Small Group Discussion 5, Bombay, 23 January 1973
Achyut Patwardhan (AP): Could we start at that point where yesterday you said that if you can discover that point of stability, that thing which is not moved, then probably we will be able to deal with it. I think there is a great deal in this. Because it is not only with regard to chattering, but with regard to all the activities that we take up. Every kind of action that we take up ties us up unless we have that. So this is a personal experience of everyone of us. Could we explore that point? Could we take up that point?
Maurice Frydman (MF): I would like to start at the point at which I could not find an answer. The question of chaos, you know chaos in distinction from disorder. Order and disorder we can understand. But chaos, I don’t see how awareness can act on chaos. That is my question.
K: The root meaning of that word *chaos*…
MF: It is not disorder.
K: No, no. Chaos. The meaning of that word *chaos* in dictionary—what does it mean?
MF: Complete lack of structure.
K: Complete disorder…
MF: No, don’t use the word *disorder*.
K: All right. Complete…
MF: …lack of structure.
K: …lack of structure.
MF: Not a broken-up state, not a disorganized state.
K: Chaos.
MF: Chaos, pure chaos.
AP: Confusion. Chaos translated in terms of the mind is confusion, delusion, confusion.
MF: Delusion, confusion is structured.
Questioner 1(Q1): It is disorder.
AP: No. Order and disorder are two states which we can understand, but there is a state where the nature of the disorder is not clear; how the process is maintained is not clear.
K: No, sir. I would like to ask the meaning of that word, not you and I or he translate it, but according to a dictionary, what does it mean—a chaotic world. I think you will find disorder is included in it.
MF: You see, cosmos and chaos they talk. Cosmos and chaos.
K: Cosmos and chaos.
MF: The two opposites in Greek is cosmos and chaos.
K: Chaos, I know that. I am just wondering what it means.
MF: Chaos is not a word. Chaos is essentially something—if I may use the word—destructive. It absorbs, dissolves everything, it slaughters, it exterminates, without anything in return, it just destroys without anything new.
K: Yes, sir, proceed. What is it you are trying to say?
MF: Whether awareness has got any relationship to chaos.
K: Has awareness any relationship to chaos?
MF: Can awareness overcome chaos?
K: How do you bring this up?
MF: Imagine I am mad.
K: You are mad.
MF: Mad, stark mad.
K: Then there is no hope.
MF: No. Don’t say. I am asking about it. Don’t say there is no hope. When I ask a question at a moment of lucidity, can I by your awareness or my awareness overcome my madness? It is a call from the depth, let us say. Anyhow it is a legitimate call. Or take another case: there is war, there is destruction, there is an atomic bomb exploding, and we ask, what can we do? We are useless people. Can we *do* anything? You answer this.
K: I understand, sir, I understand, sir. But what is the question?
MF: The question is…
AP: Can we not keep it simpler still and say there is a state of attention, there is a state of inattention, and there is a state of confusion in which there is no awareness of anything?
MF: No, there is. If there is no awareness, it is confusion. There is awareness of chaos, but is the awareness potent? Is the awareness acting? Is the awareness operational? Can it *do* anything?
K: Is this a theoretical question?
MF: No, no, sir. Remember I told you, sir. You cannot get it. Chaos is in life, in daily life.
K: Is there chaos in daily life?
MF: Of course.
K: Whose life?
AP: My life.
K: Let’s come down to it so as to discuss it factually, not theoretically. Because theoretically we can go on spinning a yarn. Now, in one’s life, daily life, there is chaos, chaos being no order, disorder, utter confusion, no structure. You put all these words in opposition to cosmos where there is supposed to be order. So you are saying in one’s life there is this utter confusion, chaos, disorder.
MF: You know, it is dying without rebirth.
K: Wait, sir, wait, sir. And can awareness, attention, can an observation bring about order?
MF: Not out of disorder but out of chaos. I make this distinction, I insist on this distinction.
K: Yes, sir. But I would like, if I may, to be clear that we both have the same meaning to that word *chaos*. Right. We both say chaos is utter confusion, chaos is utter disorder, chaos is a state of mind in which confusion is rampant. That we say is chaos, right? And you are asking: in one’s life, in my life, there is such complete chaos. Can attention, awareness, observation, bring about an order which is not the opposite of chaos? You got it? Right. Is that right, sir? How do you know you are in chaos? I am not being clever, I just want to go step by step into it. How do you know you are in chaos? Why do you use that word at all? Please don’t mind, Frydman, I am not trying to be clever or argumentative or dialectical, verbal, opinion, all the rest of it.
