The Natural State

In the words of U.G. Krishnamurti
Peter Maverick    1  ·  2  ·  3  ·  4  ·  5  

1983-1984—Amsterdam



You are affected by nothing, having erected an impenetrable armor around yourself. You feel nothing. Unable to understand your situation, you react through thought, which is your ideas and mentations. Reaction is thought. The pain you are going through there is clearly reflected without having to experience the pain here. Here there is no experience at all, that is all. In this natural state you feel the pain of others whether you personally know them or not.

Suffering is an experience and there is no experience here. You are not one thing and life another. It is one unitary movement and anything I say about it is misleading, confusing. You are not a person, not a thing, not a discrete entity surrounded by other things. The unitary movement is not something which you can experience.

What I am saying conflicts with your logical framework. You are using logic to continue that separative structure, that is all. Your questions are again thoughts and therefore reactive. All thought is reactive. You are desperately protecting this armor, this shield of thought, and are frightened that the movement of life might smash your frontiers. Life is like a river in spate lashing at the banks, threatening the limits that have been placed around it.

Your thought structure and your actual physiological framework are limited but life itself is not. That is why life in freedom is painful to the body. The tremendous outburst of energy that takes place here is a painful thing to the body, blasting every cell as it goes. You cannot imagine how it is in your wildest dreams. This is why it is misleading no matter how I put it.

Your belief in a unitary movement of life is just a groundless belief, lacking any certainty. You have cleverly rationalized what the gurus and holy books have taught you. Your beliefs are the result of blind acceptance of authority, all secondhand stuff. You are not separate from your beliefs. When your precious beliefs and illusions come to an end, you come to an end. My talking is nothing more than the response to your pain which you are expressing through questions, logical arguments and other mentations. There is nobody here talking, giving advice, feeling pain, or experiencing anything at all. I have nothing here of my own, no obvious or hidden agenda, no product to sell, no axe to grind, nothing to prove.
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The body is not concerned with the afterlife or any kind of permanency. It struggles to survive and multiply now. The fictitious beyond, created by thought out of fear, is really the demand for more of the same in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence. Such permanence is foreign to the body. Thought's demand for permanence is choking the body and distorting perception. Thought sees itself as not just the protector of its own continuity but also of the body's continuity. Both are utterly false.

You will continue doing what you are doing. Its meaninglessness does not even occur to you. I tell you, when you stop doing things out of hope and the desire for continuity, all you do along with it stops. You will stay afloat. But still the hope remains there, “There must be some way, perhaps I am not doing it the right way.” In other words, we have to accept the absurdity of depending upon anything. We must face our helplessness.

Your problems continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are not there the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent. Your problems and solutions go together. Because you want to use certain answers to end your problems, those problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by all these holy people—the psychologists, the politicians—are not really solutions at all. That is obvious. If there were legitimate answers there would be no problems. They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more meditations, love, and more and more of the same. That is all they can do.

The teacher, guru or leader who offers solutions is also false, along with his so-called answers. He is not doing any honest work, only selling a cheap, shoddy commodity in the marketplace. If you brushed aside your hope, fear and naiveté, and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods and never will. But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts.

All their philosophies cannot compare to the native wisdom of the body itself. What they are calling mental activity, spiritual activity, emotional activity and feelings are really all one unitary process. This body is highly intelligent and does not need these scientific or theological teachings to survive and procreate. Take away all your fancies about life, death and freedom, and the body remains unscathed, functioning harmoniously. It does not need your or my help. You don't have to do a thing.
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The body knows that it will come to an end in that particular form only to continue on in others. Those leaders who would direct your spiritual life cannot be honest about these things for they make a living out of fear, speculations about future life and the mystery of death. And as for you, the followers, you are not really interested in the future of man, only in your own petty little destinies.

You are all neurotic people. You talk against birth control, drone on and on about the preciousness of life, then bomb and massacre. It is too absurd. You are concerned with an unborn life while you are killing thousands and thousands of people by bombing, starvation, poverty and terrorism. Your concern about life is only to make a political issue out of it. It is just an academic discussion.

Are you interested in the future of mankind? Your expressions of anger, righteousness and caring have no meaning to me. It is just a ritual. You sit and talk, that's all. You are not at all angry. If you were angry at this moment you would not ask this question even to yourself. You sit everlastingly talking of anger. The angry wouldn't talk about it. The body has already acted with regard to that anger by absorbing it. The anger is burnt, finished then and there. You don't do anything. The body just absorbs it, that is all. If all this is too much for you, if it depresses you, don't ever go to the holy men. Do anything but don't expect the holy business to help you. It is a waste of time.

All moral, spiritual, ethical values are false. The psychologists, searching for a pragmatic way out, are now at the end of their tethers, even turning to the spiritual people for answers. They are lost and yet the answers must come from them, not from the encrusted, useless traditions of the holy business.

The so-called messiahs have left nothing but misery in this world. If a modern messiah came before you, he would be unable to help you at all. And if he can't help no one can. Truth is a movement. You can't capture it, contain it, give expression to it or use it to advance your interests. The moment you capture it, it ceases to be the truth. What is the truth for me is something that cannot, under any circumstances, be communicated to you.

The certainty here cannot be transmitted to another. For this reason, the whole guru business is absolute nonsense. This has always been the case, not just now. Your self-denial is to enrich the priests. Those in the holy business thrive on the stupidity and credulity of others. The politicians, similarly, thrive on the gullibility of man. It is the same everywhere.

When you die, the body is in a prostrate position. It stops functioning and that is the end of it. But in this case, the body somehow renewed itself. It happens daily as a matter of course now. The whole process took years to stabilize. For me, life and death are one, not two separate things. Just let me warn you that if what you are aiming at, enlightenment, really happens you will die. There will be a physical death because there has to be a physical death to be in that state. It is like playing around with controlling your breath because you find it amusing. But if you hold the breath long enough you choke to death.

To describe that state as a meditative state full of awareness is romantic hogwash. Awareness—what a fantastic gimmick used to fool themselves and others. You can't be aware of every step. You only become self-conscious and awkward if you try. I once knew a man who was a harbor pilot. He had been reading about passive awareness and attempted to put it into practice. For the first time he nearly wrecked the ship he was guiding. Walking is automatic and if you try to be aware of every step you will go crazy. So don't invent meditative steps. Things are bad enough. The meditative state is worse.

Any remedy I offered you would become part of your search, that is, more romantic stuff. That is why I never tire of saying that I have no wares to sell, much less offer you new and better methods, whereby you can continue your search. I deny the validity of that search entirely.

If your meditations, methods and techniques meant anything you wouldn't be here asking these questions. They are all means for you to bring about change. I maintain that there is nothing to change or transform. You accept that there is something to change as an article of faith. You never question the existence of the one who is to be changed. The whole mystique of enlightenment is based upon the idea of transforming yourself. I cannot convey or transmit my certainty that you, and all the authorities down through the centuries, are false. They, and the spiritual goods they peddle, are utterly false.
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There is no particular charm in being antisocial. I don't give people what they want. When they realize they will not get what they want here they invariably go away. As they are leaving for the last time I like to add the rider, “You won't get it anywhere.” When people come to talk they find themselves confronted with silence itself. That is why everybody who comes is automatically silent thereafter. If he cannot stand the silence and insists upon talking and discussing things he will be forced to disagree and walk out.

But if you stay long you will be silenced, not because it is over-persuasive, more rational than you are, but because it is silence itself silencing that movement there. That silence burns everything here. All experiences are burnt. That is why talking to people doesn't exhaust me. It is energy to me. That is why I can talk for the whole day without showing any fatigue. Talking with so many people over the years has had no impact upon me. All that I or they have said is burnt here, leaving no trace. This is not, unfortunately, the case with you.
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Any action that takes place at the conscious level of your thinking existence is a reaction. The one and only action is the response of this living organism to the stimuli around it. That stimulus-response process is a unitary phenomenon. There is no division between action and reaction except when thought interferes and artificially separates them. Otherwise, it is an automatic, unitary process and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Just as in reality there is no separation of action and reaction, so there is no room for the religious man in the natural scheme of things. The fresh movement of life threatens his source of power and prestige. Still, he does not want to retire. He must be thrown out. Religion is not a contractual arrangement, either public or private. It has nothing to do with the social structure or its management. Religious authority wants to continue its hold on the people but religion is entirely an individual affair.

I am simply pointing out the absurdity of this conversation. Once you get the hang of it you just go. I have no message to give mankind.
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We have set in motion irreversible forces. We have polluted the sky, the waters, everything. Only technology progresses, while we as a race are moving closer to complete and total destruction of ourselves and the world. Everything in man's consciousness is pushing the whole world, which nature has so laboriously created, towards destruction. There has been no qualitative change in man's thinking. We feel about our neighbors just as the frightened cave man felt towards his. The only thing that has changed is our ability to destroy our neighbor and his property.

Violence is an integral part of the evolutionary process. That violence is essential for the survival of the living organism. You can't condemn the hydrogen bomb for it is an extension of the policeman there and your desire to be protected. Where do you draw the line? You can't. We have no way of reversing the whole thing.
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Love and hate are the same. They have together resulted in massacre, murder, assassination and wars. This is a matter of history, not my opinion. It is the same thing everywhere. All our political systems have come out of that religious thinking, whether of the East or of the West. In light of these facts, how can you have any faith in religion? What is the good of reviving the whole past, the useless past? It is because your living has no meaning to you that you dwell on the past. You are not even drifting. You have no direction at all. You are just floating. Obviously, there is no purpose to your life, otherwise you would not live in the past.

