Public Talk 4, Madras, 27 December 1964

Krishnamurti: If we may, we’ll continue with what we were talking about the other day. We were saying that unless we understand this whole problem of desire, as a human being, there will be no order in society. I mean by order, cooperation. And without cooperation there will be only conformity, and that conformity leads to various forms of revolt, which is not revolution. And without understanding the very complex problem of desire, there can be no freedom for man, and, without freedom at every level of one’s being, life becomes a series of irremediable and insoluble problem. And to understand this question of desire we ought also to understand the other complex problem of love, for without love, we were saying the other day, there can be no cooperation, and a society that exists without cooperation must be a disintegrating society. And cooperation is one of the most difficult things, to not only verbally understand, but actually live in a state of cooperation. We do cooperate with authority, with ideas, with a person who dominates with his ideas, therefore cooperation is established on a basis of authority, and where there is authority there is no freedom. And to cooperate, not on the basis of personal motive, on an imperative necessity or for a profitable life, one must understand this question of love and desire.

We went into it the other day the beginning of desire, how it originates, which is, through perception, sensation, contact, and giving continuity to that sensation through constantly thinking about that particular sensation, pleasure or pain. We went into that, perhaps some of you were here, and those who were here can go into it further, but we’re not going to repeat it all over again because we want to go further into this matter. So we see for ourselves how desire arises, and society with its saints, with its religious sanctions demands that the human being suppress these desires, control them, sublimate them, or run away from them through various forms of escapes. And without understanding desire, mere discipline, that is efficiency, order, cooperation ceases to exist. So we are concerned this evening with the inquiry into the ways of desire and their contradiction, and also with discipline and the question of love. We also said the other day when we met that we would go into the mechanism of thinking and of time, because all these are related — desire, love, thought and time. And without understanding one, one cannot follow or live in the whole field of thought, time, love and desire.

When we use the word *understand*, we mean, don’t we, not merely intellectually, verbally or agreeing. When we talk about understanding, it is not only verbal communication, which the intellect translates according to the understanding of those words, but also when we use the word *understand*, understanding is not only the comprehension and the cognition of words and their meaning, not only intellectually, but we also mean with a great deal of feeling, not only mentally but neurologically, with the nerves, you’re your ears, with your eyes, with the… Understanding can only take place when there is a total comprehension with all your being. Understanding is not partial, is not fragmentary. You can’t say, ‘I understand what you’re talking about, intellectually.’ Such a statement has no meaning whatsoever; we mean really we understand the words you are using. Because you and I both speak English, we understand the meaning of those words. But understanding is much more profound, more real than the merely the understanding of words. When we say, ‘We understand,’ it means a total comprehension and therefore an action. To understand is to act, not understand and then act. That is, then understanding merely remains as an idea, which is not understanding, and separated from action. And then the whole problem arises: how to bring action to conform, or be in approximation to the idea. So there is always a contradiction if we don’t understand this usage of words, and the creation of ideas out of those words as ideas, and accepting or rejecting those ideas, and trying to conform, or approximate your action to those ideas. All these process is not a state of understanding. Understanding is a state of being totally, with all one’s being, nervously, emotionally, intellectually, with feeling, with everything that one has. And when there is such understanding, there is action.

Because life is action. Life is not an idea carried out in action; these two are not separate. Like you cannot have love as an idea. Love cannot be cultivated, it cannot be nurtured, produced. Either there is or there is not. Similarly, there is understanding or no understanding. To understand something one has to listen, and listening is an art. To listen to something implies that you are giving complete attention, not only to what the speaker is saying, complete attention to those crows, complete attention to the sunset, to the clouds, to the breeze among the leaves, complete attention to the various colours that are here, so that your whole neurological as well as the cells of the brain comprehend totally, and out of that total comprehension alone there is action which does not bring about contradiction and therefore conflict and endless pain and misery. So in that sense we are using the word *understand*. Now, we are trying to understand the way of desire, that is, to learn about it, not to suppress it, not to deny it, nor sublimate it. To understand something; that means to understand something you must give attention to it, you must learn about it, you must investigate it, you must explore it, you must go into it, which doesn’t mean that you yield or restrain. You understand it, you learn about it. And we said the other day that desire is the way of man. It exists in each one of us, it must exist, it’s part of life. And we’ve shown how desire arises. And people have been taught throughout the world, though especially who are concerned with religious matters to suppress desire, to be without desire, which is absolutely impossible. You’re only without desire only when you’re dead. But to understand desire requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of patience, inquiry.

