the man came to the same place and performed his ritual. The beauty of the garden and the moment surrounded him, but he never saw it because he was lost in his own world.

"Meditation is not the repetition of a word, nor the experiencing of a vision, nor the cultivating of silence. The bead and word do quieten the chattering mind, but this is a form of self-hypnosis. You might as well take a pill."

The meditative mind sees, watches and listens without words, without comment, without opinion. It is attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day. Only the indolent have dreams; only those who are half-sleep need intimations of their own state.

When the mind observes both the outer and inner movement of life, comes a silence that is not put together by thought.

It is not a silence which the observer can experience. If it is experienced, it is no longer silence, because the silence of the meditative mind is not within the realm of recognition. This silence has no frontier, in it, the space of division ceases.

Silence Fills the Valley

In chapter four, meditation is described as the unfolding of the new. The new is beyond and above the repetitive past. Meditation puts an end to this repetition; it is the silence of thought. It is like a river that cannot be tamed, running swiftly and overflowing its banks.

K comments on the extraordinary silence of the morning. He suggests that this must be the same silence that had filled the whole valley and the hills at the beginning of the world.

She was forty-five. She came to see K with her uncle after losing both her husband and son a few years ago. Her hands were restless as she tried to prevent herself from bursting into tears.

K asked her if she wanted to talk seriously and get to the root of it all, or just be comforted by some explanation or reasoned argument, and let words distract her from her sorrow.

She said that she would like to discuss deeply, but she was not sure if she had the energy to face what K was going to say.

K asked her if she was grieving for herself or her husband. Tears would not help her husband or bring him back. She was crying for her own emptiness, and her tears were a sign of self-pity.

When K said that comfort meant living under an illusion, she said K was rather cruel.

"To point out all this is not cruelty, isn't it", K replied.

"When you see all this clearly, then you come out of it immediately, without a scratch, unblemished, fresh, untouched by the events of life. One has to come into touch with this enormous fact of life."

Many Kinds of Silences

Chapter five begins with the statement that silence has many qualities. There is silence between two noises, between two notes and the interval between two thoughts. There is also the peculiar, quiet, pervading silence that comes of an evening in the country.

Then there is the silence through which you can hear the bark of a dog in the distance or the whistle of a train as it climbs a steep gradient. There is the silence in a house when everyone has gone
to sleep, and silence when you wake up in the middle of the night and listen to an owl hooting in the valley.

Silence can be as tangible as the wall you touch. It's not self-generated. It comes from everywhere. It is innocent and so endless. When there is this silence of the mind action springs from it, and this action does not cause confusion or misery.

The meditative mind contains all these varieties, changes and movements of silence. In this silence, there is bliss and laughter.

The Noise of Ego

Then K meets a man who wants to talk about immortality and ultimate reality.

K states that the self exists for as long as thought imagines it. When the thinker ends while we are alive, reality continues without the self.

There is no point in thinking about reality; all effort should be put into understanding how the 'me' creates reality. Once you realise this, you are no longer interested in immortality.

Guru Misleads

In chapter six, K is visited by a bearded man wearing a turban. He was a businessman and looked prosperous and well-fed. He was slow in his walk and in his thinking. His reactions were even slower. It took him several minutes to understand a simple statement.

He said he had his own guru and asked why K was against gurus.

K replied: Because no one can teach another person the extraordinary state of mind that sees the world exactly as it is? Everyone has to take the journey alone. To follow another is to lose oneself. Thousands of gurus believe that their way is the only right way, but truth has no way to it.

The stranger was horrified at the thought of having to give up his guru and abandoning everything he had taught him. After a while, he named Krishnamurti as his guru – a label K refused to accept.

"Nothing has been taught, but you have looked. The looking is your guru. It's for to you either to look or not to look. Nobody can force you. To see oneself as one is – in that awareness is the beginning and end of all search."

We must be free from all authority, tradition, fear, and thought. Truth is not in some distant place; it is in the looking at what is.

On the Path of Buddha

Space is discussed in chapter seven. Any thought that is formulated has within it the limitations of its boundaries. Thought always has a horizon; the meditative mind has not.

Meditation opens the door to spaciousness that cannot be imagined or speculated upon.

