Then what is sorrow?
What is the nature of it?
In that thing called sorrow, there is pain,
there is grief, there is a sense of isolation,
a sense of loneliness in which there is no relationship.
It is not only a physical shock
but it is a great crisis in the consciousness, in the psyche.
I have lost my son. I'm only taking that example.
I've lost my son to whom I'm attached.
And I wanted him to grow up into some beastly business man.
Right? To have some kind of good, substantial income,
a house and so on.
In him, I have immolated myself,
you understand this word?
You're following what I'm saying?
and suddenly, he's gone.
What is that quality of suddenness?
The sudden ending of something which has given me great joy,
great pain, great anxiety, concern about his future.
And all that movement: my affection, my concern, my care,
my sense of helping him to have good taste,
to live aesthetically because where there is deep, aesthetic sensitivity,
that is the highest moral, highest ethics, and suddenly he's gone.
Don't you know all these feelings?
I hope not your son, or your wife or your father or your mother dead,
but in every house, there is this shadow of sorrow.
There is sudden ending, sudden ending of my attachment
you're following all this?
a sudden ending of all my hope, which I have invested in him,
a sudden sense of not only deep shock.
And life becomes empty, either become very cynical
or find a rational explanation,
or plunge myself into some form of entertainment,
drugs, drinks and all the rest of it,
or believe in some future life.
This is the lot of all human beings.
So, what is this ending?
You are following this?
Are we together in this, a little bit?
What does it mean to end?
Have we ever ended something without a motive,
without a reward or punishment to end?
Because where there is an ending, there is a totally new beginning.
But we never end.
We end things if it is profitable or painful.
Our life is based on reward and punishment,
both outwardly and much more, inwardly,
but we never end something without a cause.
So, grief, loneliness and a sense of separation,
which is, essentially, time, which we went into yesterday:
time, identification, investment,
and all the things one has cultivated in another,
all that ends and there is a shock, and that shock I call sorrow.
Now, can one remain with that, not escape, not seek comfort,
that's the most silliest thing to do,
not go off to a temple or run off to some guru,
but to remain with that tremendous challenge
without a single movement of thought?
Because sorrow is, perhaps, one of the greatest challenges,
greatest demand on the human mind, on the human quality,
and if you merely escape from it, run away, rationalise,
then that which has a tremendous depth to it...
then sorrow is your shadow.
But with the ending of that, there's passion,
not lust but the passion that's the very essence of energy.
But very few of us have that passion,
very few of us have that passion which is living,
not occasionally, but that passion which moves the universe.