A: Sir, we have been listening to you with all the attention of which we are capable, with our minds and with all our analytical capacities. We have covered every inch of the ground, and we no longer accept anything we do not understand. Between you and us there has been a verbal communication and there has been also a communication beyond words. By ourselves we have not been able to penetrate the verbal barrier and reach that understanding which lies beyond words. When I sit by myself, I find that all communication with myself remains at the verbal level. I wonder whether we could take up for discussion the problem of communication.
Tradition has classified communication into four different states: vaikharī, madhyamā, paśyantī, and parā. Vaikharī is verbal communication apprehended through the auditory organ. It is subject to distortion of various kinds. It is dependent on sequence. Madhyamā is apprehended through the internal organ (the mind), and not by an external sense organ. In madhyamā there is the sequence of the mentally conceived. In paśyantī there is no sequence, it does not have the attributes of priority or posteriority; perception and communication are undivided. In paśyantī there is a transcendence of association with the diverse objects of the world, and also of time and space; such a state is free of the distinctions of the cognizer and the cognized. Parā is the power of self-revelation of the Absolute, which is inseparable from itself. Parā is the true channel of communication.
P: A is right. In investigating what Krishnaji calls listening and seeing, which are the operational part of his teaching, it might be possible to explore communication. I do not think we have gone into the question of whether communication is a process or whether it is an instantaneous light.
K: Can we start with the verbal level and work it through?
P: The question involves not just a communication between the speaker and oneself, but it involves the very instrument with which we apprehend.
K: Shall we begin slowly with this? There is a verbal communication in which both of us understand the meaning of the word. In that communication, the word is the meaning, and the meaning can be understood by me and by you. Then communication also means listening, not only to the meaning of the word but also to the intention of the speaker in using the word. Otherwise communication breaks off. When we use the word, it must have a quality of directness in which there is no double meaning, and it must also have the quality of the real urge to communicate something. In that urge there must be affection, care, consideration and the feeling that you must understand; not that I am superior and you are inferior. And, in using the word, there must be the contact of intention conveyed in the quality of the voice. That means both of us at the same time, at the same level, with the same intensity must understand the word. There must be the contact of intention, only then is there real communication.
A: This is so. Our minds, listening to you, used to set up so many obstacles. All that is over. Now there are no barriers.
K: What is important in communication is not so much the word, although the word and meaning are necessary, but to meet each other at the same time, at the same level, with the same intensity.
A: To communicate with oneself is also important. What does communication mean in that context?
K: Can one communicate with oneself?
A: Yes. It is a question of becoming coherent to oneself.
K: Communication is generally understood to be between two or more people.
A: But it need not even be two people. It can be between a person and a book. All this is implied when we talk about communicating with oneself.
K: I do not think one can communicate with oneself.
A: Sir, in Sanskrit they use the word svasamvāda for ‘self-communication’.
K: I question that.
A: Why?
K: Even when you use the word ‘self-communication’, I do not think you communicate with yourself. You only observe what is going on. But the moment you use the word ‘communicate’, there is duality—in the sense that there is the division between you and the book, between you and me.
A: You said that there must be a certain sense of rapport, even for observing. I wonder if there is anything in that.
F: The message is the most important part in communication.
K: No; I can say something, and if you are not in a state of rapport you will twist it; you will twist the message. So the important thing is not the message but why at certain levels certain messages seem to be communicated to some people and not to others.
D: Why is the message you want to communicate not received by others?
K: We are talking of the quality of communication and not of what you communicate. When that quality is not there, you cannot communicate.
A: There is the communication of words, there is the communication of meaning and there is a communication that is beyond word and meaning.
F: The human race has developed certain instruments to take in messages through word and meaning, but they have no instruments to take in or to contact that which is beyond word and meaning. After all, radio and television have special instruments to receive. Do we have special instruments to receive?
D: The problem of communication arises only when the message is distorted or incomplete.
K: It is also in the meaning. You tell me something, and I twist it.
F: No. You tell me something. I listen to it with the instrument I have, and then translate it according to the instrument I have. There is no question of twisting it. We find that the reception of what you have to say remains at a lower wavelength. There is no question of twisting. What you say just does not seem to penetrate. It has nothing to do with the message.