K was walking on a path that had become holy because the Buddha was said to have walked it 2,500 years ago. There was an ancient village, probably even older than the Buddha himself, with numerous shrines and places where pilgrims could spend the night. Everything was dilapidated, nobody seemed to care; the goats wandered around the place. The land was ancient and full of enchantment and human sorrow, with its poverty and useless temples.

A man ­came to discuss beauty and love with K, but he could not understand what K said.

"Why is it that in our lives there is so little beauty? Why are museums with their pictures and statues necessary? Why do we have to listen to music or read descriptions of scenery?"

Austerity in self-abandonment is beauty. There is no love unless you abandon yourself. Separation creates conflict and ugliness. The deep, inward simplicity of austerity makes for a life that has no duality.

This is the journey the mind had to take to come upon this beauty without the word. This journey is meditation.

Hard Work

"Meditation is hard work; it demands the highest form of disciple. Meditation is not an activity of isolation; it demands co-operation, sensitivity and intelligence. Without laying the foundation of a righteous life, meditation becomes an escape and therefore has no value whatsoever."

The monk with a nice delicate face and sensitive hands had spent many years studying under a guru and visiting many ashrams across India. He believed that, in order to realise reality, one must withdraw from the world and live in the higher mountains.

K asked him to look at the nearby river and green wheat fields. To truly see them, one's eyes must be full of love. To hear the rattling of the train over the iron bridge is as important as hearing the voice of a bird. Seeing requires communion with the world.

Many religious people are self-centred and violent in their renunciation of the beauty and love of life.

The monk said that K was rather harsh. He replied that he was merely stating a fact, and that facts are neither harsh, pleasant nor unpleasant. Most of us object to facing things as they are.

Isolation is the way of life, the way of world. When it becomes extreme, there is a neurosis, which – if one has talent – can produce art or good literature.

Talent can be used to achieve something meaningful on a personal level. A disciplined person can develop their capacity and subdue others, and win some of them over, because those in power are often worshipped, admired, and feared.

The guru destroys the disciple, and the disciple destroys the guru. Authority and its acceptance are exploitation. Renouncing from this structure leads to freedom and innocence. Goodness cannot flourish when a particular path is followed, because there is no path to truth.

Happiness in the Shadow of Sorrow

Meditation is the emptying of experience and is going on all the time, consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, it is not an action limited to a certain period during the day. It is a continuous action from morning till night – watching without the watcher.

"There is no division between daily life and meditation, the religious life and the secular life. Meditation is not individualistic, nor is it social; it transcends both and so includes both. This is love: the flowering of love is meditation."

An official wanted to discuss happiness: can we be happy all our life? He said that he was sometimes happy, but that sorrow always accompanied it.

If we are not free to investigate, we are like animals tethered to a post. We can only go as far as the rope allows.

When we want to remain in a state of happiness, we turn the dead past into an actuality in the present, and we become afraid of losing it tomorrow. Nothing can blossom in ashes – and thought is ashes.

When thought abandons itself, there is the discipline of abandonment, which becomes the grace of austerity. The whole mind becomes quiet. This is a state of pure attention, from which comes a bliss, an ecstasy that cannot be put into words.

Worshipping Gods in the Dark

"This temple was older than its gods. They remained, prisoners in the temple, but the temple itself was far more ancient. It had thick walls

and pillars in the corridors, carved with horses, gods, and angels."

People came there from all over the country, rich and poor alike, but only a select few were permitted to enter the sanctuary.

K writes: "All gods must be worshipped in mystery and in darkness, otherwise they have no existence."

When K stepped out into the open strong sunlight, he looked at the blue sky and wondered why is it that man worships images that he has made with his hands and mind.

A young, bright-eyed man with a quick smile wanted to know what religious life is. K wanted him to first find out what living is.

"The actuality of living is the daily grind, the routine with its struggle and conflict; it is the ache of loneliness, the misery and the squalor of poverty and riches, the ambition, the search for fulfilment, the success and the sorrow. This is what we call living – gaining and losing a battle, and the endless pursuit of pleasure."

Religious life is not on the other side of the river; it is on this side.

"It is this that we must understand, and the action of understanding is the religious act – not putting on ashes, wearing a loincloth, sitting in the seat of the mighty or being carried on an elephant."

We must deny the social, religious and industrial morality, and slip out of the pattern of that morality, which is immoral. Going beyond this pattern is not an act of thought; otherwise, we are imprisoned by thought.

