Saanen 1973 Talk 3
Now what is the meaning of life? Because I think if we could understand that, not verbally, not merely intellectually, structurally, linguistically, but seriously go into it and find out for ourselves what is the meaning of life. And then perhaps we shall be able to find out for ourselves how to live in this world, although we may, at least some of us, being serious, have turned away from it.
I think there is a difference between the purpose of life and the meaning of life. One can project a purpose, a goal, an end, depending on one’s environment, the culture in which one has been brought up, or one’s own idiosyncrasy, temperament, out of one’s own background one can project a purpose of life. The intellectuals have done it, the religious authorities have done it, and our own desire to have a purpose.
Now I think the meaning of existence is different, you can’t invent a meaning. You can deceive yourself, you can say to yourself, ’This is the meaning of my life’ – again depending on your economic, social, religious background, depending on your tendency, the cultural depth. To me, both are utterly meaningless because they do not reveal the real significant meaning of life. And when we ask what is the meaning of life, is it a reaction, because we find that life as we live now has no meaning whatsoever – the daily routine, the office, the factory, the labour, endless travail, struggle in our relationships with each other, the sense of lack of love, loneliness, weary years, and then ultimately die. This existence of life, as it is now, has very little meaning, or none at all.
The religious people throughout the world have tried to give a meaning – saints, saviours, the various gurus who are springing up like mushrooms in this country, in the world, and don’t eat these mushrooms, they are dangerous! They have invented according to their particular experience, according to their conditioning, a purpose and a meaning to life. Again based on their rationalization, if you are intellectual, and if you are religiously inclined on their conditioning according to their particular sect, religious belief and so on. As we said, they are essentially based on the whole movement of thought. Thought is knowledge, experience, memory. And whatever the culture in which one has been brought up, and according to that culture and background one can project, invent, imagine, linguistically, emotionally, intellectually a meaning to life. And without finding it out for ourselves, not according to any ’philosopher’ – I really don’t like to use that word ’philosopher’ because the word means the love of truth in daily life, not a clever, cunning, highly educated mind that invents a theory. And such people are called philosophers. Intellectually they may invent, or by their very clever reasoning project or give a meaning to life. And we generally accept such meaning, because we have no meaning to our life, and if there is somebody who says, ”This is the meaning of life”, we are only too eager, delighted to accept what others have said.
And it is important now to find out, if you are serious at all, and if you have rejected completely the purposes, the meanings which others have given, or you have given out of your own suffering, out of your own loneliness, out of your own feeling that life has no meaning, therefore you have to invent a meaning, if you can reject all that, put aside all that – which is quite an arduous thing to do because we like to cling to our own particular beliefs, to our own particular experiences, to our own desire to find something that has a meaning. Now if one can put aside all that, because they are all illusions, they have no meaning. Verbally they may have a meaning, ideologically, but in substance, in reality, as an actual fact in daily life they have no meaning whatsoever.
Now can you and the speaker together share this question in all seriousness, committing ourselves totally to find out: what is the meaning of life? Has it any meaning at all? And if you are putting that question: has it any meaning? – are you putting it as a reaction because you find it has no meaning? Or are you putting it to find out, to enquire, to investigate? Then if you are investigating, enquiring, then we can share that together. But if you have a purpose, a meaning, and the speaker or another has no purpose or a meaning, then we cannot possibly share. We can only share that which both of us are aware of, know the significance and the intention of.
So that being clear, let’s proceed to find out if there is a meaning to life because it is necessary, absolutely necessary because modern culture, or ancient culture have imposed on us certain values, certain moralities. The religious structures have given us a background of a purpose – heaven and hell – you know, all that! Now a mind that is really very serious, and we are here for that purpose, we are serious, at least some of us, I hope so. As we said, this in not an entertainment, intellectual, verbal, or religious entertainment. The speaker is very serious, and if you are also very serious then we can meet together, talk over together, share together.
