17th
We were going up the path of a steep wooded side of a mountain and presently sat on a bench. Suddenly, most unexpectedly that sacred benediction came upon us, the other felt it too, without our saying anything. As it several times filled a room, this time it seemed to cover the mountainside across the wide, extending valley and beyond the mountains. It was everywhere. All space seemed to disappear; what was far, the wide gap, the distant snow-covered peaks and the person sitting on the bench faded away. There was not one or two or many but only this immensity. The brain had lost all its responses; it was only an instrument of observation, it was seeing, not as the brain belonging to a particular person, but as a brain which is not conditioned by time-space, as the essence of all brains.
It was a quiet night and the whole process was not so intense. On waking this morning, there was an experiencing whose duration was perhaps a minute, an hour or timeless. An experiencing that is informed with time ceases to be experiencing; what has continuity ceases to be the experiencing. On waking there was in the very depths, in the measureless depth of the total mind, an intense flame alive and burning furiously, of attention, of awareness, of creation. The word G not the thing; the symbol G not the real. The fires that burn on the surface of life pass, die away, leaving sorrow and ashes and remembrance. These fires are called life but it’s not life. It’s decay. The fire of creation that is destruction is life. In it there is no beginning, no ending, neither tomorrow or yesterday. It’s there and no surface activity will ever uncover it. The brain must die for this life to be.
20th
The process was particularly intense yesterday afternoon. In the car, waiting, one was almost oblivious of what was going on around one. The intensity increased and it was almost unbearable so that one was forced to lie down. Fortunately there was someone in the room.
The room became full with that benediction. Now what followed is almost impossible to put down in words; words are such dead things, with definite set meaning and what took place was beyond all words and description. It was the centre of all creation; it was a purifying seriousness that cleansed the brain of every thought and feeling; its seriousness was as lightning which destroys and burns up; the profundity of it was not measurable, it was there immovable, impenetrable, a solidity that was as light as the heavens. It was in the eyes, in the breath. It was in the eyes and the eyes could see. The eyes that saw, that looked were wholly different from the eyes of the organ and yet they were the same eyes. There was only seeing, the eyes that saw beyond time-space. There was impenetrable dignity and a peace that was the essence of all movement, action. No virtue touched it for it was beyond all virtue and sanctions of man. There was love that was utterly perishable and so it had the delicacy of all new things, vulnerable, destructible and yet it was beyond all this. It was there imperishable, unnameable, the unknowing. No thought could ever penetrate it; no action could ever touch it. It was “pure”, untouched and so ever dyingly beautiful.
All this seemed to affect the brain; it was not as it was before. (Thought is such a trivial thing, necessary but trivial.) Because of it, relationship seems to have changed. As a terrific storm, a destructive earthquake gives a new course to the rivers, changes the landscape, digs deep into the earth, so it has levelled the contours of thought, changed the shape of the heart.
21ST
The whole process is going on as usual, in spite of cold and feverish state. It has become more acute and more insistent. One wonders how long the body can carry on.
Yesterday, as we were walking up a beautiful narrow valley, its steep sides dark with pines and green fields full of wild flowers, suddenly, most unexpectedly, for we were talking of other things, a benediction descended upon us, like gentle rain. We became the centre of it. It was gentle, pressing, infinitely tender and peaceful, enfolding us in a power that was beyond all fault and reason.
Early this morning, on waking, changing, changeless purifying seriousness and an ecstasy that had no cause. It simply was there. And during the day, whatever one did it was there in the background and it came directly and immediately to the fore when one was quiet. There is an urgency and beauty in it.
No imagination or desire could ever formulate such profound seriousness.
22ND
Waiting in the doctor’s dark, airless office, that benediction, which no desire can construct, came and filled the small room. It was there till we left. If it was felt by the doctor it’s impossible to say.
Why is it that there is deterioration? Inwardly as well as outwardly. Why? Time brings destruction to all mechanical organizations; it wears out by use and disease every form of organism. Why should there be deterioration inwardly, psychologically? Beyond all explanations which a good brain can give, why do we choose the worse and not the better, why hate rather than love, why greed and not generosity, why self-centred activity and not open total action? Why be mean when there are soaring mountains and flashing streams? Why jealousy and not love? Why? Seeing the fact leads to one thing, and opinions, explanations, to another. Seeing the fact that we decline, deteriorate is all important and not the why and wherefore of it. Explanation has very little significance in face of a fact, but to be satisfied with explanations, with words is one of the major factors of deterioration. Why war and not peace? The fact is we are violent; conflict, inside and outside the skin, is part of our daily life – ambition and success. Seeing this fact and not the cunning explanation and the subtle word, puts an end to deterioration. Choice, one of the major causes of decline, must wholly cease if it’s to come to an end. The desire to fulfil and the satisfaction and sorrow that exist in its shadow, is also one of the factors of deterioration.