P: Either the instruments have not been tuned or they are not there. Krishnaji, you can say what you will, but until the instruments are there, the message will not be received. Is the question one of the instruments being tuned right or of new instruments coming into being? That is the essential question.
K: A said that when we began contacting each other, there was a certain resistance, a certain intellectual objection to what was said. Now, he says, he has put all that aside, and he listens. Why should there have been resistance in the beginning?
A: We met after a gap of nine to ten years. There was conditioning—social, political, ideological; there was also the effort to understand you in terms of that conditioning.
K: P asks if there is a need for tuning the instrument.
P: Suppose you take a child and carefully remove it from all conditioning, it will still react, because conditioning is the instrument for transferring heritage. The instruments I have operate in a particular way; they are in themselves incapable of receiving in any other way but the known way.
K: Therefore, what is the question? Is the question one of taking these very instruments and making them sharp, vulnerable, sensitive or is it a question of new instruments coming into being?
D: May I say that the only available instruments we have are our eyes, our ears. They prevent us from understanding.
P: Through man’s evolutionary history the sensory instruments have been perfected. They have been trained to operate along one channel; every sense organ operates singly: when there is hearing there is no seeing; where there is seeing there is no hearing. The operation of sensory perception is compartmentalized. I am asking whether it is the same instruments that are to be used.
B: A referred to two things—a stage where there was resistance and a stage where there was no resistance, but the instruments were the same.
A: In the use of the instruments man has no choice then. There might be an imperfect use of the instruments.
P: It may be either an imperfect use of the instrument or it may be that an entirely new instrument is necessary. Let us ask Krishnaji. Let us pose the question to him. Do you say that it is the same instrument or do you say it is a new instrument? If I had received what was to be communicated, I would not question, I would not be sitting here, but the very fact that I have not received that which has to be communicated means that the instruments I have, have failed.
A: My point is that there is a certain level of communication, but it remains at the verbal level.
P: Listening to Krishnaji many things have been communicated—the instruments can receive. I am certain, however, that the explosion which needs to take place has not happened. Despite the flexibility of consciousness, its capacity for receiving, despite the capacity of the instruments operating together, and the understanding of the problem of time, the explosion has not taken place.
A: Can we impersonalize it? Can we understand objectively the problem of communication?
P: Up to the paśyantī level that you described, we understand; paśyantī is ‘seeing’.
A: Can we use the brain, which is our instrument, so that it does not create obstacles at any level?
K: What is the problem?
P: You have seen us through a span of time. Do you think we are able to communicate with you?
K: Obviously up to a point.
P: What is the hitch at that point?
K: Obviously, all communication is up to a point. I cannot go into this unless we begin very simply. I want to understand what the problem is. Communication implies telling you something and you listening to me, and either agreeing or disagreeing. That is, you and I have a common problem and we discuss it. We can only discuss the problem if we both see the common problem in its entirety, and if the meaning, the description each of us has, tallies. We can then say that we have understood each other.
Then the next point is: I may want to tell you something which you resist. I may be telling you something which is not accurate, and you have a right to resist. Then I tell you something which is true, mathematically true, and you say that it is not true because you have your own judgements and opinions. At that moment communication stops. I want to tell you something as between two human beings, not I as the guru and you as the disciple. I will express it as well as I can in words, but I know that what I want to say is not the word, nor the meaning of the word. I want to tell you something which can partially be described, and the rest of the meaning cannot be described. You take the description and not the other. Therefore, there is no communication. You are satisfied with the explanation and say that that is enough. I want to communicate something through the word, through the meaning, through the description, something which is not the word, which is not the meaning, but which is more than the description.
I want to tell you something which I feel very strongly, which I feel I must communicate to you. I describe, but you refuse to enter into that, and our communication comes to an end. Verbally we understand, but the ‘other’ cannot be communicated.
A: There is no refusal on our part; there is only incapacity.
K: I question it. Listen to what I said. I use words which you understand. You listen to the meaning, the word, the description, the explanation. But all that does not cover the thing which I want to convey to you. At first you refused to go beyond. You refused in the sense that you did not know what was being talked about. You felt that what could not be put into words did not exist.