Now how are you going to find out what is the purpose of life? Because once you discover it as a reality, not as an idea, as something somebody else has projected, or you yourself have projected, but if you can discover for yourself the purpose, the meaning of life, the meaning, the significance, the depth, the beauty, then it has a relationship with regard to your action, with regard to your relationship with another, with regard to your whole living. So how do we begin to enquire: what is the meaning of life? Will thought reveal it – thinking about it, rationalizing, discussing and trying to find out the truth through opinions, which is dialectic? You may have an opinion of what the meaning of life is, and another may have another meaning, and through exchange of opinions, reason, can you come upon the truth of what is the meaning of life? You are following? We are taking a journey together into this matter. You are not merely listening to a speaker, to a lot of words, or ideas or imagination. We are actually together sharing this problem, seriously. So through opinions you cannot find it. So you have to discard opinions. Right? Can you discard actually? If you have, then can you find it through very careful analysis? Analysis, as we explained the other day, is a process of paralysis – right? – paralysis through analysis! We went into that the other day. And can you discover it through the movement of time, as thought? Please, are you following all this? Am I making it clear?
Is it a matter of time? That is, investigating through the process of thinking what others have said, or through careful rationalization – which thought can do excellently, objectively. So can thought reveal the meaning of life? Thought, as we said, is the movement within the area of time. Thought is time. And our brain, and the whole structure of our mind is based on time.
So we have these problems, opinions, what others have said, whether it is Mao, Lenin, various saviours, gurus, intellectuals, you accept them or reject them, or through the capacity of a mind that can think very clearly and logically and say to itself, ”This is the meaning of life” – can thought do that? – thought being the response of memory, knowledge, experience, which is the past. So can the past reveal the full meaning of life? You understand this? We have got these three things, which are really one, but it doesn’t matter. For the moment we will look at them separately. Opinions; what others have said, the saints, the saviours, the teachers, the books; and your own thought. So can you depend on your thought? And you may not be perfectly balanced, most of us are slightly neurotic. And can you depend on what others have said, it doesn’t matter who it is? – the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Indian books and so on and so on. And also can you depend on your own thinking? Have you sufficient confidence – that isn’t the word – have you sufficient knowledge which you have put to the test to find out – you have understood?
So we can reject opinions, what others say, what the meaning of life is to you, what others have said. It is only the fools who advise! So we can reject that without too much thought.
Then can you look at your culture, of which you are a part, the culture that says, ”The meaning of life is this, work endlessly, in the office, in the factory and bear the responsibility of a family” – and your culture says, whether it is western culture or western culture, it doesn’t matter, all cultures are more or less the same, says that you will live in heaven if you are good on earth. And that is the meaning of life, going to heaven! And also your culture says, ’Why bother what the meaning of life is, just live, put up with the ugliness, the beastly existence, the sorrow, the pain, the anxiety, the pleasures, the fears, the utter boredom, the loneliness, put up with it – that is part of your life, you can’t go beyond it, therefore enjoy, therefore make pleasure as the main thing of your life’ – right? And that is what you are doing.
So we are asking: is pleasure the full meaning of life? And that is what you want, that is what you are seeking, a permanent, enduring, continuous pleasure – right – not only sexually, but also in your relationship with others. So pleasure, which is derived in work, in fulfilment, in becoming ambitious, achievement, success, in possession, either of ideas or of things – right – so the principle of pleasure is for most people the meaning of life. Right? Please let’s be terribly honest. We can so easily deceive ourselves. And in the pursuit of pleasure fulfilment becomes extraordinarily important – sexually, fulfilment of your desires, fulfilment to be somebody important, famous, successful, all that. Now is pleasure the full deep meaning of life? Which is what you want – right? Is that the meaning of life? If you accept that, as you do, that is the meaning of life – the fulfilment, the self aggrandizement, the sexual pleasures, the pleasure of competition, success, wanting to be known, self-important, self-centred activity, all that gives pleasure. If that is the meaning of life then life becomes terribly superficial – doesn’t it? And that is what we have done. Follow this. That is what we have done actually. We have made life, in the pursuit of pleasure, very superficial. Haven’t you noticed it? You may be very clever, you may be a great artist, pianist, or whatever you are, expert, a good or swindling politician, whatever it is, but it is all on the surface.
