Talks in Calcutta - 4th Public Talk - 28th November, 1982 - ‘The Meaning of Daily Living’

We have been talking about so many things, so many human problems, and we ought to consider this evening several things more. You and the speaker have to think together, not agree, not disregard or reject. Thought has been responsible for all the miseries of human beings, though it has created in the world of technology most extraordinary things. It seems so utterly urgent and necessary that we should think together, cooperate together, find out for ourselves because there is no more any leader, no politician, no guru. We are utterly and totally responsible for ourselves. As the crisis is great, we ought to be able to think together, and apparently that is one of the most difficult things to do because each one of us has so many opinions, so many conclusions, which prevent our coming together. To think together means to put aside all your personal prejudices, bias, opinions and various forms of conclusions which actually prevent communication with each other. We could put all that aside and so find out for ourselves the truth, the actuality of life, look at it without any bias; not as a communist, Marxist, socialist, or belonging to some sect or religion or nationality, but together look very closely at our lives. Nobody is going to change our lives; no environment, no authority, no book. We have to look together at ourselves as we are and explore with great depth the meaning of existence, the meaning of our lives, the significance of our activities.

Let us together look at the whole existence of our life. Going to the office day after day for the next 40/50 years and then dying at the end of it – the ugliness and brutality of it all. We should be able to look at this whole existence of our life, of each one’s life, to observe it, not direct it, not to ask ourselves what is the goal, what should I do, but first to get acquainted, to understand ourselves, to understand what actually we are, why we do certain things, why we belong to this or to that. It is important that we look at our life. If you observe closely, you will see that your life is fragmented, broken up. Either you are a businessman or a doctor or a surgeon or an engineer, and in your own personal life there is always this division between you and another, however intimate. There is always this division, this struggle, this pain. Of course, there is some kind of joy, pleasure, but that is also part of life. Our life, as it is now, is broken up, fragmented, and this fragmentation takes place because our thinking is also fragmentary.

Our thinking is the outcome of knowledge, and knowledge is always limited. Knowledge always goes hand in hand with ignorance. There is no complete knowledge about anything. Our thinking, which is born out of our knowledge, is always limited under all circumstances, whether you are a scientist or a psychologist or an engineer, and so on. So thought, thinking, is limited, circumscribed, and what is limited must inevitably, in its action, create fragmentation. Thought itself is the cause of all division, of all fragmentation. Unless one understands the nature and the structure of thought, one cannot go very far, and to go very far you must begin very near, which is you, how you think, what you think, and discover for yourself that thought always is limited. Thought can invent god, the immeasurable, the nameless, the invisible, the supreme, but it is still the product of thought. So thought is one of the major factors of our conflict, of our misery, of our sorrow. Unless one understands this basically, very deeply, not intellectually, not verbally or argumentatively or logically, unless you understand the nature of thinking, you cannot begin to discover for yourself a new instrument, a totally different instrument. Because, the only instrument we have now is thought, and thought has created incredible problems, most complex problems, and thought tries to solve those problems and thereby creates more problems. You must have noticed this politically, religiously, and so on. We must find together a new instrument, and that is what we are going to do when we talk about death, religion, meditation. And to understand, to discover, and to come upon something that is not man-made, that something must be beyond time, beyond all measure.

It is much more important to understand what happens before death rather than what happens after death. We are always enquiring what happens after death, but we never enquire what is happening before death, not at the last day or the last minute but the way we live for thirty, forty, fifty years or more. Time is death, time – which is the inward time, the psychological time, the time that has created the idea of thought, ‘I hope to become something, I hope to become rich, I hope to become a saint, or a particular person.’ The inward time, the psychological time of hope, of achievement, of that which is to change to become something else – all that involves time both physically and psychologically. We are talking about the psychological time, a time that is inside the skin as it were – that time is death. To think in terms of time is to bring about division, fragmentation, give the future greater significance than the present.

