Sensitivity is wholly different from refinement; sensitivity is an integral state, refinement is always partial. There is no partial sensitivity, either it is the state of one’s whole being, total consciousness or it is not there at all. It is not to be gathered bit by bit; it cannot be cultivated; it is not the result of experience and thought, it is not a state of emotionalism. It has the quality of precision, no overtones of romanticism and fancy. Only the sensitive can face the actual, without escaping into all kinds of conclusions, opinions and evaluations. Only the sensitive can be alone and this aloneness is destructive. This sensitivity is stripped of all pleasure and so it has the austerity, not of desire and will but of seeing and understanding. There is pleasure in refinement; it has to do with education, culture, environment. The way of refinement is endless; it is the outcome of choice, conflict and pain and there is always the chooser, the one who refines, the censor. And so there is always conflict and contradiction and pain. Refinement leads to isolation, self-enclosing aloofness, the separation which intellect and knowledge breed. Refinement is self-centred activity, however enlightened aesthetically and morally. There is great satisfaction in the refining process but no joy of depth; it is superficial and petty, without great significance. Sensitivity and refinement are two different things; one leads to isolating death and the other to life that has no end.
While crossing the bridge, up in the sun-speckled wood, meditation was quite a different thing. Without any wish and search, without any complaint of the brain, there was unenforced silence; the little birds were chirping away, the squirrels were chasing up the trees, the breeze was playing with the leaves and there was silence. The little stream, the one coming from a long distance, was more cheerful than ever and yet there was silence, not outside but deep, far within. It was total stillness within the totality of the mind, which had no frontiers. It was not the silence within an enclosure, within an area, within the limits of thought and so recognized as stillness. There were no frontiers, no measurements and so the silence was not held within experience, to be recognized and stored away. It may never occur again and if it did, it would be entirely different. Silence cannot repeat itself; only the brain through memory and recollection can repeat what had been, but what had been is not the actual. Meditation was this total absence of consciousness put together through time and space. Thought, the essence of consciousness, cannot, do what it will, bring about this stillness; the brain with all its subtle and complicated activities must quiet down of its own accord, without the promise of any reward or of security. Only then it can be sensitive, alive and quiet. The brain understanding its own activities, hidden and open, is part of meditation; it’s the foundation in meditation, without it meditation is only self-deception, self-hypnosis, which has no significance whatsoever. There must be silence for the explosion of creation.
As the sun rose, a magnificent cloud caught it, sending streaks of blue light across the sky. It was light playing with darkness and the play went on till the fantastic cloud went down behind the thousand chimneys. How curiously petty the brain is, however intelligently educated and learned. It will always remain petty, do what it will; it can go to the moon and beyond or go down into the deepest parts of the earth; it can invent, put together the most complicated machines, computers that will invent computers; it can destroy itself and recreate itself but do what it will, it will ever remain petty. For it can only function in time and space; its philosophies are bound by its own conditioning; its theories, its speculations, are spun out of its own cunningness. It cannot escape from itself, do what it will. Its gods and its saviours, its masters and leaders are as small and petty as itself. If it’s stupid, it tries to become clever and its cleverness is measured in terms of success. It is always pursuing or being chased. Its shadow is its own sorrow. Do what it will, it will ever remain petty.
Its action is the inaction of pursuing itself; its reform is action that ever needs further reform. It is held by its own action and inaction. It never sleeps and its dreams are the awakening of thought. However active, however noble or ignoble, it is petty. There is no end to its pettiness. It cannot run away from itself; its virtue is mean and its morality mean. There is only one thing it can do—be utterly and completely quiet. This quietness is not sleep or laziness. The brain is sensitive and to remain sensitive, without its familiar self-protective responses, without its customary judgments, condemnation and approval, the only thing it can do is to be utterly quiet, which is to remain in a state of negation, complete denial of itself and its activities. In this state of negation, it’s no longer petty; then it is no longer gathering to achieve, to fulfil, to become. It is then what it is, mechanical, inventive, self-protective, calculating. A perfect machine is never petty and when it functions at that level it is a wonderful thing. Like all machines, it wears out and dies. It becomes petty when it proceeds to investigate the unknown, that which is not measurable. Its function is in the known and it cannot function in the unknown. Its creations are in the field of the known but the creation of the unknowable it can never capture, neither in paint nor in word; its beauty it can never know. Only when it is utterly quiet, silent without a word and still without a gesture, without movement, there is that immensity.
