The Book of Life 1

August
August 1
Full heart, empty mind
There is no path to truth, it must come to you. Truth can come to you only when your
mind and heart are simple, clear, and there is love in your heart; not if your heart is filled
with the things of the mind. When there is love in your heart, you do not talk about
organizing for brotherhood; you do not talk about belief, you do not talk about division or
the powers that create division, you need not seek reconciliation. Then you are a simply a
human being without a label, without a country. This means that you must strip yourself
of all those things and allow truth to come into being; and it can come only when the
mind is empty, when the mind ceases to create. Then it will come without your invitation.
Then it will come as swiftly as the wind and unbeknown. It comes obscurely, not when
you are watching, wanting. It is there as sudden as sunlight, as pure as the night; but to
receive it, the heart must be full and the mind empty. Now you have the mind full and
your heart empty.

GOLD A1
Masters generally don't complain, but when they complain it means something. This is not only Gensha complaining, it is all the masters complaining. But this is their experience, and wherever you move you find deaf and dumb and blind people, because the whole society is that way. And how to save them? They cannot see, they cannot hear, they cannot feel, they cannot understand any gesture. If you try too much to save them they will escape. They will think: This man is after something, he wants to exploit me, or he must have some scheme. If you don't do very much for them they feel: This man is not for me because he is not caring enough. And whatsoever is done they cannot understand.

July 31
Be in communion with sorrow
Most of us are not in communion with anything. We are not directly in communion with
our friends, with our wives, with our children...
So to understand sorrow, surely you must love it, must you not? That is, you must be in
direct communion with it. If you would understand something—your neighbor, your
wife, or any relationship—if you would understand something completely, you must be
near it. You must come to it without any objection, prejudice, condemnation, or
repulsion; you must look at it, must you not? If I would understand you, I must have no
prejudices about you. I must be capable of looking at you, not through barriers, screens of
my prejudices and conditionings. I must be in communion with you, which means I must love you. Similarly, if I would understand sorrow, I must love it, I must be in communion
with it. I cannot do so because I am running away from it through explanations, through
theories, through hopes, through postponements, which are all the process of
verbalization. So words prevent me from being in communion with sorrow. Words
prevent me—words of explanations, rationalizations, which are still words, which are the
mental process—from being directly in communion with sorrow. It is only when I am in
communion with sorrow that I understand it.

July 30
Live with sorrow
We all have sorrow. Don’t you have sorrow in one form or another? And do you want to
know about it? If you do, you can analyze it and explain why you suffer. You can read
books on the subject, or go to the church, and you will soon know something about
sorrow. But I am not talking about that; I am talking about the ending of sorrow.
Knowledge does not end sorrow. The ending of sorrow begins with the facing of
psychological facts within oneself and being totally aware of all the implications of those
facts from moment to moment. This means never escaping from the fact that one is in
sorrow, never rationalizing it, never offering an opinion about it, but living with that fact
completely.
You know, to live with the beauty of those mountains and not get accustomed to it is very
difficult...You have beheld those mountains, heard the stream, and seen the shadows
creep across the valley, day after day; and have you not noticed how easily you get used
to it all? You say, “Yes, it is quite beautiful,” and you pass by. To live with beauty, or to
live with an ugly thing, and not become habituated to it requires enormous energy—an
awareness that does not allow your mind to grow dull. In the same way, sorrow dulls the
mind if you merely get used to it—and most of us do get used to it. But you need not get
used to sorrow. You can live with sorrow, understand it, go into it—but not in order to
know about it. You know that sorrow is there; it is a fact, and there is nothing more to
know. You have to live.

July 29
An immensity beyond all measure
What happens when you lose someone by death? The immediate reaction is a sense of
paralysis, and when you come out of that state of shock, there is what we call sorrow.
Now, what does that word sorrow mean? The companionship, the happy words, the
walks, the many pleasant things you did and hoped to do together—all this is taken away
in a second, and you are left empty, naked, lonely. That is what you are objecting to, that
is what the mind rebels against: being suddenly left to itself, utterly lonely, empty,
without any support. Now, what matters is to live with that emptiness, just to live with it
without any reaction, without rationalizing it, without running away from it to mediums,
to the theory of reincarnation, and all that stupid nonsense—to live with it with your whole being. And if you go into it step by step you will find that there is an ending of
sorrow—a real ending, not just a verbal ending, not the superficial ending that comes
through escape, through identification with a concept, or commitment to an idea. Then
you will find there is nothing to protect, because the mind is completely empty and is no
longer reacting in the sense of trying to fill that emptiness; and when all sorrow has thus
come to an end, you will have started on another journey—a journey that has no ending
and no beginning. There is an immensity that is beyond all measure, but you cannot
possibly enter into that world without the total ending of sorrow.

July 28
The center of suffering
When you see a most lovely thing, a beautiful mountain, a beautiful sunset, a ravishing
smile, a ravishing face, that fact stuns you, and you are silent; hasn’t it ever happened to
you? Then you hug the world in your arms. But that is something from outside which
comes to your mind, but I am talking of the mind which is not stunned but which wants
to look, to observe. Now, can you observe without all this upsurging of conditioning? To
a person in sorrow, I explain in words; sorrow is inevitable, sorrow is the result of
fulfillment. When all explanations have completely stopped, then only can you look—
which means you are not looking from the center. When you look from a center, your
faculties of observation are limited. If I hold to a post and want to be there, there is a
strain, there is pain. When I look from the center into suffering, there is suffering. It is the
incapacity to observe that creates pain. I cannot observe if I think, function, see from a
center—as when I say, “I must have no pain, I must find out why I suffer, I must escape.”
When I observe from a center, whether the center is a conclusion, an idea, hope, despair,
or anything else, that observation is very restricted, very narrow, very small, and that
engenders sorrow.

