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To what extent is sorrow attenuated, softened by accepting it?

To what extent is sorrow attenuated, softened by accepting it?

From Public Talk 6 in Saanen, 18 July 1963

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To what extent is sorrow attenuated, softened by accepting it? Why should I accept sorrow? That is another superficial activity of the mind: to accept it and live with it. I don’t want to soften sorrow, I don’t want to attenuate it, I don’t want to run away from it, I don’t want to accept it. I want to know, understand, see what it means – the beauty, the ugliness, the extraordinary vitality it has. I don’t want to make it something it is not. By accepting it, by running away from it, by finding a concept or formula, I am not dealing with it. So a mind that wants to understand sorrow can’t transform it, can’t make it gentle, can’t do something about it. You cannot do a thing about it. But for a million years, we have done something about it, and that is why we are still in sorrow.

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