Self-centredness and its activities must die naturally and easily. It is in this death alone that there is the beginning of the new religious life.

Playing with Toys of the Mind

"If you deliberately take a posture in order to meditate, then it becomes a plaything, a toy of the mind. In the total attention of meditation there is no knowing, no recognition nor the remembrance of something that has happened. Time and thought have come to an end."

That morning, the valley was extraordinarily quiet. There was a glow and a sense of promise, and not even a whisper stirred among the leaves. K could "feel the silence, touch it, smell it, and it had that quality of penetration". As he looked out of the window, the distance

between all things disappeared, and his eyes opened with the dawn and saw everything anew.

One man said that he is interested in sex, social equality, and God. Nothing else matters to him; those are the only things he wants to talk about.

K asked, if the man wanted to strengthen his belief or actually see reality – not experience it, but see it with a mind that is highly attentive and clear. Belief and faith lead to darkness, to dark temples and sensations of rituals. Along that path, there is no reality, only fancy and the imaginative furnishings that fill the church remain.

If we deny fear, belief becomes unnecessary. If we cling to belief and dogma, then fear takes hold. Thought invests in belief to protect itself against the fear which it has created.

"The immeasurable cannot be sought by thought. The sublime is neither within the structure of thought and reason nor the product of emotion and sentiment. The negation of thought is attention. It must come to you – if you are lucky."

Sacred – Everything or Nothing

An old monk, respected by thousands, came to ask, why K is against morality and the sacred scriptures despite not having read them. Perhaps he has been spoilt by the West?

K replied: "Either everything is sacred, or nothing is."

Why should only some thoughts, books, or people be considered holy? These so-called sacred books have no meaning. People are selfish, greedy and violent, regardless of their faith.

Under the robe, the monk is frightened. He has his appetites and he is burning with desire; the robe is merely an escape from this fact.

We quarrel about which books are more sacred than others and interpret them according to our immature preferences. There is nothing sacred about tradition, whether ancient or modern. Reading holy books does not make anyone holy or exempt them from anything.

In the next chapters, K talks about meditation again. It is not the pursuit of visions and delights, but a never-ending movement. You can never say that you are meditating, nor can you set aside a period for it. It is not at your command. It only comes when your heart is

open like the skies without a cloud. Then it comes, without your knowing, without your invitation.

"Don't sit in a darkened room waiting for it; it comes only when you are not there at all, and its bliss has no continuity."

The Eagle Leaves No Trace in the Air

A young man came to discuss his place in the world. He was perturbed and, despite his young age, discouraged. The older generation had nothing to offer him with their bitterness, cruelty, hypocrisy, compromise and prudence.

K began by saying that the lark and the eagle leave no trace in the air during their flight, but the scientist does, as do all specialists. One must be both the eagle and the scientist, knowing that the two will never meet. This doesn't mean that they are two separate things. Both are necessary. However, when the scientist wants to become the eagle, and when the eagle leaves its footprints, misery ensues.

The mind can give meaning to anything, but the meaning it gives is meaningless. The purpose of life is revealed to those who can observe quietly and innocently.

Innocence can only be with the death of yesterday, but we never die to yesterday. We hold on to what the mind has anchored in, so there is no freedom. It is the fullness of heart that is truly innocent.

An Empty Mind Cannot Be Purchased

"Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known. The known is the past. The emptying is not at the end of accumulation but rather it means not to accumulate at all."

The known is the action of will, and will cannot possibly empty the mind. An empty mind cannot be purchased at the altar of demand, it comes into being when thought is aware of its own activities, not when the thinker is aware of his thoughts.

An analyst with a degree said she was working in a large clinic. She was very disturbed, intense, and unnecessarily talkative.

She sat at the table, but she never looked out of the large window at the flowers, the breeze among the leaves, or the tall eucalyptus tree swaying gently in the wind.

As an analyst, she said her work was to "help sick people to fit into a sicker society". For her, work was just a way to earn a living. She struggled to be different from the average person.

K asked if her struggle was any different to that of her patients. And why all this struggle? She may be as sick as the patients she is trying to cure. So the issue is more fundamental.

We are the result of the enormous weight of society with its cultures and religions. We must either accept its maladies and live with them or totally refute it, and find a new way of living. However, we cannot find a new way without letting go of the old.

We want security, but is there such a thing? There is no security in relationship, beliefs or actions. Seeking security creates disorder.