The brain is restless, an astonishingly sensitive instrument. It’s always receiving impressions, interpreting them, storing them away; it is never still, waking or sleeping. Its concern is survival and security, the inherited animal responses; on the basis of these, its cunning devices are built, within and without; its gods, its virtues, its moralities are its defences; its ambitions, desires, compulsions and conformities are the urges of survival and security. Being highly sensitive, the brain with its machinery of thought, begins the cultivation of time, the yesterdays, the today and the many tomorrows; this gives it an opportunity of postponement and fulfilment; the postponement, the ideal and the fulfilment are the continuity of itself. But in this there is always sorrow; from this there is the flight into belief, dogma, action and into multiple forms of entertainment, including the religious rituals. But there is always death and its fear; thought then seeks comfort and escape in rational and irrational beliefs, hopes, conclusions. Words and theories become amazingly important, living on these and building its whole structure of existence on these feelings which words and conclusions arouse. The brain and its thought function at a very superficial level, however deeply thought may have hoped it has journeyed. For thought, however experienced, however clever and erudite, is superficial. The brain and its activities are a fragment of the whole totality of life; the fragment has become completely important to itself and its relationship to other fragments. This fragmentation and the contradiction it breeds is its very existence; it cannot understand the whole and when it attempts to formulate the totality of life, it can only think in terms of opposites and reactions which only breed conflict, confusion and misery.
Thought can never understand or formulate the whole of life. Only when the brain and its thought are completely still, not asleep or drugged by discipline, compulsion, or hypnotized, then only is there the awareness of the whole. The brain which is so astonishingly sensitive can be still, still in its sensitivity, widely and deeply attentive but entirely quiet. When time and its measure cease then only is there the whole, the unknowable.
There is a red flower among the dark green leaves and from the verandah you only see that. There are the hills, the red sand of the river-beds, the big high banyan tree and the many tamarinds, but you only see that flower, it is so gay, so full of colour; there is no other colour; the patches of blue sky, the burning clouds of light, the violet hills, the rich green of the rice field, all these fade away and only this wondrous colour of that flower remains. It fills the whole sky and the valley; it will fade and fall away; it will cease and the hills will endure. But this morning it was eternity, beyond all time and thought; it held all love and joy; there was no sentiment and romantic absurdities in it; nor was it a symbol of something else. It was itself, to die in the evening but it contained all life. It was not something you reasoned out nor was it a thing of unreason, some romantic fancy; it was as actual as those hills and those voices calling to each other. It was the complete meditation of life, and illusion exists only when the impact of fact ceases. That cloud so full of light is a reality whose beauty has no furious impact on a mind that is made dull and insensitive by influence, habit and the everlasting search for security. Security in fame, in relationship, in knowledge destroys sensitivity and deterioration sets in. That flower, those hills and the blue restless sea are the challenge, as nuclear bombs, of life, and only the sensitive mind can respond to them totally; only a total response leaves no marks of conflict, and conflict indicates partial response.
The so-called saints and sannyasis have contributed to the dullness of mind and to the destruction of sensitivity. Every habit, repetition, rituals strengthened by belief and dogma, sensory responses, can be and are refined, but the alert awareness, sensitivity, is quite another matter. Sensitivity is absolutely essential to look deeply within; this movement of going within is not a reaction to the outer; the outer and the inner are the same movement, they are not separate. The division of this movement as the outer and as the inner breeds insensitivity. Going within is the natural flow of the outer; the movement of the inner has its own action, expressed outwardly but it is not a reaction of the outer. Awareness of this whole movement is sensitivity.