Public Talk 8, Saanen, 28 July 1964

Perhaps this morning we could leave all our problems – economic, personal relationship, ill-health and the many problems that surround us, national, international: wars, starvation, riots; if we could leave all these aside, for this morning at least — not that we are escaping from them, but perhaps we shall be able, if we could, approach them differently, with a fresher mind, with a clearer perception, a total approach so that these problems, going to the office, old age and so on can be tackled afresh, anew, with a greater vigour, with a greater clarity. It seems to me that the only revolution can take place with great love. Only love can produce the right revolution and every other form of revolution, economic, social and so on only breed disorder, more confusion and more misery. We cannot put the many parts together and hope to solve them. It’s only when there is love that we can have a total outlook, a total action and not a partial, fragmentary activity.

I would like this morning to talk about something that will include the totality of life, that is not fragmentary, that is a total approach to the whole existence of man. And to go into it rather deeply, one must, it seems to me, cease to plough everlastingly; that is, always have theories, beliefs, dogmas, which is, to plough the land of the mind and never sow. Most of us plough incessantly, discuss, tear things to pieces, but we never seem to sow so that out of that very activity we understand the whole business of life. Now, there are three things, it seems to me, that one has to very deeply understand to comprehend the whole way of life. That is: time, sorrow and death. To understand time and to comprehend the full significance of sorrow, and to abide with death demands the clarity of love. Love is not a theory, it isn’t an ideal. Either you have it or you don’t have it; you cannot be taught, it cannot be taught. You cannot have lessons how to love or a method by the daily practice of which you will know what love is. But I think one comes to it naturally, easily and spontaneously when we understand altogether the meaning of time, the extraordinary depth of sorrow and the quality of purity that comes with death. In understanding these things I feel we shall begin to comprehend what that thing that man has always been seeking and everlastingly failing, which is that quality of love that unites all action, the action at the office, action of relationship, the daily activities which bring such routine and boredom and weariness.

So if we could, not verbally, not theoretically or abstractly consider the nature of time, the quality, the structure of sorrow and the extraordinary thing that we call death. As I said, these three things are not separate. If I understand time, I shall understand what it is… what is death, I shall understand what is sorrow. But if we take time as a separate thing and deal with it separately, then our approach will be fragmentary, and therefore we shall never comprehend the extraordinary beauty and the vitality of love. So one can talk everlastingly about time, but we’re not doing that this morning, we’re not talking about it. We are not verbally or symbolically accepting the word and not go beyond the word. We are not merely dealing with the abstraction of time. We are dealing actually with time, time being the continuity of existence and duration.

There is the everyday time by the watch, twenty-four hours a day, a year, two million years, and that time has produced the mind with which we function. Mind is the result of time, the continuity of existence, and the perfection, the polishing of that continuity is called progress. And time is also that duration which thought has created as a means of achievement, as a means of action which will bring us a certain result. So we use time to progress, to achieve, to become, to find out what is true. We use time as a means of stepping stone to something far greater, as the development of certain faculties, the achievement of a certain result, a goal, perfecting a certain technique. In all that, time is necessary as a means of achieving an end, praiseworthy or not, so we think time is necessary to realize what is true, what is God, what is beyond all the travail of man.

So time, which is, from the moment of now to the moment when you shall have achieved. We use that time to cultivate character, to get rid of a certain habit, to develop either a muscle or an outlook. It has taken two thousand years for the Christian mind to be so conditioned that it believes in a saviour, in hell, in heaven, and it has taken thousands and thousands of years in the East to produce a certain quality of the mind. And we think time is necessary for everything that we have to do or to achieve, so time becomes a burden, time becomes a barrier to actual perception. To see the truth of something immediately and not take time over it; not to say to oneself, ‘I will eventually see. I will eventually, or in a couple of years, day after tomorrow I shall comprehend this extraordinary clarity.’ The moment you admit time, you’re not only cultivating the idolatry of time but also indolence, this quality… that laziness which prevents your from seeing the thing actually and immediately. And we think we need time to break through our conditioning which society, with its religions, with its morality, with its dogmas, with its competitive spirit and arrogance and all the rest of it, we think we need time to break through that, through the barrier because we think in terms of time; because thought is of time.

