conflict. All that we know now is biological survival and the survival of
psychological consciousness. What is the next question?
P: You implied yesterday that there was a necessity to strip consciousness of
everything save the factors which insure biological survival.
K: Can you strip that whole content of consciousness which is psychological? In
that stripping, intelligence operates. Then there remain only the factors which
ensure biological survival and intelligence—there is no other.
P: You did not speak about intelligence yesterday. You said: When there is a
total stripping of consciousness and nothing else remains, that operation is the
biological movement of survival; it is the movement which perceives. Is there
such a seeing?
K: Then the mind is not merely the survival-element, but there is another quality
in it which perceives.
P: What is that quality?
K: What did K say yesterday?
P: He said that there is a stripping away of consciousness, and that there is only
the movement of survival in silence. And that silence sees.
K: Perfectly true. Now what is silence? What is the nature of silence?
P: That seeing is something which we can affirm. But something else was said
yesterday and, so, we cannot help asking: If man is stripped of everything which
we consider the element which makes him human—
K: Which is conflict, pain.
P: Not only that, but compassion—
B: We consider that man, as opposed to the animal, is human. What are the
things which differentiate man from the animal?—Intelligence, the capacity to
analyse, speech.
D: Man is an animal that uses language. And this is the mark which distinguishes
him from the rest of the animal world. Language enables man to say, ‘I am I’.
And the moment he goes beyond it, he speculates, he projects, he says, ‘I am I,
and in that “I” you can contain the whole cosmos’.
B: And one more thing. Because of language, man has been able to evolve
culture, and he cannot go back to the biological stage.