AP: Where one’s own motivation is not traceable clearly, there I would call it chaos. Where the motivation can be traced, right or wrong, there may be disorder, but the motivation can be traced; I know exactly from what motivation the process springs. But if I am unable to delineate the source, the centre, of my motivation, then it becomes..
K: Frydman wouldn’t like to enter into the question of motivation. He finds himself in a state of utter confusion, utter disorder, lack of structure, complete chaos. He starts there, not motivation.
AP: No, I said that in order to…
MF: Lack of motivation is included.
K: Is included. Put all that.
AP: Not lack of motivation, unspecified motivation.
MF: All right, all right.
K: Now, from that state, through attention, can there be order? How do I know disorder, confusion? Why should I call it chaos? Ah, wait, wait. I want to go slowly, step by step. How do I know it? Why do I *call* it disorder? Either I have known order before, and in comparison to that I call the present state disorder, chaos, right?, so confusion.
MF: I don’t need to know pleasure to know pain.
K: No, no.
MF: I don’t need to know order to know disorder.
K: Sir, wait. I want to see why I give a name to something which I call disorder.
MF: No. Chaos.
K: The word *chaos*, the word *disorder* all that is included. I want to see why we give it a name.
MF: Disorder is broken-up order. So leave it, leave it out of this.
K: All right. Confusion.
MF: In chaos there is no past which was not chaos. The chaos is beginningless.
K: Ah, I see you are going back to the primordial.
MF: Whatever it is, it is in my mind, it is beginningless. It was always conflict. Now I have learnt something about awareness, and I am asking you—the man who pointed this out to me—will awareness work on chaos?
K: Of course it must.
MF: How does it?
K: That’s why I want to be clear, sir. I want to be very clear. Be patient, sir, be patient with me. I want to be very clear. The word *chaos* and the word *awareness.* And I am also very clear if chaos has no beginning or would you use ignorance has no beginning?
MF: I don’t know. I don’t know about beginnings. But it is now.
S. Balasundaram (SB): But there is a difficulty in this. When you say something is chaos, do we use the word to describe something that we have really felt into, or use the word and afterwards grope round it?
K: No, sir. Balasundaram, it is like this. My mind is in chaos, you follow?, completely out of focus, completely disoriented, everything is upside down, confusion. And I want to find out if, through awareness, through attention, that state can be totally altered, so that the mind can operate functionally very clearly in a mathematical order and so on. Right? What am I to do? Will attention bring about a state in which there is no chaos? I don’t know what that is, but what *I* know is there is chaos in my mind, everything is upside down, confused, a sense of hopeless disorder. I can’t create anything out of it. Right? Why am I concerned about it? I am just going slowly. Please, sir. Why am I concerned about it? Does it cause pain? Is it a sense of hopelessness, a sense of complete despair that I can’t do a thing about it? And somebody comes along and says to me, ‘Be aware of this whole phenomenon, and out of that you will have something quite different.’ Now, the fact is my mind is in chaos. We will stick to that word for the moment. And you come and tell me, ‘Be alert, be aware, and perhaps something quite different might come out.’ Right? So. How do I know I am in disorder, confusion or chaos?
MF: I know.
K: Are you quite sure? You tell me.
MF: I have nothing to trust.
K: I have put my faith in something before..
MF: No, no, no.
K: Wait, wait, just a minute. I think we will come to the same thing. I have put my trust in something before, and now I have no faith in anything because I see the futility of all my putting faith in things. I see the futility of it, and now I have no faith in *anything*, in myself or in you.
MF: Or in the universe.
K: Yes. The whole business. In governments, in religions, the whole business. I have no faith in anything. Is that a state of confusion?
MF: It is a part of it.
K: I question it. Having no faith—is that a state of confusion, chaos? I have no faith—listen to me—I have no faith in governments because I see governments cannot alter radically human nature. I have no faith in gurus because I see the gurus are equally caught in the same business, and I see religions. So my perception has created in me the intelligence to say that I have no faith in anything. That intelligence is not chaos.
MF: No, that is not chaos.
K: Therefore in which way do I reject, having no faith in anything?
MF: If I have no trust even in having no trust, you understand?
K: I understand. I have no trust. Wait, sir.
