excerpts

If you are really alert you will see that there is no guru, no path, no system or belief that can lead you to truth. There is only the exploration of the process of your own thinking... once you begin to know the ways of your mind and see what it is that lies behind your thought - why there is fear, why you seek security, and all the rest of it -  then you will never again follow anybody…

Now, the mind is controllable through education, is it not? That is what is happening throughout the world. The communists get hold of the mind through so-called education, through brainwashing, and so control it. That is essentially what all organized religions do. You are a Hindu or a Parsi, a Moslem or a Buddhist, because you have been brought up as one; your parents, your tradition, your priest, your whole environment, all help to condition your mind in that way.

So the mind is being influenced all the time to think along a certain line. It used to be that only the organized religions were after your mind, but now governments have largely taken over that job. They want to shape and control your mind.

 

 

On the surface the mind can resist their control. You will become a communist only if it pays you. If you think you will find God through Catholicism, you will become a Catholic, not otherwise. Superficially you have some say in the matter; but below the surface, in the deep unconscious, there is the whole weight of time, of tradition, urging you in a particular direction. The conscious mind may to some extent control and guide itself, but in the unconscious your ambitions, your unsolved problems, your compulsions, superstitions, fears, are waiting, throbbing, urging.

So there is a division in the mind as open and the hidden; inwardly, deeply, there is a contradiction. You remain a Hindu and cling to certain superstitions, even though modern civilization says they are nonsense. You are a scientist, and yet you marry off your son or daughter in the old traditional way. So there is in you a contradiction. There is also a contradiction in thought itself, in desire itself. You want to do something, and at the same time you think you should not do it. You say "I must" and "I must not".

This whole field of the mind is the result of time, it is the result of conflicts and adjustments, of a whole series of acceptances without full comprehension. Therefore we live in a state of contradiction; our life is a process of endless struggle.

We are unhappy, and we want to be happy. Being violent, we practise the ideal of non-violence. So there is a conflict going on, the mind is a battlefield. We want to be secure, knowing inwardly, deeply, that there is no such thing as security at all. The truth is that we do not want to face the fact that there is no security; therefore we are always pursuing security, with the resultant fear of not being secure.

So the mind is a mass of contradictions, oppositions, adjustments, emotional reactions, conscious as well as unconscious, and from there we begin to think. We have never explored the depths of our own consciousness, but merely act on the surface. We believe or do not believe; we pursue what we think is profitable; we compel ourselves to do something, or we argue, drift. This is our life. And in this state the mind says "I want to find reality".

But you can perceive what is real only when the mind is not in a state of self-contradiction.

the moment you discover that your mind is conditioned, the whole structure will collapse

Whether you believe or do not believe in God has very little importance. Actually, it is of no importance at all, because in your life it is just a matter of convenience, of tradition and social security. You are conditioned to believe in God, as the communists are conditioned not to believe, It is conditioning that makes you call yourself a Hindu or a Buddhist, a Moslem or a Christian. Your moralizing about God or truth and your quoting of the various scriptures has very little significance, because the moment you discover for yourself that your mind is conditioned, that whole, structure will collapse.

Being afraid, the mind finds security within the field of its own thought, convictions and experiences; it builds a haven of refuge through belief, and wards off the movement of life. This is the actual fact, whether you acknowledge it or not. The haven of refuge which the mind creates and remains within is the `me' and the `mine', and every form of disturbance that might shake the foundations of this refuge, the mind rejects.

Seeing that thought is transient, the mind creates the `I'-process, the `me' which it then calls the permanent, the everlasting, but which is still within the field of the mind, because the mind has created and can think about it.

What the mind can think about is obviously within the field of the mind, which is the field of time; therefore it is not the timeless, the eternal, though you may call it the Atman, the higher self, or God. Your God is then a product of your thought; and your thought is the response of your conditioning, of your memories, of your experiences, which are all within the field of time.

all creation takes place outside the field of time

Now, can the mind be free of time? That is the real problem. Because all creation takes place outside the field of time. All profound thinking, all deep feeling is always timeless. When you love somebody, when there is love, that love is not bound by time.

'the mind as we know it' - but there is another state of mind which we do not know

But the conditioned mind is incapable of finding out what lies beyond time. That is, Sirs, the mind as we know it, is conditioned by the past. The past, moving through the present to the future, conditions the mind; and this conditioned mind, being in conflict, in trouble, being fearful, uncertain, seeks something beyond the frontiers of time. That is what we are all doing in various ways, is it not?

But how can a mind which is the result of time ever find that which is timeless? All it can do is to mesmerize itself into a state which it calls the timeless, the real, or make itself comfortable with certain beliefs.

To find reality, the mind must transform itself; it must go beyond itself. And unless the mind is capable of receiving reality, it cannot resolve the innumerable problems that confront us in our daily life. It can adjust itself, defend itself, it can take refuge temporarily; but life is all the time challenging the defences that you so sedulously build around yourself. The house of your beliefs, of your properties, of your attachments and comforting ways of thinking, is constantly being broken into. But the mind goes on seeking security, so there is a conflict between what you want and what life's process demands of you. This is what is happening to every one of us.