Thought is the result of the response of memory; memory which has been accumulated, inherited, acquired as a race, as the community, as a group, as the family, as the individual. That accumulation, the additive process of the mind has taken time. Mind for us is the memory, and whenever there is any challenge, any demand, the response of that memory, like the electronic brain which functions, as the brain, with association, responds, and the response is thought, and thought is, in its very nature is the product of time and the creator of time. Please, we’re not putting forward a theory, something that you have to think about. You have not to think about it, it is so. We may not go into all the intricate details, but those are the essential facts, so you have not got to think about, it is there; either you see it or don’t see it; you follow non-verbally, non-linguistically, analytically, but see actually it is so, then you will see how time deceives. And the… and the question is — not the problem — and the question is whether time can stop so that we can see life and the whole process of activity, the depth and the shallowness, the beauty, the ugliness, the extraordinary depth of something immediately, and that very perception is the action that destroys time.

Because without understanding time I shan’t understand sorrow. They are not two different things, as we try to make out. Life is not just going to the office, coming back to the family, sex, they’re not separate, individual, isolated incidents; they are all related to each other, deeply profoundly, intimately, and you cannot see this extraordinary intimacy if there is not the sensitivity that love brings. So to understand the nature of sorrow one has to really understand the nature of time and the structure of thought. If time is to have a stop — and you must have… time must come to a stop, otherwise you are merely repeating the information, like the electronic brain that you have… that has been given to it, or the information that has been given to it; like a human being that has been taught through millennia, informed, accumulated his experiences, knowledge, he merely repeats. Unless there is an end to time, which means an end to thought, there is mere repetition, adjustment, a continued modification. There is never anything new. We are glorified electronic brains; naturally you’re more independent and all the rest of it but the electronic brain, the computers are made along the same… in the same structure as the human mind. And if time does not come to an end, we are merely machines.

So to understand the nature of sorrow and the ending of sorrow, one must understand time and therefore understand thought. The two are not separate. In understanding time you will come upon thought, and in understanding thought you will understand the ending of time; they are interrelated. You cannot say, ‘I will search out the whole meaning of time and put thought aside’, the two are interrelated, you can’t separate them. So when that is very clear, then we can look at sorrow, and not worship it as the Christians do. What we don’t understand, we either worship or destroy it; either put it in a church, in a temple, in a dark corner of the mind and respect it, or we kick it away, throw it away, or escape from it. So we are neither worshipping sorrow nor escaping from it nor trying to avoid it. Because man, who for so may millennia has struggled with this problem of sorrow, and we go on with it, we become hardened to it, we accept it, we say that it’s part of life, life being sorrow, misery, confusion, ambition, greed, envy and all the little pleasures and all the miseries, worries, we say this is one more and we accept it. A man who accepts sorrow is not only a stupid man but a dull man. He makes his mind insensitive, brutal, superficial, and therefore he makes of life into something shoddy, a thing of mere pleasure, living in fragmentation, as the office, as the scientist, as the artist, as the sentimentalist, as the religious person and so on.

So to understand sorrow you not only have to understand time and thereby thought, you have also not to deny it, not try to run away, escape through entertainment, through churches, through organized belief, or accept it and worship it. This demands a great deal of energy; this demands attention, which is energy, and it’s only then you can understand sorrow. Sorrow, for most of us, is the beginning of self-pity, and to understand anything, there must be a ruthless operation of all self-pity. I do not know if you have observed yourself how sad you become moment you begin to say how… ‘I am like this; how… too bad.’ Moment there is self-pity, you have given the root to sorrow. And you justify that self-pity, rationalize it, give it all kinds of nuances, polish it, cover it up with gold, ideas, but it’s there, deep down. So a man who would understand sorrow must be free of this brutal, self-centred, egotistic triviality which is self-pity. Self-pity, whether you are diseased, whether you have lost somebody, whether you have not fulfilled, whether you are empty, dull, self-pity is the root of it. And then you can look at sorrow, neither worshiping it nor escaping from it, nor giving it an extraordinary spiritual, sublime significance, that you must suffer to find God, which is utter nonsense. It’s only the dull, stupid mind that puts up with sorrow. So there must be no acceptance whatsoever of sorrow; not the denial of it, not the acceptance of it. Then you have deprived sorrow of all sentimentality, all emotion — sentimentality, emotions spring from self-pity – and then you are able to look.

