There is the cause, from the cause, there is an effect, which is the action, that effect becomes the cause for the next action. So, it is a chain: cause, effect and that effect becomes the cause to the next effect, and so on. So, when the mind is caught in this limited chain – and it’s always limited – then your response to that challenge will be very limited.
I wonder if you see all this? May I go on? Do we understand a little bit?
I hope I’m making this clear. If I am not making it clear, I’ll go over it again, ten times, in different ways, because this is very important, because to act to that challenge without a time interval – the time interval is the response of memory. Are you doing it?
You know what sorrow is – all of us know it, every human being in the world knows what sorrow is. So, you know it very well. You may not actually have had any sorrow, but you see around you the enormity of sorrow of mankind – the global sorrow of mankind.
And if you respond to that according to your conditioning, according to your memory, you are then caught in an action that’s always time-binding. The challenge and response demands no time interval. I wonder if you see this.
Therefore, there is instant action. Right? So, that’s what we are enquiring into.
That is, what is the root of sorrow? We’re not trying to find out the cause but the very substance, the very nature, the very movement of sorrow. As we said, fear is time.
Fear, we said, is the movement of thought, thought as measure. So, thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge, and that thought is limited and so it’s a movement in time. So, if there is no time, there is no fear.
You understand this? I’m afraid I might die. That is, I might, in the future, I’m living now but I might die.
So, that is time interval. But if there was no time interval at all, there is no fear. I wonder if you see this?
So, in the same way, is the root of sorrow, time? Time being the movement of thought, time is thought. And, if there is no thought at all, when you respond to that challenge, is there suffering?
I wonder. . .
Am I…? This is rather… Please, again, let’s forget science fiction, and also forget, put away for the time being, your ideas about time, sorrow, fear and all the rest of it, your conclusions, what you have read about sorrow and reincarnation everything, forget all that, and begin again, as though you knew nothing about sorrow, as though you really – though you suffer – have no answer to it. Then we can begin, together.
But we are so conditioned to put sorrow on somebody else. Christianity has done that, beautifully. Go to church and you see all the suffering in that figure.
The Christians have given all their suffering over to somebody. And they think by that they have understood the whole circus of sorrow. And in India and the Asiatic countries, they have also another form of evasion: karma.
I won’t go into all that business. So, here we are not doing that. Here, we’re trying to face the actual movement at the moment of sorrow, and to be completely, choicelessly aware of that thing.
We’re asking, is time, which is thought, is that the fundamental issue that makes sorrow flower? I wonder if you understand all this. So, we are asking, is thought responsible for suffering?
Not only the suffering of others, the brutality of others, the total ignorance of this whole movement of the self, is that the movement of thought – thought being the past? There is no new thought, there is no free thought, there is only thought, which is the response of knowledge as experience, stored up in the brain as memory, and that responds. Now, if that is the fact, if that is true, that is, sorrow is the outcome of time and thought, if that is a fact, not a supposition, then you are responding to sorrow without the ‘me.
’ Aren’t you? The ‘me’ is put together by thought – my name, my form, how I look, my qualities, my reactions, all the things I’ve acquired, is all put together by thought, surely? So, that thought is ‘me.
’ Thought is ‘me. ’ So, time is me, the self, the ego, the personality, all that is the movement of time, as ‘me. ’ When there is no time – you understand?
– when you respond to this challenge of suffering and there is no ‘me,’ is there suffering? I wonder if you see this!
