F: What is consciousness? You reply that it is the content, but I am asking for
something more—for the meaning, not the description.
K: F is asking for something more. He is asking: What is the meaning of my
existence? None at all—
F: Is there no question of your wanting to have meaning? What is the meaning of
Krishnamurti? Can you negate the self? Then you are guillotined. The individual
within, the censor, existence, consciousness, body—there is more besides these.
And that is the abstract soul. Ultimately there is a soul around which everything
impinges. Can you negate that?
K: The soul is the ‘me’.
P: That is the difficulty. There is a validity in F’s question because the self is the
most difficult thing to negate. If you attempt to negate the ego, the self, you will
never succeed. But if you proceed as we have just done, that is all that is
necessary.
F: What is the meaning of all this? Why should the ‘me’ end? The meaning of
the atoms is the organism; the meaning of the organism is consciousness. Why
should it stop there?
K: It does not stop there. It stops there only when thought realizes its limitations.
Let us come back. What is the instrument that is going to investigate—the
instrument in which there is no separation, in which there is no investigator and
the investigated? I see that thought has really no meaning. It has meaning only
within its small field. Now we ask: What else is there to discover?—not as a
discoverer discovering something. What is the movement which is neither inward
nor outward? Is it death? Is it the total negation of everything? Then what takes
place?
When thought, in which we include consciousness and its content—despair,
failure, success—ends, then what takes place? That part of the brain which is
registering, goes on. It must go on, otherwise it would become insane. But there
is the whole of the brain, which is quiet. Thought does not enter that field at all.
In fact thought enters into a very small portion of the field of the brain.
P: It is a fact that we use only a millionth part of our brain.
K: There is the other part.
F: There is no reason to suppose that the remnants of the brain which are not
used can become anything more than the other parts of consciousness.
K: No. Do look at it.