Desire means, does it not, an unfulfilled appetite. Please, if I may point out, you’re not merely hearing a talk, but you’re partaking, share, sharing it. You are as active as the speaker; you’re not merely hearing a few words or few ideas, a few sentences, and then agreeing with them or disagreeing with them and going away. We are together sharing in the investigation of this question of desire. And to investigate you must be free to find out. It doesn’t mean that you agree or disagree. You don’t say, ‘We have been told by the great saints’ – whoever those people are — ‘that we must suppress it, we must control it, we must deny it, we must find ways of sublimating it.’ That way you don’t inquire, you don’t learn, you don’t find out. To find out there must be freedom from your tradition, from what people have said, which doesn’t mean you (inaudible) indulge in desire.

So we are going to investigate. That means we are going to find out the ways of desire, and in the understanding of desire comes discipline, not imposed, not the way of conformity, suppression, but in the very process of understanding desire comes discipline. As we said, desire is unfulfilled appetite, wish, longing. And either we yield to that longing, to that desire, or we suppress it because society says we must suppress it, religious organisations say that we must transmute it, and so on and so on. And in this process there is constant battle between the human being who is trying to understand or caught in desire, and the society which has established certain norms and the religious organisations with their beliefs that say you must conform to the pattern.

And desire is not in contradiction with itself. That is the first thing we have to understand: desire is not in contradiction with itself. Desire is in contradiction with the objects of its fulfilment. You understand? I fulfil my desire in one direction, then later I want to fulfil it in another direction. The two directions or the two states are contradictory to each other. I want to be a very rich man and also I want to lead a very saintly life — not saintly life – a religious life. It’s one of the most… easiest things in the world to be a saint. All that you have to do is to conform to a pattern which is recognised by society. Put on a loincloth, lead a very so-called outwardly simple life of exhibition, showing off that you are really simple, and society says, ‘What a marvellous human being you are.’ That is the outward show of simplicity. Inwardly you’re boiling, you’re tormented, you’re tortured by your passions, by your lust, by your ambitions, greed, identifications with a particular society. So we are not concerned what kind of life one leads inwardly, the saint. All that we are concerned is that he shall conform to the pattern of a saint, which is to be this and that. So it is comparatively easy to be a saint. But it’s much more difficult, it requires tremendous intelligence, understanding, to go into this question of desire and to be free from the conflict which the objects of desire create. And to understand the whole process of desire you need intelligence.

Intelligence is not the accumulation of experience and knowledge, but intelligence is the highest form of sensitivity. To be sensitive to everything, to the birds, to the squalor, to the poverty, to the beauty of a tree, to the beauty of a face, to the sunset, to the colours, to the reflections, to the movement of a leaf, to the bird on a wing, to the smile of a child, the tears, the laughter, this pain, the agony, the anguish, the misery of human being, to be totally sensitive to all that means to be intelligent. And you cannot be intelligent if you merely suppress or indulge. You can only be sensitive when there is an understanding.

We have desire, which is really a response to an appetite. I want something and I respond. This response depends upon the intensity of my feeling. If the feeling is intense, if the emotion is urgent, then there is an almost immediate fulfilment, either in thought or in action. Please, you have to follow this fairly closely because we’re going into the question of time, question of thought and love, and if we don’t follow this step by step – not authority; as far as we are concerned there is no authority, because authority is contrary to every state of sensitivity. A religious mind has no authority. A religious mind is a mind that is constantly in a state of learning and therefore sensitive. And learning ceases when there is authority. It doesn’t matter who it is, the authority of a government, the authority of your priest, the authority of your guru or a master, authority prevents your learning. It only makes you conform through fear, and a mind that is frightened at any level ceases to be a religious mind. So here, as far as we are concerned, there is no authority. When we use the word *follow*, we are using the word as a way of speaking that you’re following what is being said. Desire, which is the response of a sensation which has been given continuity by thought seeks fulfilment, and in the various forms of fulfilment there is contradiction, and out of that contradiction there is conflict, and where there is conflict, there is effort. So desire breeds effort if we do not understand the whole process of desire.