MF: If I trust my no trusting, then it is already something.
K: No, sir. I have no trust in *anything*, faith in *anything*. MF: Including myself.
K: I said that: including myself. Because I have put faith in everything before, given my faith to everything before, including my own experience, my own cunningness, my own sharpness of mind, and I too have dropped that. Now, why have I dropped it? Have I the right to say that I have no faith in anything until I have actually seen the structure of faith, dependency, and the total involvement in faith? No, sir, this is serious, I am not…
MF: Serious, but you see, you are taking me away, you are…
K: I am not.
MF: I will tell you how. You make my perception of chaos or the intuition of chaos subsequent to my seeing any faith and so on which is…
K: No, I don’t, sir. You brought in faith, I didn’t.
MF: You asked me: by what do I know that I am in chaos?
K: That is a basic, valid question.
MF: To which my very square answer is: I know it because I don’t trust anything. That means I am convinced that everything will fall to pieces. There is no structure.
K: No, sir, no. You have misunderstood my meaning. When I say I have no faith in anything including myself…
MF: Yours is a different ‘no faith’, and mine is a different ‘no faith’. Yours is liberation from belief, and mine is just absence of trust. Mine is a part of chaos and yours is a…
K: I question this.
MF: No, but I’ve learnt it for myself.
K: Look, Frydman. After all, this is a dialogue between two people. And you can’t say, ‘That is my…’
MF: No, I am not imposing, but that’s how it looks to me. To me it looks like this, that I realize that there is nothing to trust.
SB: This distrust or lack of faith is a sort of despondency, nothing else. But whereas you are saying…
MF: Yours is a state of freedom.
SB: …you reject it, it is useless.
K: So what is the question? Mine is, I have rejected faith blindly, right? I don’t know, but I have rejected blindly. Either you did it consciously, deliberately, knowing all the structure of faith and say, ‘I won’t touch it.’ Or you blindly say, ‘Faith is no good.’ Which is it?
MF: I don’t say that. I don’t say faith is no good. Maybe I wish I had some faith.
K: Wait a minute. Yes sir, yes sir.
MF: I find that I have nothing to trust, except maybe a few tiny little feelings of friendliness.
K: Oh, no, no.
MF: But I find that on the whole I have nothing to trust.
K: What made you come to that point?
MF: Everything passes, everything disintegrates.
K: You are not answering my question.
AP: It is very simple, to my mind. You give your faith to something. You work for it, you are willing to die for it, you are willing to live for it, and then you suddenly discover that that thing for which you were willing to do all this is not worth two rolls of pins because in itself it is unsound. Now something has gone. I have not rejected it. It has let me down. I feel that this distinction between my rejecting something as inadequate and my feeling let down by something to which I gave my heart, these are two…I wish he would see that these are two distinct… In one case…But it comes to that and it happens at various levels. And when it happens at one level, it happens at another level, it happens at a third level. It creates a state of mind in which there is a sense of missing a direction altogether. When you reject it intelligently, then it might give you…
K: But, sir, you are not rejecting faith intelligently. So what have you done? It has left you or you have left it?
AP: Actually it has left me. Isn’t it so?
K: Which is it?
MF: It has disintegrated. I did nothing to it.
K: Sir, then you take another person or another thing to have faith in. That has disintegrated, I hope this won’t disintegrate and I put my faith in that.
MF: And then when I lose faith in my faith, then I don’t do it anymore.
K: How did it happen that you have lost faith in faith?
MF: By reiteration. You know it is a cumulative process.
K: Yes, sir. Which means what? You are not answering. Either you positively, intelligently discard faith, or if that thing which you have put your faith in disappears. But you haven’t lost faith.
MF: No, I haven’t lost the willingness to believe.
K: Ah no, Frydman, do let’s be simple about this. I put my faith in you, and you wander away, but I have still my faith untouched. The object of my faith has gone. Having faith, I turn to him.
AP: Sir, this is the story of my whole generation. Why don’t you see that this is so? People put faith in creating a new society, in our age we do it in diverse ways. And in every one of those ways, all that they get is a sense of being let down by that particular faith. But they haven’t lost the idea that I want to change my society. You see, there is an undefined postulate. It is an undefined postulate from which all this confusion is arising.
K: But, Achyutji, Frydman says, ‘I have lost faith not only in things, in people, but I have no faith in myself.’
