THE FLAME OF SORROW
Dialogue 1K: What does sorrow mean in this country? How do the people in this country
meet sorrow? Do they escape from sorrow through the explanation of karma?
How does the mind in India operate when it meets sorrow? The Buddhist meets it
in one way, the Christian in another way. How does the Hindu mind meet it?
Does it resist sorrow, or escape from it? Or, does the mind rationalize it?
P: Are there really many ways of meeting sorrow? Sorrow is pain—the pain of
someone dying, the pain of separation. Is it possible to meet this pain in various
ways?
K: There are various ways of escape, but there is only one way of meeting
sorrow. The escapes with which we are all familiar are really the ways of
avoiding the greatness of sorrow. You see, we use explanations to meet sorrow,
but these explanations do not answer the question. The only way to meet sorrow
is to be without any resistance, to be without any movement away from sorrow—
outwardly or inwardly—and to remain totally with sorrow, without wanting to go
beyond it.
P: What is the nature of sorrow?
K: There is personal sorrow, the sorrow that comes with the loss of someone you
love—the loneliness, the separation and the anxiety for the other. With death
there is also the feeling that the other has ceased to be, and that there was so
much that one wanted to do. All this is personal sorrow. Then there is that man,
ill-clad, dirty, with his head down; he is ignorant, ignorant not merely of book-
knowledge, but deeply, really ignorant. The feeling that one has for that man is
not pity, nor is it an identification with that man—it is not that one is placed in a
better position than he is and so feels pity for him, but that there is within one the
sense of the timeless weight of sorrow in man. This sorrow has nothing personal
about it. It exists.
P: While you have been speaking, the movement of sorrow has been operating
within me. There is no immediate cause for this sorrow, but it seems like a
shadow, always with man. He lives, he loves, he forms attachments, and
everything ends. Whatever be the truth of what you say, in us there is such an
infinitude of sorrow. How is it to end? There appears to be no answer. The other
day you said that in sorrow there is the whole movement of passion. What does it
mean?
K: Is there a relationship between sorrow and passion? Is there such a thing as
sorrow without a cause? We know the sorrow which is cause and effect. My son
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