What is desire and how does that desire continue? We see how desire arises — perception, seeing, contact, sensation. Now, what gives continuity to desire? That’s the problem, that’s where we left off the other day. Surely, thought gives continuity to desire. That is, I like something, it gives me great pleasure to look at the sunset, or to look at a beautiful face, or to see a man in position, status, with power, money and all the rest of it. It gives me pleasure to be in that man’s position. I think about that pleasure, whether that pleasure be sexual pleasure or a subjective pleasure or a pleasure caused by outward objects. I think about it. I like your face. You’ve got a nice smile. And your smile, your face is attractive. I like it, I think about it. The more I think about it, the more I give strength to the desire which seeks fulfilment with that person, or through that idea, or through that object. So thought gives continuity to desire. If there were no continuity to desire, there would be no fulfilment. It would arise and go away. Please follow all this. It would come as a reaction – and you must have reaction, otherwise you’re a dead human being — it would come, a reaction, and there would be no continuity to that reaction if there was no interference of thought.

You observe it in your own life. You have pleasure, sexual or ordinary pleasure. You think about it, you create in your mind the images, symbols, words. And the more you think about it, the greater the intensity of that pleasure. And that intensity demands fulfilment, and in that very fulfilment there is a contradiction because you also want to fulfil in other directions also. So where there is fulfilment of desire there is contradiction — please follow all this — and hence to escape from contradiction, from conflict, from the pain of conflict we say… you say you must suppress desire. But what is important is to understand, not the suppression of desire or the shaping of desire or the sublimation of desire, but what gives it substance, what gives it the intensity, what gives it the urgency. If that can be understood, then desire has quite a different significance. You observe, when you have a pleasure you think about it. When you have pain, you also think about it. The thinking about that gives it vitality, gives it strength, gives it a continuity. So one has to go into the question of thinking if we would understand desire.

What is thinking? This is not an academic question. Now, wait; I’m asking you a question: What is thinking? There is a challenge, that is, what is thinking, and you’re waiting for a response, aren’t you? You’re waiting for a response from the speaker. You want to be told. If he does not tell it, you’re trying to find out from your own knowledge, or from the knowledge of what others have given to you, or you are looking, searching in your memory to find out what is thinking. So when a challenge is put to you, given to you, your memory responds. Please follow this carefully, because unless you go into this very carefully, step by step, you’ll miss the whole sequence of what is going to be said. There is… life is a challenge, it is a series of continuous challenges. Life is a movement, constantly changing, constantly moving, never the same, and that’s the beauty of life, because it’s living, not dead, and therefore it’s always giving us challenge every minute, consciously or unconsciously, whether we are aware of it or not. And when there is a challenge, we respond according to our conditioning, according to our memory, and that memory responds. This process of challenge and response, with an immediate response, or an interval of time, in the interval of time, which is the process of thinking. You are…?

So, I ask what is thinking, and probably most of you have not thought about it at all, and you’re waiting to be told. Now, which is, when you are told, you either agree or disagree, or your memory says, ‘That is not enough, that’s only part of it. There must be much more to this mechanism of thought.’ So we’re going to go into it. That is, where there is a challenge and a response, if the response is immediate, there is no process of thinking, isn’t it? If you’re asked your name, you say very quickly because you’re very familiar with your name and you reply immediately. You may have thought about it before, but the immediate response is instant. But if you’re asked a much more complicated question, you take time, the time interval between that challenge and response. In that time interval the mind is looking for an answer, searching, asking, waiting, questioning. That interval is what we call thinking, isn’t it? Thinking. And that thinking depends on your race, on your family, the knowledge, the memory, the imprints of time, your experiences, the pain, the sorrow, the innumerable pressures and the agonies of life, and that’s the background, and from that background you respond. And so the response to the challenge is always inadequate. You’re following? I hope I’m making myself clear. And that inadequacy to a response creates contradiction.

So one has to understand not only the mechanism of thinking but also storing up knowledge as a means of response to a challenge which is always new. So we respond always to something new with the old, with your tradition, if you’re a Hindu, if you’re a Christian with your tradition, if you’re a scientist with your particular knowledge and so your response is never total, it’s always fragmentary, and therefore a contradiction, a conflict, a pain, or a pleasure which you want to continue, which breeds again conflict. So we live in this process: challenge, response, inadequate response, contradiction, conflict, pain or pleasure, and the demand for the pain to cease and the pleasure to continue. And that is the cycle of our life.