AP: Sir, that is what I am saying that this undefined postulate also I can’t explore because I am blocking my way of examining that also. I am blocking myself from examining anything further. It may be a sense of frustration. I am willing to go, you can cut it to pieces surgically, if necessary, but we must cut through this.
K: Do you agree to that, sir?
MF: Yesterday we discussed the chattering mind. Today we are discussing the chattering universe. It is the entire universe which is chattering away meaninglessly, and I am listening…
K: Sorry, I won’t accept that. No, I won’t accept that. I mean that’s your idea.
SB: Seriously, there is a difficulty in this. Neither is the chaos real nor is this awareness real. What are we discussing?
K: That’s just what I want…
AP: No, I’m going through it, sir. I’ll tell him.
SB: Only one side.
AP: Please, because this is very serious. Sir, it was one of the postulates like ‘terra firma’ that the State has an essentially moral… Because when we work for a new social order, then we had a certain place for the State, the State is a model—that model gets knocked down before our eyes. Then we see institutions, we see ideologies; one by one, we realize they have all feet of clay. We see that, it goes. K: But is your mind, at the end of it, chaotic in the sense we have used that word, and therefore it has no faith whatsoever in anything and in any person?
AP: Sir, shall we say that at this point the mind has lost its vitality to look things beyond?
K: Is that so?
MF: We don’t talk the same language, Achyut. You are talking of something else, and I am talking of something else. You talk from ‘has been’—you had the vitality, you lost it; there was order, you have destroyed it; you had hope, and you have lost it, and so on. I am not starting with a glorious past.
K: He says, ‘I am starting with chaos.’ Right?
MF: I am starting with chaos.
K: I don’t believe it. Sorry, it has no meaning.
AP: Sir, I can understand that position also, sir. Because if I have a son, he sees what has happened to me. Then my son will feel that if this fellow did this, this, this, and this and he has come to naught, and then he doesn’t see his way out either so that for him chaos is his inheritance.
K: Chaos is…?
AP: His inheritance.
MF: He has inherited chaos.
AP: I work, I work, I work.
K: Is that what you are saying? You have inherited chaos? Frydman, you’ve changed. You change pages each time…[*Laughs*].
MF: I am describing it as I see it. The father, the grandfather, the ancestors, all this is chaos. The present, my seventy years of life is chaos. K: Let’s start with that. I find myself in complete chaos. I have inherited, I am in that state. What am I to do? Is that right? I am completely mad; would I ask that question ‘What am I to do?’
AP: Sir, I see that it is my difficulty.
K: No sir, no sir.
MF: That means there is a moment of lucidity…
K: That’s it.
MF: …in which I am asking that question.
K: That is it, that is it. That is the whole thing. I never say I am *completely* mad. If I am completely mad, I won’t put this question.
MF: That is obvious.
K: So there is a moment of clarity, and in that moment of clarity I say to myself, ‘I am in chaos, what am I to do?’
MF: Correct.
K: My Lord! I said this at the beginning and you…
MF: Don’t nag.
K: Has clarity any relationship to chaos? Wait, sir, go slow, go slow. Does clarity see chaos, or some other factor comes into this? Clarity and chaos—what is the relationship between the two? Is there any relationship between the two? Why should clarity put that question, ‘What am I to do with regard to my madness or to my confusion?’? Clarity is clarity: it won’t put that question.
MF: Sir, there is a difference between saying I see nothing and saying I see darkness. The blind man says, ‘I see nothing.’ The seeing man says… K: I agree, I agree, you don’t have to bring that.
MF: Awareness says, ‘I see darkness, I see chaos’, while the non-awareness says, ‘I see nothing.’
K: I am asking you. Go slow. I want to see. I say there is clarity. Clarity has put this question that what am I to do with chaos?
MF: About chaos.
K: About chaos. Right? So there is a relationship between clarity and confusion. I am asking, is there? I am not saying it is not or it is. Is there any relationship between the two?
MF: Unless the confusion responds, there is no relationship.
K: Who has put this question?
MF: Clarity.
K: Does clarity put this question? Sir, do go slow, at a moment of clarity there is no question.
MF: You are putting some other clarity.
K: No, no. Clarity. I am using…
MF: Lucidity, clarity, call it any other…
K: Lucidity, clarity, clear perception.
MF: There is nothing absolute about it. It is just enough to put the question.
K: You see, you’re…
MF: Oh, no, sir. I am on my ground very much.