Time is a movement invented by thought. Psychological time is invented by thought, and thought itself is the product of time. Thought is the product of time because man has acquired knowledge through long evolution; evolution implies time, and when we think in terms of time, we divide life, we fragment life – I am a Hindu, you are a Buddhist, I am a Muslim, you are a Christian, and so on. This fragmentation is the result of thought which itself is limited. And psychological time is invented by thought. When you say, ‘I am, I will be, I am this but I will one day be different,’ that gap between what you are and what you should be or what you want to be, is time. When you have such time, there must be fragmentation. Life which is being lived now, in that life we have separated death from living.

We never enquire deeply what happens long before death, what happens to our life. Very few people ask that. They are all concerned with what happens after death – whether you will live, whether you will meet your brother, and so on, but not with the long period of thirty, forty, fifty years which is far more important than what happens after. So, we are going to examine, observe, what our life is. Because, if we don’t understand that profoundly, when you meet death, then you are frightened, then you are totally blind to everything. We ought to investigate our life which we live daily, whether it has any significance at all, whether it has any value, depth, beauty. Perhaps you go to the office from nine to five for the rest of your life. Have you ever thought about what a tragedy it is? And what are you working for? You will say, ‘My responsibility, my duty to my family, I must earn money, therefore I go to the office from nine to five for the next 60 years; then I retire, and then die. That is one of the factors of our daily existence. There, in the office or in the factory, you are struggling, you are competing, you want to become the manager, the clerk wants to become the executive, the priest wants to become the bishop, and so on. You come home, weary, insulted, bored. What do you call home – just the roof, half a dozen rooms, or one room? What is a home? Have you ever thought about all this? What does that word ‘home’ mean to you? Is it just to live there, eat, sex, children, quarrelling, arguing, discussing, bullying each other or withdrawing from it all, becoming a monk, a sannyasi? You can’t withdraw from life; you may put on different robes, but life is where you are, what you are, and during these 40/50 years, there is constant struggle, constant conflict, pain, little joy, the pursuit of pleasure and facing the inevitable death. That is our life, put in a nutshell. You can’t deny it; it is so. Now this is the life of every human being on earth, whether he lives in an affluent society or under a dictatorship or in a totalitarian state, whether he is Marxist, Leninist or democrat. This is his life – pain, struggle, conflict, working from morning till night. Do you know what happens to such a human being, his capacity to think? This is the state of every human being, that is his consciousness.

You are actually the rest of mankind. This is not a logical conclusion, this is a fact. You must understand this fact; otherwise, as we talk about death furthermore, you won’t understand the significance of it, which is your consciousness with its content. The content is the belief, the dogma, the name, the form, the pain, anxiety, loneliness, depression, desire; all that is you. All that is what you are actually. This consciousness is the consciousness of all human beings. If you feel the depth of it, the extraordinary beauty of it, the strength of it, that you are the rest of mankind, that it is a fact, and when you feel it in your blood, in your heart, in your mind, then you are no longer an individual. I know it is difficult for you to swallow this or even to think about it because you are conditioned to be an individual, but you are not. You may be tall, you may be short or clever, and so on, but inside you are like the rest of mankind.

If you are the rest of mankind, you are mankind. Then what is your responsibility to man? What is your responsibility to what is happening in the world? Probably, you have never asked this question of yourself. You say my responsibility is to my family, to my country. But the idea of your country is just another invention of thought. When you ask the question what is my responsibility to the rest of mankind, you have to find out for yourself what is your responsibility, what is right action. You can’t escape from it. You may limit yourself to certain immediate responsibilities, but you as a human being who is the rest of mankind, you are also responsible for mankind. So your consciousness is not yours. It is shared by all human beings living on this earth. They all go through every kind of misery, every kind of suffering – pain, anxiety, despair and the feeling of utter loneliness. If you are at all aware of what is happening in the world, then you will have to ask yourself what is your responsibility, what is your action.