Woke up early this morning, to experience that benediction. One was “forced” to sit up to be in that clarity and beauty. Later in the morning sitting on a roadside bench under a tree one felt the immensity of it. It gave shelter, protection like the tree overhead whose leaves gave shelter against the strong mountain sun and yet allowed light to come through. All relationship is such protection in which there’s freedom, and because there’s freedom, there is shelter.
24th
The process has not been so intense, as the body for some days has not been well, but though it is weak, now and then one can feel the intensity of it. It’s strange how this process adjusts itself to circumstance.
Yesterday, driving through the narrow valley, a mountain stream noisily making its way beside the wet road, there was this benediction. It was very strong and everything was bathed in it. The noise of the stream was part of it and the high waterfall which became the stream were in it. It was like the gentle rain that was coming down and one became utterly vulnerable; the body seemed to have become light as a leaf, exposed and trembling. This went on through the long, cool drive; talk became monosyllabic; the beauty of it seemed incredible. All the evening it remained and though there was laughter, the solid, the impenetrable seriousness remained.
On waking this morning, early when the sun was still below the horizon, there was the ecstasy of this seriousness. It filled the heart and the brain and there was a sense of immovability.
To look is important. We look to immediate things and out of immediate necessities to the future, coloured by the past. Our seeing is very limited and our eyes are accustomed to near things. Our look is as bound by time-space as our brain. We never look, we never see beyond this limitation; we do not know how to look through and beyond these fragmentary frontiers. But the eyes have to see beyond them, penetrating deeply and widely, without choosing, without shelter; they have to wander beyond man-made frontiers of ideas and values and to feel beyond love.
Then there is a benediction which no god can give.
27th
It was a beautiful drive through two different valleys, up to a pass; the sweeping mountainous rocks, fantastic shapes and curves, their solitude and grandeur, and far away the green, sloping mountain, made an impression on the brain that was still. As we were driving, the strange intensity and the beauty of these many days came more and more pressing upon one. And the other felt it too.
Woke up very early in the morning; that which is a benediction and that which is strength were there and the brain was aware of them as it is aware of a perfume but it was not a sensation, an emotion; they were simply there. Do what one will, they will always be there; there was nothing one could do about it.
There was a talk this morning and during the talk, the brain which reacts, thinks, constructs was absent. The brain was not working, except, probably, for the memory of words.
31St
Walking along the path that followed the fast-running stream, cool and pleasant, with many people about, there was that benediction, as gentle as the leaves and there was in it a dancing joy. But there was beyond and through it that immense, solid strength and power that was unapproachable. One felt that there was immeasurable depth behind it, unfathomable. It was there, with every step, with an urgency and yet with infinite “indifference”. As a big, high dam holds back the river, forming a vast lake of many miles, so was this immensity.
But every moment there was destruction; not the destruction to bring about a new change – change is never new – but total destruction of what has been so that it can never be. There was no violence in this destruction; there is violence in change, in revolution, in submission, in discipline, in control and domination but here all violence, in any form with a different name, has totally ceased. It is this destruction that is creation.
But creation is not peace. Peace and conflict belong to the world of change and time, to the outward and inward movement of existence, but this was not of time or of any movement in space. It is pure and absolute destruction and only then can the “new” be.
This morning on awaking this essence was there; it must have been there all night, and on waking it seemed to fill the whole head and body. And the process is going on gently. One has to be alone and quiet, then it is there.
As one writes that benediction is there, as the soft breeze along the leaves.
2ND
Woke up early this morning; unwashed one was forced to sit up and one has generally sat up in bed for some time before getting out of bed, But this morning it was beyond the usual procedure, it was an urgent and imperative necessity. As one sat up, in a little while there came that immense benediction and presently one felt that this whole power, this whole impenetrable, stern strength was in one, about one and in the head, and in the very middle of all this immensity, there was complete stillness. It was a stillness which no mind can imagine, formulate; no violence can produce this stillness; it had no cause; it was not a result; it was the stillness in the very centre of a tremendous hurricane. It was the stillness of all motion, the essence of all action; it was the explosion of creation and it’s only in such stillness that creation can take place.