What has not helped you cannot help anybody. No matter what I am saying, you are the medium of expression. You have already captured what I am saying and are making of it a new ideology and means to attain something. What I am trying to say is that you must discover something for yourself. But do not be misled into thinking that what you find will be of use to society, that it can be used to change the world. You are finished with society, that is all.
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God is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted happiness. No such thing exists. Your wanting something that does not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, liberation and all that stuff are just variations on the same theme, permanent happiness. The body cannot take that. The pleasure of sex, for instance, is by nature temporary. The body can't take uninterrupted pleasure for long. It would be destroyed. Wanting to impose a fictitious, permanent state of happiness on the body is a serious neurological problem. It never strikes you that the enlightenment and God you are after is just the ultimate pleasure, a pleasure, moreover, which you have invented.
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If I narrate the story of my life it is as if I am describing somebody else's life. There is no attachment, sentiment or emotional content for me when I consider my life. You get the wrong impression if you think I harbor any private, precious thoughts or feelings regarding my past.

What is the difference whether or not you find this freedom, this enlightenment, or not? You will not be there to benefit from it. What possible good can this state do you? This state takes away everything you have. While living, the body has died. Somehow, the body, having gone through death, is kept alive. Here you lose everything.

I am only saying that you must go find out for yourself if there is anything behind these meaningless abstractions being thrown at you, all the abstract, mystical terms used to seduce gullible people. Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologized.

Don't talk of higher centers and chakras. It is not these but glands that control the human body. It is the glands that give the instructions for the functioning of this organism. In your case, you have introduced an interloper, thought. In your natural state, thought ceases to control anything. It comes into temporary function when a challenge is put before it, immediately falling into the background when it is no longer needed.

Forget about the ideal society and the ideal human being. Just look at the way you are functioning, that is the important thing. What has prevented the organism from fully flowering into its own uniqueness is culture. It has placed the wrong thing, the ideal person, before man. The whole thing is born out of the divisive consciousness of mankind. It has brought us nothing but violence. That is why no two gurus or saviors ever agree. Each is intent upon preaching his own nonsense.

You want to know. You believe that in knowing my story you will be able to duplicate what happened to me. You, having been brainwashed all your life, can only think in terms of imitation. You think that somehow you can repeat what happened to me, that is all. That is your motive for coming.

It is not a new approach to that religious stuff. It is completely different. It has absolutely nothing to do with all that romantic, spiritual, religious stuff. If you translate what I am saying into religious terms you are missing the point entirely. Religion, God, soul, are all just words, ideas used to keep your psychological continuity intact. When these thoughts are not there, what is left is the simple, harmonious physical functioning of the organism.

I am able to describe the way this organism is functioning because your question has created the challenge here. Your questions create the conditions necessary for this response to happen. So it is describing itself, but that is not the way it is functioning. It functions in a state of not knowing. I never ask myself how I am functioning. I never question my actions before, during or after they occur. You can't fit me into a category. Any attempt on your part to translate what I am saying into your religious framework is to miss the point. I am not one of your holy men who say, “I am hanging so come hang with me.” All that stuff is a form of madness.

Your intellectual understanding, in which you have a tremendous investment, has not done one damn thing for you so far. You persist in the cultivation of this intellectual understanding knowing all the while that it has never helped you at all. This is amazing. When hoping and attempting to understand is not there then life becomes meaningful.

Life, your existence, has a tremendous living quality about it. All your notions about love, infinite bliss and peace only block this natural energy of existence. How can I make you understand that what I am describing has absolutely nothing to do with all that religious stuff? It is really something. It is no good throwing all this junk at me. Whatever hits this is immediately burnt. That is the nature of the energy here.

The spiritual people are the most dishonest people. I am emphasizing that foundation upon which the whole of spirituality is built. If there is no spirit then the whole talk of spirituality is bosh and nonsense. You can't come into your own being until you are free from the whole thing surrounding the concept of self. To be really on your own, the whole basis of spiritual life, which is erroneous, has to be destroyed. It does not mean that you become fanatical or violent, burning down temples, tearing down the idols, destroying the holy books like a bunch of drunks. It is not that at all. It is a bonfire inside of you. Everything that mankind has thought and experienced must go. The incredible violence in the world today has been created by the Jesuses and Buddhas.

It is the ones who believe in God, who preach peace and talk of love, who have created the human jungle. Compared to man's jungle, nature's jungle is simple and sensible! The so-called civilized man kills for ideals and beliefs while the animals kill only for survival. Because man is worse than other animals it made it necessary and possible for him to create the moral dilemma. When man first experienced the division in his consciousness, when he experienced his self-consciousness, he felt superior to other animals, which he is not, and therein sowed the seeds of his own destruction.
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Awareness is not a divided state. There are not two states, awareness and something else. There are not two things. It is not that you are aware of something. Awareness is simply the action of the brain. The idea that you can use awareness to bring about some happier state of affairs, some sort of transformation or God-knows-what, is absurd. Awareness cannot be used to bring about a change in yourself or the world around you.

All this rubbish about the conscious and the unconscious, awareness and the self, is all a product of modern psychology. The idea that you can use awareness to get somewhere psychologically is very damaging. After more than a hundred years we seem unable to free ourselves from the psychological rubbish, Freud and the whole gang.

Just what exactly do you mean by consciousness? You are conscious, aware, only through thought. The other animals use thought. The dog, for example, can recognize its owner in a simple manner. They recognize without using language. Humans have added to the structure of thought, making it much more complex.

Thought is not yours or mine. It is our common inheritance. There is no such thing as your mind and my mind. There is only mind, the totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by man, handed down from generation to generation. We are all thinking and functioning in that thought sphere just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing. The thoughts are there to function and communicate in this world sanely and intelligently.

Knowledge—that is all that is there. The self is nothing more than the totality of the inherited knowledge passed on to us from generation to generation. You teach the child to distinguish between colors, to read, to imitate manners. It is relative to each culture. Gestures and expressions constituted the first language. Later, words were added on. We still use gestures to supplement our spoken words because we feel that words alone are inadequate to fully express what we want to convey.

All this is not to say that we can really know anything about thought. We can't. You become conscious of thought only when you make it an object of thought. Otherwise, you don't even know you are thinking. We use thought only to understand something out there, to remember something or to achieve something. Otherwise, we don't even know if thought is there or not. Thought is not separate from the movement of thought. Thought is action and without it you cannot act. There is no such thing as pure, spontaneous, thought-free action at all. To act is to think.

You have a self-starting, self-perpetuating mechanism which I call the self. This does not mean that there is actually an entity there. I do not want or mean to give that connotation to that word. Where is this ego or self that you talk of? Your non-existent self has heard of spirituality and bliss from someone. To experience this thing called bliss you feel you must control your thoughts. It is impossible. You will burn yourself and die if you attempt it.

The demand for more and more experience constitutes your present, which is born out of the past. If that is seen, there is no future at all. Any achievement you are interested in is in the future. The only way that the future can come into operation is in the present moment. Unfortunately, in the present moment what is in operation is the past. Your past is creating your future. In the past you were happy or unhappy, foolish or wise. In the future you will be the opposite.

When the past is not in operation there is no present at all, for what you are calling the present is the past repeating itself. In an actual state of here and now there is no past in operation and therefore no future. The only way the past can survive and maintain its continuity is through the constant demand to experience the same thing over and over. That is why life has become a bore. Life has become boring because we have made of it a repetitive thing. So what we mistakenly call the present is really the repetitive past projecting a fictitious future. Your goals, your search, your aspirations, are cast in that mold.

From your knowledge out of the past you ask questions and the very motive of your asking is only to gain more knowledge from someone else so that your knowledge structure can continue. You are really not interested in this at all. Your knowledge coming to an end means that you are coming to an end. Where, you ask, is this knowledge, the past? Is it in your brain? Where is it? It is all over your body. It is in every cell of your body.

It doesn't matter what the object of that search is—God, a beautiful woman, whatsoever—it is all the same search and that hunger will never be satisfied. That hunger must burn itself out completely without knowing satisfaction. The thirst you have must burn itself out without being quenched. It dawns on you that this is not the way and it is finished.

What I am emphasizing is that we are trying to solve our basic human problems through a psychological framework when actually the problem is neurological. The body is involved. Take desire. As long as there is a living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and tried to suppress, control and moralize about desire to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the problem of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem. You somehow continue to hope and believe that the same instrument can solve your other problems as well. You hope against hope that thought will pull you through but you will die in hope just as you have lived in hope. That is the refrain of my doom song.
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Unless you are free from the desire of all desires—liberation or self-realization—you will be miserable. The ultimate goal which society has placed before us is the one that has to go. Until you are free from that desire you cannot be free from any of your miseries. By suppressing these desires you are not going to be free. This realization is the essential thing, going as it does to the crux of the problem.

It is society that has placed before us the desire for freedom, the desire for liberation, the desire for God, the desire for self-realization. That is the desire you must be free from. Then all these other desires fall into their own natural rhythm. You suppress these desires only because you are afraid society will punish you if you act on them or because you see them as obstacles to your main desire, freedom.

