Journal
35th Entry 29th October 1973
In the valley of orange orchards, this one was very well looked after row upon row of young trees, strong and sparkling in the sun. The soil was good, well-watered, manured and cared for. It was a beautiful morning with a clear blue sky, warm and the air was softly pleasant. The quails in the bushes were fussing about, with their sharp calls; a sparrow-hawk was hovering in the air, motionless, and soon it came down to sit on a branch in the next orange tree and went to sleep. It was so close that the sharp claws, the marvellous speckled feathers and the sharp beak were clearly visible; it was within the reach of an arm. It had been earlier in the morning along the avenue of mimosa and the small birds were crying out their alarm. Under the bushes two King snakes, with their dark brown rings along the length of their bodies, were curling around each other, and as they passed close by they were utterly unaware of a human presence. They had been on a shelf in the shed, stretched out, their dark, bright eyes watching and waiting for the mice. They stared without blinking for they had no eyelids. They must have been there during the night and now they were among the bushes. It was their ground and they were seen often, and on picking up one of them, it coiled around the arm and felt cold to the touch. All those living things seemed to have their own order, their own discipline and their own play and gaiety.
Materialism, that nothing exists but matter, is the prevailing and the persistent activity of human beings who are affluent and those who are not. There's a whole block of the world which is dedicated to materialism; the structure of its society is based upon this formula, with all its consequences. The other blocks are also materialistic but some kind of idealistic principles are accepted when it's convenient and discarded under the name of rationality and necessity. In changing the environment, violently or slowly, revolution or evolution, the behaviour of man is changed according to the culture in which he lives. It is an age-old conflict between those who believe man is matter and those who pursue the spirit. This division has brought such misery, confusion, illusion to man.
Thought is material and its activity, outer or inner, is materialistic. Thought is measurable and so it is time. Within this area, consciousness is matter. Consciousness is its content; the content is consciousness; they are inseparable. The content is the many things which thought has put together: the past modifying the present which is the future which is time. Time is movement within the area which is consciousness, expanded or contracted. Thought is memory, experience and knowledge, and this memory, with its images and its shadows, is the self, the'`me" and the "not me", the "we" and "they". The essence of division is the self with all its attributes and qualities. Materialism only gives strength and growth to the self. The self may and does identify itself with the State, with an ideology, with activities of the "non-me", religious or secular, but it is still the self. Its beliefs are self-created, as are its pleasures and fears. Thought by its very nature and structure is fragmentary, and conflict and war are between the various fragments, the nationalities, the races and ideologies. A materialistic humanity will destroy itself unless the self is wholly abandoned. The abandonment of the self is always of primary importance. And only from this revolution a new society can be put together.
The abandonment of the self is love, compassion: passion for all things the starving, the suffering, the homeless and for the materialist and the believer. Love is not sentimentality, romanticism; it is as strong and final as death.
Slowly the fog from the sea came over the western hills like huge waves; it folded itself over the hills and down into the valley and it would presently reach up here; it would become cooler with the coming darkness of the night. There would be no stars and there would be complete silence. It is a factual silence and not the silence which thought has cultivated, in which there is no space.
Malibu 1975
36th Entry 1st April 1975
Even so early in the morning the sun was hot and burning. There wasn't a breeze and not a leaf was stirring. In the ancient temple it was cool and pleasant; the bare feet were aware of the solid slabs of rocks, their shapes and their unevenness. Many thousands of people must have walked on them for a thousand years. It was dark there after the glare of the morning sun and in the corridors there seemed to be few people that morning and in the narrow passage it was still darker. This passage led to a wide corridor which led to the inner shrine. There was a strong smell of flowers and the incense of many centuries. And a hundred Brahmanas, freshly bathed, in newly washed white loin cloths, were chanting. Sanskrit is a powerful language, resonant with depth. The ancient walls were vibrating, almost shaking to the sound of a hundred voices. The dignity of the sound was incredible and the sacredness of the moment was beyond the words. It was not the words that awakened this immensity but the depth of the sound of many thousand years held within these walls and in the immeasurable space beyond them. It was not the meaning of those words, nor the clarity of their pronunciation, nor the dark beauty of the temple but the quality of sound that broke walls and the limitations of the human mind. The song of a bird, the distant flute, the breeze among the leaves, all these break down the walls that human beings have created for themselves.
