Love is not Thought
GSTAAD, SWITZERLAND, 3 AUGUST 1981
The valley runs from east to west; the east end tapers off to a narrow canyon with
a 6,000-feet mountain over which the morning sun comes, casting long deep
shadows and endless silence. There is an old oak tree—several hundred years
old—which catches the morning sun, golden and motionless. The very highest
leaf is breathless in its stillness. The mourning dove begins its peculiar long, soft
cooing, answered by its mate. And the day has begun. The great-horned owl had
stopped its hooting as the early spring dawn was showing the outlines of the
rocky mountain and the long lines of wooded hills. Before the sun came up, great
silences seemed to cover the land. And how beautiful was the earth, timeless in
its vastness. It is our earth, ours and not of any group, community or nation. It is
ours; it belongs to every one of us.
The road is well-engineered, smooth, wide, without too many sharp turns as it
climbs, passing miles upon miles of well-kept orange orchards and endless
avocado groves, which go down the gullies and up the whole hillside, all to be
watered and cared for. The valley is filled with the scent of orange blossoms and
avocados. The road passes through the highest point, perhaps 5,000 feet, then it
descends slowly into the desert. At the highest point of the road the car stopped.
To the south the high, vast hills were covered with trees and bushes, purple and
yellow flowers; to the north there was no tree; it was barren, rocky, vast,
stretching to the horizon, utterly unspoiled, every rock as it must have been for a
thousand years. Immense space and immeasurable silence.
Solitude is one thing and being alone is another. Solitude can be isolation, an
escape, an unwanted thing; but to be alone without the burden of life, with that
utter freedom in which time/thought has never been, is to be with the universe. In
solitude there is despairing loneliness, a sense of being abandoned, lost, craving
for some kind of relationship, like a ship lost at sea. All our daily activity leads to
this isolation, with its endless conflicts and miseries, and rare joys thrown in.
This isolation is corruption, manifested in politics, in business and of course in
organized religions. Corruption exists in the very high places and on the very
doorstep. To be tied is corruption; any form of attachment leads to it, whether it
be to a belief, faith, ideal, experience, or any conclusion. Psychological
corruption is the common factor in the human. Money, status, power are the
superficial responses of the inward corruption of the mounting pleasure of desire,
the image that thought builds around the movement of desire. Corruption is
fragmentation.
In that vast space between the blue, clear sky and the beauty of the earth,
consciousness had come to an end. All the senses were fully awake to the
unpolluted air, the smell of the desert and distant flowers, the movement of the
lizard on the warm rock and the utter silence. It was not only the silence of high
altitude, that strange silence just after the sun has set, or that which seems to
descend on the earth with the beginning of dawn, away from all cities and noisy
villages, but also that profound silence which the noise of thought has never
touched. It is that silence that has no measure, of such purity and clarity that it
goes far beyond all the movement of consciousness. Time had literally stopped.
That silence accompanied us as the car ran down through the orchards and the
groves. There civilization began, the incredible vulgarity, the brutal haste and the
immodesty of humans, everyone asserting his presence, and the rich showing
their power and will. Even that excellent motor seemed to have become suddenly
silent, which of course is nonsense. The morning papers in their editorials were
stating what the effect would be if and when a nuclear bomb exploded over a
great city: several millions vaporized, society in ruins and primordial chaos. And
so on, horror upon horror. And humanity puts its faith in politicians and
governments.
Any specialist—the surgeon, the archbishop, the chef or the plumber—uses
only a part of the brain, narrowing down its total activity. The politician and the
guru employ only a small part of the extraordinary capacity and energy of the
brain. This limited, partial activity is creating havoc in the world. This small part
of the brain is functioning in all religions when they repeat their rituals, their
meaningless words, their gestures of 2,000 or 5,000 years of tradition, according
to how they have been programmed. Some do it gracefully in fine garments, and
others crudely. It is the same in government circles, the corruption of power. The
little part may accumulate great knowledge, but that very knowledge only further
strengthens a part of the brain. The ascension of man can never be through
knowledge, for it is never complete; it is ever within the shadow of ignorance.
The ultra-intelligent machine, the fast-developing computer, which is
programmed by experts, will overtake and outrun man’s thought and its slow
capacities; it will learn faster, correcting its own mistakes, solving its own
problems. The human being has not resolved any of his psychological problems,
the issues that have become so complex. It appears that he has been burdened
with them from the most ancient of days. We are still carrying on with these
problems, of government, religion, relationship, violence, wars and the pollution
of the earth. They will remain insoluble as long as only a part of the brain is
functioning, as long as one is programmed to be American, British, French and
so on, as long as one is a Catholic, Hindu, Muslim. One is, it appears, so utterly
unaware of how conditioned, programmed, that little part of the brain is. This
gives this programming an illusory sense of security, a verbal structure against
the barbarians. But man is the only barbarian; he himself is the cause of all the
corruption and horror that is taking place in the world. He is totally and
completely responsible for all that is happening around him.
This little part of the brain is our consciousness; it is the seat of time,
measure, space and thought. Time is evolution both biologically and
psychologically; it is the sun rising and setting; it is the sense of becoming.
Measure is what is and what should be, the ideal to be achieved, the violent
becoming peaceful, achieving the constant, the continuous becoming;
comparison, imitation, conformity; the better and the more. Space is the vast
expanse of the earth, the heavens and the little space in crowded cities, and space, if any, in consciousness. Thought is the master. Thought is the most dominant factor in human life. There is no Eastern thought or Western thought; there is only thought which may be expressed in many different ways, but it is still the movement of thought. Thought is common to all mankind, from the most
primitive to the most highly educated. Thought has put men on the moon;
thought has built the atom bomb; it has built all the temples, the great cathedrals
with all the things in them called sacred, the elaborate rituals, the dogmas, the
beliefs, faith and so on. It has built the computer and the programme that goes
into it. It has helped mankind in countless different ways, but it has also bred
wars and all the instruments of death. It has projected ideals, enormous violence,
tortures, divided humanity into nations, classes and innumerable religions which
have divided man against himself and set man against man. Love is not thought
with its remembrances and images.
Thought sustains and nourishes consciousness. The content of consciousness
is the never-ending movement of thought, the desires, the conflicts, the fears, the
pursuit of pleasures, pain, loneliness, sorrow. Love, compassion with its
incorruptible intelligence, is beyond this limited consciousness. It may not be
divided into higher or lower, for the high or the low is still consciousness, ever
noisy, ever chattering. Consciousness is all time, all measure, all space, for it is
born of thought. Thought can never in any circumstances be whole; it may
speculate about that which is whole and indulge in the verbalization and the
experience of it, but thought can never perceive its beauty, its immensity.
For thought is the barren child of experience and knowledge, which can never
be complete, whole. So thought will always be limited, fragmented. The
problems thought has brought to man thought tries vainly to resolve and thus
increasingly perpetuates them. Only when it realizes its utter incapacity
psychologically to resolve the problems and conflicts it has brought about, can
perception, insight, end them.
From BULLETIN 56, 1989
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