The next question is, what is this observer, the observer who has separated himself from the observed? We see that when we are angry, at the moment of anger, there is no observer. At the moment of experiencing anything, there is no observer. When you look at a sunset, that sunset is something immense; when you look at it, there is no observer saying, ‘I am seeing the sunset.’ A second later comes the observer. Supposing you are angry, at the moment of anger there is no observer, no experiencer, there is only a state of anger. A second later comes the observer who says, ‘I should not have been angry,’ or ‘I was justified in getting angry.’ This is the beginning of division.
How does this happen? Why, at the moment of experience, is there a total absence of the observer, and how does it happen that a second later the observer comes into being? When you look at this flower, at the moment you observe it closely, there is no observer, there is only a looking. Then you begin to name the flower. Then you say, ‘I wish I had it my garden or in my house.’ Then you have already begun to build an image about that flower. The image and the image-maker are the observer, and the observer is the past, the “me’’ as the observer is the past, the “me” is the knowledge which I have accumulated, the knowledge of pain, sorrow, agony, suffering, despair, loneliness, jealousy. The observer looks at that flower with the eyes of the past. You do not know how to look without the observer, and therefore, you bring about conflict.
Now our question is, can you look not only at the flower but at your life, at your agony, at your despair, at your sorrow, without naming it, without saying to yourself, ‘I must go beyond it, I must suppress it’? Can you look at it without the observer? Take your particular form or particular tendency, or take what most people are – envious. You know what envy is. You are very familiar with that. Envy is comparison, the measurement of thought, a comparing of what you are with what you should be or what you would like to become. When you are envious of your neighbour – he has got a bigger car, a better house, and all the rest of it-you certainly feel envy, that is, you compare yourself with him and envy him more. Now can you look at that feeling without saying it is right or wrong, without naming it? Can you look at it without an image, Then you go beyond it. Instead of struggling with envy and trying to suppress it, observe your anger, your envy, without naming it. The naming is the movement of the past memory while it justifies or condemns. If you can look at it without naming, then you will see that you go beyond it.
The moment you know the possibility of going beyond ‘what is’, you are full of energy. The man who does not know how to go beyond ‘what is’, because he does not know how to deal with it, is afraid, he wants to escape. Such a person loses energy. If you have a problem and you can solve it, then you have energy. A man who has a thousand problems and does not know what to do with them loses his energy. So in the same way, look at your life, in which there is what you call love.
What is love? We are not discussing theories of what love should be. We are observing what we call love. Is love pleasure? Is love jealousy? Can a man love who is ambitious? Can a man love who is competitive? And you are all competitive, you want a better job, better position, better house, an image of yourself. Can you love when you go through all this tyranny, when you dominate your husband, your wife, your children? When you are seeking power, is there a possibility of love?
In negating what is not love, there is love. You have to negate everything that is not love, which means no ambition, no competition, no aggression, no violence either in speech, act, or thought. When you negate that which is not love, then you know what love is. And love is something that is intense, that you feel strongly; love is not pleasure. Therefore, one must understand pleasure, and not attempt to love somebody.
Now let us examine what the observer is-if you have the energy to go on with this. What is the observer? Surely the observer is the past-the past, be it yesterday or a few seconds ago, or the past of many years, many years as a conditioned entity living in a particular culture. The observer is the past. The observer is the total sum of past experiences. The observer is knowledge. When I say, ‘I know you because I met you yesterday’; when I say, ‘I am a Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, communist, Muslim’ – it is the past; I have been conditioned in the culture in which I have been brought up. So the observer is the past. This is obvious, isn’t it? The observer is within the field of time-to make it a little more complex. The observer is the past, which through the present modifies the future. And the future is still the observer. When he says, ‘I will be that,’ he has projected ‘that’ from past knowledge, either pleasure, pain, suffering or delight, fear, and so on, and says, ‘I must become that.’ That is, the past going through the present which becomes modified into the future, which is a projection from the past. So the observer is the past. That is, you live in the past, don’t you? Just think of it. You are the past and you live in the past. And that is your life. Past memories, past delights, past remembrances, the things that you enjoyed, and the failures, the lack of fulfilment, the misery, everything is in the past. And through the eyes of the observer you begin to judge the present, the thing that is living, moving. Are we going together?