In the great cathedrals and lovely mosques, the chants and the intoning of their sacred books it is the sound that opens the heart, to tears and beauty. Without space there's no beauty; without space you have only walls and measurements; without space there's no depth; without space there's only poverty, inner and outer. You have so little space in your mind; it's so crammed full of words, remembrances, knowledge, experiences and problems. There's hardly any space left, only the everlasting chatter of thought. And so your museums are filled and every shelf with books. Then you fill the places of entertainment, religious or otherwise. Or you build a wall around yourself, a narrow space of mischief and pain. Without space, inner or outer, you become violent and ugly.
Everything needs space to live, to play and to chant. That which is sacred cannot love without space. You have no space when you hold, when there is sorrow, when you become the centre of the universe. The space that you occupy is the space that thought has built around you and that is misery and confusion. The space that thought measures is the division between you and me, we and they. This division is endless pain. There's that solitary tree in a wide, green, open field.
37th Entry 2nd April 1975
It was not a land of trees, meadows, streams and flowers and mirth. It was a sunburnt land of sand and barren hills, without a single tree or bush; a land of desolation, an endless scorched earth mile upon mile; there wasn't even a bird and not even oil with its derricks and flames of burning oil. Consciousness could not hold the desolation and every hill was a barren shadow. For many hours we flew over this vast emptiness and at last there were snow peaks, forest and streams, villages and spreading towns.
You may have a great deal of knowledge and be vastly poor. The poorer you are the greater the demand for knowledge. You expand your consciousness with great varieties of knowledge, accumulating experiences and remembrances and yet may be vastly poor. The skilful use of knowledge may bring you wealth and give you eminence and power but there may still be poverty. This poverty breeds callousness; you play while the house is burning. This poverty merely strengthens the intellect or gives to the emotions the weakness of sentiment. It's this poverty that brings about imbalance, the outer and inner. There's no knowledge of the inner, only of the outer. The knowledge of the outer informs us erroneously that there must be knowledge of the inner. Self-knowing is brief and shallow; the mind is soon beyond it, like crossing a river. You make a lot of noise in going across the river and to mistake the noise as knowledge of the self is to expand poverty. This expansion of consciousness is the activity of poverty. Religions, culture, knowledge, can in no way enrich this poverty.
The skill of intelligence is to put knowledge in its right place. Without knowledge it's not possible to live in this technological and almost mechanical civilization but it will not transform the human being and his society. Knowledge is not the excellence of intelligence; intelligence can and does use knowledge and thus transforms man and his society. Intelligence is not the mere cultivation of the intellect and its integrity. It comes out of the understanding of the whole consciousness of man, yourself and not a part, a separate segment, of yourself. The study and the understanding of the movement of your own mind and heart give birth to this intelligence. You are the content of your consciousness; in knowing yourself you will know the universe. This knowing is beyond the word for the word is not the thing. The freedom from the known, every minute, is the essence of intelligence. It's this intelligence that is in operation in the universe if you leave it alone. You are destroying this sacredness of order through the ignorance of yourself. This ignorance is not banished by the studies others have made about you or themselves. You yourself have to study the content of your own consciousness. The studies the others have made of themselves, and so of you, are the descriptions but not the described. The word is not the thing.
Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. Even in a monastery you are related to the society which has made the monastery as an escape, or closed the doors to freedom. The movement of behaviour is the sure guide to yourself; it's the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and the sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations. or in its identities. Negating without resistance this content of consciousness is the beauty and compassion of intelligence.