Now, you think you are an individual, you think you are separate from the rest of mankind, and then you ask, ‘What happens to me after I die, do I not incarnate?’ Let us examine that very closely. What are you? When you say, I want to be born next life, I believe in reincarnation, and so on, what is it that is going to be reborn? What are you? Let us examine it together dispassionately. You are the name, the form, the body. You are what you think, you are the result of your education, if you have had one. And the education is so rotten, it only conditions you to become some engineer, clerk, or this or that. You are not educated to understand the beauty, the wholeness of life. You are given a lot of knowledge so that you can act either skilfully or not, in the world. That is not education. That is one very small part of education. Education is the cultivation of the whole human being, the unfoldment, the flowering of a human mind, not crippling by specialization. So what are you? Are you a series of words, a series of ideas, a repetitive memory, a continuity of conviction? That is all. It is so. This is a verbal structure. But you will say that is not all, there is something much deeper. When you say there is something much deeper, god or atman or whatever you like to call it – the soul as the Christians do, and you call it by another name – when you say I am not all that, I am much more, there is a fragment of light in me; when you say there is something more than mere physical attributes, more than mere conclusions, concepts, beliefs and words, there is something beyond; when you say you are more than that, it is also the invention of thought, obviously. You are put together by thought. You call yourself a Hindu, and another calls himself a Muslim, and so on. All that division is the result of thought. You are actually a series of memories, a series of reactions and responses based on your knowledge, your experience, your quality of mind. That is what you are, which is essentially death. You are living in the past and the past is death. All knowledge is in the past, and therefore, when you live with knowledge which is the past, and as the past is over, what are you? Look at yourself as you would look in a mirror. That is what you are. And you say, ‘If I die, I incarnate in another’, which is to carry the same thing over to the next life. If you do believe in future life, that is, next life, then what you do now matters more because next life you will pay for it. This is your conviction. This is what you cling to, a lot of memories which are dead ideas, which are also finished. So the content of your life is that. That is why this country which believes in so many things, so many beliefs, so many superstitions, believes in reincarnation. That is why here there is a slow dying.

Now, the question then is, what is death? Please ask this question: Are you just the vast reservoir of memory, words, pictures, symbols? Is your consciousness the rest of mankind, that you are not an individual? That what you think, other people think, your thinking, is not individual and that there is only thinking? When you realize you are not an individual though you may have a different form, different shape of head, different jobs, and so on, but that inwardly you are like the rest of mankind, what does death mean then? Look, sir. Suppose I am all that – name, thought, education, physical responses, psychological reactions, all the inherited racial memories and personal memories, which is all in the past, I am all that and all human beings are that, all human consciousness is that, then what does it mean to die? Ask this question, sirs. Now we are living, repetitively active, mechanically active, as most people are; but you are active, you have got life, you have got feelings, you have got responses, sensations, and when death comes, all that is wiped out. That is what we call death, which is to end all the things you have held, your joys, your house, your bank account, your wife, your children; all that you end; you and your attachment, that is death. But you want to carry it over to the next life which is just an idea, vision, fulfilment. Please listen: While living, can you end attachment? Because, when you die, all attachment ends. But can you invite the ending of attachment? Do you understand this? That is ending. Ending is death. So, can you, while living, vigorous, active, end your attachment, end a particular habit voluntarily, easily, quietly? Because then, where there is an ending, there is a totally different beginning. When you end something like attachment, there is a different activity going on: to incarnate in the present now. That is creativity. It is up to you if you want to do all this.

We ought to talk over together what is religion, what is a religious life, what is a religious mind. We are going to enquire together what is a religious life, what is meditation, and if there is anything that has not been touched by thought. Do you call the present religions all throughout the world as religious? You are a Hindu, you believe, your religion says this and that, you worship an idol; the Muslim does not, but he has his own form of worship. The Christian has his symbol – the rituals, the dogmas, the beliefs, the superstitions, all that. The hierarchical structure of a religious society, you call all that religion. Your belief is god. Unless you believe in god or some supreme principle, it is considered that you are not religious. We say to ourselves, ‘There must be something more, something which is protecting, which is giving, which is creating.’ Thought creates the idea, based on books, tradition, being programmed to believe in god. That surely is not religion. Do you agree with that? Of course not. But that is not religion: your belief, your worship, going to the temple, to the mosque, to the church, repeating some phrases utterly divorced from daily life. To understand the daily life, to bring about a radical change in that life, to have a brain that is not superstitious – that is actually facing facts, facing what one is and going beyond ‘what is’. That is the beginning of what is a religious mind. To understand the whole meaning of daily living, which is the understanding of the relationship with each other, to love, to have that quality of love, to have that perfume. that beauty, that flame, that is religion. That is the religious mind, To live a life that has no conflict, that has the sense of compassion with love, with intelligence, that is a religious life. Compassion is intelligence. That is the religious life. But that is not enough. We have to understand much deeper things, which is what is meditation.