I am not concerned with the word and the description. I want to tell you something now. How do I communicate what is not in the word or in the meaning, what is not a description, and yet is as real as the word and has as much meaning as the word? Words and explanations are not the things they refer to. That is the problem.
Now what is taking place in you and in me? Let us discuss that. I use words, my description is within the framework of words, and the words have space, they have a point of reference, a common meaning. You accept that; you follow up to that point and you stop there. You all do this in various degrees. Why? Why do you stop there? (pause) I think I know.
A: In this relationship of communication between us there has been a very clear understanding that one must never accept something which one does not comprehend. The mind has a capacity to manufacture beliefs, to take in what it would like to believe. I am trying to express the barrier my mind puts up. I say it will not do to take in anything that I do not understand.
K: Wait. You accept the word, the meaning, the description, the explanation, the analysis. You go as far as that. Now I tell you, as between two human beings, that I want to communicate something else over and beyond the word; and you do not move. I ask myself why. Either you do not consciously want to understand what I want to communicate beyond the word, because the understanding might upset you, or you resist because your whole training, heritage tells you: Do not go near it, do not touch it.
A: That is not so.
K: I am just questioning. This is generally what happens. You listen to the word, the meaning, the description and the analysis, and you stop there because you sense that there is a danger to your image. So the image comes in and says: Stop. Communication then comes to an end.
A: I do not think so.
K: I am putting this tentatively.
P: What happens, Krishnaji, is that one can follow you, move with you, move within oneself to the point when thought stops, to a point where there is an ending of thought. At that point when thought ends, there is a total incapacity of moving in this new field.
K: I am coming to that, P. I want to finish this. I ask myself consciously or unconsciously: Where is he leading me? I will not move because my image of myself is breaking down, and my security is threatened. I say that the description is good enough for me; I agree and stop there. My image of myself is more important, and so I am satisfied with a verbal understanding.
F: That is not so.
A: In the concrete instances which we are discussing, this is not true.
P: If you were to pose a question to me which threatened my image of myself, or even if I were to pose such a question to myself, there would be resistance. Yet by observing, moving step by step, there is no necessity to pose that question. If you pose the question, it is disastrous.
K: I am opening up the problem.
P: If I pose that question, everything rushes to protect the image, whereas if I move, observe step by step, then there is a fluidity that dissolves the image.
K: It dissolves only when you and I want to communicate something which is not merely words. Right? Very few go beyond that point; very few are willing to break their opinions, their conclusions, their images. In talking it over, I discover the image, you throw light on it, and I see. The very seeing is the ending of it.
There is the word, meaning, description, analysis, seeing without the image. That is real communication. Right? The difficulty comes in when we enter into something which is non-verbal. So, can there be communication about something which is beyond the word?
What is the quality necessary for both of us to understand something which is not the word?—Which means, to look at it, and not be caught in the description, in the explanation, in the meaning, in the word.
P: Look at what you have just done. You take us up to a point through analysis, thought, word. You sharpen intelligence, rarefy intelligence. You never proceed beyond that. So there is nothing, no description with which I can fill this emptiness.
K: Listen. To communicate in the sense we are talking about, that is, through word, meaning, description, analysis, all that and something more, the mind must not be caught in the word, in the meaning of words, in the description, or in the analysis. It must not be caught; it must be fluid, it must move. But you hold on to the words. The word, the meaning, the description, the analysis, is a process of thought and of memory. The word, cultivated, gathered through years, the meaning which you and I have given it, and the description through the word— all that is thought. Now you tell me something which is not the word. And I move all the time in terms of thought. I move with thought. Right? Communication is the word and communication is not the word. So the meaning, the description and the analysis—all that must be there, and the mind be so… (I do not know what word to use), so that you and I see the same thing, at the same time, at the same level, and with the same intensity. Otherwise our communication is verbal.
P: Now comes the crucial point.
K: Go slowly. We have come to this very carefully.
P: Is that movement in space a question of my feeling the movement of space in you?
K: Please, simple words, simple words.
P: Is it a question of contacting the movement of emptiness which you are communicating?
