P: One way of doing so would be to examine what you have said, along with the
influences which have operated on you at that time, to see at what point the break
took place and what were the crises, inward or outward, that have been recorded,
to produce that break.
K: But suppose you knew nothing of all that and, yet, you had to answer the
question seriously now, what would you do? What you suggest would take time,
investigation. How would you find out now? How would you find out if you
were faced with this problem that there was a young man who followed the
traditional path, the idea of a fixed point, the fixed goal, using time, evolution,
but at a given point he broke away? How would you unravel it?
D: It is like this. We heat water. Up to a hundred degrees it is uniform, and then
there is complete transformation.
K: But to come to that point takes time.
P: If I did not have the historical background, the only way of investigation
would be to see whether this process is possible within my own consciousness.
D: I was driving at something else. The traditionalist would say that there is a
process which, like the boiling point of water, leads to transformation. You can
negate tradition, but tradition is necessary to take you up to that point.
P: If the historical data on K were not available, of K being put through various
sādhanās and so on, and one were just given the fact of this phenomenon of K,
the only way to investigate would be through self-knowing.
D: How would you explain the phenomenon?
F: You seem to be creating a relationship between the former state of
development and the present state of being. Is there a relationship between the
two? You say that one leads to the other, that one is before the other; you are
arranging it in time.
P: We know the history of the phenomenon of K—that he was born of Brahmin
parents and so on. I look at his background, I notice that up to a point K talked of
time, of salvation as a final point and then, suddenly, the whole thing was
negated.
K: F asks why you relate this horizontal movement to the vertical movement.
There is no relationship between the two. Therefore keep the two separate.
P: When I look at K, I look at the whole background.
K: Look, but do not relate the two.