Thought is always trying to find a secure spot. So thought is creating disorder. Love is not within the realm of thought. Like beauty, it cannot be touched by the paintbrush.

She became very silent and withdrawn. It was difficult for her to control the tears streaming down her cheeks.

Artificial Light

We have no light within ourselves, says K, but we do have the artificial light of others; the light of knowledge; the light that talent and capacity give us.

The light of thought becomes its own shadow, but deep, inward brilliance is not a commodity. You cannot seek it, cultivate it, imagine it or speculate upon it, for it is not within the reach of the mind.

The man said he was religious. He had been a professor at a university, but he gave it up to lead a life of meditation. He had spent some time searching for his identity, as well as a way to overcome the fragmentation of life and become whole, to find harmony between mind and heart.

He said that he had identified an intellectual reason for division, but had not yet managed to build a bridge between opposites and to be one with everything.

K replied that discovering the cause of separation is not enough. Knowing the cause of fear does not dissolve it; more is needed. We must understand how the 'I' tries to identify itself with the 'not-I', be that a spouse, family, community, or concept of God.

However, whatever the 'I' identifies itself with remains a concept, a memory or a structure of thought.

Duality exists outwardly, but the psychological division is part of our conditioning. We never question it.

"There is only what is, not what should be. The what should be is a division which thought has put together in the avoiding or the overcoming of the reality of what is. Hence the struggle between the actual and the abstraction."

Innocency Is Space

Innocency (a term coined by Krishnamurti to describe a quality of innocent people) and spaciousness are the flowering of meditation. The mind must be free from the marks left by experience. Freeing the mind from the constant pressure of experience is meditation.

There were a few men with their wives in the room. They were all professionals who wanted to discuss what K meant when he talked about space.

K began by saying that there is dividing space and unlimited space. It is in the divisive space between people that mischief grows. However, there is also a space without the boundaries of time or place.

Consciousness lives within the limited, narrow space of tradition, culture, custom and memory. Just as a room is an area limited by walls and a ceiling, the observer creates a sphere of action around itself. This is akin to the confined yard of a prison, where there is no freedom.

No matter how comfortable and well-decorated a prison may be, it is still a prison. Freedom there is limited and relative. Even if you enjoy the limited freedom within these boundaries, you must break down the prison walls.

Freedom is not relative; either you are free, or you are not. Freedom is infinite space. When there is a lack of space, violence ensues and we fight for our space like animals for their territory. Lack of freedom leads to aggression and confusion, causing people to seek solace in ideologies and theories.

It is not possible for the intellect to build a bridge between itself and freedom. Thought is always old and cannot build a bridge

to the new. Imagination in any form destroys truth, blocks freedom and isolates humans.

The Map of Sorrow

The man said that he had lost his son and was still in shock, but had great self-control. He wanted to know how to explain to his wife and children the ending of sorrow that K had talked about.

K asked if he was grieving for his son or for himself. Sorrow is often rooted in self-pity, which can isolate one from others. You must be as aware of your sorrow as you are sensually aware when you touch a flower.

"You have to lay down the map of sorrow and trace every path and road. You have to see this whole map at a glance. In ending sorrow, time must come to an end."

Sorrow cannot be ended by thought. When time stops, thought as the way of sorrow, ceases.

"See the map of sorrow not with the eyes of memory. Listen to the whole murmur of it; be of it, only then can sorrow end. There is no other way."

Prayer Is Born of Self-pity

Meditation is never prayer. Prayer, supplication, is born of self-pity. A happy person does not ask for anything. When confused, one cries out to heaven, to one's spouse, or to some deity of the mind. This cry may find an answer, but the answer is an echo of self-pity.

"The repetition of words, of prayers, is self-hypnotic, self-enclosing and destructive. Meditation is far from this. It is in the open, secrecy has no place in it. Everything is exposed, clear; then the beauty of love is."

A young lady said that she had no illusions about herself and felt that she had committed suicide and stopped living a long time ago, after something unpleasant had happened to her. She spoke simply and without hesitation.

K said that, after experiencing life's shocks, people tend to build a wall around themselves. Separative life is a life of suicide, and this is the accepted morality of religion and society. When we feel that we are not getting what we want, or that something is being taken away

from us, we no longer want to live. We close ourselves off and isolate ourselves from the world.