K: Wait, wait. I am not communicating anything. I am only communicating this, not that. There is no communication there; there is communication only here.
A: You are saying that you have gone through words and descriptions, but all the while we have held the hand of thought. This is something which cannot be held by thought.
K: Do look at what is taking place between you two, A and P. You have a meaning, you have the word, the description, the analysis. You have come to a conclusion, and she has not come to a conclusion; communication has stopped. The moment you come to a conclusion and the other man has no conclusion, communication is finished.
P: Krishnaji says that he communicates through words up to a point, then there is a communication for which no words can be found. How is that to be done? Again I am putting it into my own words. I say that up to the point where the mind becomes fluid, rarefied, communication through words is possible because there is a point of reference. An instant after, I ask him whether the movement in that space has to contact or be contacted by the movement of Krishnaji in silence. Is it then not a problem of Krishnaji and me at all?
K: Not at all; there are no ‘two’. What you have said is simple. Have you got it? (pause)
Two things can take place: The word, description, meaning, analysis and a conclusion; word, meaning, description, analysis, but no conclusion. The man who has got a conclusion stops there, and he cannot communicate with a man who has no conclusion. They cannot meet. They can go on discussing endlessly, but these two cannot meet.
Now we are asking: Is there something which is totally outside thought, which is the ‘other’? And, is the ‘other’ communicable? Communicability implies ‘two’. When you have no conclusion but I have a conclusion, there is an ending of communication. When there is a state where I have no conclusion and you have no conclusion, we both move, and we both smell the flower. Right? What is there to communicate when we are both smelling the flower? (pause)
F: Now I want to ask something. Is there such a thing as ‘co-experience’ or a ‘co-state’?
K: There is no such thing as ‘co-experience’ when there is experiencing.
F: I am talking about communication. Communication implies two.
K: Up to a point.
F: And ‘co-experience’?
K: When you and I are experiencing the sunset or sex, there is no two.
F: The instruments are two.
K: Of course.
F: The perceiver is not there.
A: Are these valid questions with regard to what we have talked of just now?
K: About what?
A: No conclusion, and them moving together. Are there any valid questions in that?
K: But we have not gone beyond the fact of coming to a conclusion. Take a little more time over that; we are slurring over it.
F: I see that there is also the threat to the image.
K: I am committed to a certain activity and I am going to translate, in terms of my activity, whatever you say. I say that I have understood you, but I am going to translate what I have understood in terms of my activity. I am committed.
P: If there is a frontal attack on my image, and you ask me whether I have an image of myself, I would say: Of course I have an image; but it is a peripheral thing. There can be a stripping, a denudation, a breaking of the image without a confrontation with the image. You can strip, denude the image, but do not ask me a frontal question about the image.
K: I want to go a little deeper into this image-making.
P: Every movement of thought is adding to the image, and every negation is a denudation of the image.
D: The motivations which have built the image consist in our being bound to a certain mode of operation. So long as the mind refuses to let go, we are preventing communication.
P: I think that approach is totally wrong. If you are going to be caught in trying to be free of the image, you will never be free of it.
K: You are right.
P: You said that image and conclusion end communication, but you have to be confronted with this.
K: What is going on all the time, consciously or unconsciously, is that I am committed, or I shall be committed, or I am being committed; therefore communication is only up to a point and not beyond. This is what is happening all the time.
P: The image is built up of a lot of little things; it is what it is. I have tried to tackle it for twenty-two years, and now I say: Let me leave it alone; let me move, let me see whether what is static can be freed. Then it will do what it will.
A: But these million years of the past, how am I going to tackle that?
F: Can two brains with different pasts, different histories, different experience, feel the same thing at the same level? How is it possible?
K: The way you put the question is wrong.
P: I cannot break the image which has taken a million years to build. Can I break this instrument and make it flexible, moving? That is all.
A: There is one point which needs to be taken into account. There are certain accretions, and they can be dropped as they are pointed out in communication. This kind of thing happens effortlessly.
P: All of us who have participated these thirty days know, understand up to the point when thought ends. I am certain that what has to happen has to happen there.
K: Let us put the same thing in a different way. Is there a possibility of communicating or of experiencing that which is not verbal? The whole implication of experiencing is wrong.