So knowing that it is a superficial life, then you ask: is there not a deeper meaning?
Brockwood Park 1976 Talk 4
So we are together and we mean together, exploring and finding out for ourselves together if there is any meaning to life at all, any depth to life at all – or merely a passing event in a long series of historical processes. So, to explore in any field there must be freedom; freedom to examine so that in that very examination there is no distortion. When there is distortion there is a motive behind that distortion, a motive to find an answer, a motive which you would like to have or which you think would solve our problems, a motive which may be based on past experience, past knowledge – and all knowledge is the past – and if there is any motive there must be distortion. So, can our mind, which is our ’common mind’ because we have the same content in our consciousness, all human beings whether they live in the far east, the middle east or far west, go through this process of fear, agony, torture, anxiety, fear and endless conflict – inwardly and outwardly. That’s the common consciousness of mankind. So when you examine your own consciousness you are looking into the consciousness of man, and therefore it’s not a personal individualistic examination. On the contrary, you are looking into the consciousness of the world – which is you – which is a fact when you go into it very deeply.
So a mind that is free, which is a tremendous demand, which demands that you as a human being are committed totally to the transformation of the content of consciousness – because the content makes the consciousness. And we are concerned with the transformation, with the total psychological revolution of this consciousness, and to explore it you need great energy. And that energy comes into being when there is no dissipation of energy; one dissipates through trying to overcome ’what is’, to deny ’what is’, to escape from ’what is’, or analyse ’what is’. Because the analyser, as we said during these many talks over many years, is the analysed. The analyser is not different from that which he analyses. When you’re envious or angry or greedy – whatever it is – when you analyse the process of greed, the analyser is himself ’greed’ – that which he analyses in not separate from him. And this is a fundamental reality.
So, we are asking what is the meaning and the significance of life, if there is any at all? If we say there is, you have already committed yourself to something, therefore you cannot examine, you have already started with distortion. Or, if you say, there is nothing, no meaning to life, that also is another form of distortion. So, one must be completely free of both – both the positive and the negative assertion.
So, as we said, this is part of meditation. This is the real beginning of meditation. The gurus that come over to this country from India, and are springing up all over the world like so many mushrooms, they have brought to this word a great many meanings. There is the transcendental meditation, and I wish they hadn’t used that lovely word – which is the repetition of certain words and there are really in Sanskrit very, very few mantras, which we won’t go into now. And the repetition of those words given, at a certain price on the market, give you, if you repeat every morning for twenty minutes in the afternoon, and another twenty minutes in the evening, they bring you a certain qualities of quietness, constant repetition. You can just as well repeat ’Ave Maria’ or ’coca cola’ or any other mechanical repetition, it will certainly give you a certain quality of quiet, but this is mechanical quietness. Because you have reduced the brain to constantly repeat, repeat, repeat – even if you have tried it for two minutes, how mechanical it becomes, it becomes quiet. But that’s no more transcendental than anything else. And, thereby, we think we’ll experience something that is beyond the material process of thought.
So, there is this, that man seeks experience, he seeks experience other than the ordinary daily experience. We are bored or tired or fed up with all the experiences we have of life, and we hope to capture some experience which is not the product of thought. And to experience – the word means ’to go through’, to go through with anything and end it; not remember it and carry it on. But we don’t do that. To recognize an experience you must have already known it; it’s not a new experience. So a mind that demands experience – please listen to this – other than the mere, physical, psychological everyday experience – that demands something far greater and above all this, what it will experience is its own projection, and therefore it is still mechanistic, still materialistic, which is the product of thought. So, when you do not demand any experience, when there is no distortion and therefore no illusion, and one has understood the whole meaning of desire, which we went into many times during this and other talks, which is sensation plus thought is desire with its image. And so desire is also a distortion in the process of examination. I hope you are following all this. Then only the mind, the whole structure of consciousness, being free is capable of looking at itself, looking at itself without any distortion, as you see in a clear mirror, your face. The mirror reflects exactly what your face is; there’s no distortion – unless the mirror is distorted. So in that way the mind, which includes the brain and all the nervous organisms, the whole totality which is the mind is now free – absolutely without any distorting movement. Distortion takes place when there is effort – right? Effort implies ’me’ and something I am going to achieve – division between me and that. That division invariably brings conflict as in the nationalities and so on; wherever there is division there must be conflict, and so on. Meditation comes only when there is the complete ending of conflict. Therefore every other form of meditation where there is effort, practice, control has no meaning. Right? Please don’t accept what the speaker is saying. We are examining together, sharing together, therefore it’s very important not to accept a thing that is being said, but examine it.