"Living begins when the act of suicide ends. Demanding the continuity of pleasure is to invite the separation of death. In separation there is no love. Love has no identity. Pleasure, and the seeking of it, build the enclosing wall of separation. There is no death when all devotion ceases. Self-knowledge is the open door."

Our Common Burden

Meditation is the ending of the word, freeing the mind from all symbols, images, and remembrances.

The man was an artist, a painter, who was rather proud that his paintings were selling well. He was enclosed within the dream of his own gifts. He could come out of it, but then go back into his own den.

Most of us live within the walls of self-interest: the army acts in its own interests; the businessman is enclosed within steel and glass; the housewife pottering about the house is another example.

The religious fragment is unrelated to the factory, and the factory to the artist. The general is as unrelated to the soldiers as the priest is to the layman. Society is made up of fragments and broken pieces. We are prisoners of these divisions, bearing the burden of our anxieties, guilt and apprehensions.

"In the common greed, hate and aggression, human beings are related and this violence builds the culture, the society in which we live. The unity of man does not lie in any of the structures which the human mind has invented. Co-operation is not the nature of the intellect. Between love and hate there can be no unity, and yet it is what the mind is trying to find and establish. Unity lies totally outside this field, and thought cannot reach it."

Thought has constructed this culture of aggression, competition and war, yet this very thought gropes after order and peace. However, thought will never find them; thought must be silent for love to be.

The Known Is Confusion

"The mind freeing itself from the known is meditation. Prayer goes from the known to the known; it may produce results, but it is still in the field of the known."

Meditation is the total denial of everything the mind has collected. The image is of the past, and meditation is the ending of the past.

There was an old eucalyptus tree in the monastery courtyard, with a canopy towering above the tops of all the other trees. In that country, trees were not respected. They were cut down if it was necessary to build houses, and people did not mourn their loss.

Nature had very little meaning except as a decoration. The gardens of magnificent villas are filled with trees that show off the graceful curves of the houses. That eucalyptus tree was not decorative to any house, it stood alone, quiet yet full of silent movement.

There were several people in the room, mostly young. They wanted to know how to act within the society in which they felt imprisoned.

For K, revolt is a reaction that does not free a conditioned mind. Any form of obedience is also a form of resistance that leads to violence.

To be free, one must be psychologically an outsider to all communities, religions and to the morality of a society that produces division and war. We are the society we live in, not separate from it.

Separation is the work of thought. Thoughts separate people. It is insane to call oneself an Italian, an Indian or an American.

Thought is the past, thought is memory. It creates differences and gives them specific meanings. Negating the false leads to freedom from the images that maintain separation.

Can Silence Be Heard?

He was a big man who filled an enormous chair. He had a kindly face and he was ready to laugh. He was interested in the origin and acceptance of silence. That was his philosophy.

K assumed that this man had never come upon silence. You can't buy silence as you would buy good cheese, nor cultivate it as you would a lovely plant. Silence is not an experience. You only know it only when it is over.

Silence is all around us. We cannot take it home, hold it in your hands or keep it in our minds. You can imagine it, but that's just a memory – a romantic escape from the daily noise of life.

"Because of silence everything exists. We don't listen to the silence because our ears are full of the chatter of the mind. Silence is where you are, in yourself and beside yourself."

"Meditation is the summation of all energy", begins the next chapter. It is not to be gathered little by little by denying this or that, but rather, it is the total denial of all wasteful energy.

Seeing clearly requires the attention of all energy. Thought is wasted energy; perception never is. Seeing is not a determined effort. Observation puts the observer aside. The thinker who attempts to observe, spoils energy, but love is not wasted energy.

Don't Take Sides!

A man came to ask K what intelligence is.

K responded indirectly, stating that an opinion is not the truth, no matter how reasonable it may seem. It is always biased, coloured by culture, education, knowledge which one has. In order to see clearly, the mind must be empty.

"It is opinion and belief that prevent the observation of what actually is. There is no intelligence if there is no sensitivity of the body and of the mind, of feeling and the clarity of observation. Emotionalism and sentimentality prevent the sensitivity of feeling."

Intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge or information. Knowledge is always the past. Intelligence is in the present; it is not bound by time.

Connection Comes from Understanding

Meditation is the freeing the mind from all dishonesty. Thought breeds dishonesty. All comparison is a process of evasion and hence breeds dishonesty.