If this kind of thing should happen to you, you will find yourself back in a primeval state, without primitivity and without any volition on your part. It just happens. Such a free man is not in conflict with society any more. He is not antisocial, not at war with the world. He sees that it can't be any the different. He doesn't want to change society at all. The demand for change has ceased. Any doing in any direction is violence. Any effort is violence. Anything you do with thought to create a peaceful state of mind is using force and so is violent. Such an approach is absurd. You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Meditation is violent. The living organism is very peaceful. You don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't give a damn for your ecstasies or blissful states. People have abandoned the natural intelligence of the body.

All I am saying is that the peace you are seeking is already inside you in the harmonious functioning of the body. Anything you do to free yourself from anything, for whatever reason, is destroying the sensitivity, clarity and freedom that is already there.
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There is no question of your seeing things as they are. You can't see things as they are. You never leave any experience or feeling you have alone. You have to capture and interpret that feeling within the framework of the known. You are happy or unhappy only as you have knowledge about and experience of happiness and unhappiness. So everything has to be brought within the framework of the known before you can experience it. The movement of the known is gathering momentum within you. Its only interest is to continue. There is no entity, nothing there to give itself continuity. It is just the movement of thought, the self-perpetuating separation. It is mechanical. Anything you try to do about it only adds momentum to it.

It is the desire to reach a particular goal, an all important goal, that must go, not the countless petty little desires. The only reason you try to manipulate or control the petty desires is that such control is a part of your strategy to attain the highest goal, the desire of all desires. Eliminate that main goal and the others fall into a natural pattern and pose no problem for you or for the world. You won't get anywhere by trying to endlessly control and manipulate these numerous desires. It is vicious in its nature.

The so-called highest goal is like the horizon. The further you move towards it the further it recedes. The goal, like the horizon, is not really there. It is a projection of your own fear and it moves away from you as you pursue it. How can you keep up with it? There is nothing that you can do. Still, it is desire that keeps you moving. No matter in which direction you move, it is the same.

What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion. Only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say.
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There is no such thing as absolute. It is thought and thought alone that has created the absolute. Absolute zero, absolute power, absolute perfection, these have been invented by the holy men and experts. They kidded themselves and others. Down the centuries, the saints, saviors and prophets of mankind have kidded themselves and everybody else. Perfection and absolutes are false. You are trying to imitate and relate your behavior according to these absolutes and it is falsifying you. You are actually functioning in an entirely different way. You are brutal. You feel you must be peaceful. It is contradictory. That's all I'm pointing out.
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The certainty that dawned upon me is something which cannot be transmitted. It does not mean that I am superior, a chosen one, one in whom all the virtues are rolled into one, not at all. I am just an ordinary man and have nothing to do with it. This certainly blasts everything including the claims of the so-called religious.

What I am trying to put across is that there is no such thing as God. It is the mind that out of fear has created God. Fear is passed on from generation to generation. What is there is fear, not God. If you are lucky enough to be free from fear then there is no God. There is no ultimate reality, no God, nothing. Fear itself is the problem, not God. Wanting to be free from fear is itself fear. You see, you love fear. The ending of fear is death and you don't want that to happen. I am not talking of wiping out the phobias of the body. They are necessary for survival. The death of fear is the only death.
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You are blind. You see nothing. When you actually do see and perceive for the first time that there is no self to realize, no psyche to purify, no soul to liberate, it will come as a tremendous shock to that instrument. You have invested everything in that—the soul, mind, psyche, whatever you wish to call it—and suddenly it is exploded as a myth. It is difficult for you to look at reality, at your actual situation. One look does the trick. You are finished.

I don't see anything other than the physical activity of the body. Spirituality is the invention of the mind and the mind is a myth. Your traditions are choking you but, unfortunately, you don't do anything. You actually love being choked. You love the burden of the cultural garbage sack, the dead refuse of the past. It has to drop away naturally. It just drops. You don't depend upon knowledge anymore except as a useful tool to function sanely in this world.

Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against sorrow is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.

Suppose I say that this meaninglessness is all there is for you, all there can ever be for you. What will you do? The false and absurd goal you have before you is responsible for that dissatisfaction and meaninglessness in you. Do you think life has any meaning? Obviously, you don't. You have been told that there is meaning, that there must be a meaning to life. Your notion of the meaningful keeps you from facing this issue and makes you feel that life has no meaning. If the idea of the meaningful is dropped then you will see meaning in whatever you are doing in daily life.

Whatever you want, even the so-called spiritual goals, is materialistic in value. What, if I may ask, is so spiritual about it? If you want to achieve a spiritual goal, the instrument you use will be the same which you use to achieve materialistic goals, namely thought. You don't actually do anything about it. You just think. So you are just thinking that there must be some purpose to life. And because thought is matter, its object, the spiritual or meaningful life, is also matter. Spirituality is materialism. In any event, you do not act, you just think, which is to postpone. There is simply nothing else thought can do.

That instrument called thought, which you are employing to achieve your so-called spiritual goals, is the result of the past. Thought is born in time, it functions in time and any results it seeks are bound to be in and of time also. And time is postponement, the tomorrow.

Understanding your goal is the main thing. To achieve that goal implies struggle, battle, effort, will, that is all. There is no guarantee that you will reach your goal. You assume the goal is there. You have invented the goal to give yourself hope but hope means tomorrow. Hope is necessary for tomorrow, not for today. You want more knowledge so you can develop better techniques for reaching your goal. You know that there is no guarantee that more experience, more knowledge, more systems and more methods will help you reach your goal yet you persist. It is all you know how to do. Seeing today demands action. Seeing tomorrow involves only hope.

The energy you are devoting to the search, or whatever you wish to call it, is taking away the energy you need to live. You are obsessed with finding meaning in life and that is consuming a lot of energy. If that energy is released from the search for meaning it can be used to see the futility of all search. Then your life becomes meaningful and the energy may be used for some useful purpose. Life, the so-called material life, has a meaning of its own, but you have been told that it is devoid of meaning and have superimposed a fictitious layer of spiritual meaning over it.

There is nothing to be achieved, nothing to accomplish. Here there is no need to sit in special postures and control your breath. Even while my eyes are open, in fact no matter what I am doing, I am in a state of moksha. The knowledge you have about moksha is what is keeping you away from it. Moksha comes after the ending of all you have ever known, at death. The body has to become like a corpse before that knowledge, which is locked into every cell in the body, ceases.
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Your highly praised inventiveness springs from your thinking, which is essentially a protective mechanism. The mind has invented both religion and dynamite to protect what it regards as its best interests. There is no good or bad in this sense. Don't you see? All these bad, brutal, terrible people who should have been eliminated long ago are thriving and successful. Don't think that you can get off this merry-go-round or that by pretending to be spiritually superior you are avoiding any complicity. You are that.
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There is no love in the world. Everybody wants the same thing. Whosoever is the most ruthless gets it, as long as he can get away with it. Getting what you want in this world is a relatively easy thing if you are ruthless enough. I had everything a man could want, every kind of desirable experience, and it all failed me. Therefore, I can never recommend my path to anyone, having eventually faced the falseness of that path myself and rejected it. I would never even hint that there was any validity in all those experiences and practices.
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The prophets were all wrong, as far as I am concerned. As long as you harbor any hope or faith in these authorities, living or dead, so long this certainty cannot be transmitted to you. This certainty somehow dawns on you when you see for yourself that all of them are wrong. When you see all this for yourself for the first time you explode. That explosion hits life at a point that has never been touched before. It is absolutely unique.

So whatever I may be saying cannot be true for you. The moment you see it for yourself, you make what I am saying obsolete and false. All that came before is negated in that fire. You can't come into your own uniqueness unless the whole of human experience is thrown out of your system. It cannot be done through any volition or the help of anything. Then you are on your own.
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When once you are freed from the pairs of opposites—right and wrong, good and bad—you will never be wrong. But until then the problem will be there. It is like accidentally touching a live wire. You are much too frightened to touch it through your own volition. By sheer accident, this thing touches you, burning everything. It burns out this search, the hunger. The hunger stops, not because it is satisfied. The hunger can never be satiated, especially by the traditional food that is offered. With the burning away of that hunger the duality ceases, that is all.
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My interest is not to knock off what others have said (that is too easy) but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. This is why my talking sounds contradictory to others. I am forced by the nature of your listening to always negate the first statement with another statement. Then the second statement is negated by a third and so on. My aim is not some comfy dialectical thesis but the total negation of everything that can be expressed.

Anything you try to make out of my statements is not it. You sense a freshness, a living quality, to what is being said here. That is so, but this cannot be used for anything. It is worthless. All you can do with it is to try to organize it, create organizations, open schools, publish holy books, celebrate birthdays, sanctify holy temples and the like, thus destroying any life it may have had in it. No individual can be helped by such things. They only help those who would live by the gullibility of others.
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There was an outburst of energy which is utterly different from the energy that is born out of thinking. All spiritual, mystical experiences are born out of thought. They are thought-induced states, nothing more. The energy here that is burning all thought as it arises tends to accumulate, eventually it has to escape. The physical limitations of the body act as obstacles to the escape of this unique energy. When it escapes it goes up, never down, and never returns.

When this extraordinary energy, which is atomic, escapes it causes tremendous pain. It is not the pain you are familiar with. It has nothing to do with it. If it did, the body would be shattered. It is not matter converting into energy. It is atomic. The process goes on and on while the pain comes and goes. It is like the tremendous relief when a tooth is extracted. That is the kind of relief that is there, not the spiritual.

The translation of this as bliss is very misleading. Through thought anyone can create those experiences but it is not actually bliss. The real thing is not something that can be experienced. Anything you can experience is old. That means everything you experience or understand is tradition.