So when I look at myself, I am looking with the eyes of the past, and therefore, I condemn, judge, evaluate, and say, ‘This is right, wrong, good, bad,’ according to the culture, the tradition, the knowledge, the experience which the observer has gathered. Therefore, it prevents observation of the living thing, which is the ‘me’. And that ‘me’ may not be me at all. I only know the ‘me’ as the past. When the Muslim says he is a Muslim, he is the past, conditioned by the culture in which he has been brought up. As the Catholic or the communist is. The whole thing is based on this. So when we talk about living, we are talking about Jiving in the past. And therefore, there is conflict between the past and the present, because I am conditioned as a Muslim, or whatever, and I cannot meet the living present, which demands that I break down my conditioning. And my conditioning is deliberately brought about by my father, my forefathers, keeping me in the narrow line of their belief, their tradition, their mischief, their misery. This is what is happening all the time-not only is there conditioning by the past, the culture in which we have lived, but also by every incldent1 experience, happening. We live in the past. I see a beautiful sunset and I say, ‘How marvellous that is, look at the light, the shadows, the rays of the sun, the green light, the hills,’ and it is stored up, and that memory acts tomorrow, saying, ‘I must look at that sun again, find again that beauty.’ And then I can’t find it, so I struggle to find it – go to a museum – you follow? – the whole circus begins.
Now can I look at myself with eyes that have never been touched by time? Time involves analysis, holding on to the past, this whole process of dreaming, recollection, gathering the past and holding it-all that. Can I look at myself without the eyes of time? Put that question to yourself. Don’t say you can or you cannot. You don’t know. And when you look at yourself without the eyes of time, what is there then to look? Don’t answer me, please. Do you understand my question? I have looked at myself with the quality, the nature, and the structure of time, the past, I have looked at myself through the eyes of the past. I have no other eyes to look with. I have looked at myself as a Catholic, or something else, which is the past. So my eyes are incapable of looking at myself, at ‘what is’, without time, which is the past. So I am asking a question, which is: can the eyes observe without the past?
Now let me put it differently: I have an image about myself, not only created by the culture in which I have lived, but I also have my own particular image of myself, apart from the culture. We have a great many images. I have an image about you, I have an image about my wife, children, political leader, my priest, and I have an image about what I should be, what I am not, as well as the image which culture has imposed on me. So I have quantities of images. Don’t you have them? (Audience responds: yes.) Delighted!
Now how can you look without an image? Because if you look with an image, it is a distortion – obviously. Isn’t it? I look at you with the image which I have of you, which has been put together because you were angry with me yesterday, the image that you are not my friend anymore, you are ugly, you are this or that. Now that image distorts the perception when I meet you next time. So that image is the past, and all my images are the past. And I daren’t get rid of any of those images because I don’t know what it would be like without an image. So I cling to one or two images. So the mind depends on an image for its survival.
Now can the mind observe without any image-without the image of the tree, the cloud, the hills, the flowing waters, the image of my wife, my children, my husband, my aunt, without any image in relationship. It is the image that brings conflict in relationship. Right? I cannot get on with my wife because she has bullied me. That image has been built up day after day, and that image prevents any kind of relationship; perhaps we sleep together, that is irrelevant. And there is a fight. So can the mind look, observe without any image that has been put together by time. That means, can the mind observe without any image? Which means to observe without the observer, which is the past, the ‘me’. Can l look at you without the ‘‘me’ as the conditioned entity?
Questioner: It’s impossible.
Krishnamurti: Impossible? How do you know it is impossible? The moment you say it is impossible, then you have blocked yourself. And if you say it is possible, it is also blocking yourself. But if you say, let’s find out, examine, go into it, then you will find the mind can observe without the eyes of time. And when it so observes, then what is there to be observed.
I started out learning about myself. I have explored all the possibilities, analysis, all that, and I see the observer is the past, and the mind lives in the past, because the brain has evolved in time, which is the past. And in the past there is security. Right? My house, my wife, my belief, my status, my position, my fame, my blasted little self-in that there is great safety, security. And I am asking, can the mind observe without any of that? And if it so observes, what is there to see, except the hills, the flowers, the colours, the people – is there anything in me to be observed? Therefore, the mind is totally free. And you may say, ‘What is the point of that being free?’ The point is, such a mind has no conflict. And such a mind is completely quiet and peaceful, not violent. And such a mind can create a new culture – a new culture, not a counterculture to the old, but a totally different thing altogether, where we shall have no conflict at all. That one has discovered, not as a theory, as a verbal statement, but as an actual fact within oneself-that the mind can observe totally and therefore without the eyes of the past, and therefore, the mind is something totally different.
