It was a strange day yesterday. That otherness was there all day yesterday, on the short walk, while resting and very intensely during the public talk. It was persistently there most of the night, and this morning, waking early, after little sleep, it continued. The body is too tired and needs rest. Strangely, the body becomes very quiet, very still, motionless but every inch of it very alive and sensitive.
As far as the eye can see, there are short small chimneys, all without smoke for the weather is very warm; the horizon is far away, uneven, cluttered up; the town seems to stretch far out endlessly. Along the avenue there are trees, waiting for winter, for autumn is slowly beginning already. The sky was silver, polished and bright and the breeze made patterns on the river. Pigeons stirred early in the morning and as the sun made the zinc roofs warm they were there warming themselves. Mind, in which are the brain, thought, feeling and every subtle emotion, fancy and imagination, is an extraordinary thing. All its contents do not make up the mind and yet without them, it is not; it is more than what it contains. Without the mind the contents would not be; they exist because of it. In the total emptiness of the mind, intellect, thought, feeling, all consciousness have their existence. A tree is not the word, nor the leaf, the branch or the roots; the whole of it is the tree and yet it is none of these things.
Mind is that emptiness in which the things of the mind can exist but the things are not the mind. Because of this emptiness time and space come into being. But the brain and the things of the brain cover a whole field of existence; it is occupied with its multiple problems. It cannot capture the nature of the mind, as it functions only in fragmentation and the many fragments do not make the whole. And yet it is occupied with putting together the contradictory fragments to make the whole. The whole can never be gathered and put together.
The activity of memory, knowledge in action, the conflict of opposing desire, the search for freedom are still within the confines of the brain; the brain can refine, enlarge, accumulate its desires but sorrow will go on. There’s no ending of sorrow as long as thought is merely a response of memory, of experience. There’s a “thinking” born out of the total emptiness of the mind; that emptiness has no centre and so is capable of infinite movement. Creation is born out of this emptiness but it is not the creation of man putting things together. That creation of emptiness is love and death.
Again, it has been a strange day. That otherness has been present wherever one has been, whatever the daily activity. It is as though one’s brain was living in it; the brain has been very quiet without going to sleep, sensitive and alert. There’s a sense of watching from infinite depth. Though the body is tired, there’s a peculiar alertness. A flame that is always burning.