In other words, I am trying to free you not from the past, the conditioning, but rather from what I am saying. I am not suggesting any way out because there is no way. I have stumbled into this and freed myself from the paths of others. I can't make the same mistake they did. I will never suggest that anyone use me as a model or follow in my footsteps.

My path can never be your path. If you attempt to make this your path you will get caught in a rut. No matter how refreshing, revolutionary or fantastic, it is still a rut, a copy, a secondhand thing. I myself do not know how I stumbled into this so how do you expect me to give it to another? My mission, if there is any, is to debunk every statement I have ever made. If you take seriously and try to use or apply what I have said you will be in danger.

Moksha cannot be transmitted to another because there is nothing there to transmit. Neither is there anything to renounce. What is it that these teachers suggest you should renounce? Even your scripture, the Kathopanishad, says that you must renounce the very search itself. The renunciation of renunciation happens not through practice, discussion, money or intellect. These are the least of things. A rough translation of the original Sanskrit is, “Whomsoever it chooses, to him it is revealed.” If this is so then where is the room for practices and volition? It comes randomly, not because you deserve it.

If you are lucky enough to have this dawn on you, you die. The continuity of thought dies. The ending of thought is the beginning of physical death. What you experience is the emptiness of the void. Just wanting to be free of egoism is insufficient. You must go through a clinical death to be free from thought and egoism. The body will actually get stiff, the heartbeat slows and you will become corpse-like. The ideas you have about that natural state are totally unrelated to what it actually is. You are trying to capture and give expression to what you hope is that state. It is an absurd exercise. What is there is only the movement to capture, nothing else. All the rest is speculation.
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Knowledge is not something mysterious or abstract. Knowledge is just naming things. The knowledge you have of the world creates the objects you are experiencing. The actual existence or non-existence of something out there in the world is not something you can determine or experience for yourself except through the help of knowledge, and this knowledge is not yours. It is something which you and your ancestors have accumulated over a long time. What you call the act of knowing is nothing other than this accumulated memory. You have personally added to and modified that knowledge but essentially it doesn't belong to you at all.

There is nothing there inside you but the totality of this knowledge you have accumulated. That is what you are. You cannot even directly experience the reality of the world in which you are functioning, much less some world beyond. There is no world beyond space and time. It is your invention based upon the vague promises of the holy men. Our sense of value springs from the world as it is imposed on us. We must accept the world.

Tradition is what you are, what you call you. No matter how you may modify it, it continues. In life, everything is temporary, and the attempt to give continuity to conditioning, which is based upon thought, is pathological in nature. You treat the psychological and the pathological as if they were two different things. Actually, there is only the pathological there. Your conditioning that makes you feel separate from yourself and the world is pathological.

All your actions spring from the same source, thinking. The thoughts themselves cannot do any harm. It is when you attempt to use, censor and control those thoughts to get something that your problems begin. You have no recourse but to use thought to get what you want in this world, but when you seek to get what does not exist—God, bliss, love, etc.—through thought you only succeed in pitting one thought against another, creating misery for yourself and the world.

When the thought structure, pressed into the service of fear and hope, cannot achieve what it wants, or cannot be certain, it introduces what you call faith. When your beliefs have gotten you nowhere you are told you must cultivate faith. In other words, you must have hope. Whether you are seeking God or bliss, peace of mind or, more tangibly, happiness, you end up relying on hope, belief and faith. These dependencies are the tokens of your failure to get the results you desire.

Every thought that is born has to die. If a thought does not die it cannot be reborn. It has to die and with it you die. But instead of dying with each thought and breath, you hook up each thought with the next, creating a false continuity. It is that continuity that is the problem. Your insecurity springs from your refusal to face the temporary nature of thought. It is a little easier to talk to those who have meditated because they experience the futility of it and can see where they are hung up.
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Your morality, or the lack of it, is of no importance compared to the fact that you are dead. You are always operating in and through your dead memory. Memory is nothing more than the same old nonsense repeating itself, that's all. All you know or can ever know is memory, and memory is thought. Your ceaseless thinking is only giving you continuity. Why do you have to do that all the time? It is not worth it. You are wearing yourself out. When there is a need for it one can understand.

You are mulling over the future or the past all the time, oblivious to the present. There is no future in relation to your problem. Any solution you think of is in the future and is therefore useless. If there is anything that can happen it must happen now. Since you don't want anything to happen now you push it away into something you have named the future. What you have in place of the present is fear. Then begins the whole exhausting search for a way to be free from fear. Do you really want this kind of freedom?

Anything you want to be free from, for whatever reason, is the very thing that can free you. You are always dealing with a pair of opposites, so being free of one is to be free from the other, its opposite. Within the framework of the opposites there is no freedom. That is why I always say, “You haven't got a chance.” Likewise, the man who is not concerned with morality will not be interested in immorality. The answer to selfishness lies in selfishness, not a fictitious opposite called selflessness. Freedom from anger lies in anger, not in non-anger. Freedom from greed lies in greed, not in non-greed.

The whole religious business is nothing but moral codes of conduct. You must be generous, compassionate, loving, while all the time you remain greedy and callous. Codes of conduct are set by society in its own interests, sacred or profane. There is nothing religious about it. The religious man puts the priest, the censor, inside you. Now the policeman has been institutionalized and placed outside you. Religious codes and strictures are no longer necessary. It is all in the civil and criminal codes. You needn't bother with these religious people anymore. They are obsolete. But they don't want to lose their hold over people. It is their business. Their livelihood is at stake.
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Your search for happiness only succeeds in destroying the sensitivity and intelligence of the nervous system. Wanting what does not exist—the romantic, religious, spiritual stuff—only adds momentum to that false continuity, which destroys the body. It is radically disturbing the chemical balance of the body. The body, which is only interested in survival and procreation, treats both pain and pleasure alike. It is you who insist on stopping pain and extending pleasure. The body's response to both pleasure and pain is the same, it groans. What does the body want? It doesn't want anything except to function. All other things are the inventions of thought.

The body has no separate, independent existence of its own apart from pleasure and pain. The various vibrations affecting the body may differ in intensity but it is you who divide them into good and bad. You are constantly translating vibrations that hit the body into experiences. The body's natural intelligence is correctly processing the sensory input without your having to do a thing. It is similar to how the body turns over many times during sleep without your being aware of it, much less trying to control it. The body is handling itself.

You are all the time interfering with the natural functioning of the nervous system. When a sensation hits your nervous system, the first thing you do is to name it and categorize it as pleasure or pain. The next step is that you want to continue the pleasurable sensations and stop the painful sensations. First, the recognition of a sensation as pleasure or pain is itself painful. Second, the attempt to extend the life of one kind of sensation and to stop another kind of sensation is also painful.

Both activities are choking the body. In the very nature of things, every sensation has its own intensity and duration. The attempt to extend pleasure and stop pain only succeeds in destroying the sensitivity of the body and its ability to respond to sensations. So what you are doing is very painful for the body.

If you do nothing with the sensations, you will find that they must dissolve into themselves. That is what I mean when I speak of the ionization of thought. That is what I mean by birth and death. There is no death for the body, only disintegration.

Thought being material, all its pursuits are material. That is why your so called spiritual pursuits have no meaning. Don't get me wrong, I am not against using thought to get what you need. You have no other tool at your disposal.

So the body is interested only in its survival. All that are necessary for life are the survival and reproductive systems. That is nature's way. Why life wants to reproduce itself is another matter. The only way the human organism can survive and ensure its reproduction is through thought. So thought is very important and even essential to the living organism. Thought determines whether there is action or no action. All animals have these survival thoughts but in the case of man the factor of recognition is introduced, complicating the whole thing enormously. We have superimposed over the natural sensory functioning a never-ending verbalization.

The body is not at all interested in psychological or spiritual matters. Your highly praised spiritual experiences are of no value to the organism. In fact, they are painful to the body. Love, compassion, understanding, bliss—all these things which religion and psychology have placed before man are only adding to the strain of the body. All cultures, whether of the Orient or of the Occident, have created this lopsided situation for mankind and turned man into a neurotic individual.

Instead of being what you are, unkind, you pursue the fictitious opposite put before you, kindness. To emphasize what we should be only causes strain, giving momentum to what we already in fact are. In nature, we find the animals at one time violent and brutal, at others kind and generous. For them there is no contradiction. But man is told he must be always good, kind, loving. We emphasize only one side of reality thus distorting the whole picture. This trying to have one without the other is creating tremendous strain, sorrow, pain and misery for man.

Actually, you are born and die with every breath you take. That is what is meant by death and rebirth. Your thought structure denies the reality of death. It seeks continuity at all costs. I am only pointing out that if you go deep enough, the you disappears, the body goes through an actual clinical death, and that, in some cases, the body can renew itself. At that point, the entire history of the individual, located in the body's genetic structure, no longer separates itself from life, and falls into its own rhythm. From then on it cannot separate itself from anything. You can no longer create this division in consciousness between waking and sleeping.

So don't bother theorizing about thoughtless states. When thought is finished, you die. Until then, all talk of thoughtless states are the silly products of thought trying to give itself continuity by believing in and searching out a thoughtless state. If you have ever fancied yourself to be in a thoughtless state it means that thought was there.