And I hope you are doing this with me this morning; not verbally accepting what is being said but actually being aware of one’s own state, the state of acceptance, the state of rationalizing, the excuses, the self-pity, the sentimentality, the emotional attitude towards sorrow, because all that is a dissipation of energy. To understand sorrow you must give your whole attention to it — your whole attention. That means in that attention there is no place for any deviation, no excuses, no sentiment, no rationalizing and therefore no self-pity whatsoever. I hope I’m making myself clear when I talk about this attention. In that attention there is not the shadow of trying to resolve sorrow, not trying to understand it. Every form of effort to understand, to rationalize, to escape denies completely that attention, that negative state of attention with which… or in which this thing called sorrow can be understood.

We are not analyzing sorrow — we will a little bit – not analytically investigating and thereby getting rid of it. We’re not doing that because that’s another trick, another trick of the mind that analyzes sorrow, thinks it has understood and is free of it – that is sheer nonsense; it’ll come up in another form. You may get rid of one kind of sorrow or another but we are talking sorrow as a total thing, whether it’s yours or mine or of a human being, there is sorrow as such. So to understand sorrow there must be the understanding of time and thought, and becoming choicelessly aware of all the escapes, the self-restrained, purposeful self-pity, all the verbalizations so that the mind, in understanding all this, becomes completely quiet in front of something which it has to understand. So there is no division between the observer and the thing which is observed. It is not that you are in sorrow, that you as the observer, as the thinker looking at sorrow or feeling sorrow, but there is only the state of sorrow, not you in sorrow. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. That is necessary, otherwise when you look at it as an observer, sorrow, you create conflict, and therefore dull the mind, therefore energy is dissipated and so there is no attention.

So the mind now, having understood the nature of time, thought, the root of self-pity, sentiment and all the rest of it, then thought, which has created all this complex, that has come to an end, therefore it’s capable of looking at it. Therefore thought being absent and therefore no time, therefore you are directly, intimately in contact with that thing which you call sorrow. And only when there is an escape, a desire to resolve it, a desire to worship it, to run away from it, then only sorrow is sustained. But when there is nothing of that, but the mind is directly in contact and therefore completely silent with regard to that fact, then you will see for yourself that the mind is not in sorrow at all. Then you will see, because the mind is completely in contact with the fact, then that fact resolves all the animalistic, the quality of time and thought, therefore there is a freedom from the fact, the ending of… (inaudible). And to understand this thing of which we are so frightened, of which man has created so many devious ways – worshiping it, denying it, creating innumerable beliefs, this thing of which man is so frightened is death.

To understand… (inaudible) you must come to it afresh, because you don’t know anything about death, do you? You have seen people die, you have seen… (inaudible) and the deterioration of old age… (inaudible) and the ending of life by accident, by disease… (inaudible) or suicide… (inaudible) but we don’t know actually, as you know sex, hunger, cruelty, brutality, you don’t know what death is, actually. Unless you know it actually, it has no meaning whatsoever. To be afraid of something of which you don’t know is an abstraction of thought, and thought, not knowing the fullness of what the implications of death is, is frightened of it; thought, not of the fact. Please go into it with me a little bit. If you died instantly, there would be no time to think about death and be frightened about it. But we have time, the gap between now and the time when death will come, and you have plenty of time to worry, to rationalize, to invent theories and carry over for the next life – if there is a next life – all the anxieties, the desires, the accumulated knowledge; so you have time… (inaudible) and so you admit life as something separate from death. Death is over there and you are… (inaudible) driving a car, sex, hunger, worrying, going to the office, accumulating knowledge… (inaudible) your books, you don’t know how to play the violin beautifully yet so you separate the two, and by saying, ‘I will resolve this; I will understand life and presently I will understand death.’ The two are not separate and that’s the most extraordinary thing to understand. As I said at the beginning, going to the office, having a family, digging in the garden, enjoying a good… (inaudible), your sex, the worries of money, time, thought, sorrow, death and love are all one, intimately related. You cannot separate the one, isolate the one and try to understand it. Most of us do… (inaudible) that’s all you are and you don’t know anything about death, or you’re a doctor, specialised is the nose and throat, or heart or whatever it is, and… (inaudible) you die. (Inaudible).