Again the brain could not capture it; it could not record it in its memories, in the past, for this thing is out of time; it had no future, it had no past or present. If it was of time, the brain could capture it and shape it according to its conditioning. As this stillness is the totality of all motion, the essence of all action, a living that was without shadow, the thing of shadow could not, by any means, measure it. It is too immense for time to hold it and no space could contain it.
All this may have lasted a minute or an hour.
9th
Again this morning, on waking one felt it was an empty night; it had been too much, for the body, with the talk and seeing people, was tired. Sitting up in bed as usual, it was quiet; the country was asleep, there was no sound and the morning was heavy with clouds. Wherever it has its being, it came suddenly and fully, this benediction with its strength and power. It remained filling the room and beyond, and presently it went, leaving behind a feeling of vastness, whose height was beyond the word.
Yesterday, walking amidst hills, meadows and streams, among pleasant quietness and beauty one was again aware of that strange and deeply moving innocence. It was quietly, without any resistance, penetrating, entering into every corner and twist of one’s mind, cleansing it of all thought
and feeling. It left one empty and complete. Suddenly all time had stopped. Each one was aware of its passage.
10th
It had rained sharply and very heavily, washing off the white dust on the big round leaves by the unpaved road that went deep into the mountains. The air was soft and gentle and at that altitude not heavy; the air was clean and pleasant and there was the smell of rain-washed earth. Walking up the road, one was aware of the beauty of the earth and the delicate line of the steep hills against the evening sky; of the massive, rocky mountain with its glacier and wide field of snow; of the many flowers in the meadows. It was an evening of great beauty and quietness. The stream so boisterous, was made muddy by the recent, heavy rain; it had lost that peculiar bright clarity of mountain water but in a few hours it would again become clear.
As one looked at the massive rocks, with their curves and shapes and the sparkling snow, half-dreamily with no thought in mind, suddenly there was an immense, massive dignity of strength and benediction. It filled the valley on the instant and the mind had no measurement; it was deep beyond the word. Again there was innocence.
On waking early this morning, it was there and meditation was a little thing and all thought died and all feeling had ceased; the brain was utterly quiet. Its record is not the real. It was there, untouchable and unknowable. It would never be what has been: it is of never ending beauty.
It was an extraordinary morning. This has been going on for four solid months, whatever the environment, whatever the condition of the body. It’s never the same and yet the same; it is destruction and never ending creation. Its power and strength are beyond all comparison and word. And it’s never continuous; it is death and life.
12tH
Yesterday, walking up the valley, the mountains covered with clouds and the stream seemingly more noisy than ever, there was a sense of astonishing beauty, not that the meadows and hills and the dark pines had changed. Only the light was different, more soft, with a clarity that seemed to penetrate everything, leaving no shadow. As the road climbed, we were able to look down on a farm, with green pasture land around it. It was a green meadow, a rich green that is seen nowhere, but that little farmhouse and that green pasture contained all the earth and all mankind. There was an absolute finality about it; it was the finality of beauty that is not tortured by thought and feeling. The beauty of a picture, a song, a building is put together by man, to be compared, to be criticized, to be added up but this beauty was not the handwork of man. All the handwork of man must be denied with a finality before this beauty can be. For it needs total innocence, total austerity; not the innocence that thought had contrived nor the austerity of sacrifice. Only when the brain is free of time, and its responses; utterly still, is there that austere innocency.
Woke up long before dawn when the air is very still and the earth waiting for the sun. Woke up with a clarity that was peculiar and an urgency that demanded full attention. The body was completely motionless, an immobility that was without strain, without tension. And inside the head a peculiar phenomenon was going on. A great wide river was flowing with the pressure of immense weight of water, flowing between high, polished granite rock. On each side of this great wide river was polished, sparkling granite, on which nothing grew, not even a blade of grass; there was nothing but sheer polished rock, soaring up beyond measurable eyesight. The river was making its way, silently, without a whisper, indifferent, majestic. It was actually taking place, it wasn’t a dream, a vision nor a symbol to be interpreted. It was there taking place, beyond any doubt; it was not a thing of imagination. No thought could possibly invent it; it was too immense and real for thought to formulate it.
