What is sorrow?
Not only the physical pain and the enduring pain,
a person who is paralysed or maimed or diseased,
but also the sorrow of losing someone: death.
We’ll talk about death presently.
Is sorrow self-pity?
Please, investigate. We’re not saying it is or it is not,
we’re asking is sorrow brought about by self-pity, one of the factors?
Sorrow brought about by loneliness?
Feeling desperately alone, lonely;
Not alone: the word ‘alone’ means ‘all one’.
But feeling isolated,
having in that loneliness no relationship with anything.
Is sorrow merely an intellectual affair?
To be rationalized, explained away?
Or to live with it without any desire for comfort.
You understand?
To live with sorrow, not escape from it, not rationalize it,
not find some illusive or exclusive comfort:
religious or some illusory romantic escapes
but to live with something that has tremendous significance.
Sorrow is not only a physical shock
when one loses one’s son or husband, wife or girl, whatever it is,
it’s a tremendous biological shock.
One is almost paralysed with it.
Don’t you know all this?
There is also the sense of desperate loneliness.
Can one look at sorrow as it is actually in us
and remain with it, hold it, and not move away from it.
Sorrow is not different from the one who suffers.
The person who suffers wants to run away, escape, all kinds of things.
But to look at it as you look at a child, a beautiful child,
to hold it, never escape from it.
Then you will see for yourself, if you really look deeply,
that there is an end to sorrow.
And when there is an end to sorrow there is passion;
not lust, not sensory stimulation, but passion.
Very few have this passion, because we are so consumed with our own griefs,
with our own pains, with our own pity and vanity and all the rest of it.
We have a great deal of energy
– look what is happening in the world –
tremendous energy to invent new things,
new gadgets, new ways of killing others.
To go to the moon needs tremendous energy and concentration
both intellectual and actual.
We’ve got tremendous energy,
but we dissipate it by conflict, through fear,
through endless chattering about nothing.
And passion has tremendous energy.
That passion is not stimulated, it doesn’t seek stimulation,
it’s there, like a burning fire.
It only comes when there is the end of sorrow.
And when you have this sorrow, the ending of it, it’s not personal
because you are the rest of humanity, as we said yesterday afternoon.
We all suffer.
We all go through loneliness, every human being on this earth,
rich or poor, learned or ignorant,
everybody goes through tremendous anxieties, conscious or unconscious.
Our consciousness is not yours, it’s human consciousness.
In the content of that consciousness is all your beliefs,
your sorrows, your pities, your vanities, your arrogance,
your search for power, position, and all that.
All that is your consciousness, which is shared by all human beings.
Therefore it’s not your particular consciousness.
And when one really realizes that, not verbally or intellectually
or theoretically or as a concept, but as an actuality,
then you’ll not only not kill another, hurt another,
but you’ll have some other thing which is totally different,
of a different dimension altogether.