You need not practice any yogic techniques in order to experience these things. By taking drugs you can have all these experiences. I am not at all advocating drugs any more than I am advocating yoga. I am just pointing out that all experience is born out of thought and is in all the essentials identical. If you call these yogic or drug-induced states blissful, more profound or in any way more pleasurable than ordinary experiences, you are strengthening the ego and fortifying the separative structure by wasting your thoughts, translating sensations into higher or lower and pleasurable or painful. Anything you experience as energy is thought-induced energy. It is not the energy of life.
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What are you, essentially? Look, in this state there is no division. Our situation is that I cannot transmit and you cannot receive that fact. In addition to it you have gone one step further and created a more complex problem for yourself by placing the undivided state outside yourself as you are. This means search. To search is willful. The search for peace is dulling the natural peacefulness of the body. Your knowledge and search are meaningless because there is nothing inside the division you have created around you.

It is all worthless as far as you are concerned. It is a menu without the meal. It is all a sales pitch. It has resulted in hypocrisy and commercialism. There is something radically wrong with it. If there is anything good it cannot produce anything bad. Obviously, religions are false—religion, spirituality, society, you, your property, your motives and values, the whole thing.

I am not here to teach you anything. This is not a didactic or instructional exercise. Words only have a vague abstract meaning for you. Otherwise, they have no relevance to you at all. You have to be saved from the very idea that you have to be saved. You must be saved from the saviors, redeemed from the redeemers. If it is to happen it must happen now. My words cannot penetrate the lunacy there. It is the madness of the spiritual search that makes you unmoved and impervious to my words.

Forget the rosaries, the scriptures, the ashes on your forehead. When you see for yourself the absurdity of your search, the whole culture is reduced to ashes inside you. Then you are out of that. Tradition is finished for you. No more games. Vedanta means the end of knowledge. So why write more holy books, open more schools, preserve more teachings? The burning up inside you of everything you want is the meaning of ashes. When you know nothing, you say a lot. When you know something, there's nothing to say.
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I cannot form any image at any time. It does not matter here whether the eyes are open or closed. The only thing that is there in that individualized consciousness is the sure reflection of what is presented to it. You do not name it. The movement or desire to know what it is, is simply is not there. The explanations don't mean a thing. That is why I maintain that your natural state is one of not knowing.

We have superimposed a naming process over this natural physiological awareness, an awareness we share, incidentally, with the other animals. Awareness and the movement or tendency in you to bring about change in you are two different things entirely. That difference cannot be perceived by you for there is no perception without the perceiver. Can you become conscious of anything except through the medium of memory and thought? Memory is knowledge. Even your feelings are memory. The stimulus and the response form one unitary movement. They cannot be neatly separated.

In other words, you cannot even differentiate the stimulus from the response. There is no dividing line except when thought steps in and creates one. Thought, as memory and knowledge, has created this mechanism. The only way it can perpetuate itself is to gather knowledge, to know more and more, to ask more and more questions. As long as you are seeking you will be asking questions, and the questioning mechanism only adds more momentum to the naming process.

Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously but sound, traveling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events. It is only the natural physiological sensations and perceptions that can move with the flow of life. There is no question of capturing or containing that movement. We like to use the word consciousness glibly, as if we are intimately familiar with it. Actually, consciousness is something we will never know.

As far as I am concerned, we become conscious of something only through memory, knowledge. Otherwise, space and the separative consciousness it creates are not there. There is no such thing as looking at something without the interference of knowledge. To look you need space, and thought creates that space. So space itself, as a dimension, exists only as a creation of thought. Thought has also tried to theorize about the space it has created, inventing the time-space continuum. Time is an independent reference or frame. There is no necessary continuity between it and space.

Thought has also invented the opposite of time, the now, the eternal now. The present exists only as an idea. The moment you attempt to look at the present it has already been brought into the framework of the past. Thought will use any trick under the sun to give momentum to its own continuity. Its essential technique is to repeat the same thing over and over again. This gives it an illusion of permanency. This permanency is shattered the moment the falseness of the past-present-future continuum is seen. The future can be nothing but the modified continuity of the past.
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Nature cannot be captured by thought. The important thing to see is the false separation between you and nature. Thought has created all these divisions, making what you call experience possible. The man who has freed himself from all divisions in consciousness has no experiences. He does not have loving relationships, does not question anything, has no notions about being a self-realized man and is not stuck on wanting to help somebody else. What I am maintaining is that the whole problem has been created by culture. It is that that has created this neurotic division in man. Somewhere along the line, man separated himself and experienced self-consciousness, which the other animals don't have, for the first time. This has created misery for man. That is the beginning of the end of man.

The individual who is able through luck to be free from this self-consciousness is no longer experiencing an independent existence. He is, even to himself, like any other thing out there. What happens in the environment repeats itself within such an individual without the knowledge. Once thought has burnt itself out, nothing that creates division can remain there. While thought is taking birth, the disintegration or death of thought is taking place also. That is why it is not natural for thought to take root. Only by maintaining a divisive consciousness in man is thought capable of denying the harmonious functioning of the body. To cast man in religious or psychological terms is to deny the extraordinary intelligence of this wondrous body. It is the movement of thought that is constantly taking you away from your natural state and creating this division.

Is there any way for us to experience, much less share, reality? Forget about ultimate reality, you have no way of experiencing the reality of anything. Experiencing reality from moment to moment is also a thought-induced state of mind. Without a common reference point, which is another invention of thought, how can you communicate and share? It is just not possible. There is nothing to communicate anyhow. You want to use communication to help you out of the mess you are in. That is your only interest. Getting out of your situation is your only aim. Why? Why do you want to get out of your situation? Wanting to get out of situations is what has created the problem in the first place. Wanting to free yourself from the burden is really the problem.

I am not recommending anything. Doing or not doing lead to the same end, misery. So doing nothing is no different from doing something. As long as you have knowledge about that burden, which I deny exists, you will have to struggle to be free of it. You cannot do otherwise. Anything you do is part of the mechanism of thought. Your search for happiness is prolonging your unhappiness. What is there inside you is only the movement of knowledge wanting to know more and more. The you, the separative structure, can continue only as long as there is a demand to know.
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The demand for freedom, whether outwardly or inwardly, has been with us for a long while. We have been told that this demand is a sacred, noble thing. Have we again been misled? The demand to be free is the cause of your problems. You want to see yourself as free. The one that is saying, “You are not free,” is the same one that is telling you that there is a state of freedom to be pursued. But the pursuit is slavery, the very denial of freedom. I do not know anything about freedom because I do not know anything about myself, free, enslaved, or otherwise.

Freedom and self-knowledge are linked. Since I do not know myself and have no way of seeing myself except by the knowledge given me by my culture, the question of wanting to be free does not arise at all. The knowledge you have about freedom denies the very possibility of freedom. When you stop looking at yourself with the knowledge you have, the demand to be free from that self drops away.

What is there is the constant demand to be free. Nothing else is there. How can you, and why should you, be free from memory? Memory is absolutely essential. The problem is not having a memory but your tendency to use memory to further your spiritual interests or as a means to find happiness. To attempt to be free from memory is withdrawal, and withdrawal is death.
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The greatest ideal, the most imposing, perfect and powerful, is, of course, God. It is an invention of frightened minds. The human mind has many destructive inventions to its credit. The most destructive one, and the one that has corrupted you, is the invention of God. The history of human thinking has produced saints, teachers, gurus, but God is the most corrupt of them all. Man has already messed up his life and religion has made it worse. It is religion that really made a mess of man's life.
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What I am trying to say is that there is no individual there at all. There is only a certain gathering of knowledge, which is thought, but no individuality there. The knowledge you have of things is all that you are capable of experiencing. Without knowledge, no experience of any kind is possible. You cannot separate experience and knowledge. The self is nothing sacred. It is the totality of your knowledge and you are, unfortunately, stuck with it. Why are you interested in separating the knowledge you have about yourself, whatever you call yourself? Knowledge is all that is there. Where is the self? It is an illusion.

Similarly, enlightenment has no independent existence of its own apart from your knowledge about it. There is no enlightenment at all. The idea of illumination is tied up with change but there is nothing to change. Change admits of time. Change always takes time. To change, to eliminate one thing and replace it with another, takes time. What you are now and what you ought to be are linked together by time. You are going to be enlightened tomorrow.

Let us take this as an example. You want to be enlightened. You want to be selfless. You are this, you want to be that. The gap between the two is filled with time. Your enlightenment or selflessness is always tomorrow, not now. So time is essential and time is thought. Your thought structure, which is you, can't conceive of the possibility of anything happening except in time.

This escapist logic is also applied by everyone to spiritual matters, only the time frame is larger. It happens in heaven or perhaps in a future life, at any rate later. And just as there is no tomorrow in these matters, so its reference point, the present, does not exist. Where does it not exist? In thought, which is the past. There is no question of enlightenment now because there is no now, only the projection of the past.
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What I am saying is valid and true for me, that is all. If I suggest anything, directly or indirectly, you will turn it into another method or technique. I would be falsifying myself if I were to make any such suggestion. If anyone says there is a way out he is not an honest fellow. He is doing it for his own self-aggrandizement, you may be sure. He simply wants to market a product and hopes to convince you that it is superior to other products on the market. If another man comes along and says that there is no way out, you make of that another method.

You can't blast what I am saying as long as you are relying upon what someone has said before. The saint is a technocrat. That is what most people are. Don't listen to me, it will create an unnecessary disturbance in you. It will only intensify the neurotic situation you are already caught in. Having taken for granted the validity of all this holy stuff, having never questioned, much less broken away from it, you not only have learned how to live with it but also how to capitalize on it. It is a matter of profiteering, nothing more.