So, we have to go into the question of control because we are going to go into the question of control, awareness and attention. All these are necessary to find out if there is a meaning to life, or no meaning at all. We are educated from childhood to control – our feelings – you know, the whole process of control. In control there is the controller and the thing that is being controlled. Right? The controller thinks he is different from that which he desires to control. So he has already divided himself as the ’controller’ and the ’controlled’ hence there is always conflict. That is, one fragment of thought says to itself, I must control other fragments of thought. But thought which says, ”I must control other fragments” is itself a part of thought – a fragment of thought. So when you see all that the controller is the controlled. This is very important because when this is realized completely, deeply, not verbally, not theoretically, but actually, then conflict comes to an end. That is, there is no division in oneself; there is not the controller different from the controlled. The experiencer is the experience; they are not two different entities or movements. The thinker is the thought; there is no thinker if there is no thought. So when one realizes this profoundly as a truth, as a law, then all effort comes to an end. And it’s very important in the investigation with which we are concerned now, that this effort comes to an end. Because effort also is a distorting factor.
So, meditation can only come into being when there is no effort of any kind, and it is necessary to meditate to find out if there is any meaning to life at all, or if there is a meaning. And meditation is also laying the foundation of right conduct; right in the sense, accurate, not according to an ideal, not according to a pattern, not according to any formula – but action which takes place when there is complete observation of that which is going on in oneself. From that, action takes place. So we must establish this through meditation and right relationship. Relationship between human beings, which means no conflict between human beings. The conflict exists only when there is division between the two images, which we have talked about a great deal. The image which you have and which she has about you and you have about her. The images make the division, which we have gone into, we won’t go into it now because it would take too long.
And if there is to be meditation there must be no psychological fear whatsoever. Therefore the ending of sorrow – and what we talked about yesterday – compassion, and love; that’s the basis, the foundation of meditation. Without that you can sit under a tree for the rest of your life, cross-legged, and you will still be sitting there under the tree for ever and ever. Or, you may breathe properly – you know all the tricks one plays – none of those are going to help.
You may remember a certain teacher, and to him came a disciple. And the disciple took a position – sitting properly, cross-legged, the so-called Indian lotus posture, and shut his eyes. And the teacher says, my friend, what are you doing? He replied, I’m breathing properly, I’m sitting straight, and controlling my thoughts so that I can reach the highest consciousness. So the teacher picks up two stones and keeps on rubbing them. And the disciple wakes up and says, Master, what are you doing? The Master says, I’m rubbing two stones to make one of them into a mirror. And the disciple says, Master don’t you know you can never do that. The Master says, I know that, but do you know you can sit like that for the next ten thousand years – all the rest of it.
So, when you have really, deeply established a way of life, which in itself is not an end. that’s only the beginning of it, then we can proceed to find out whether the mind, which is the totality – the brain and all the rest – which is the entire consciousness, is quiet, without any distortion, because it’s necessary to be quiet. Because it is only when the mind is quiet, still, you can hear properly. We never hear anything completely, we never listen to anything totally. While you are listening there is already a distortion taking place – what you hear, either you agree or disagree, or you compare what you hear with what you already know, or your mind is chattering. So it is never actually listening either to your wife, to your husband, anything, because you are already crowded. So it is necessary for the mind to be quiet to listen to any conversation, like now. To listen to any person, to a bird, to the wind, the mind must naturally be quiet to listen to the beauty of a bird singing. So the mind must be quiet to find out, to investigate, to look, to observe if life has any meaning at all, or if there is something most profound, which we are doing now, I hope. That is your mind after laying down the foundation of behaviour, conduct, order, in this confusion of existence, naturally the mind becomes quiet. Now in that quietness is there an observer who says, ”I am quiet”? You understand my question? When you are happy, walking along a street, or in the woods, or sitting in the sun, quietly happy, when you say, ”Am I happy?”, then that happiness has gone. Right? Have you not noticed, it is a very simple fact. The moment you are conscious of something which gives you happiness, that happiness disappears. So when you say, ”Am I silent, is my mind silent?”, it is no longer. Right?
