suffering—that is ‘what is’; there is no feeling of wanting to be out of it. Where
does duality arise? Duality arises when the mind says: I must be rid of pain. I
have known states of non-pain, and I want to be in a state of non-pain. (pause)
You are a man and I am a woman. That is a biological fact. But is there a
psychological dualism? Is there a basically dualistic state or does it arise only
when the mind moves away from ‘what is’?
There is sorrow—my son is dead. I do not move away. Where is the duality?
It is only when I say: I have lost my companion, my son, that duality comes into
being. I wonder if this is right. I have pain—physical or psychological grief. A
movement away from it is duality. The thinker is the movement away—the
thinker that says: This should not be, and the thinker that also says: There should
not be duality.
First see the fact that the movement away from ‘what is’ is the movement of
the thinker, who brings in duality. In observing the fact of pain, why should there
be a thinker? The thinker arises when there is a movement, either backwards or
forwards. The thought that I had no pain yesterday—in that duality arises. Can
the mind remain with the pain? Any movement away from it brings in the
thinker.
The mind is asking itself: How does this dualistic attitude towards life arise?
It is not asking for an explanation of how to go beyond it. I have had pleasure
yesterday; it is finished. (pause) Is it not as simple as that?
P: Not really.
K: I think it is. You see, this implies non-comparative observation. Comparison
is dualistic; measurement is dualistic—there is pain today; there is the
comparison with the non-pain of tomorrow. But there is only one fact: the pain
which the mind is going through now. Nothing else exists. Why have we
complicated this? Why have we built tremendous philosophies around all this?
Are we missing something? Is it that the mind does not know what to do and,
therefore, moves away from the fact and brings duality into being? If it knew,
would it bring about duality? Is the ‘what-to-do’ itself a dualistic process? Do
you understand?
Let us look at it again. There is pain—physical or psychological. When the
mind does not know what to do, in the non-dualistic sense of doing, it escapes.
Can the mind caught in the trap, in the backward and the forward movement,
deal with ‘what is’ in a non-dualistic way? Do you understand?
So we are asking: Can pain, the ‘what is’, be transformed without dualistic
activity? Can there be a state of non-thinking, in which the thinker does not come
into being at all?—the thinker who says: I had no pain yesterday and I will not
have it tomorrow.
P: See what happens to us. What you say is right. But there is a lack of
something within us; it may be strength, energy. When there is a crisis, the
weight of that crisis is sufficient to plunge us into a state where there is no
movement away from the crisis, but in everyday life we have trivial challenges.