K: You are on your ground. I understand that, sir, but I am just asking—I may be wrong—I am just asking: what is the relationship between the two, between darkness and light?
MF: None whatsoever.
K: None whatsoever. Right? Then who is putting the question?
MF: Light.
K: Light? Is light putting the question?
MF: Or put it as love—not love, life. Something alive in me is both exposed to clarity and also choked by darkness.
K: Is it intelligence that is putting this question?
MF: Put it as intelligence.
K: So intelligence says I am in chaos—that word we have understood now—and what I am to do with it? Go on, sir, discuss it.
AP: I have a feeling, sir, that in this movement of intelligence, it is possible to realize that what has been causing this erosion which constantly hurts me is that there is a core of postulates which my mind is refusing to examine.
MF: I think mind says this: I want to do something about chaos. I want to act on chaos. The only thing that seems to be plausible is to say to myself: ‘Don’t try to do anything with chaos. Create any structure, not out of chaos, or with chaos, but independent of chaos. That means, do it entirely on awareness without any regard for chaos. Don’t meddle with chaos. In other words, create your own universe, your own cosmos, not out of the old chaos, but afresh. Out of awareness, if I may use that. Use awareness as the building material or intelligence or whatever it is, and don’t meddle with chaos.’ It comes to what you say—stand outside society and all those things. It comes about the same thing.
K: No, sir, I am not sure it does. What we are talking about since you… after half an hour’s discussion, what we are talking about is, Frydman asked: I am in complete chaos. Chaos is disorder, lack of structure, confusion and more. Can attention, awareness, bring about a change in this chaos? And I have lost faith in everything that man has put together—their gods, in their literature, in their work, in their society, in their worship, in their priests—everything, completely. I haven’t lost faith, but I have lost faith in the things in which I have invested that faith. You are following this? I have still the energy of faith, right? You don’t say, ‘I have no faith, the energy has gone.’ Do you?
MF: The desire to believe has gone.
K: But the energy is there.
MF: Oh, yes, maybe. But it doesn’t manifest itself.
K: Yes. So after talking this over we say now: clarity says, ‘I want to do something about chaos.’ From that we went on, whether there is any relationship between clarity and chaos, and we agreed that there is no relationship. Then who is putting the question?
MF: Intelligence.
K: What am I to do with regard to this chaos which I live in? Right? Who is putting this question? Is it intelligence that has been awakened in the mind, in seeing that everything I have put my faith in has no value anymore and also having some clarity and realizing that clarity has no relationship with chaos, that has awakened in me an intelligence?
MF: Correct.
K: That intelligence says, what am I to do? Right, sir, so far? This is his point.
MF: Correct.
K: According to Frydman, there are three points: clarity, intelligence that has insight that has been born by rejecting the whole structure of faith, and that intelligence says, how am I to deal with this chaos in which I live daily? Right, sir? Up to that we have come. Pupul Jayakar (PJ): I question whether intelligence can ever ask that question, whether that which asks the question is not a part of the chaos itself.
MF: As I see it, the chaos itself has got the immense capacity of swallowing up everything, digesting everything, destroying and annihilating, and it can inject digestive juices in the form of cunning questions and so on, which lead nowhere because they are all serving the purposes of chaos.
PJ: That is why I am asking: is intelligence asking that question?
MF: But intelligence also can be used for the purposes of chaos.
PJ: How are we using the word *intelligence*?
MF: Ordinary technological intelligence, it is not a different intelligence. It is intelligence, but anyhow…
K: Where is this leading us?
MF: I am not immune to chaos. That is my cry, that is my question, that is my complaint, that is my sickness.
K: I see, I understand.
MF: And I come to you and say, ‘Doctor, cure. Where is your cure? I am not immune.’
K: I understand. We are saying, ‘Look, I have no immunity against chaos, against this disease, and what am I to do?’
MF: That’s right.
K: Sir, most of us have this disease. Now, you call it chaos, I might call it despair, another will…
MF: …ignorance…
K: …ignorance, anything. Most people are in this state—that my life has no stability, is rather chaotic, destructive; what am I to do about it? Right?
MF: You said yourself: for a mind to function healthily, clearly, you need security.
K: Absolutely.
MF: There is no security.
K: Wait. Now you move away. Shall we discuss that point?
MF: All right, all right.
K: The mind, the brain cells, from childhood, need security. Right? That is, security, the feeling of being completely sure. Right?