There are different kinds of silence; the silence between two words, the silence between two notes of the piano, the silence between two noises, the silence between two thoughts – an interval between two thoughts – the silence after a long battle with oneself – the weariness. The silence between two wars, which you call peace. So, all those are silences which are the product of noise – between two noises, between two thoughts, between two notes, between two wranglings. That is not silence; there is silence which is not produced or cultivated, so that there is no ’me’ to observe that silence, there is only silence, quietness. Then we can ask that question: in that silence is there any meaning or not at all? You really don’t ask that question in that ’silence’ but we have started with that question; we are not answering that question; we must find an answer to that question. We have prepared the field, or rather the mind that is capable now of finding out. Have we gone together so far? A little bit at least.
Where do you find the answer? You understand my question? We put a question which is: has life any meaning? We have said various religions have offered a substitute, a symbol; a symbol, a myth is not actual, it’s a romantic thing. But when you have started with that question we must find out who is going to answer that question. Am I going to answer it, that is, as a human being – answer that question – or, in that very silence the answer is? You understand my question? Am I making myself somewhat clear?
That is, when there is no distortion – and distortion exists only when there is motive, distortion exists when there is effort, distortion exists where there is a demand for experience, distortion exists when there is division between the observer and the observed, the thinker and the thought and so on, all these are distorting factors – when there is no distortion and therefore no wastage of energy, now in that silence there is this energy, which has been dissipated, but now that dissipation has ceased. So in that silence there is great energy. Is that actual with each of us – or are you still floundering somewhere in the middle? You understand my question? Because there must be that energy, that vitality, that strength to see – words! Because the word is not the thing, the description is not the described. So is there anything beyond this energy and silence? Is this energy a mechanical thing – because mechanical thought has tremendous energy – to go to the moon, to create the instrument to go to the moon there must be a great deal of energy to put all that together, a million parts together. That demands great co-operation of three hundred thousand people to put that thing together. That is, that energy is derived from knowledge, experience, memory, response of thought; and thought in its activity has its own energy which is mechanistic, which is a material process. That energy is totally different from the energy which we are talking about. Am I mesmerizing all of you?
You see, the speaker is very serious about all this. He has spoken for fifty years and more on this, and as most minds are caught in grooves, deep or shallow, one is constantly watching if the brain forms a groove and feels secure in that groove and remains in that groove. We are asking the same thing of each one of us. And when one stays in a groove – belief, dogmas, religions – whatever the groove be, however beautiful, however pleasant, however comforting, then that mind becomes mechanical, repetitive, so it loses its depth, its beauty. So we are asking, is the silence mechanistic, a product of thought which says ”There must be something beyond me – and therefore to find that out I must be silent, I must control myself, I must subjugate everything to find out” – which is still the movement of thought. Right? So we must find out the difference between concentration, awareness and attention, because we are concerned with these three.
Concentration implies, to focus ones energy in a particular direction, excluding all other directions. Right? I concentrate on a page, on a word; the word near or the word very far away, to concentrate on that demands your energy applied to that one particular thing, therefore you are excluding all other things; you are building a wall, resisting. That is concentration.
Then there is awareness, which is fairly simple if you don’t give a lot of complications to it. To be aware. To be aware of the marquee, its shape, the people sitting round you, the colour of their dress – to be aware of all this; but that awareness then begins to choose. To choose that colour better than the other colour, to choose what it would be like, what it would not be like. So, to be aware without choice – just to observe the total thing without any choice. I hope you are doing this as we are talking.