Anything I do to help would only add to your misery, that is all. By continuing to listen to me you merely heap one more misery upon those you already have. In that sense, this discussion we are having is doing you no good whatever. You don't seem to realize that you are playing with fire here. If you really want freedom here and now you can have it.

You see, you are anger, selfishness and all these things. If they go, you go. There is a physical going, not in the abstract but actual, physical death. It can happen now, you simply don't want it. You would not touch it with a ten-foot pole. If anger and selfishness, which is you, go, liberation is now, not tomorrow. Your own anger will burn you, not the fire. The religious man has invented selflessness. If that selflessness goes, you go, that is all.

So freeing yourself from any one of these things implies that you, as you know and experience yourself, are coming to an end now. Please, in your interest and out of compassion, I am telling you that this is not what you want. This is not a thing you can make happen. It is not in your hands at all. It hits whomsoever it chooses. You are out of the picture altogether.

You have to actually touch life at a point where nobody has touched it before. Nobody can teach you that. As long as you continue to repeat what others have said before, you are lost and nothing good can come of it. Listening to and believing what others have said is not the way to find out for yourself and there is no other way.

You may very well ask why the hell I am talking. I emphatically assure you that, in my case, it is not at all in the nature of self-fulfillment. My motive for talking is quite different from what you think it is. It is not that I am eager to help you understand or that I feel that I must help you, not at all. My motive is direct and temporary. You arrive seeking understanding, while I am only interested in making it crystal clear that there is nothing to understand.

As long as you want to understand, so long there will be this awkward relationship between two individuals. I am always emphasizing that somehow the truth has to dawn upon you that there is nothing to understand. As long as you think, accept and believe that there is something to understand, and make that understanding a goal to be placed before you, demanding search and struggle, you are lost and will live in misery. The search is invalid because it is based upon questions which in turn are based upon false knowledge. Your knowledge has not freed you from your problems.

So what is your goal? You must be very clear about it, otherwise there is no point in proceeding. It becomes a game, a meaningless ritual. What do you want to get? There is always somebody to help you get what you want for a price. You have foolishly divided life into higher and lower goals, into material and spiritual paths. In either case, great struggle, pain and effort is involved. I say, on the other hand, that there are no spiritual goals at all. They are simply the extension of material goals to what you imagine to be a higher, loftier plane.

You mistakenly believe that by pursuing the spiritual goal you will somehow miraculously make your material goals simple and manageable. Such pursuits are in actuality not possible. You may think that only inferior persons pursue material goals, that material achievements are boring. But, in fact, the so-called spiritual goals you have put before yourself are exactly the same. You are your search.
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The past will always be there as long as you want something. Even if you attempt to suppress your wants, the past has to come to your help and tell you how to suppress your wants. There is no such differentiation of wants. They are all exactly the same. When wanting ceases even for a moment thought is absent and you are left with the simple matter of taking care of the bodily needs—food, clothes and shelter.

If you go on trying to suppress the past, trying to live in what you call the present, you will drive yourself crazy. You are trying to control something over which you have no control. It is just not possible to control thought without becoming neurotic, for it is not just your personal, petty little past that is in the way but the entire past of mankind, the entire memory of every human being, every form of life and every form of existence. It is not such a simple, easy thing to do.

If you try to control the natural flow of the river through all these artificial means, building a dam, so to speak, you will inundate and destroy the whole thing. That is why you find thoughts welling up inside you despite your efforts to control, observe and be aware of them. Once this is understood then you are never concerned whether thoughts are there or not.

When there is an actual need for thought to function, it is there. When there is no need for thought to function, it is not there. You don't even know and have no way of finding out whether you are thinking or not. Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separative self is you. There is nothing there inside you other than that.

What you call the self is nothing other than the continuity of thought. If that artificial continuity is not there, neither are you. The self wants only to function on a different, higher level and not to come to an end. You want to be transformed, to become something else, while continuing. The only way the self can do that is to add more and more experiences to those it has already accumulated.

Whether you want something material or simple peace of mind, it makes no difference. As long as you are searching for peace of mind, you will have a tormented mind. If you try not to search or if you continue to search you will remain the same. You have to stop. You don't stop searching because such an act would be the end of you.

You are lost in a jungle and you have no way of finding your way out. Night is fast approaching. The wild animals are there including the cobras and still you are lost. What do you do in such a situation? You just stop. You don't move. As long as there is that hope that you can somehow or the other get out of the jungle, so long will you continue what you are doing, searching, and so long you feel lost. You are lost only because you are searching. You have no way of finding your way out of the jungle.

You still expect something to happen. That expectation is part of the problem. Your expectations are part of your desire to change everything. Nothing needs changing. You must accept life as it is. You may as well find out if it is possible to be at peace now. You want so many things and I am not in a position to help you get any of them. You are not clear what you really want. When that which you want is fully recognized then you find out how to get it and either you get it or you don't, that's all. Don't bother separating your goals into the low and the lofty. You have been doing that all your life and have not succeeded.
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When once you have understood that there is nothing to understand, what is there to communicate? Communication is just not necessary. Your desire to communicate is part of your general strategy of achievement. Veiled behind that desire for communication is the dependency upon some outside power to solve your problems for you. Except for the quite natural need for practical communication necessary to function in this world, your interest in communication is really an expression of your feelings of helplessness and your hope for the support of some outside agency.

Your helplessness persists because of your dependency upon some outside agency. When that dependency, fictitious or not, is not there then the feelings of helplessness and the desire to communicate in the abstract are not there. If the one goes, the other must go also. Your situation and prospects only seem hopeless because you have ideas of hope. There is bound to be helplessness and overwhelming frustration as long as you exist in relationship with the hope for fulfillment because there is no fulfillment at all. This is the source of your dilemma.
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The future is created by hope. That is the only future that exists. The hope of achieving your goal, the hope of attaining enlightenment, the hope of somehow getting off the merry-go-round—that is the future. The point from which you project yourself into the future appears to you to be the present, the now, but this is mistaken. There is only the past in operation and that movement creates the illusion of present and future. You may find what I am saying here logical or illogical and you may accept or reject it. But it will, in any case, be the past that is doing so for that is all that is in operation within you.

It is the past that has projected these goals—God, enlightenment, peace of mind, whatever—and has placed them in the future out of reach. There is only the past. You have been told by holy men who talk of enlightenment and such nonsense that the past has got to come to a stop before you are free to operate in the present and so realize your potential or future possibilities. This I deny.

First of all, why should you be interested in attempting to stop the past from interfering with the present? Be very clear that this idea that the past must die, that time must have an end, has been put into you by those self-appointed guardians of your so-called soul—the priests, holy men and saviors of mankind. It is not yours at all. You need to be very clear also about the implications of ending the influence of the past. It is really a dangerous, calamitous thing.

In your search to find the end of time, the past, you must use the past, so you only succeed in perpetuating the past. This is a fact, like it or not. Anything you do—having kinder thoughts, behaving selflessly, approaching life negatively rather than positively, listening to holy men, listening to me—is only adding momentum to the past. All the techniques and methods of achievement at your disposal are from the past and, therefore, useless. Luckily, there is absolutely nothing to be achieved.

Your actual approach to happiness is grounded in self-interest and naiveté. To demand the cessation of the continuity of the movement of the past is ridiculous and unfounded. We have been brainwashed that if we free ourselves from the past everything will be hunky-dory, full of lightness and sweetness. It is all romantic hogwash—sheer unadulterated fantasy and nothing more.

All your actions are from the past and anything you do only strengthens the hold of pleasure and pain upon you. Ultimately, it is all pain and no pleasure. I can say that with certainty but you are still cocksure that there is a timeless state, a way out. It is therefore impossible for us to communicate. What I am saying will, if really listened to, put an end to you as you know and experience yourself. You are not listening to me at all. Your so-called listening is all in the past. The constant interpretation by the past of what is being said prevents you from listening to what is being said.

All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness you will remain unhappy. This is a fact. Society is so organized and complex that you have no other way of surviving except to accept the way of life around you along with the limitations it places upon all of us. We must all accept the reality of society whether we like it or not. All your relationships, knowledge and experiences, all your emotions and feelings, all that romantic stuff, belongs entirely to society, not to you.

You are not an individual at all. Only when you are free from what every man and woman has thought and felt before you will you become an individual. Such an individual will not burn books that men have made with great care. He would not be a rebel. All the accumulated knowledge, experience and suffering of mankind is inside of you. You must build a huge bonfire within you. Then you will become an individual. There is no other way.
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You want to change yourself into something and at the same time find you cannot change at all. This change you talk of is really just more romantic, fancy stuff for you. You never change, only think about changing. As long as you want to change for some reason or the other so long will you insist upon changing the whole world. You want a different world so that you can be happy in it. That is your only interest. You can talk of mankind—concern for mankind, compassion for mankind—but it is all bullshit.

Since you are determined to bring about change, a notion put into you by your culture, you remain discontent and want the world to be different. When your inner demand to be something different from what in fact you are comes to an end then the neurotic demand to change your society ceases. Then you cannot be in conflict with society. You are in perfect harmony with society, including its brutalities and miseries. All your attempts to change this brutal society only add momentum to it.