So the mind is the result of time, it is caught up in conflict, in discipline, control; and how can such a mind be free to discover what lies beyond the limits of time? I do not know if this problem interests you at all. Everyday existence, with all its troubles, seems to be sufficient for most of us. Our only concern is to find an immediate answer to our various problems. But sooner or later the immediate answers are found to be unsatisfactory, because no problem has an answer apart from the problem itself. But if I can understand the problem, all the intricacies of it, then the problem no longer exists.

Most of us are concerned, I think, with how to live in this world without too much conflict. We want what we call peace of mind, which means that we do not want to be deeply disturbed. That is why we accept the immediate answers about death, about sorrow, and so on.

But these problems cannot be understood, nor can there be the cessation of conflict, until one begins to comprehend the whole process of the mind. When you begin to inquire into the mind you will make the inevitable discovery that the limits or frontiers of the mind are defined by that which is recognizable, and that these frontiers of the mind can never be stormed; so thought can never be free. Thought is merely the reaction of your experience, the response of memory; and how can such thought ever be free? Freedom means, surely, a state which has no beginning and no end; it is not a continuity of conditioned thinking based on experience with all its memories.

So thought, which is the response of memory, of accumulated experience, of one's particular conditioning, is not the solution to any problem; and I think for most of us this is a bitter pill to swallow.

Thought can never fly straight, because it is always influenced, it is always motivated, attracted, and that attraction is based on our conditioning, on our background, on our memory. So thought is merely mechanical.

Please, sirs, do see the significance of this. Machines are taking over more and more of the functions of the human mind. The electronic brain, which can do much better work in certain areas than you and I can, is based essentially on association, memory, experience, habit, which are also the ways of the mind; and through association, memory, experience, habit, you can never come to that which is free.

It is of fundamental importance, then, to be aware - not only at the conscious or surface level, but also at the deeper, unconscious level - of this extraordinary thing called the mind, with its frontiers of the recognizable. And can this mind - which is the result of time in both the chronological and the psychological sense - with all its demands, with all its variances and influences, be creative? Because that is what is needed, surely - a mind that is not merely productive or inventive, but in a state of creativeness which is not the product of the mind.

I do not know if I am making myself clear. This is a difficult thing to go into, and it will mean very little unless you have followed what has been said this evening - followed it, not just verbally, but at the same time watching your own mind.

In what we call thinking there is always a thinker apart from the thought, an observer different from the observed. But it is thought that has produced the thinker; there is no entity as the thinker who produces thought. Thought, which is the reaction of memory, produces the thinker. If there is no thinking, there is no `I' - though this is contrary to what you have always been told. You have accepted the idea that there is a permanent `I' - which you call the Atman, the higher self, and all the rest of it - that produces thought. To me this is sheer nonsense...

 

Editor’s note: Here, I would contend, K drifts into error. There is a background mental awareness, not the product of thought, but deriving from Universal Consciousness, which is the real self. This is the part of us that knows we are thinking.

 

What is important is for you to find out the truth of the matter for yourself. As long as there is this division of the thinker and the thought, as long as there is an experiencer who is experiencing, the mind is held within the frontiers of the recognizable, and is therefore limited. It is caught in the process of accumulation, attachment, and is therefore in a state of perpetual self-contradiction.

So in the mind there is this division of the experiencer and the experienced, the observer and the observed. Knowing this fact and recognizing its own limitations, how is the mind to go beyond itself?

Because it is only when the mind goes beyond itself that there is creation. Creation cannot take place within the field of the experiencer and the experienced, the thinker and the thought, because in that field everything is in a state of conflict; there is confusion, misery. As long as there is the experiencer and the experienced, the thinker and the thought, there is a division, a contradiction, and hence a ceaseless struggle to bring the two together, to build a bridge between them. As long as that division exists, the mind is held within the frontiers of the recognizable; and what is recognized is not the new. Truth cannot be recognized. What you recognize you already know, and what you know is not what is.

Now, how is the mind to free itself from the known? For only in the state of unknowingness is there creation, not within the field of the known. Bring the result of time, which is then known, how is the mind to die to the known:

Sirs, there is no answer, there is no system by which you can make the mind new, fresh, young, innocent. As long as the mind is functioning within the field of the known, it can never renew itself, it can never make itself totally free. So please listen to the question, and let the seed of the question penetrate into the unconscious; then you will find the answer as you live, as you function daily.

How is the mind to free itself from the known? It is only in that state of freedom from the known that there can be creation, which can then be translated as inventiveness, as the creativeness of an artist, as this or that - all of which is irrelevant, it has only social significance.

God, or truth, is that state of freedom from the known; it has nothing to do with your ideas about that state. The man who is seeking God will never find God. The man who practises a discipline, who does puja and all the rest of it, will never find out what is true, because he is still working within the field of the known.

It is only when the mind is dead to everything that it has experienced, totally empty of the known - not blank, but empty, with a sense of complete unknowingness - it is only then that reality comes into being.

 

Editor’s note: I would disagree. It is not a state of 'unknowingness' -- save a freedom from conditioning -- but a higher state of intuitive intelligence beyond the thinking mind.