And there is attention. Attention implies there is no centre from which you are attending. When there is a centre from which you are attending, that’s merely an extension of the centre. The centre is me or you, and if you are aware from that centre that attention is limited. Right? But there is an attention which has no centre; the centre exists when there is choice in awareness. Right? Are you following all this?
You understand? Concentration, awareness, awareness with choice; when there is choice there is always ’me’, my experience, my knowledge – me, separate from you. That ’me’ chooses; where there is choice there is me and therefore it is still limited. Now we are talking about attention in which there is no centre at all. Therefore if you do it now as you are sitting there, you will see when there is no centre your attention is vast; there is no boundary. And this is necessary because the mind is now without choice, completely attentive. Completely. With your nerves, with everything – it is completely attentive, and therefore no centre. There is no ’me’, who says, ”I am attentive”. Now, in that attention, there is silence; silence which contains this energy which is no longer dissipated.
Now let’s proceed from there. To proceed from there must be either actual or verbal. You understand? Either your mind is moving, not in time – I won’t go into that – is capable of a different kind of movement, and when you describe that movement it’s either verbal or actual. If you’re caught in the verbal description then you’re lost. Right? Then you’re playing with words, arguments and all the rest. But if it is actual, real, that which is going on, then that question is still unanswered: is there a meaning to life, or none at all? Which is, to put it differently, is there anything sacred in life? Sacred in the sense – holy? The word ’whole’ means health, sanity and a quality of sacredness; that’s the word whole; the word ’whole’ means that: health, sanity and holy. Now, is the mind, your mind, healthy? That is, both your body and your mind completely healthy, so that there is no neurotic movement. Right? Even though your body may not be healthy, if it interferes then that illness distorts the mind, the activity of mind, then it’s impossible. Right? But even though you can be not completely healthy, you can know you’re not healthy, be aware of it, know its limitation and therefore leave it there. You follow?
So, we are now asking if the whole of the mind is whole – healthy, sane and holy? Is your mind like that? Please, this requires tremendous enquiry into oneself, so that there is no false note in it, no hypocrisy, never going beyond actually ’what is’. That requires great attention, great energy to look at yourself. Not to analyse yourself, but to observe what is going on. So, it is only such a mind that can find the answer. It’s only such a mind that discovers – unfortunately I describe it and therefore it becomes something unreal – there is something beyond all this travail, all this misery if you are capable, if you give your whole energy, time, capacity to this; otherwise one leads a very shallow, meaningless life – and the inevitable death coming after.
So the whole of this is meditation; from the beginning to the end. The beginning is to understand oneself; not according to any philosopher, any psychologist or any analyst, but for yourself. Yourself is mankind, the rest of the world. When you look at yourself you are looking at every human being in the world. And then after seeing what your consciousness is – your consciousness is its content – the misery, the confusion, the anxiety, the fears, the attachments, the property, the wife – you follow; all that is your consciousness, which is the consciousness of every human being. It may have frills around it, but in its essence it is the same. From there you can go into the question of fear. Psychological fear must be totally ended. We went into that, and also we went into pleasure; we talked about sorrow and the ending of sorrow. In the ending of sorrow then only there is love, compassion; otherwise there is no compassion. That is the solid earth upon which your feet are firmly established, rooted – so that there is no deception. Then effort. Where there is effort there must be distortion. So can one live a life, a daily life, without a single effort? Find out what it means. It is possible to live without a single effort. That comes only when you understand contradictions in yourself. Observe the contradiction in oneself; not try to change it, not try to alter the contradiction; just to observe. The very observation is its own ending of the contradiction. When there is a total observation in which is total attention then any contradiction in yourself comes to an end. You can test it out actually everyday for yourself. So one can live a life in which there is no conflict. Then only the real deeper meditation begins, and then you have that energy of silence, in which there is no illusion, and that is, as we said at the beginning, the first step is the last step, which is freedom.