P: Let me understand that. It is a very important statement: The whole of experiencing is wrong.
K: The conclusion or the idea that a state can be experienced by two is wrong.
A: That is correct.
K: It can never be experienced. What does that mean? Any man who says, ‘I have experienced’, has not experienced. Right, sir? You see how extraordinarily subtle it is. When you and I are looking at the sunset, there is only the sunset. I believe it is the same with sex. It is the same with two people who are at the height of anger; there are no two people. They do not say: We are experiencing anger.
F: What about the registering that goes on in the brain?
K: What is that? Memory?
F: In the present there is no memory.
K: But it acts in the present.
F: The memory is not yet created.
K: Do not theorize. Watch. You and I see the sunset. When it is in front of us, both of us see it, both of us are silent because it is glorious. We do not stop all movement. All movement stops. There are no two people there.
F: Are there not two separate ‘I-consciousnesses’?
K: Both of us experience the sunset in its fullness; you and I do not talk about experiencing at that minute.
P: I would like to ask one question of you now, sir, because I feel it is important that your mind is also open to us. You took us through the state of the verbal; your mind was registering, and at some point the verbal ceased.
K: That means you and I were not forming any image.
P: Yes. At any moment of time, was there in you a registration of this?
K: I do not quite follow.
P: You moved in thought. You went through the whole process of communication through word, meaning, analysis. The point of flexibility came, and there was an ending of the analysis. Before the next analysis started, there was a gap. Has the brain any registration at all in this gap?
K: No.
P: Is there no part of your brain cells which bears the impact of this gap?
K: I wonder what you are talking about. I said no.
D: Is that because you are always in the gap?
K: What are you trying to say?
P: How do you know that there was no registration of the experience?
K: That is the next question. In experience, from the most trifling to the most sublime, is there not a recording?—as thought, as memory. There are the words, the description, and the analysis. This recording is a necessary process. What is not necessary, and irrelevant, is the conclusion. Then we are asking: Should the experiencing of something which is non-verbal necessarily be turned into thought, into description, into analysis, into words?
A: The process is now reversed.
K: See the subtlety of it. I started out with communication. Then there was an ending of thought. Then the feeling of that. The question now comes through a reverse process. Wait a moment. Am I right? (pause)
Now the next thing is: Do the brain cells register that thing, which then becomes the memory which says: I have experienced? Do you follow? Does that seeing, perceiving, the listening to something which is non-verbal, which cannot be experienced, register in the brain cells?
A: No.
K: Of course not.
P: You are saying something else. I would ask: Does seeing operate on the brain cells?
K: It is curious what happens. The brain is registering noise, it is registering impressions—everything is being registered. The brain is completely used to this; it accepts it. And that is a healthy, normal, rational state. Right? So it says: A strange phenomenon has occurred; I have registered it. Of course I have experienced it because it has been registered; it has been memorized.
A: I do not get it.
D: The moment it says that, the ‘other’ ceases to be.
K: Hold on a minute. Does every experience, except the ones which are useful for survival, have to register? I know I am asking the most absurd thing. I am asking: When you insult or flatter me, why should the brain register the insult or the flattery? The brain registers what is important. Why should the brain carry every superficial impact?
P: How can you ask why?
K: I will show you. You insult or flatter me. Why should I hold on to it? What is the point of holding on? Can I push it off, and, can the brain only hold things which are useful for it to survive?
F: You have introduced the word ‘survival’.
K: Why should I hold your insult or flattery? Why should it register? Because if I do register the insult, then there is the effort to cut it off; there is like and dislike.
F: How can I cut it off?
K: Freedom is the emptying of all this. Freedom is not the burden of carrying insults, regrets, happiness, fears, miseries.
A: May I ask you one question? Am I capable of living outside the groove of registering?
K: No.
A: Living in the groove, it will register. There is nothing I can do to stop registering.
K: If you see this, there is a state of intelligence which refuses to register. Only the active present can help here, not the past or the future.
P: When there is attention there is no registering; not only that, but attention wipes out what is registered.
K: That is good enough. If the brain realizes that it need not carry all the burdens of everyday incidents, that is good enough.