38th Entry 3rd April 1975
How extraordinarily beautiful is the great curve of a wide river. You must see it from a certain height, not too far up or too close as it meanders lazily through the green fields. The river was wide, full of water, blue and clear. We were not flying at a great altitude and we could just see the strong current in the middle of the river with its tiny waves; we followed it, past towns and villages to the sea. Each curve had its own beauty, its own strength, its own movement. And far away were the great snowcovered peaks, pink in the early morning light; they covered the eastern horizon. The wide river and those great mountains seemed to hold, for that hour, eternity - this overwhelming sense of timeless space. Though the plane was rushing south-east, in that space there was no direction, no movement, only that which is. For a whole hour there was nothing else, not even the noise of the jets. Only when the Captain announced that we would soon be landing did that full hour come to an end. There was no memory of that hour, no record of the content of that hour and so thought had no hold on it. When it came to an end there were no remains, the slate was clean again. So thought had no means to cultivate that hour and so it got ready to leave the plane.
What thought thinks about is made into a reality but it's not the truth. Beauty can never be the expression of thought. A bird is not made by thought and so it's beautiful. Love is not shaped by thought and when it is it becomes something quite different. The worship of the intellect and its integrity is a reality made by thought. But it is not compassion. Thought cannot manufacture compassion; it can make it into a reality, a necessity, but it will not be compassion. Thought by its very nature is fragmentary and so it lives in a fragmented world of division and conflict. So knowledge is fragmentary and however much it is piled up, layer after layer, it will still remain fragmented, broken up. Thought can put together a thing called integration and that too will be a fragment. The very word science means knowledge, and man hopes through science he will be transformed into a sane and happy human being. And so man is pursuing eagerly knowledge of all the things of the earth and of himself. Knowledge is not compassion and without compassion knowledge breeds mischief and untold misery and chaos. Knowledge cannot make man love; it can create war and the instruments of destruction but cannot bring love to the heart or peace to the mind. To perceive all this is to act, not an action based on memory or patterns.
Love is not memory, a remembrance of pleasures.
39th Entry 4th April 1975
By chance it happened that one lived for some months in a small dilapidated house, high in the mountains, far from other houses. There were lots of trees and as it was spring there was perfume in the air. The solitude was of the mountains and the beauty of the red earth. The towering peaks were covered with snow and some of the trees were in bloom. One lived alone amidst this splendour. The forest was nearby, with deer, an occasional bear and those big monkeys with black faces and long tails, and of course there were serpents too. In deep solitude in strange ways one was related to them all. One could not hurt a thing, even that white daisy on the path. In that relationship the space between you and them didn't exist; it was not contrived; it was not an intellectual or an emotional conviction that brought this about but simply it was so. A group of those large monkeys would come around, especially in the evening; a few were on the ground but most of them would be sitting in the trees quietly watching. Surprisingly they were still; occasionally there would be a scratch or two and we would watch each other. They would come every evening now, neither too close nor too high among the trees, and we would be silently aware of each other. We had become quite good friends but they didn't want to encroach upon one's solitude. Walking one afternoon in the forest one came suddenly upon them in an open space. There must have been well over thirty of them, young and old, sitting among the trees round the open space, absolutely silent and still. One could have touched them; there was no fear in them and sitting on the ground we watched each other till the sun went behind the peaks.
If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity. If there's no relationship with nature then you become a killer; then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins and man either for gain, for `sport', for food or for knowledge. Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty. You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places but you are a killer and so lose their friendship. You probably are not related to anything, to your wife or your husband; you are much too busy, gaining and losing, with your own private thoughts, pleasures and pains. You live in your own dark isolation and the escape from it is further darkness. Your interest is in a short survival, mindless, easygoing or violent. And thousands die of hunger or are butchered because of your irresponsibility. You leave the ordering of the world to the lying corrupt politician, to the intellectuals, to the experts. Because you have no integrity, you build a society that's immoral, dishonest, a society based on utter selfishness. And then you escape from all this for which you alone are responsible, to the beaches, to the woods or carry a gun for `sport'.