As I said, to deal with life fragmentarily is to live in constant confusion, contradiction, misery. You have to see the totality of life, and you can see the totality of it only when there is affection, when there is love. Love is the only revolution that will produce order. It is no good acquiring more and more knowledge about mathematics, about medicine, about history, about economics, and then putting all the fragments together—that will not solve a thing. Without love, revolution only leads to the worship of the state, or the worship of an image, or to innumerable tyrannical corruptions and the destruction of man. Similarly, when the mind, because it is frightened, puts death at a distance and separates it from daily living, that separation only breeds more fear, more anxiety, and the multiplication of theories about death. To understand death you have to understand life. But life is not the continuity of thought—and it is this very continuity which has bred all our misery.

So, can the mind bring death from the distance to the immediate? Do you follow? Actually, death is not somewhere far away—it is here and now. It is here when you are talking, when you are enjoying yourself, when you are listening, when you are going to the office. It is here at every minute of life, just as love is. If once you perceive this fact, then you will find that there is no fear of death at all. One is afraid, not of the unknown, but of losing the known. You are afraid of losing your family, of being left alone without companions; you are afraid of the pain of loneliness, of being without the experiences, the possessions that you have gathered. It is the known that we are afraid to let go of. The known is memory, and to that memory the mind clings. But memory is only a mechanical thing—which the computers are demonstrating very beautifully. To understand the beauty and the extraordinary nature of death, there must be freedom from the known. In dying to the known, there is the beginning of the understanding of death because then the mind is made fresh, new, and there is no fear; therefore, one can enter into that state which is called death. So, from the beginning to the end, life and death are one. The wise man understands time, thought, and sorrow, and only he can understand death. The mind that is dying each minute, never accumulating, never gathering experience, is innocent, and is therefore in a constant state of love. I wonder if you care to ask questions about this so that we can go into it in greater detail?

Questioner: Sir, what is the difference between your thought about love and the Christian thought about love?

Krishnamurti: I am afraid I cannot tell you. I am not thinking about love. You cannot think about love; if you do, it is not love. You know, there is a vast difference between sex, and the thought about sex which stimulates the feeling. The mind that is occupied with the mere enjoyment of sex, that thinks about sex, exciting itself by images, by pictures, by thoughts—the quality of such a mind is destructive. But the other thing, the feeling when there is no thought about it, is entirely different. Similarly, you cannot think about love. You can think about love according to the pattern of your memory, or in terms of what you have been told—that it is good, profane, sacred, and so on. But that thinking is not love. Love is neither Christian nor Hindu, neither Oriental nor Occidental, neither yours nor mine. It is only when you get rid of all these ideas of your nationality, of your race, of your religion, and all the rest of it—it is only then that you will know what it is to love. You see, I have talked this morning about death so that you might really understand this whole thing—not just while you are here in this tent, but throughout the rest of your life—and thereby be free of sorrow, free of fear, and actually know what it means to die. If now, and in the days to come, your mind is not completely aware, innocent, deeply attentive, then listening to words is utterly futile. But if you are aware, deeply attentive, conscious of your own thoughts and feelings, if you are not interpreting what the speaker is saying but are actually observing yourself as he describes and goes into the problem, then when you leave this tent you will live—live not only with exultation, but with death and with love.