excerpts

I think it is important to consider the negativeness of experience; because our whole life is a series of accumulated experiences, and a false centre forms around these accumulations.

Whether experience is destructive or so-called creative, what is it that nevertheless makes the mind insensitive and brings about deterioration?

Does experience liberate the mind from the deteriorating factor? Or must there be freedom from this craving for experience, from the accumulative process of experience?

We take experience as a necessary factor for the enrichment of life; and I think it is, at one level. But experience nearly always forms a hardened centre in the mind, as the self, which is a deteriorating factor.

Most of us are seeking experience... Being tired of worldly things, we want a more extensive, a wider, deeper experience; and to arrive at such an experience, we suppress, we control, we dominate ourselves, hoping thereby to achieve a full realization of God, or what you will. We think the pursuit of experience is the right way of life in order to attain greater vision, and I question whether that is so.

Does this search for experience, which is really a demand for greater, fuller sensation, lead to reality? Or is it a factor which cripples the mind?

... But through it all, the fundamental desire is for greater sensation - to have the sensation of pleasure extended, made high and permanent, as opposed to the suffering, the dullness, the routine and loneliness of our daily lives.

So the mind is ever seeking experience, and that experience hardens into a centre; and from this centre we act. We live and have our being in this centre, in this accumulated, hardened experience of the past.

And is it possible to live without forming this centre of experience and sensation? Because it seems to me that life will then have a significance quite different from that which we now give it. At present we are all concerned, are we not, with the extension of the centre, recruiting greater and wider experience which ever strengthens the self; and I think this invariably limits the mind.

So, is it possible to live in this world without forming this centre? I think it is possible only when there is a full awareness of life - an awareness in which there is no motive or choice, but simple observation.

I think you will find, if you will experiment with this and think about it a little deeply, that such awareness does not form a centre around which experience and the reactions to experience can accumulate.

Then the mind becomes astonishingly alive, creative - and I do not mean writing poems, or painting pictures, but a creativeness in which the self is totally absent.

I think this is what most of us are really seeking - a state in which there is no conflict, a state of peace and serenity of mind. But this is not possible so long as the mind is the instrument of sensation and is ever demanding further sensation.

After all, most of our memory is based on sensation, either pleasurable or painful; from the painful we try to escape, and to the pleasurable we cling; the one we suppress or seek to avoid, and the other we grope after, hold on to, and think about.

So the centre of our experience is essentially based on pleasure and pain, which are sensations, and we are always pursuing experiences which we hope will be permanently satisfying.

That is what we are after all the time, and hence there is everlasting conflict. Conflict is never creative; on the contrary, conflict is a most destructive factor, both within the mind itself and in our relationship with the world around us, which is society.

If we can understand this really deeply - that a mind which seeks experience limits itself and is its own source of misery - then perhaps we can find out what it is to be aware.

Being aware does not mean learning and accumulating lessons from life; on the contrary, to be aware is to be without the scars of accumulated experience. After all, when the mind merely gathers experience according to its own wishes, it remains very shallow, superficial.

A mind which is deeply observant does not get caught up in self-centred activities; and the mind is not observant if there is any action of condemnation or comparison. Comparison and condemnation do not bring understanding, rather they block understanding. To be aware is to observe - just to observe - without any self-identifying process. Such a mind is free of that hard core which is formed by self-centred activities.

Awareness comes into being naturally, easily, spontaneously, when we understand the centre which is everlastingly seeking experience, sensation.

A mind which seeks sensation through experience becomes insensitive, incapable of swift movement, and therefore it is never free. But in understanding its own self-centred activities, the mind comes upon this state of awareness which is choiceless, and such a mind is then capable of complete silence, stillness.

Without this extraordinary stillness of the mind, which is not seeking further experience, all our activities will merely add to the dead centre of accumulation.

Only when the mind is completely still can it know its own movement - and then its movement is immense, incalculable, immeasurable. Then it is possible to have that feeling of something which is beyond time.

Then life has quite a different significance, a significance which is not to be found through capacities, gifts, or intellectual gymnastics.

Creative stillness is not the end result of a calculating, disciplined and widely-informed mind. It comes into being only when we understand the falsity of the whole process of endlessly seeking sensation through experience.

Without that inward stillness, all our speculations about reality, all the philosophies, the systems of ethics, the religions, have very little significance. It is only the still mind which can know infinity.