You may know all this but knowledge does not bring about transformation in you. When you have this sense of the whole, you will be related to the universe.
40th Entry 6th April 1975
It is not that extraordinary blue of the Mediterranean; the Pacific has an ethereal blue, especially when there is a gentle breeze from the west as you drive north along the coast road. It is so tender, dazzling, clear and full of mirth. Occasionally you would see whales blowing on their way north and rarely their enormous head as they threw themselves out of the water. There was a whole pod of them, blowing; they must be very powerful animals. That day the sea was a lake, still and utterly quiet, without a single wave; there was not that clear dancing blue. The sea was asleep and you watched it with wonder. The house overlooked the sea. [This is the house where he was staying at Malibu.] It is a beautiful house, with a quiet garden, a green lawn and flowers. It's a spacious house with the light of the Californian sun. And rabbits loved it too; they would come early in the morning and late in the evening; they would eat up flowers and the newly planted pansies, marigolds and the small flowering plants. You couldn't keep them out though there was a wire netting alI around, and to kill them would be a crime. But a cat and a barn owl brought order to the garden; the black cat wandered about the garden; the owl perched itself during the day among the thick eucalyptus; you could see it, motionless, eyes closed, round and big. The rabbits disappeared and the garden flourished and the blue Pacific flowed effortlessly.
It is only man that brings disorder to the universe. He's ruthless and extremely violent. Wherever he is he brings misery and confusion in himself and in the world about him. He lays waste and destroys and he has no compassion. In himself there is no order and so what he touches becomes soiled and chaotic. His politics have become a refined gangsterism of power, deceit, personal or national, group against group. His economy is restricted and so not universal. His society is immoral, in freedom and under tyranny. He is not religious though he believes, worships and goes through endless, meaningless rituals. Why has he become like this cruel, irresponsible and so utterly self-centred? Why? There are a hundred explanations and those who explain, subtly with words that are born out of knowledge of many books and experiments on animals, are caught in the net of human sorrow, ambition, pride and agony. The description is not the described, the word is not the thing. Is it because he is looking for outward causes, the environment conditioning man, hoping the outer change transforms the inner man? Is it because he's so attached to his senses, dominated by their immediate demands? Is it because he lives so entirely in the movement of thought and knowledge? Or is it because he's so romantic, sentimental, that he becomes ruthless with his ideals, make-beliefs and pretensions? Is it because he is always led, a follower, or becomes a leader, a guru?
This division as the outer and inner is the beginning of his conflict and misery; he is caught in this contradiction, in this ageless tradition. Caught in this meaningless division, he is lost and becomes a slave to others. The outer and the inner are imagination and the invention of thought; as thought is fragmentary, it makes for disorder and conflict which is division. Thought cannot bring about order, an effortless flow of virtue. Virtue is not the continuous repetition of memory, practice. Thought-knowledge is time-binding. Thought by its very nature and structure cannot grasp the whole flow of life, as a total movement. Thought-knowledge cannot have an insight into this wholeness; it cannot be aware of this choicelessly as long as it remains as the perceiver, the outsider looking in. Thought-knowledge has no place in perception. The thinker is the thought; the perceiver is the perceived. Only then is there an effortless movement in our daily life.
Ojai 1975
41st Entry 8th April 1975
In this part of the world it doesn't rain much, about fifteen to twenty inches a year, and these rains are most welcome for it doesn't rain for the rest of the year. There is snow then on the mountains and during summer and autumn they are bare, sunburnt, rocky and forbidding; only in the spring are they mellow and welcoming. There used to be bear, deer, bob cat, quail and any number of rattlers. But now they are disappearing; the dreaded man is encroaching. It had rained for some time now and the valley was green, the orange trees bore fruit and flower. It is a beautiful valley, quiet away from the village, and you heard the mourning dove. The air was slowly being filled with the scent of orange blossoms and in a few days it would be overpowering, with the warm sun and windless days. It was a valley wholly surrounded by hills and mountains; beyond the hills was the sea and beyond the mountains desert. In the summer it would be unbearably hot but there was always beauty here, far from the maddening crowd and their cities. And at night there would be extraordinary silence, rich and penetrating. The cultivated meditation is a sacrilege to beauty, and every leaf and branch spoke of the joy of beauty and the tall dark cypress was silent with it; the gnarled old pepper tree flowed with it.