And if you proceed further into this question of thinking, you come to a state of mind when you actually say, ‘I don’t know.’ You understand? That is the difference between the computer, electronic computer and the human mind. The human mind can say, ‘I don’t know,’ and he means, ‘I don’t know.’ There is no pretence, there is no waiting for an answer. ‘I don’t know’ is the most extraordinary state of mind, if you could really understand that state. Because most of us have so much knowledge about everything. We know about God because we have been told for five thousand, seven thousand or two million years. We are burdened with knowledge, with our experiences, which is the past. We know about God, we know about love, we know about sex, we know about almost everything that human mind has invented or thought about. And we’re always searching to find more, that is, adding more to our knowledge, and we never say, ‘I don’t know.’ And is it not necessary to always say, ‘I don’t know,’ therefore a mind that is always learning, and therefore a mind that’s always fresh, innocent, young. It’s only a young mind that says, ‘I don’t know,’ and he means ‘I don’t know,’ not that he’s waiting to be informed. Moment you know, it has already become the old. But a mind that is saying to itself all the time — not doubting. When you doubt, you’re already expecting confirmation or a denial. But when you say, ‘I don’t know,’ your mind is already young, fresh, eager, ready to find out.

Now, that is the way of thought. Thought exists only in time. Time, we mean by time the psychological state of postponement, of the idea, psychological idea of progress, of evolution, of reaching a height, accumulating and getting rid, a distance between *what is* and *what should be*, which is all a time interval, a time interval in space. Please, follow all this a little bit, because a mind that has no space is a dead mind. You must have space, you must have… the mind must have space, which is emptiness, and it’s only in that space a new state can come into being; it’s only in space a mutation can take place, a complete revolution. And we need a revolution in this world, psychological revolution, not economic, social revolution, but a really deep religious revolution. And such a revolution, such a mutation cannot take place if the mind is not totally empty, if there is no space in the mind. And the understanding of desire, the comprehension of time brings about, without seeking, this extraordinary space. Space is not created by the object in the space. Space does not create object. I’ll show it to you. That tree, which is the object, creates space, doesn’t it? That tree, because of it, there is space round it. We only know space in relation to the object and non-object. And a man who is caught in the space which an object creates is everlastingly a slave. It is only the mind that has space without object is a free mind.

Now, we human beings who have lived for over two million years, according to anthropologists, have developed, progressed, evolved through time. It has taken us two million years to be what we are. Two million years from the animal to supposed human beings, and we say, ‘We’ll have more time to progress, to evolve, another two million years or more.’ In that two million years we have suffered, we have lived in tremendous anxiety, with appalling loneliness. You know what loneliness is? Most of us know what anxiety is. Most of us know what sorrow is. Most of us are familiar with pain, physical and otherwise. Most of us know the agony of uncertainty and the pain, the corruption, the disgust, the impurities of one’s own thinking and life. But very few of us know the pain, the agony of complete loneliness. And man has lived with this loneliness for two million years, not knowing, escaping from it when he knows it, and inventing gods, heavens, hells, every form of fulfilment to escape from this extraordinary, intense sense of complete isolation, complete loneliness.

And we have lived for two million years, and we have invented time because we are the result of time. Our brain cells, our whole structure, the organism, the brain, everything is the result of time. Time being the idea that, ‘I will become, that I will be, I will achieve, I will progress, I will change, from now ’til tomorrow, from now ’til the next second.’ That is what we mean by time. We’re not talking of time as chronological time by the watch. We are talking of time of a mind that thinks in the field of gradualness. That is an invention. There is no tomorrow, we have invented tomorrow, psychologically. There is tomorrow by the watch, but actually, if you go into it, it is thought that has created tomorrow. The thought that has created tomorrow because tomorrow is going to be uncertain, tomorrow you have to go to the office, tomorrow you have to do certain things, you are thinking about it today. So thought actually creates time as tomorrow, and so we have time. And we use time as a means of change: ‘I am angry, I am ugly, stupid, but I will become’ — using time as a means to become, so there is always a postponement, there is always an avoidance.

Now, take the question: most human being, almost all human beings are violent. They have never been gentle. They don’t know what love is. They know what sex is, desire. They know the ways of agony, and being caught in agony, they say, ‘I must have time to get over it. I must have tomorrow, or next life, or I will get rid of it gradually.’ So thought invents time, thought is time. And a man who understands this process of desire, thought and time understands it, is a human being that lives completely in the present. He has no time as a means of achieving or accumulating. Because the moment you have time, what actually takes place? You’re not confronting… you’re not confronted with the actual, the factual challenge, the immediate. You’re only… you act in the immediate only when you have pain or intense pleasure. When you are intensely sexual, or intensely… have intense pain, you have to act. And most of us are incapable of looking facts as they are, seeing things as they are, *what is.* The *what is* is the fact, and we come to that with various opinions, ideas, judgments, which is the past. With the past we come to the fact and therefore create contradiction or the lack of understanding of that fact.