MF: Protected from disorder.
K: Protected, sure, certain, safe, completely invulnerable. And the brain can only function sanely in that invulnerability. Right?
MF: Correct.
K: And it has to find it. It has to find that state in which there is complete security. I have invested my energy, my thought, my faith, in that. That has gone, right? I have invested my faith, my energy, my hope, my money, everything in a belief, that is gone, in a State, in guru, in books, in phenomenon, in ideal; all that has gone. Right? Now, why have they gone? Why has my mind, the brain, has rejected those?
MF: Because I have seen contradictions everywhere.
K: No. Which means what? No, sir, you’re not…
MF: The security has become insecurity. K: No, Frydman, just listen.
MF: I am listening.
K: I have put my faith in communism, and I see it doesn’t work out. It works in certain directions but, taken as a whole, it has not worked.
MF: It is too destructive, yes.
K: It is too destructive. All right. How have I come to that state to say, ‘I won’t touch communism’? Because I have investigated, I have looked at it, I have observed it, dispassionately, impersonally, talked to many, many people and read and so on—out. Which is, my mind has become intelligent enough to reject that, right? And I have rejected in the same way the church, the temple, the Upanishads, the Gita, the gurus. So the mind has become very intelligent. Right? That is, the brain cells themselves have investigated all this and have realized the utter falseness of it, and the realization is intelligence. Right? So in intelligence there is complete security, not in any of these things. So my mind …
MF: Security is an objective thing.
K: Wait. Not only objective, also inward.
MF: Yes, but objective in the sense that it is not in jeopardy, it is not all the time being assailed.
K: No, it’s not. Intelligence can never be assailed. It will meet things.
MF: Sir, if my brain is touched, my intelligence goes gaga.
K: If I am shot, if somebody hits me on the head with a poker, you know all the rest of it, gets damaged, of course it’s gone. I am not damaged now. Next minute the whole ceiling might fall on me, but at the present moment my intelligence is functioning, and that is the *completest* security. Not in the neurotic business…
MF: I see your point. So from vulnerability lead me to invulnerability. How do we proceed?
K: We have done it!
MF: No, but you have done it by the usual procedure of bringing me into the present. But the present always does not exist.
K: No. I have put my faith, I have given my fifty years of my life to something which I discover is utterly meaningless.
MF: That doesn’t give me security.
K: It does not give him security. But you see…
MF: Intelligence in that case, in my case, will always limit itself to saying this is secure, this is insecure.
K: No, sir. Intelligence is not yours or mine; it is intelligence. Not yours, Frydman’s or K’s or Mr. somebody else’s.
MF: Oh, no, no, my *own* intelligence, my *own* personal intelligence, private, intimate intelligence. Oh, don’t talk of common intelligence. Excuse me, sir, you mustn’t talk about it.
K: I don’t talk about common intelligence.
PJ: Krishnaji, I think is using *intelligence* in a totally different way.
K: I use the word *intelligence* which means having a mind that is very clear. Wait, wait. And also the meaning of that word *intellegere*, means ‘to read between the lines’. *Inter legere*—that is, to read between the lines. So the mind reads between the lines of the whole structure of faith.
MF: It’s all right. We’ve gone through it ten times.
K: Therefore it is intelligence—not common, yours, mine—it is intelligence.
MF: No, sir. It is your intelligence, it is your personal intelligence. Therefore you can’t share it with me.
K: No. On the contrary, on the contrary.
MF: You can talk to me, but unless my intelligence responds…
AP: Maurice, would you not say that in the case of an abstract noun either you have got it or you haven’t got it? You can say you haven’t got it. But about the quality and the characteristics, anyone has it, he must have the same thing. Otherwise the word would be meaningless.
K: We both of us can go through that door. It is not common door, or your door, or my door.
AP: Either you can say it is there or it is not there. That I can understand.
MF: Generalities, sir, are not facts.
K: It is not general.
MF: Abstractions are not facts.
K: I agree, but this is not an abstraction. I haven’t abstracted from the fact. I have abstracted nothing.
MF: Two intelligences can communicate. But to hypothesize it and make a one single intelligence out of it…
K: No, sir, you have misunderstood my usage of the word *intelligence*.