You cannot, may not, invite joy; if you do it becomes pleasure. Pleasure is the movement of thought and thought may not, can in no way, cultivate joy, and if it pursues that which has been joyous, then it's only a remembrance, a dead thing. Beauty is never time-binding; it is wholly free of time and so of culture. It is there when the self is not. The self is put together by time, by the movement of thought, by the known, by the word. In the abandonment of the self, in that total attention, that essence of beauty is there. The letting go of the self is not the calculated action of desire-will. Will is directive and so resistant, divisive, and so breeds conflict. The dissolution of the self is not the evolution of the knowledge of the self; time as a factor does not enter into it at all. There is no way or means to end it. The total inward non-action is the positive attention of beauty.
You have cultivated a vast network of interrelated activities in which you are caught, and your mind, being conditioned by it, operates inwardly in the same manner. Achievement then becomes the most important thing and the fury of that drive is still the skeleton of the self. That is why you follow your guru, your saviour, your beliefs and ideals; faith takes the place of insight, of awareness. There's no need for prayer, for rituals, when the self is not. You fill the empty spaces of the skeleton with knowledge, with images, with meaningless activities and so keep it seemingly alive.
In the quiet stillness of the mind that which is everlasting beauty comes, uninvited, unsought, without the noise of recognition.
42nd Entry 10th April 1975
In the silence of deep might and in the quiet still morning when the sun is touching the hills, there is a great mystery. It is there in all living things. If you sit quietly under a tree, you would feel the ancient earth with its incomprehensible mystery. On a still night when the stars are clear and close, you would be aware of expanding space and the mysterious order of all things, of the immeasurable and of nothing, of the movement of the dark hills and the hoot of an owl. In that utter silence of the mind this mystery expands without time and space. There's mystery in those ancient temples built with infinite care, with attention which is love. The slender mosques and the great cathedrals lose this shadowy mystery for there is bigotry, dogma and military pomp. The myth that is concealed in the deep layers of the mind is not mysterious, it is romantic, traditional and conditioned. In the secret recesses of the mind, truth has been pushed aside by symbols, words, images; in them there is no mystery, they are the churnings of thought. In knowledge and its action there is wonder, appreciation and delight. But mystery is quite another thing. It is not an experience, to be recognised, stored up and remembered. Experience is the death of that incommunicable mystery; to communicate you need a word, a gesture, a look, but to be in communion with that, the mind, the whole of you, must be at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity as that which is called mysterious. This is love. With this the whole mystery of the universe is open.
This morning there wasn't a cloud in the sky, the sun was in the valley and all things were rejoicing, except man. He looked at this wondrous earth and went on with his labour, his sorrow and passing pleasures. He had no time to see; he was too occupied with his problems, with his agonies, with his violence. He doesn't see the tree and so he cannot see his own travail. When he's forced to look, he tears to pieces what he sees, which he calls analysis, runs away from it or doesn't want to see. In the art of seeing lies the miracle of transformation, the transformation of what is". The "what should be" never is. There's vast mystery in the act of seeing. This needs care, attention, which is love.
