I am violent or I’m in sorrow.
Something happens to my son or brother or my wife,
and I’m in sorrow.
When there is sorrow, I’m trying to escape from it, through comfort.
I want some kind of comfort because I cannot face my loneliness.
Right?
I say, ‘Why am I lonely?’. I’m seeking the cause of it.
That’s a psycho-analytical process. I don’t want to enter into that.
I don’t want to seek a cause or escape from it
or seek comfort for sorrow.
So, I observe that sorrow.
Right? I’m living with it.
In that living, am I an outsider looking at sorrow, or I am sorrow?
You understand the difference? Q: Yes.
How do I observe sorrow or violence or fear or even pleasure?
How do I observe or be aware of my sorrow? What does it mean?
Am I different from that which I call sorrow?
Or I am sorrow, I am not different from it.
Q: So, sorrow has to observe itself.
K: I’m just going into it. No, no, no.
Let’s go step by step into it. Q: Generally, it’s the first case.
Sorrow is going on but I am not sorrow.
K: What do you mean? Q: Well, it’s going on
but there are other things or I’m probably something else
or I’m partially that. K: No, just a minute.
Of course, ordinary life is going on around you.
Q: I’m not totally that though. K: Why not? Why?
When my son dies, it is a great shock – right? –
physical, as well as psychological.
It takes time to get over that shock.
Things are happening around me but I’m living in shock.
Right?
Now, that shock I call sorrow.
How do I look at that sorrow?
Things are happening
– I have to eat, I have go to the office and so on –
leave all that aside for the moment.
How do I observe this sorrow?
Q: One’s sense of self seems to escape all the time further back,
from a feeling like sorrow.
It’s a continuous escape. K: You want to withdraw from it.
Q: But facing the fact. K: That’s what I’m trying to say.
My son is dead. It is a shock, which I call sorrow,
both physical and psychological,
my reaction to that is to escape from it, avoid it,
because it is indicating something tremendous to me,
which I’m incapable, being presently in shock,
of seeing the whole content of that.
Q: When you say stick with it… K: I’m coming. Slow, patience.
I’m in that state. Right? How do I look at this feeling?
Q: But this contradictory feeling also comes up so quickly...
K: I know all that. Q: How is one to look at it?
Q: To see yourself as different from the sorrow is the first escape.
And to see that you are the sorrow is...
K: That is the point. You are sorrow.
You are not different from sorrow.
Q: That might be the beginning... K: That is so. Not ‘might be’.
You are not different from anger, from greed and envy.
You are that. Q: I resist that.
I listen to you and say, ‘Yes, that is so’,
but at the same time, there’s a resistance.
K: There is resistance because of our education, our tradition,
because I’ve been told, ‘You are different from that.
God is different’, all the rest of it.
Q: How do we stop the resistance?
K: You don’t stop resistance, sir. Forget sorrow. Wait a minute.
Watch your resistance. Why do you resist?
Don’t seek the cause.
Why do you resist?
I won’t say ‘why?’ – ‘why’ means cause.
There is resistance. Right?
Stay with it.
Q: Can we understand from what you say
that the usual way of looking at…
K: It’s not what I – no – you said, ‘what I am saying’.
Please, just a minute. I am not saying anything.
I’m saying just watch. Q: But the way we watch wrongly
either involves escape
or the idea of doing something. There is a separation from it.
Out of this I want to escape or act or something,
which is away from looking at the fact.
K: All that arises because there is division between sorrow and myself.
That division is illusory. The fact is I am sorrow.