This is not to say that the free individual is indifferent to society, on the contrary. In any case, it is you who are indifferent right now. You only talk and whine, meanwhile doing nothing. Unless you are at peace with yourself there cannot be peace around the world. When you are at peace with yourself that is the end of the story.
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You are trying to establish relationships with people around you, with society, with the whole world. For some reason or other, the actual relationships are very ugly and horrible. Have you noticed that as long as our relationships can be directed to serve personal happiness there is no conflict? Every person is in the same situation. Relationships are harmonious as long as they serve one's ideas of happiness. Because you cannot face the dynamism of relationships you invent sentiments, romance and dramatic emotions to give them continuity. Therefore, you are always in conflict.
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Understanding yourself is one of the greatest jokes perpetrated on the gullible and credulous people everywhere, not only by the purveyors of ancient wisdom, the holy men, but also by the modern scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self-knowledge, self-actualization, living from moment to moment and such rot. These absurd ideas are thrown at us as if they are something new.
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I have been everywhere in the world meeting and talking with people. People are exactly the same the world over. The questions never vary but I am never bored with it. How can I be bored? If I were some sort of fool getting some sort of kick out of this, looking for new, better and different questions then there would be a possibility of getting bored. But I am not looking for anything so boredom is impossible.
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You are alive because your parents had sex, period. Don't look for a meaning to life. There may not be any meaning at all. It may have its own meaning that you can never know. Obviously, life has no meaning for you, otherwise you would not be here asking these questions. Everything you do seems absolutely meaningless. That is the fact. Don't bother about others. The whole world is an extension of you. The way you are thinking, feeling and experiencing is exactly the same way everyone else in this world is thinking, feeling and experiencing.

The goal may be different but the mechanism and instrument you are using to achieve your particular goal is not a whit different from that used by others to achieve theirs. Why should there be any meaning in living? The moment a baby arrives in the world it is interested in one thing, survival. The instinct in the baby to feed itself, to survive and to reproduce itself, seems to be the way of life. It is life expressing itself, that is all. You needn't impose a meaning upon it.

Instead of living you are obsessed with the question, “How am I to live?” That dilemma is put into us by our culture and is the one responsible for many of our problems. Because you are dead, not living what we call life, you are concerned with how to live. If you succeed in getting rid of the idea of somehow living a better, nobler and more meaningful life you will replace that belief with another. You must face the fact that you know nothing about life or the living of it.
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I am just singing my song then I go. If someone listens to me or not it is not my concern. If nobody comes and talks it is alright with me. Believe me, my talking is only incidental. It is not aimed at liberating anyone. If you are not here it's all the same for me. I am not selling anything. I am simply pointing out that at the rate at which we are going the whole genetic engineering technology will end up in the hands of the political system to be used for the complete control and subjugation of man.

This natural state cannot be used to further anyone's crusade nor am I interested in setting myself up as an archetype or prophet for mankind. I am not interested in satisfying the curiosity of anybody. The scientists are making tremendous progress in the fields of microbiology and glandular and brain physiology. They will soon have enough sophistication in these areas to understand the physiological mutation that took place within me. I personally cannot make any definite statement except to say that the whole mechanism is an automatic thing. The interference of thought is not there anymore.

Thought is functional in value, nothing more. It operates temporarily here when there is a demand from the environment but cannot act with regard to becoming something or to changing things there. That is energy, an energy that can make functioning in this world sanely and intelligently an easy affair. Now you are wasting that energy by attempting to be something other than what you, in fact, are. Then you will have a certainty which cannot be transmitted by me or by anybody.

I have discovered, for myself and by myself, that what we have been told about freedom, enlightenment and God is false. No power in the world can touch this. This does not make me superior, nothing of the sort. To feel superior or inferior you must separate yourself from the world. I do not look upon the world as a separate thing, as you do. The knowledge I have about the world, whether within or without, comes into operation only when there is a demand for it. Otherwise, I simply don't know.

Your natural state is one of not knowing. The knowledge that you are this, that you are that, that you are happy, that you are unhappy, that you are a realized man, that you are not a realized man, is completely absent here. We have no way of knowing if we are free. Nothing tells me that I am free. In your case, the naming process, the wanting something, the questioning, goes on and on no matter what.

Here thought functions only from a stimulus from the outside. Even then, the response of knowledge is instantaneous and I am back again like a big question mark. Your constant demand to experience the same thing over and over again results in compulsive, repetitive thinking. I don't see any need or reason for the repetitive process to go on and on.

In my case, there is no one separate from this functioning, no one who can step back and say, “This is reality.” There is no such thing as reality at all. Reality is imposed upon us by culture, society and education. Don't get me wrong, thought has a functional value. If we don't accept the world as it is imposed on us we will end up in the loony bin. I have to accept it as a relative fact. Otherwise, there is no way of experiencing the reality of anything.

It is thought that has created the reality of your body, of your living, of your sleep, and of all your perceptions. You experience this reality through knowledge. Otherwise, there is no way of your knowing for yourself that you have a body, that you are alive, that you are awake. All that is knowledge. The reality of anything is something which cannot be experienced by anybody.
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The military wars out there are the extension of what is going on all the time inside you. Why is there a war waging inside you? Because you search for peace. The instrument you are using in your attempt to be at peace with yourself is war. There is already peace in man. You need not search. The living organism is functioning in an extraordinarily peaceful way.

Man's search for truth is born out of this same search for peace. It only ends up disturbing and violating the peace that is already there in the body. So what we are left with is the war within and the war without. It's an extension of the same thing. Our search in this world for peace, being based upon warfare, will lead only to war, towards damnation. Humanity has polluted, destroyed and killed off everything, all on account of his wanting to be at the center of the universe, of all creation.
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You are interested in the self, not I. Whatever it is, it is the most important thing for man as long as he is alive. If you don't think it never occurs to you that you are alive or dead. The very birth of thought creates fear and it is out of fear that all experience springs. Both inner and outer worlds proceed from a point of thought. Everything you experience is born out of thought.

So everything you experience or can experience is an illusion. The self-absorption in thought creates a self-centeredness in man—that is all that is there. All relationships based upon that will inevitably create misery for man. These are bogus relationships. As far as you are concerned, there is no such thing as a relationship. And yet, society demands not just relationships but permanent relationships.
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It is mortality that creates immortality. It is the known that creates the unknown. It is time that has created the timeless. It is thought that created the thoughtless. Just as we all breathe from a common fund of air we appropriate and use thoughts to function in this world. Man's insistence that thought must be continuous denies the nature of thought, which is short-lived. Thought has created for itself a separate destiny. It has been very successful in creating for itself a separate parallel existence. By positing the unknown, the beyond, the immortal, it has created for itself a way to continue on.

There is no timeless, only time. When thought creates time, a space is created there. So thought is space as well. Thought also creates matter; no thought no matter. Thought is a manifestation or expression of life and to make of it a separate thing, impute to it a life of its own and then allow it to create a future for its own unobstructed continuity, is man's tragedy.
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I don't think that this kind of life exists anywhere else on any other planet. I am not saying that there may not be life in other worlds only that it is not like our existence here. Your ruminations about other forms of life and other worlds is just a wish for unlimited extension into the future and far-off places. Thought is trying to give itself continuity and speculating about the future and undiscovered worlds is a convenient way to do it.
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In order to concentrate or focus on one thing you must block out the others. By concentrating upon what you take to be nothing you withdraw and separate yourself from the natural flow of life through and around you. You are part of a generalized magnetic field and what separates you from others is thought. You are concerned only with your happiness and unhappiness, the video set you are watching. You view and experience things from a different viewpoint than others, that's all. You think that you are having a subjective experience of an objective thing. There is nothing there, only your relative, experiential data, your truth. There is no such thing as objective truth at all. There is nothing which exists outside or independent of our minds.

That part of culture that promises you peace, bliss, heaven and selflessness is the problem. To separate the rest of culture—how you entertain yourself, how you eat, your work habits and language—from this counter-reality created by culture is a mistake. The so-called savages are functioning in exactly the same way we are functioning today. Basically, there is no difference. In either the primitive or modern cultures there is no peace.

The idea that there is peace somewhere else, sometime in the future, is causing the problem. All these religious experiences like compassion, bliss and love are part of the craving for a non-existent peace which is destructive to the natural peace already there. Whatever is happening at the moment is all that there is for me. All your yesterdays, all your knowledge and your very sense of self are dead things of the past. These memories have a great deal of emotional content for you but not for me. I am only interested in what is actually happening now, not tomorrow or yesterday.

I have no particular message for mankind nor do I have any of the missionary zeal in me. I am not a savior of mankind or any such thing. People come here out of their own free will and volition because they have heard of me or out of sheer curiosity, it doesn't matter. A person may come here out of any one of a number of reasons. He finds me somehow different, a rare bird, and cannot figure me out or fit me into any framework he knows. He tells his friends and soon they arrive at the door. I can't tell them to get lost. I invite them in knowing very well that there is nothing I can do for them. What can I do for you? “Come in, sit down, make yourself comfortable,” is all I can say.
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Whatever happens, it changes the movement and demands your complete attention. Everything happening at that moment demands your complete and total attention. In that state there are no longer two things; lover and beloved, pursuer and pursued. What you call a beautiful woman, which is an idea, gives way to something else.

Romanticism is not my reality. Nothing has ever or will ever sweep me off my feet. It is not that I am the opposite of that, a man of reason. It is the element of reason in me that revolted against itself. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do but it is your doing not mine. I am not interested in anyone's search for happiness, romance or escape.