Honesty is not a principle, a conformity to a pattern; rather, it is the total perception of what is. Meditation is the movement of this honesty in silence.

A woman came with her two daughters, but left them to play outside. She was young and rather nice-looking, and told that her husband worked in an office. There was a peculiar sadness beneath her swift smile.

She wanted to talk about relationship. She was married, but something seemed to be lacking in her marriage. K said that if both partners live in their own isolated worlds, there is no connection and they cause their own suffering. Physical contact is not enough.

She said she understood this, but how could she make her husband understand? He enjoys striving and achieving.

K replied that when one deeply understands that such a life has no meaning, one gives it up immediately. When there is no tomorrow, the whole existence changes. When you live completely in the present, your connection with other people and with nature is actual. Living then has a wholly different meaning.

Start from the Other Shore

"You can never set about to meditate; it must happen without your seeking it out. If you seek it, or ask how to meditate, you strengthen your own present conditioning. When you try to meditate from reason or from a contradictory and neurotic state it will inevitably take its own structure as a serious reality."

Sound makes its own cage. The noise of thought is of the cage. Words divide the observer from the observed. They unleash the movement of memories, but meditation is the complete absence of words. The root of fear is the machinery of words.

It was early spring and K was walking in the park with a friend who was wondering what to do. His endless analysis seemed to lead nowhere. He had tried everything, but all his attempts left him feeling empty.

K told him to start from the other end, from the unknown. If the mind lives on the unknown, these problems will not exist.

We only know what is already finished, over. The more we dig the old, the more there is to dig. The digging itself is the conditioning, and each shovelful takes us further from the answer.

"Begin from that which you don't know and live from there. Be silent, and you will find out. All knowing is on the wrong side. If you know, you are already in your grave. The being is not knowing."

In the Light, All Limits Disappear

In the light of silence, all problems dissolve. Meditation is not a private affair, a personal search for pleasure. In meditation, the dividing line between 'you' and 'me' disappears. The light of silence destroys the concept of 'me'.

The man was probably very rich and he was proud of his art collection. His dog was more alive than its master. It would rather have been out in the grass among the dunes, racing against the wind, but its owner had told it to sit down. It soon fell asleep from boredom.

He said he had read a great deal and was interested in mysticism. However, he was unable to cover or fill his emptiness with possessions and knowledge.

"Possessions possess us more than we possess them. The castle, the house, the pictures, the books, the knowledge, they become far more vital, far more important, than human being."

Our life is either sadness or love; it cannot be both. One breeds cynicism and bitterness, while the other lies beyond all woods and hills. The sadness of life is that, despite trying every trick in the book, that emptiness remains.

He will probably only be aware of the sadness of a wasted life at the moment of his death – and then it will be too late.

At the Lunch Table

Eight people sat around the table having lunch. They talked about politics, riots in America and the never-ending war. There was an easy flow of conversation about nothing in particular.

The film director said that his generation had no place in the modern world. A well-known author recounted how students had torn him to pieces by during a lecture he had given at the university.

The pianist said that he had given up a promising career because he wanted to lead a religious life. He believed that young people offered promise and new vitality. They reject the church and its hierarchies, and do not want war.

The young university student had remained silent. Finally, he said that the older generation's morality stinks. They are hypocrites who say one thing and do another. His generation does not want that kind of world, which is why they are revolting.

After a few minutes of silence, K said that to deny all morality is to be moral. Everyone wants to be respected and treated like a good citizen. This creates a rotten society with a morality that accepts greed, envy and hate. That is immorality; it is the way of the establishment.

True morality springs from love, not profit or achievement. There cannot be love in a world where fame, recognition and status are desired.

Do You See the Daffodils?

To meditate is to transcend time. Only then does truth cease to be an abstraction. Bliss is then an actuality, not an idea derived from pleasure.

Emptying the mind of time is the silence of truth, and seeing this is doing. It is in the interval between seeing and doing that conflict, misery and confusion are born.

There were fresh daffodils on every table. K was at a restaurant where people were talking and laughing loudly. Someone was secretly feeding her dog meat. Everyone had huge portions, and K found it not pleasant to watch people eating; it seemed almost barbarous.

A man across the room had filled himself with wine and meat, and was just lighting a big cigar. A look of beatitude spread across his fat face. His equally fat wife lit a cigarette. They both appeared to be lost to the world.