What is meditation? Is it sitting in a certain posture, closing your eyes, repeating some phrases, some mantra? The word mantra means in Sanskrit, to ponder over, consider, not becoming. When you are not becoming, what are you? Also that word mantra means to resolve and put away self-centred activity. That is the real meaning of that word mantra. Now, look at what you have done with it. You repeat some words and call that mantra. As we said, a religious life is not becoming inwardly anything; we must go much deeper than that. Meditation is the ending of measurement. I will go into it. So what is meditation, not how to meditate. When you put the ‘how’, when you use that word ‘how’, that means, ‘give me a system, please tell me what to do, show me the path.’ If you can remove that word ‘how’ altogether from your mind, and then look at it, what is meditation? Systems, methods, practices, certain forms of discipline, breathing correctly, deeply, and so on, all that is not meditation. It is an exchange, a market place where the guru sells you something and you practise. We are going to see what meditation is. Meditation is not the practice of any system. Because, when you practise a system, your brain becomes atrophied, becomes dull. It is not alive, active. If you are really, deeply, concerned with meditation, then there is no system, no method. Practising every day, sitting half an hour quietly, is not meditation. Can you deny all that intelligently because you see the absurdity of practising a method, as it brings up a routine? Whereas in meditation, there must be freedom – freedom from fear, freedom from envy, greed, sorrow and all the psychological wounds and hurts one has received from childhood. One should be free from all that.

So, we have to enquire first what it means to be aware. It means three things – what it means to be aware, what it means to concentrate, and what it means to attend. Because, all this is implied in meditation – to be aware, to be conscious of your environment, to be aware how you talk, how you walk, how you eat, what you eat; to be aware how you speak to another, how you treat another, as you are sitting there, to be aware of your neighbour, the colour of the coat, the way he looks. Without criticism just be aware. That gives you great sensitivity, empathy, so that your body is subtle, sensitive, aware of everything that is going on around you. To be aware without any choice, see where you are, looking at the speaker, looking all around you without a single choice, just look – to be aware.

Then, let us look at concentration. When you concentrate, what happens? To control all thought except one thought, which is to concentrate on something, concentrate on a book, concentrate on what you are doing, concentrate which means, shut off all other thought except one thought, to centralize all thinking to a particular point – that is what generally concentration means. That is, while you are trying to concentrate, all other thoughts are wandering, pushing, coming in and out. So you build a resistance to every other thought except one thought, one idea. Look at it. That is generally what is called concentration.

Then, there is attention. Have you ever attended to anything, given your whole energy, listened totally to another, completely attended? Not like a soldier who is drilled to attend, but if you understand the nature of awareness, concentration, then what is attention? If you are attending now completely to what is being said, in that attention there is no centre as the ‘me’. Are you so attending to what is being said? That is, giving all your energy, listening vibrantly, alive to attend? If you are, then you will find there is no centre as the ‘me’ attending. Then, when you are attending so deeply, the brain becomes quiet, naturally. There is no chattering, there is no control. Who is the controller to control thought? The controller is another part of thought, isn’t it? One part of thought says, ‘I am the witness, I am going to control my thought.’ The controller is the controlled. In meditation there is no controller, there is no activity of will, which is desire. Then, the brain, the whole movement of the brain – apart from its own anxiety which has its own rhythm – becomes utterly quiet, silent. It is not the silence cultivated by thought. It is the silence of intelligence, the silence of supreme intelligence. In that silence comes that which is not touched by thought, by endeavour, by effort. It is the way of intelligence which is the way of compassion. Then that which is sacred is everlasting. That is meditation. Such a life is religious life. In that there is great beauty.