Please do listen to this with complete attention. I may not be able to explain it very clearly, but do gather the meaning rather than stay with the words. You see, most of us are always reacting; reaction is the whole pattern of our life. Our response to sorrow is a reaction. We respond by trying to explain the cause of sorrow, or by escaping from sorrow, but our sorrow doesnt end. Sorrow ends only when we face the fact of sorrow, when we understand and go beyond both the cause and the effect. To try to be free of sorrow through a particular practice, or by deliberate thought, or by indulging in any of the various ways of escaping from sorrow, doesnt awaken in the mind the extraordinary beauty, the vitality, the intensity of that passion which includes and transcends sorrow. What is sorrow? When you hear this question, how do you respond? Your mind immediately tries to explain the cause of sorrow, and this seeking of an explanation awakens the memory of the sorrows you have had. So you are always verbally reverting to the past or going forward to the future in an effort to explain the cause of the effect which we call sorrow. But I think one has to go beyond all that. We know very well what causes sorrow - poverty, ill-health, frustration, the lack of being loved, and so on. And when we have explained the various causes of sorrow, we havent ended sorrow; we havent really grasped the extraordinary depth and significance of sorrow any more than we have understood that state which we call love. I think the two are related - sorrow and love. And to understand what love is, one has to feel the immensity of sorrow. The ancients talked about the ending of sorrow, and they laid down a way of life that is supposed to end sorrow. Many people have practiced that way of life. Monks in the East and in the West have tried it, but they have only hardened themselves; their minds and their hearts have become enclosed. They live behind the walls of their own thought, or behind walls of brick and stone, but I really do not believe they have gone beyond and felt the immensity of this thing called sorrow. To end sorrow is to face the fact of ones loneliness, ones attachment, ones petty little demand for fame, ones hunger to be loved; it is to be free of self-concern and the puerility of self-pity. And when one has gone beyond all that and has perhaps ended ones personal sorrow, there is still the immense collective sorrow, the sorrow of the world. One may end ones own sorrow by facing in oneself the fact and the cause of sorrow - and that must take place for a mind that would be completely free. But when one has finished with all that, there is still the sorrow of extraordinary ignorance that exists in the world - not the lack of information, of book-knowledge, but mans ignorance of himself. The lack of understanding of oneself is the essence of ignorance, which brings about this immensity of sorrow that exists throughout the world. And what actually is sorrow? You see, there are no words to explain sorrow, any more than there are words to explain what love is. Love is not attachment, love is not the opposite of hate, love is not jealousy. And when one has finished with jealousy, with envy, with attachment, with all the conflicts and the agonies one goes through, thinking that one loves - when all that has come to an end, there still remains the question of what is love, and there still remains the question of what is sorrow. You will find out what love is, and what sorrow is, only when your mind has rejected all explanations and is no longer imagining, no longer seeking the cause, no longer indulging in words or going back in memory to its own pleasures and pains. Your mind must be completely quiet, without a word, without a symbol, without an idea. And then you will discover, or there will come into being that state in which what we have called love and what we have called sorrow and what we have called death are the same. There is no longer any division between love and sorrow and death; and there being no division, there is beauty. But to comprehend, to be in this state of ecstasy, there must be that passion which comes with the total abandonment of oneself. ~ J Krishnamurti, Seventh Talk in Saanen, 1962
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 14:10:38 +0000
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