How shall we proceed with this fairly obvious problem that our minds are conditioned, our minds are everlastingly chattering, never quiet? We try to impose quietness, or it happens casually, by chance. To proceed with this problem, to learn, to see, there must be the quietness of a mind that is not broken up, not torn apart, not tortured. If I want to see something very clearly, whether a tree, or a cloud, or the face of a person next to me, to see very clearly without any distortion, the mind must obviously not be chattering. The mind must be very quiet to observe, to see. And the very seeing is the doing and the learning. So what is meditation? Is it possible to consider, to observe, to comprehend, to learn, to see very clearly, without any distortion, to hear everything as it is, not interpreting or translating it according to one’s prejudice? When you listen to the bird of a morning, is it possible to listen to it completely, without a word cropping up into your mind, to listen to it with total attention, to listen to it without saying how beautiful, how lovely, what a lovely morning?
All that means that the mind must be silent, and the mind cannot be silent when there is any form of distortion. That is why one must understand every form of conflict, whether between the individual and society, between the individual and the neighbour, between oneself, wife, husband, children, and so on. Any form of conflict, at any level, is a distorting process. When there is contradiction within oneself which arises when one wants to express oneself in various different ways and one cannot, then there is conflict, struggle, pain, which distorts the quality, the subtlety, the quickness of the mind.
Meditation is the understanding of the nature of life with its dual activity, its conflict. Seeing the true significance and truth of it, so that the mind, though it has been conditioned for thousands of years, living in conflict, struggle, battle, becomes clear, without distortion. The mind sees that distortion must take place when it follows an ideology, the idea of what should be as opposed to what is, hence a duality, a conflict, a contradiction, and hence a mind that is tortured, perverted.
There is only one thing. That which is, ‘what is’, nothing else. To be completely concerned with ‘what is’ puts away every form of duality and hence there is no conflict, no tortured mind. So meditation is a mind seeing actually ‘what is’, without interpreting or translating it, without wishing it were not, or accepting it. A mind can only do this when the observer ceases to be. Please, this is important to understand.
Most of us are afraid. So there is fear, and the one who wants to get rid of fear is the observer. The observer is the entity who recognizes the new fear and translates it in terms of the old fears known and stored up from the past, and from which it has escaped. So as long as there is the observer and the thing observed, there must be duality and hence conflict, and the mind becomes twisted. And that is one of the most complicated states, something which we must understand. As long as there is the observer, there must be the conflict of duality. Is it possible to go beyond the observer – the observer being the whole accumulation of the past, the ‘me’, the ego, the thought which springs from this accumulated past? I hope, as the speaker is putting this into words, you are listening to and observing it very clearly, to see if it is possible to eliminate all conflict so that the mind can be utterly at peace – not contented; contentment arises only when there is dissatisfaction, which again is the process of duality. When there is no observer but only observing and hence no conflict, then only can there be complete peace. Otherwise there is violence, aggression, brutality, wars, and all the rest of the ways of modern life.
So meditation is the understanding of thought and discovering for oneself whether thought can come to an end. It is only then, when the mind is silent, that it can see actually ‘what is’ without any distortion, hypocrisy, or self-delusion. There are the systems and gurus who say that to end thought, you must learn concentration, learn control. But a disciplined mind, in the sense of being disciplined to imitate, to conform, to accept and obey, is always frightened. Such a mind can never be still; it can only pretend to be still. And the quiet mind is not possible through the use of any drug or through the repetition of words. You can reduce it to dullness, but it is not quiet.
Meditation is the ending of sorrow, the ending of thought which breeds fear and sorrow, the fear and sorrow in daily life, when you are married, when you are in business. In business you must use your technological knowledge, but when that knowledge is used for psychological purposes to become more powerful, to occupy a position that gives you prestige, honour, fame, it breeds only antagonism and hatred. Such a mind can never understand what truth is. Meditation is the understanding of the way of life, it is the understanding of sorrow and fear and going beyond them. To go beyond them is not merely to grasp intellectually or rationally the significance of the process of sorrow and fear, but it is to go actually beyond them. And to go beyond is to observe and to see very clearly sorrow and fear as they are. In that seeing very clearly, the observer must come to an end.