Nobody seemed to care about the yellow daffodils on the table. But, because of them, K forgot the world, the smoke-filled room, the cruelty of humanity, and the ugly red meat. Those shapely daffodils seemed to take him beyond all time.

"The feeling of thought and the feeling of love are two different things. The one leads to bondage and the other to the flowering of goodness. The flowering is not within the area of any society, of any culture or of any religion, whereas the bondage belongs to all societies, religious beliefs and faith in otherness. Love is anonymous, therefore not violent. The denial of the total process of thought becomes the beauty of action, which is love. Without this there is no bliss of truth."

Something Different

Meditation is the awakening of bliss. It encompasses the senses and transcends them. It has no continuity because it is not of time. This bliss comes out of complete silence.

The man was young and had a wife and children. He seemed highly educated, intellectual, and skilled in the use of words. He said that he was always seeking truth, which he believed is beyond words and systems.

K assumed that the man was discontented, but he denied it at first. However, he soon admitted that he was indeed dissatisfied, but this was not the reason for his search. Philosophers and religious missionaries had encouraged him to never stop seeking.

K said that the search for meaning in life is one of the odd escapes of man. Even if you find what you're looking for, it won't be worth a pebble on the path. The mind must have no yesterday or tomorrow. To K, this is not a poetic statement, but an actual fact. Poetry and imagination have no place in the active present.

When the search ends, something else begins. The ending is the beginning, and the beginning is the first step – and the only step.

Double Life

He was a rather blunt man, full of interest and drive. He had read extensively, spoke several languages, and came to talk about learning.

After listening to K, he had found himself leading a double life. He had tried to live by K's teachings, but was not very successful. When faced with challenges, he reacted as he always had.

He asked K what is the source from which one acts. K replied that there is a difference between action based on memory and action based on seeing. Knowledge prevents a fresh response to a challenge.

An awakened mind has no need for challenges of any kind. It lives in constant change and has no resting place. For such a mind, everything is new.

A Mind Overloaded with Belief

Belief is one thing, reality is another. One leads to bondage, while the other is possible only in freedom. The two have no relationship.

Freedom is not a reward for rejecting belief; it is not a carrot dangled in front of a donkey. Belief can never lead to reality. It is the result of conditioning and fear. A believing mind is not an enquiring mind.

What matters is not what you believe, but why your mind is burdened with formulas, principles, dogmas and opinions.

To see, belief is not necessary, quite the opposite. In fact, belief must be absent. You can only see when you are not burdened by belief.

Belief is a formula for inaction that breeds hypocrisy. This is a danger that must be avoided if we are to see the truth of what is.

When we see, we are free. Truth is not a belief; it is not yours or mine. Like beauty and love, truth cannot be possessed.

Illusions and Honesty

K walks along the main street of a small town, his senses fully awake and his mind empty of thought. He has a strong feeling that yesterday has come to an end. He writes the definitive sentence in his notebook:

"Life begins where thought ends."

A woman came to ask K why she cannot be honest. Things come out of her mouth that she doesn't really mean. Her husband does the same: he says one thing and does something entirely different.

K tells her that admitting you have lied without making excuses for it is beinghonest. Living without principles or ideals means facing facts and being completely in touch with them. That is honesty, and there is great beauty in it.

Golden Pills

Four men came to ask why drugs should not be used. How can K judge drugs if he has never used them?

K asked whether one has to get drunk to know what sobriety is, or whether one has to make oneself ill to find out what health is.

People use drugs to expand their minds psychedelically when they feel that life is dull, shallow, or meaningless, or when they want to experience something new.

However, drugs cannot permanently change a person's mindset. Pills can't end fear and sorrow, nor can they make us realise the truth.

To K, their own state was more important than their question. They were not a very healthy lot, but rather unhappy in their own way.

They were educated, yet appeared unkempt.

"No dynamic golden pill is ever going to solve our human problems. They can be solved only by bringing about a radical revolution in the mind and the heart of man. This demands hard, constant work, seeing and listening, and thus being highly sensitive."

The highest form of sensitivity is the highest intelligence, and no drug ever invented will give us intelligence. Without intelligence, there is no love; and without love there is no dynamic balance in humans.

"This love cannot be given by the priests or their gods, by the philosophers, or by the golden drug.