SB: Frydman says there is an abstraction. But I think the difficulty is real in this sense, you say, look, you have invested in this. This you thought was secure—the state, the money, the relative, the father, all that—a person goes on investing, leaning on these things. So a person who sees this, at a point he says there is no security in any of these, but we don’t *do* it actually. This is the problem, this is the problem. This is where the abstraction comes.
K: Sir, the word *abstraction* is ‘to draw’, ‘to draw away’, to abstract something, abstract from *what is*. The abstraction is a formula, a conclusion. Conclusion is not *what is*. We are dealing with *what is*. I have invested my faith in you or in that or in this. That is a fact; it is not a conclusion, it is not an abstraction. I find there is no security in that. Then I invest my security in an abstraction, hoping that there will be security there. And I realize that too. So the mind, examining, observing, investigating, listening to all this, says, ‘By Jove, there is no security at all except in observation of the mind which is highly intelligent.’ That’s all. It is not your mind, my mind, an abstract mind.
PJ: Probably he is trying to react to chaos with chaos.
K: We went into that, Pupulji. The difficulty there is I don’t know what to do with my accumulated misery—accumulated, all the things I have gathered through life. I have touched this, I have touched that, I have touched the other thing, everything disintegrates. And I am left where I was. At the end of seventy years I am like that. That is the problem. I build a house on sand, and nothing is stable; that’s all. I call that chaos, whatever you like. And I am in despair about it at the end of seventy years. And I am in misery.
MF: The theosophists are saying the world is cosmos, not chaos. They would deny my statement.
K: Oh, I don’t care what the theosophists say.
MF: At least they stick to their guns. What you see is not chaos, it is cosmos. If you see chaos, it is because it is in your mind.
K: That is a good old…
MF: I say no, but obviously. Then others say that God has created a good world, but we have made it bad by again, it is only the human world that is…
K: The original sin you are going back to.
MF: That’s it. So it is only our human world. Then somebody will say society is right, you are wrong, and so on. All right. I say the chaos is in me, or the chaos is without me—it doesn’t make any difference to me. I am living in chaos, and that is a very distressful state.
K: I agree, sir.
MF: So I am asking a very…
K: I have answered it. You won’t *listen*. I have answered it.
MF: Intelligence.
K: No! You see, you have made an abstraction of it. I haven’t made an abstraction of it. I say I put my faith in the church, and I say there is no stability there. I put my faith in communism, no stability there. I put my faith in the guru and no stability there, in the Gita, in the Bible, in Jesus, in everything I can touch I put, my wife, my children, my God, everything. And I say there is no stability. I know there is no stability because my intelligence has… I have investigated it, I have put my blood into it.
MF: Because I suffer.
K: Call it what you like.
MF: No, sir, there is a difference. All my fingers are burnt.
K: I suffer. All right. I have suffered. I’ll grant that. I have suffered. And I say I can’t trust anything anymore. Therefore I have suffered because I have put my faith in these things which have no stability. In the rejection of that, those things that have no stability, intelligence has come into being. It is a fact!
MF: But is intelligence only the memory of pain?
K: No! Intelligence is *not* memory.
MF: But I remember pain.
K: When I have rejected the church, the church has gone, finished.
MF: No, sir, it won’t. Because of the pain, the pain has broken my faith. Sir, the pain is important.
K: I understand that.
Questioner 1 (Q1): It’s a question of inner stability, not an outward thing.
K: Sir, we have been through this before you came in: that it is in here, not out there. We went through all that, and we’ve come to this point, so we can’t go back to it. Sir, I suffer. Suffering is pain; that is not an abstraction. Right?
MF: No. Concrete, tangible.
K: I suffer because of this and this, right? That is not an abstraction, that is a fact. And I say, why have I suffered? Because I have put my faith in something which I thought had stability, and I see *nothing* has stability. Now, what has happened to my mind that says I have put in this, this, all this has caused me such chaos, such pain in me? What has happened to me? What has happened to my brain?
MF: You have got clear.
K: Which means what?
MF: More intelligence.
K: That’s all.
MF: Correct.
K: That is the only security man can ever have.
MF: Must we suffer to be intelligent?
K: No. Must we suffer to be intelligent? Certainly not.
MF: Then how can we avoid it?
K: I will show it to you. Before, our education has to be changed.
MF: Correct, correct. I understand. K: The whole structure has to be changed so that my son doesn’t have to go through this hell to come to intelligence.
MF: I understand that, yes. You’ve talked for an hour, sir.
K: We had better stop. *Finito*.