43rd Entry 14th April 1975
A very large serpent was crossing a wide cart road just ahead of you, fat, heavy, moving lazily; it was coming from a largish pond a little way off. It was almost black and the light of the evening seen falling on it gave to its skin a high polish. It moved in a leisurely way with lordly dignity of power. It was unaware of you as you stood quietly watching; you were quite close to it; it must have measured well over five feet and it was bulging with what it had eaten. It went over a mound and you walked towards it, looking down upon it a few inches away, its forked black tongue darting in and out; it was moving towards a large hole. You could have touched it for it had a strange attractive beauty. A villager was passing by and called out to leave it alone because it was a cobra. The next day the villagers had put there on the mound a saucer of milk and some hibiscus flowers. On that same road further along there was a bush, high and almost leafless, that had thorns almost two inches long, sharp, greyish, and no animal would dare to touch its succulent leaves. It was protecting itself and woe to anyone that touched it. There were deer there in those woods, shy but very curious; they would allow themselves to be approached but not too close and if you did they would dart away and disappear among the undergrowth. There was one that would let you come quite close, if you were alone, bright-eyed with its large ears forward. They all had white spots on a russet-brown skin; they were shy, gentle and ever-watchful and it was pleasant to be among them. There was a completely white one, which must have been a freak.
The good is not the opposite of the evil. It has never been touched by that which is evil, though it is surrounded by it. Evil cannot hurt the good but the good may appear to do harm and so evil gets more cunning, more mischievous. It can be cultivated, sharpened, expansively violent; it is born within the movement of time, nurtured and skilfully used. But goodness is not of time; it can in no way be cultivated or nurtured by thought; its action is not visible; it has no cause and so no effect. Evil cannot become good for that which is good is not the product of thought; it lies beyond thought, like beauty. The thing that thought produces, thought can undo but it is not the good; as it is not of time, the good has no abiding place. Where the good is, there is order, not the order of authority, punishment and reward; this order is essential, for otherwise society destroys itself and man becomes evil, murderous, corrupt and degenerate. For man is society; they are inseparable. The law of the good is everlasting, unchanging and timeless. Stability is its nature and so it is utterly secure. There is no other security.
44th Entry 17th April 1975
Space is order. Space is time, length, width and volume. This morning the sea and the heavens are immense; the horizon where those yellow flowered hills meet the distant sea is the order of earth and heaven; it is cosmic. That cypress, tall, dark, alone, has the order of beauty and the distant house on that wooded hill follows the movement of the mountains that tower over the low-lying hills; the green field with a single cow is beyond time. And the man coming up the hill is held within the narrow space of his problems.
There is a space of nothingness whose volume is not bound by time, the measure of thought. This space the mind cannot enter; it can only observe. In this observation there is no experiencer. This observer has no history, no association, no myth, and so the observer is that which is. Knowledge is extensive but it has no space, for by its very weight and volume it perverts and smothers that space. There is no knowledge of the self, higher or lower; there's only a verbal structure of the self, a skeleton, covered over by thought. Thought cannot penetrate its own structure; what it has put together thought cannot deny and when it does deny, it is the refusal of further gain. When the time of the self is not, the space that has no measure is.
This measure is the movement of reward and punishment, gain or loss, the activity of comparison and conformity, of respectability and the denial of it. This movement is time, the future with its hope and the attachment which is the past. This complete network is the very structure of the self and its union with the supreme being or the ultimate principle is still within its own field. All this is the activity of thought. Thought can in no way penetrate that space of no time, do what it will. The very method, the curriculum, the practice that thought has invented are not the keys that will open the door, for there is no door, no key. Thought can only be aware of its own endless activity, its own capacity to corrupt, its own deceits and illusions. It is the observer and the observed. Its gods are its own projections and the worship of them is the worship of yourself. What lies beyond thought, beyond the known, may not be imagined or made a myth of or made a secret for the few. It is there for you to see.
