THE FIRST STEP IS THE LAST STEP
Dialogue 5P: Yesterday you said: The first step is the last step. To understand that
statement, I think we should investigate the problem of time, and whether there is
such a thing as a final state of enlightenment. The confusion arises because our
minds are conditioned to think of illumination as the final state. Is understanding
or illumination a final state?
K: You know, when we said that the first step is the last step, were we not
thinking of time as a horizontal or a vertical movement? Were we not thinking of
movement along a plane? We were saying yesterday that if we could put aside
the vertical and the horizontal altogether, we could observe this fact, namely, that
wherever we are, whatever be the level of our conditioning, the perception of
truth, of the fact, is at that moment the last step.
Take a clerk in a little office with all the misery involved in that—the clerk
listens and at that moment really sees. That seeing, that perception, is the first
and the last step, because at that moment he has touched truth and he sees
something very clearly. The very perception brings about liberation. But what
happens afterwards is that he wants to cultivate that state, he wants to perpetuate
it, to turn it into a process. And, therefore, he gets caught and loses the quality of
perception entirely.
What we are saying is that all methods, practices, systems imply a process, a
movement from the horizontal to the vertical, towards a finality, to a point which
has no movement. If there were no conceptual ideal of finality, there would be no
process.
P: The whole structure of thought is built on a horizontal movement.
K: We are used to reading a book horizontally.
P: Everything has a beginning and an ending.
K: And we think that the first chapter must inevitably lead to the last chapter; we
feel that all practices lead to a finality, to an unfoldment—all that is horizontal
reading. Our minds, eyes and attitudes are conditioned to functioning along the
horizontal, at the end of which there is finality—the book is over. You ask if
truth or enlightenment is a final achievement, a final point beyond which there is
nothing—
P: A point from which there can be no slipping back. I might for an instant touch
the quality of that. A little later, thought arises again, and I say to myself: I am
back in the old state. I question whether that touching had any validity at all. I