The immobility of the body and this great flowing river between the polished granite walls of the brain, went on for an hour and a half by the watch. Through the open window the eyes could see the coming dawn. There was no mistaking the reality of what was taking place. For an hour and a half the whole being was attentive, without effort, without wandering off. And all of a sudden it stopped and the day began.
This morning, that benediction filled the room. It was raining hard but there would be blue sky later.
13tH
As the path that goes up the mountain can never contain all of the mountain, so this immensity is not the word. And yet walking up the side of the mountain, with the small stream running at the foot of the slope, this incredible, unnameable immensity was there; the mind and heart was filled with it and every drop of water on the leaf and on the grass was sparkling with it.
It had been raining all night and all the morning and it had been heavy with clouds, and now the sun was coming out over the high hills and there were shadows on the green, spotless meadows that were rich with flowers. The grass was very wet and the sun was on the mountains. Up that path there was enchantment and talking now and then seemed in no way to [word left out] the beauty of that light nor the simple peace that lay in the field. The benediction of that immensity was there and there was joy.
On waking this morning, there was again that impenetrable strength whose power is the benediction. One was awakened to it and the brain was aware of it without any of its responses. It made the clear sky and the Pleiades incredibly beautiful. And the early sun on the mountain, with its snow, was the light of the world.
During the talk it was there, untouchable and pure, and in the afternoon in the room it came with a speed of lightning and was gone. But it’s always here in some measure, with its strange innocency whose eyes have never been touched.
21St
Again, it has been a clear, sunny day, with long shadows and sparkling leaves; the mountains were serene, solid and close; the sky was of an extraordinary blue, spotless and gentle. Shadows filled the earth; it was a morning for shadows, the little ones and the big ones, the long, lean ones and the fat satisfied ones, the squat homely one and the joyful, sprightly ones. The roof-tops of the farms and the chalets shone like polished marble, the new and the old. There seemed to be a great rejoicing and shouting among the trees and meadows; they existed for each other and above them was heaven, not the man-made, with its tortures and hopes. And there was life, vast, splendid, throbbing and stretching in all directions. It was life, always young and always dangerous; life that never stayed, that wandered through the earth, indifferent, never leaving a mark, never asking or calling for anything. It was there in abundance, shadowless and deathless; it didn’t care from where it came or where it was going. Wherever it was there was life, beyond time and thought. It was a marvellous thing, free, light and unfathomable. It was not to be closed in; where they closed it, in the places of worship, in the market place, in the home, there was decay and corruption and their perpetual reform. It was there simple, majestic and shattering and the beauty of it is beyond thought and feeling. It is so vast and incomparable that it fills the earth and heavens and the blade of grass that’s destroyed so soon. It is there with love and death.
It was cool in the wood, with a shouting stream a few feet below; the pines shot up to the skies, without ever bending to look at the earth. It was splendid there with black squirrels eating tree mushrooms and chasing each other up and down the trees in narrow spirals; there was a robin that bobbed up and down, or what looked like a robin. It was cool and quiet there, except for the stream with its cold mountain waters. And there it was, love, creation and destruction, not as a symbol, not in thought and feeling but an actual reality. You couldn’t see it, feel it, but it was there, shatteringly immense, strong as ten thousand and with the power of the most vulnerable. It was there and all things became still, the brain and the body; it was a benediction and the mind was of it.
There is no end to depth; the essence of it is without time and space. It’s not to be experienced; experience is such a tawdry thing, so easily got and so easily gone; thought cannot put it together nor can feeling make its way to it. These are silly and immature things. Maturity is not of time, a matter of age, nor does it come through influence and environment. It’s not to be bought, neither the books nor the teachers and saviours, the one or the many, can ever create the right climate for this maturity. Maturity is not an end in Itself; it comes into being without thought cultivating it, darkly, without meditation, unknowingly. There must be maturity, that ripening in life; not the ripeness that is bred out of disease and turmoil, sorrow and hope. Despair and labour cannot bring this total maturity but it must be there, unsought.