July 26
Follow the movement of suffering
What is suffering?...What does it mean? What is it that is suffering? Not why there is
suffering, not what is the cause of suffering, but what is actually happening? I do not
know if you see the difference. Then I am simply aware of suffering, not as apart from
me, not as an observer watching suffering—it is part of me, that is, the whole of me is
suffering. Then I am able to follow its movement, see where it leads. Surely if I do that, it
opens up, does it not? Then I see that I have laid emphasis on the “me”—not on the
person whom I love. He only acted to cover me from my misery, from my loneliness,
from my misfortune. As I am not something, I hoped he would be that. That has gone; I
am left, I am lost, I am lonely. Without him, I am nothing. So I cry. It is not that he is
gone but that I am left. I am alone...There are innumerable people to help me to escape—thousands of so-called religious
people, with their beliefs and dogmas, hopes and fantasies—“It is karma, it is God’s
will”—you know, all giving me a way out. But if I can stay with it and not put it away
from me, not try to circumscribe or deny it, then what happens? What is the state of my
mind when it is thus following the movement of suffering?

July 25
Evading sorrow
Most of us have sorrow in different forms—in relationship, in the death of someone, in
not fulfilling oneself and withering away to nothing, or in trying to achieve, trying to
become something, and meeting with total failure. And there is the whole problem of
sorrow on the physical side—illness, blindness, incapacitation, paralysis, and so on.
Everywhere there is this extraordinary thing called sorrow—with death waiting round the
corner. And we do not know how to meet sorrow, so either we worship it, or rationalize
it, or try to run away from it. Go to any Christian church and you will find that sorrow is
worshipped; it is made into something extraordinary, holy, and it is said that only through
sorrow, through the crucified Christ, can you find God. In the East they have their own
forms of evasion, other ways of avoiding sorrow, and it seems to me an extraordinary
thing that so very few, whether in the East or in the West, are really free of sorrow.
It would be a marvelous thing if in the process of your listening—unemotionally, not
sentimentally—to what is being said...you could really understand sorrow and be totally
free of it; because then there would be no self-deception, no illusions, no anxieties, no
fear, and the brain could function clearly, sharply, logically. And then, perhaps, one
would know what love is.

July 24
Meeting sorrow
How do you meet sorrow? I’m afraid that most of us meet it very superficially. Our
education, our training, our knowledge, the sociological influences to which we are
exposed, all make us superficial. A superficial mind is one that escapes to the church, to
some conclusion, to some concept, to some belief or idea. Those are all a refuge for the
superficial mind that is in sorrow. And if you cannot find a refuge, you build a wall
around yourself and become cynical, hard, indifferent, or you escape through some facile,
neurotic reaction. All such defenses against suffering prevent further inquiry...Please watch your own mind; observe how you explain your sorrows away, lose
yourself in work, in ideas, or cling to a belief in God, or in a future life. And if no
explanation, no belief has been satisfactory, you escape through drink, through s*x, or by
becoming cynical, hard, bitter brittle...Generation after generation it has been passed on by parents to their children, and the superficial mind never takes the bandage off that
wound; it does not really know, it is not really acquainted with sorrow. It merely has an
idea about sorrow. It has a picture, a symbol of sorrow, but it never meets sorrow—it
meets only the word sorrow.

July 23
The end of sorrow
If you walk down the road, you will see the splendour of nature, the extraordinary beauty
of the green fields and the open skies; and you will hear the laughter of children. But in
spite of all that, there is a sense of sorrow. There is the anguish of a woman bearing a
child; there is sorrow in death; there is sorrow when you are looking forward to
something, and it does not happen; there is sorrow when a nation runs down, goes to
seed; and there is the sorrow of corruption, not only in the collective, but also in the
individual. There is sorrow in your own house, if you look deeply—the sorrow of not
being able to fulfill, the sorrow of your own pettiness or incapacity, and various
unconscious sorrows.
There is also laughter in life. Laughter is a lovely thing—to laugh without reason, to have
joy in one’s heart without cause, to love without seeking anything in return. But such
laughter rarely happens to us. We are burdened with sorrow; our life is a process of
misery and strife, a continuous disintegration, and we almost never know what it is to
love with our whole being...
We want to find a solution, a means, a method by which to resolve this burden of life,
and so we never actually look at sorrow. We try to escape through myths, through
images, through speculation; we hope to find some way to avoid this weight, to stay
ahead of the wave of sorrow...Sorrow has an ending, but it does not come about through any system or method. There
is no sorrow when there is perception of what is.

July 22
The nature of the trap
Sorrow is the result of a shock, it is the temporary shaking up of a mind that has settled
down, that has accepted the routine of life. Something happens—a death, the loss of a
job, the questioning of a cherished belief—and the mind is disturbed. But what does a
disturbed mind do? It finds a way to be undisturbed again; it takes refuge in another
belief, in a more secure job, in a new relationship. Again the wave of life comes along
and shatters its safeguards, but the mind soon finds still further defenses; and so it goes
on. This is not the way of intelligence, is it?
No form of external or inward compulsion will help, will it? All compulsion, however
subtle, is the outcome of ignorance; it is born of the desire for reward or the fear of
punishment. To understand the whole nature of the trap is to be free of it; no person, no system, no belief can set you free. The truth of this is the only liberating factor—but you
have to see it for yourself, and not merely be persuaded. You have to take the voyage on
an uncharted sea