is the ‘I’. That response increases or decreases according to pleasure, pain,
suffering.
Now, P’s question was: How is that old brain, which is doing all this
automatically, mechanically, all the time, how is that old brain, whether it is
running horizontally or in circles, ever to see without the registerer or
registration?
P: We have gone over this. I want to take it further from there. We listen. Sound
passes through us. There is attention. In that state, for a second, horizontal
movement has come to an end. What has happened to the old brain?
K: But it is still there.
P: What do you mean, ‘It is still there’?
K: Look at it. See what happens. There is that child crying. The sound of the
child’s cry is being registered—why does the mother not look after it?—and so
on.
P: Do you record all that?
K: No. I am purely listening; there is complete listening. What has happened to
the old brain in that listening? Have you understood the question? We are taking
the journey together. (pause)
Let me put it differently. What is the essential need of a brain? (pause) Must
it not feel safe, secure, to function? One sees that the brain needs security. Then
some event occurs, and the brain sees the fact that to have presumed that there
was such a thing as security or comfort is not correct.
D: The brain cannot see it.
F: We take the brain as an accumulation of impressions and as a storehouse of
memories. But the storehouse of memories is outside the brain, and the brain is
only a lens.
P: Why do we not observe our own minds at this moment, instead of talking of
the brain in the abstract?
K: Listen. Your brain demands security; it needs a great sense of protection, both
physical and psychological. That is all I am saying; that is its function. This is the
essential point.
D: What is the basic query?