For in this total maturity there is austerity. Not the austerity of ashes and sackcloth but that casual and unpremeditated indifference to the things of the world, its virtues, its gods, its respectability, its hopes and values. These must be totally denied for that austerity which comes with aloneness. No influence of society or of culture can ever touch this aloneness. But it must be there, not conjured up by the brain, which is the child of time and influence. It must come thunderingly out of nowhere. And without it, there’s no total maturity. Loneliness – the essence of self-pity and self-defence and life in isolation, in myth, in knowledge and idea – is far away from aloneness; in them there is everlasting attempt to integrate and ever breaking apart. Aloneness is a life in which all influence has come to an end. It’s this aloneness that is the essence of austerity.
But this austerity comes when the brain remains clear, undamaged by any psychological wounds that are caused through fear; conflict in any form destroys the sensitivity of the brain; ambition with its ruthlessness, with its ceaseless effort to become, wears down the subtle capacities of the brain; greed and envy make the brain heavy with content and weary with discontent. There must be alertness, without choice, an awareness in which all receiving and adjustment have ceased. Overeating and indulgence in any form makes the body dull and stupefies the brain.
There is a flower by the wayside, a clear, bright thing open to the skies; the sun, the rains, the darkness of the night, the winds and thunder and the soil have gone into make that flower. But the flower is none of these things. It is the essence of all flowers. The freedom from authority, from envy, fear, from loneliness will not bring about that aloneness, with its extraordinary austerity. It comes when the brain is not looking for it; it comes when your back is turned upon it. Then nothing can be added to it or taken away from it. Then it has a life of its own, a movement which is the essence of all life, without time and space.
That benediction was there with great peace.
28th
It had been rather a hot sunny day, hot even at this altitude; the snow on the mountains was white and glistening. It had been sunny and hot for several days and the streams were clear and the sky pale blue but there was still that mountain intensity about the blue. The flowers across the way were extraordinarily bright and gay and the meadows were cool; the shadows were dark and there were so many. There’s a little path through the meadows going up across the rolling hills, wandering past farm-houses; there was no one on the path except for an old lady carrying a milk can and a small basket of vegetables; she must have been going up and down that path all her life, racing up the hills when she was young and now, all bent and crippled, she was coming up, slowly, painfully, hardly looking up from the ground. She will die and the mountains will go on. There were two goats higher up, white, with those peculiar eyes; they came up to be petted, keeping a safe distance from the electric fence which kept them from wandering off. There was a white and black kitten belonging to the same farm as the goats; it wanted to play; there was another cat higher up still, in a meadow, perfectly still waiting to catch a field rat.
Up there in the shade, it was cool and fresh and beautiful, the mountains and the hills, the valleys and the shadows. The land was boggy in places and there grew reeds, short and golden coloured, and among the gold were white flowers. But this was not all. Going up and coming down, there was during that whole hour and a half that strength which is a benediction. It has the quality of enormous and impenetrable solidity; no matter could have, possibly, that solidity. Matter is penetrable, can be broken down, dissolved, vaporized; thought and feeling have certain weight; they can be measured and they too can be changed, destroyed and nothing left of them. But this strength, which nothing could penetrate, nor dissolve, was not the projection of thought and certainly not matter. This strength was not an illusion, a creation of a brain that was secretly seeking power or that strength that power gives. No brain could formulate such strength, with its strange intensity and solidity. It was there and no thought could invent it or dispel it. There comes an intensity when there is no need for anything. Food, clothes and shelter are necessities and they are not needs. The need is the hidden craving, which makes for attachment. The need for sex, for drinking, for fame, for worship, with their complex causes; the need for self-fulfilment with its ambitions and frustrations; the need for God, for immortality. All these forms of need inevitably breed that attachment which causes sorrow, fear and the ache of loneliness. The need to express oneself through music, through writing or through painting and through some other means, makes for desperate attachment to the means. A musician who uses his instrument to achieve fame, to become the best, ceases to be a musician; he does not love music but the profits of music. We use each other in our needs and call it by sweet-sounding names; out of this grows despair and unending sorrow. We use God as a refuge, as a protection, like some medicine and so the church, the temple, with its priests become very significant, when they have none. We use everything, machines, techniques for our psychological needs and there is no love for the thing itself.
There is love only when there is no need. The essence of the self is this need and the constant change of needs and the everlasting search, from one attachment to another, from one temple to another, from one commitment to another. To commit oneself to an idea, to a formula, to belong to something, to some sect, to some dogma, is the drive of need, the essence of the self, which takes the form of most altruistic activities. It’s a cloak, a mask: The freedom from need is maturity. With this freedom comes intensity, which has no cause and no profit.