There is no experience here. So how can there be these dramatic, crazy experiences? I have no way of separating myself from events. The event and I are one and the same. I have no teaching. There is nothing to preserve. Teaching implies something that can be used to bring about change. Sorry, there is no teaching here, just disjointed, disconnected sentences. What is there is only your interpretation, nothing else. For this reason there is not now nor will there ever be any kind of copyright for whatever I am saying. I have no claims.
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My mother died when I was seven days old. My maternal grandparents took care of me. My grandfather was a Theosophist. He was a wealthy man and instilled a strong religious atmosphere around the house. So in that sense, J. Krishnamurti was also part of my background. They had his pictures, I could not avoid him. I did not go to him in search of anything. He was just part of my background. It would have been remarkable had I never gone to see him. My problem was to free myself from the whole background that was strangling me, that's all.

It is like the man who is riding a tiger and is thrown off. The tiger, maintaining its own momentum, continues on. It's gone. That's all there is to it. You cannot do anything with the tiger anymore. You never again have the fear of encountering or riding the tiger. It is finished. It has gone. So I think there is little point in my doing anything in society. It has its own momentum. Anything you try to do will engulf you and add to that momentum. Who has given the mandate to all these people to save mankind?
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If the entire collective knowledge and experience of man is thrown out, what is left is a primordial and primeval state, without the primitiveness. That kind of individual is of no use to society at all. Like a shady tree, this individual may provide shade but can never be conscious of his doing so. If you sit under the tree a coconut may fall on your head. There is a danger involved. For this reason, society may feel threatened by this individual. This society, structured the way it is, can make no use of such a person.

When once the organism has freed itself from the stranglehold of thought, anything you do to try to bring about peace and harmony there only creates disharmony and violence. It is like using war to create peace in a peaceful world. When the search itself comes to an end it comes to an end with a big bang, as it were. Then peace is something that cannot be practiced or taught.

If you drop the fictitious models of the saint and holy man you are left with the natural biological arrangement. The separative structure of thought which was introduced into the consciousness of man long ago has created the violent world and will probably push man and the rest of life on this planet to the brink of extinction. But biologically, each cell has the wisdom to avoid models and promises and simply, out of sheer survival motives, cooperates with the cell next to it. Out of the terror of annihilation, man, like the cells of his body, will learn to cooperate, but not out of love or compassion.
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The control of the body through thought has destroyed the possibility of growing into complete humans. The extraordinary intelligence of the biological organism is all that is necessary for good living but we are all the time interfering with its natural operation through the medium of thought. Your natural bodily computer is already programmed. You don't have to do a thing. Somehow, you see, something hits you like lightning and burns the whole thing there. This man then is neither sinner nor saint. He is far outside the framework of society.

For forty-nine years I searched for a man called U.G. The whole culture put me on the wrong track. I tried the dead gurus as well as the living ones. Eventually I realized that the search was useless, that the enemy was me. Now the entire knowledge and the search it engendered has been thrown out of my system completely. The demand to change one's self and the demand to change the world go out of the system together. I am neither antisocial nor thankful to society. I don't feel any bounden duty to play any part or to help my fellow men. All this kind of thing is balderdash.

The man who is trying to free himself from the world or from what he calls evil is actually the most egotistical of men. The shattering perception that finally dawns on you is that there is no such thing as ego at all. This insight blows everything apart with a tremendous force when it hits you. It is not an experience that can be shared with another. It is not an experience at all. It is a calamity in which both experience and the experiencer come to an end. A man in such a state does not escape reality and has no romantic tendencies. He harbors no humanistic notions about saving the world for he knows that anything that is done to save it only adds momentum to it. He knows that there is nothing you can do.

Your actions and the consequences of those actions form one single event. It is the logical, cause and effect thinking that imposes a sequence to events. The sudden evidence of light and the throwing of the light switch which preceded it are actually one thing, not two. They appear to you as two or more events only because time has created a space between. But time and space, apart from the ideas of time and space, do not exist at all.

Creation and destruction are going on simultaneously. The birth and death of thought happen simultaneously. That is why I insist that there is no such thing as death at all. Even the body does not die. It can change form but does not cease altogether. Because death really does not exist it is impossible for you to experience it. What you do experience is the void or emptiness you feel upon the disappearance of someone's body. Death can never be experienced and neither can birth for that matter. In your natural state, where the body is allowed to function without the interference of thought, birth and death are going on all the time.

There is no person and no space within to create a self. What is left after the continuity of thought is blown away is one disjointed and independent series of interactions. What happens in the environment around me happens in here. There is no division. When the armor you are wearing around you is stripped away, you find an extraordinary sensitivity of the senses that responds to the phases of the moon, the passage of the seasons and the movements of the other planets. There is simply no isolated, separate existence of its own here, only the throb of life.

In this death state, the ordinary breath stops entirely and the body is able to breathe through other physiological means. Among the many doctors I have discussed this strange phenomenon with only one expert in childbirth gave me a sort of explanation. He says that newborn babies have a similar way of breathing. This death process is yoga, not the hundreds of postures and breathing exercises. When the thought process stops splitting itself in two, the body goes through a clinical death. First, the death must take place then yoga begins.

Yoga is actually the body's skill in bringing itself back from the state of clinical death. This yoga of renewal is an extraordinary thing. If you observe a newborn baby you will have observed the way it moves and articulates its whole body all in a natural rhythm. After the breath and heartbeat come to an almost complete stop somehow the body begins to come back. The corpse-like appearance of the body—the stiffness, coldness and ash covering—begins to disappear, the body warms up and begins to move and the metabolism including the pulse picks up.

So it is much more like the Tai Chi than classical yoga postures. The movements and postures that the body performs when breaking down the stiffness left over from the death process are beautiful, graceful movements, like those of a newborn baby. Yogis now prescribe savasana, the corpse posture, after the performance of any moving postures. This is backwards. You start yoga as a dead stiff body then the body is renewed through natural rhythmic movements.

This whole process of dying and being renewed, although it happens to me daily and without my volition, remains very intriguing to me. It just happens out of nowhere. Even the thought of the self or ego has been annihilated. Still, there is something there experiencing this death, otherwise I would not be able to describe it here.

With the absence of any demand to repeat or use this death process the senses are given a field day. The breath, no longer under the domination of the separative thought structure, can respond fully to the physical environment. Upon seeing a beautiful mountain or sunset, the breath is suddenly drawn out of you then back in, all in a natural rhythm. This is where the expression, breathtaking beauty, probably comes from.

The only way you become conscious of things happening around you is through subtle changes in breathing patterns. It is a tremendous mechanism and in it there are no persons, no things. Sometimes you are just sitting there and you suddenly feel a shortness of breath, almost a gasping for air. It is something like a second wind. But even this passes and finally breathing stops altogether and the body bypasses the lungs, breathing with the pulse of the body alone.

One paper stresses the difference in the way my thymus gland functions. But there are other glands that are affected also—the pineal, the pituitary and others. The pineal gland, which controls the whole movement, breathing and coordination of the body, is greatly affected. When the separative thought structure dies these glands and nerve plexuses take over the functioning of the organism.

It is a painful process, for the hold of thought over the glands and plexuses is strong and has to be burnt off. This can be experienced by an individual. The burning or ionization needs energy and space to take place. For this reason, the limits of the body are reached, with energy lashing out in all directions. The body's containment of that energy in its limited form brings pain even though there is no experiencer of pain there. This painful death process is something nobody wants, not even the most ardent religious practitioners and yogis.

It is not the result of will but of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. How all this fits into your scientific structure, I do not know. Scientists doing work in this field are interested in these changes if they are described in physiological rather than mystical terms. These scientists envisage this kind of man as representing the end product of biological evolution, not the science-fiction superman or super spiritual beings. Nature is only interested in creating an organism that can respond fully and intelligently to stimuli and reproduce itself, that's all. This body is capable of extraordinary perceptions and sensations. It is a marvel.

Scientists in the field of evolution now think that the present breed of humans we have on this planet probably evolved out of a degenerated species. The mutation that carried on the self-consciousness must have taken place in a degenerate species. That is why we have messed everything up. It is anybody's guess as to whether anyone can change the whole thing. I think that human consciousness in its totality is a tremendously powerful thing with a strong momentum of its own. The whole of human consciousness is a very formidable thing.

The scientific procedure, not the self, gives you a reference point so that you may measure the truth or falseness of what I am saying. Look, I tried everything to find an answer to my burning obsession, “Is there such a thing as enlightenment at all or have we all been fooled by abstractions?” The utter frustration and complete failure to answer that question created an intensity.

The first part of my life was spent in India around yogis, holy men, sages; in short, all the associations that could benefit a person interested in spiritual matters. I found out for myself that it was all bogus. There was nothing to it at all. Totally disillusioned with the whole religious traditions of both the East and the West, I plunged myself into modern psychology, science and whatever the material world could give me.

I found out for myself that the whole idea of spirit or psyche was false. When I experimented with and studied the material world, I was surprised to find that there was no such thing as matter at all. Denying the spiritual and material basis of things, I was left with nowhere to turn. I began drifting on my own, unable to find an answer from any source.

Then one day the futility of what I was doing dawned upon me and the question which had obsessed me for almost my entire life got burnt then disappeared. After that there were no more questions. The thirst burned itself out without ever satisfying itself. Not answers but the ending of questions is the important thing. Even though everything got burnt there, still embers remain to express themselves in a natural rhythm. What impact this expression may have on the society around me is not my concern.
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