K: I want to go very slowly, please. Thought is consciousness, listening is
consciousness and learning is consciousness. Seeing, learning, hearing,
memorizing, reacting to the memory are all part of consciousness.
P: So when any one of these parts is operating, and no other, what you say is
understandable. Then there is no duality. Now we take the next step. When only
one of these parts operates, is it consciousness?
K: I would not use the word ‘part’. When thought operates within a specific field
there is no duality. For instance, when I speak a few words in French or Italian, it
is just that. But in the focalizing of consciousness, when thought compares that
operation with another, there is dualism. I see a sunset; it is recorded at that
moment as memory. And thought says: I wish it would happen again. See what
has been discovered—when there is the simple functioning of thought without
any motive, there is no duality.
P: Let us not take an impersonal thing like the sunset as an example. Let us take
jealousy, the movement of thought as jealousy, my jealousy.
K: Jealousy is the factor of duality. My wife looks at another man, and I feel
jealous because she is my wife, and I possess her. But if, from the beginning, I
am aware that she is not mine, that she is as free as I am, the factor of jealousy
need not enter.
P: I understand that. But when thought arises in consciousness, in itself there is
no duality there.
K: There is duality only when there is a motive, measurement, comparison. In
the observation of a beautiful sunset, in seeing its lights and shadow, there is no
duality. The word ‘beautiful’ may be dualistic in the sense of implying the ugly,
but I am using the word without the sense of comparison. The dualistic process
begins the moment I say that I want to experience it again. That’s all.
P: We have somehow moved away.
K: I will come back to where we left off. Consciousness is perception, hearing,
seeing, listening, learning, the memory of all that and the responses of memory.
All this is consciousness, whether focussed or not. In that consciousness there is
time; and time creates space because it is enclosed. In it there is duality, conflict
between ‘the must and the must not’. And because that consciousness has
boundaries and frontiers, which are limitations, in it there is no real space at all.
Let us stop here.
A: There is another factor which I would like to include here. There are so many
things being syphoned into my consciousness; there are the perceptions of the
various peoples of the world—of the Africans, of the Latin Americans; there are