So a mind is free only when it is capable of meeting the fact, the *what is,* meeting the poverty, not some supreme challenge; there is no supreme challenge. Life is a challenge every minute, meeting poverty, meeting your boss in your office, how you meet your wife, the children, the bus conductor, the squalor, the beauty of a sunset, everything which are facts, and the fact of your own anger, jealousy, stupidity. The fact, not what you think about it, not what you should do about it. Then when you meet the fact, without any opinion, judgment, evaluation, then you’re living completely in the present. Then, to such a mind there is no time, and therefore you can act, because fact alone has the urgency of action, not your opinions, your desires, your ideals.

Look, sir, you have been brought up, most unfortunately, on ideals. Ideals are just words, they have no meaning whatsoever, they have no substance. They are just the barren children of a vain, thoughtless mind. You’ve been brought up on the idea, of the ideal of non-violence. You go round preaching all over the world about non-violence. That is the ideal. But the fact is that you’re violent in your gesture, the way you talk to your superior or your inferior. Please, listen to yourself, I’m just pointing it out. You are this. So you’re violent, violent in your gesture, in your thought, in your feeling, in your action. Now, why can’t we look at that violence? Why need we have ideals of nonviolence? See what has happened? The fact is you’re violent. The ideal is nonfactual, so you create a contradiction in yourself and therefore prevent yourself from looking at the fact of violence. When you look at a fact you can deal with it. Either you say, ‘I’m violent,’ and accept it, and not be a hypocrite, and say, ‘I am violent,’ and enjoy it. Or look at it without ideal. You can only look at an object or a fact of *what is* when there is no ideal, no opinion, no judgment, it is so. Then the fact brings about an intensity of action in the immediate. It’s only when you have ideas about the fact you postpone it. When you realise factually that you’re violent, then you can look at it, you can go into it, you can learn all about it, the nature of violence, whether it is possible to be free or not, not as an idea, actually.

So a religious mind has no ideals, no examples, no authority, because the fact is the only thing that matters, and that fact demands urgency of action. And you cannot but act immediately without an idea only when the mind has understood the whole question of desire, thinking, time, which prevents the mind from looking at the fact. You do it, sirs. Take your greed, take your anger, take what you like, your sexual appetite – doesn’t matter what it is — look at it, not with condemnation, judgment, evaluation, saying it’s right or wrong — you know, all the intellectual froth that men invent to avoid the fact. Take this poverty in this country. That’s a fact. And being caught in nationalism is going to prevent that fact being carried out. We’ll discuss it some other time.

So, a mind that is free from time, which is thought, which is desire, is a mind that is aware of love. For most of us love is sexual. Observe it in yourself, sir. For most of us love is jealousy. For most of us love is a contradiction of hate and love. We really don’t know what love is. We know sympathy, pity, perhaps a little generosity when it doesn’t cost too much. Don’t, sir, don’t laugh, sir, because this is what we are. You are facing all this, which is yourself, so you can’t laugh. If you can laughed at yourself, then it would have some meaning. But don’t just laugh at facts, which means you are avoiding. We know what love is only in terms of contradiction, pain and pleasure and agony and the jealousy, the pain of the… the brutality of jealousy, the violence of jealousy, but we don’t know what love is because we don’t know what beauty is.

If you don’t know what beauty is you’ll never know what love is. Not the beauty of a woman or a man or sex. Beauty. Beauty, w e have been trained, you have been trained to deny beauty because beauty has always been associated with pleasure, pleasure being the man or the woman. And if you would find God, people have told you, and especially these ugly saints, that you must have no woman, no pleasure, and therefore you deny. By denying beauty you have denied also love. Beauty isn’t pleasure. Beauty is… it’s in everything: the leaf — watch it, sirs; watch yourself — the beauty of a sunset, the beauty of the earth, of the hill and the curve of a hill, the flowing waters. The beauty of a fine, refined mind, good mind; the beauty of a face; the beauty of a smile. We have denied all that because we have associated beauty with pleasure, and pleasure with so-called sex and love.

Beauty is not that at all. Beauty is not something merely related to pleasure. To understand beauty one must have an extraordinary simple mind, that is, a mind unclouded by thought, to look at things as they are. To see the sunset with all the colour, loveliness, and light, that can look at it simply, without verbalisation, and to be in contact, in communion with it without the word, without the gesture, without the memory, so that there is not you and the object which you’re looking at. That extraordinary communion without the object, without the thinker and the thought and the object and of the experience, that sense of immense space, that is beauty. And that’s also love, and without love, do what you will, have social work, social reform, parliamentary government, you may be married and have children, without love you will find no answer to any problem in life. And with love you can do what you will. And with love there is virtue and there is humility