Malibu 1975
45th Entry 23rd April 1975
The wide river was still as a millpond. There wasn't a ripple and the morning breeze hadn't awakened yet for it was early. The stars were in the water, clear and sparkling and the morning star was the brightest. The trees across the river were dark and the village amongst them still slept. There was not a leaf stirring and those small screech owls were rattling away on the old tamarind tree; it was their home and when the sun was on those branches they would be warming themselves. The noisy green parrots were quiet too. All things, even the insects and the cicadas, were waiting, breathless for the sun, in adoration. The river was motionless and the usual small boats with their dark lamps were absent. Gradually over the dark mysterious trees there began the early light of dawn. Every living thing was still in the mystery of that moment of meditation. Your own mind was timeless, without measure; there was no yardstick to measure how long that moment lasted. Only there was a stirring and an awakening, the parrots and the owls, the crows and the mynah, the dogs and a voice across the river. And suddenly the sun was just over the trees, golden and hidden by the leaves. Now the great river was awake, moving; time, length, width and volume were flowing and all life began which never ended.
How lovely it was that morning, the purity of light and the golden path the sun made on those living waters. You were the world, the cosmos, the deathless beauty and the joy of compassion. Only you weren't there; if you were all this would not be. You bring in the beginning and the ending, to begin again in an endless chain.
In becoming there is uncertainty and instability. In nothingness there is absolute stability and so clarity. That which is wholly stable never dies; corruption is in becoming. The world is bent on becoming, achieving, gaining and so there is fear of losing and dying. The mind must go through that small hole which it has put together, the self, to come upon this vast nothingness whose stability thought cannot measure. Thought desires to capture it, use it, cultivate it and put it on the market. It must be made acceptable and so respectable, to be worshipped. Thought cannot put it into any category and so it must be a delusion and a snare; or it must be for the few, for the select. And so thought goes about its own mischievous ways, frightened, cruel, vain and never stable, though its conceit asserts there is stability in its actions, in its exploration, in knowledge it has accumulated. The dream becomes a reality which it has nurtured. What thought has made real is not truth. Nothingness is not a reality but it is the truth. The small hole, the self, is the reality of thought, that skeleton on which it has built all its existence the reality of its fragmentation, the pain, the sorrow and its love. The reality of its gods or its one god is the careful structure of thought, its prayer, its rituals, its romantic worship. In reality there is no stability or pure clarity.
The knowledge of the self is time, length, width and volume; it can be accumulated, used as a ladder to become, to improve, to achieve. This knowledge will in no way free the mind of the burden of its own reality. You are the burden; the truth of it lies in the seeing of it and that freedom is not the reality of thought. The seeing is the doing. The doing comes from the stability, the clarity, of nothingness.
46th Entry 24th April 1975
Every living thing has its own sensitivity, its own way of life, its own consciousness, but man assumes that his own is far superior and thereby he loses his love, his dignity and becomes insensitive, callous and destructive. In the valley of orange trees, with their fruit and spring blossom, it was a lovely clear morning. The mountains to the north had a sprinkling of snow on them; they were bare, hard and aloof, but against the tender blue sky of early morning they were very close, you could almost touch them. They had that immense sense of age and indestructible majesty and that beauty that comes with timeless grandeur. It was a very still morning and the smell of orange blossom filled the air, the wonder and the beauty of light. The light of this part of the world has a special quality, penetrating, alive and filling the eyes; it seemed to enter into your whole consciousness, sweeping away any dark corners. There was great joy in that and every leaf and blade of grass was rejoicing in it. And the blue jay was hopping from branch to branch and not screeching its head off for a change. It was a lovely morning of light and great depth.
Time has bred consciousness with its content. It is the culture of time. Its content makes up consciousness; without it, consciousness, as we know it, is not. Then there is nothing. We move the little pieces in this consciousness from one area to another according to the pressure of reason and circumstance but in the same field of pain, sorrow and knowledge. This movement is time, the thought and the measure. It is a senseless game of hide and seek with yourself, the shadow and substance of thought, the past and the future of thought. Thought cannot hold this moment, for this moment is not of time. This moment is the ending of time; time has stopped at that moment, there is no movement at that moment and so it is not related to another moment. It has no cause and so no beginning and no end. Consciousness cannot contain it. In that moment of nothingness everything is.
Meditation is the emptying of consciousness of its content.