Two more extracts on sorrow:
There is conscious sorrow, and there is also unconscious sorrow, the sorrow that seems to have no basis, no immediate cause. Most of us know conscious sorrow, and we also know how to deal with it. Either we run away from it through religious belief or we rationalize it, or we take some kind of drug, whether intellectual or physical; or we bemuse ourselves with words, with amusements, with superficial entertainment. We do all this, and yet we cannot get away from conscious sorrow.
Then there is the unconscious sorrow that we have inherited through the centuries. Man has always sought to overcome this extraordinary thing called sorrow, grief, misery; but even when we are superficially happy and have everything we want, deep down in the unconscious there are still the roots of sorrow. So when we talk about the ending of sorrow, we mean the ending of all sorrow, both conscious and unconscious…
The ending of sorrow begins with the facing of psychological facts within oneself and being totally aware of all the implications of those facts from moment to moment. This means never escaping from the fact that one is in sorrow, never rationalizing it, never offering an opinion about it, but living with that fact completely…
To understand sorrow, surely you must love it, must you not? That is, you must be in direct communion with it.
If you would understand something—your neighbor, your wife, or any relationship—if you would understand something completely, you must be near it. You must come to it without any objection, prejudice, condemnation, or repulsion; you must look at it, must you not? If I would understand you, I must have no prejudices about you. I must be capable of looking at you, not through barriers, screens of my prejudices and conditionings. I must be in communion with you, which means I must love you.
Similarly, if I would understand sorrow, I must love it, I must be in communion with it. I cannot do so because I am running away from it through explanations, through theories, through hopes, through postponements, which are all the process of verbalisation. So words prevent me from being in communion with sorrow. Words prevent me—words of explanations, rationalisations, which are still words, which are the mental process—from being directly in communion with sorrow. It is only when I am in communion with sorrow that I understand it…
The ending of sorrow is realised in sorrow itself, not away from sorrow. To move away from sorrow is merely to find an answer, a conclusion, an escape; but sorrow continues. Whereas, if you give it your complete attention, which is to be attentive with your whole being, then you will see that there is an immediate perception in which no time is involved, in which there is no effort, no conflict; and it is this immediate perception… that puts an end to sorrow.
(The Book of Life)
The speaker is not stimulating you to feel sorrow; the speaker is not telling you what sorrow is, it’s right in front of us, right inside you. Nobody needs to point it out, if you keep your eyes open, if you are sensitive, aware of what is happening in this monstrous world. So please ask yourself this question: whether sorrow can ever end. Because like hatred, when there is sorrow there is no love. When you are suffering, concerned with your own suffering, how can there be love? So one must ask this question, however difficult it is to find - not the answer, but the ending of sorrow.
What is sorrow? … Is sorrow self-pity? Please, investigate. We’re not saying it is or it is not, we’re asking, is sorrow brought about by self-pity, one of the factors? Sorrow brought about by loneliness? Feeling desperately alone, lonely; Not alone: the word ‘alone’ means ‘all one.’ But feeling isolated, having in that loneliness no relationship with anything.
Is sorrow merely an intellectual affair? To be rationalised, explained away? Or to live with it without any desire for comfort. You understand? To live with sorrow, not escape from it, not rationalise it, not find some illusive or exclusive comfort: religious or some illusory romantic escapes, but to live with something that has tremendous significance.
Sorrow is not only a physical shock, when one loses one’s son or husband, wife or girl, whatever it is, it’s a tremendous biological shock. One is almost paralysed with it. Don’t you know all this?
And there is also the sense of desperate loneliness. Can one look at sorrow as it is actually in us, and remain with it, hold it, and not move away from it?
Sorrow is not different from the one who suffers. The person who suffers wants to run away, escape, do all kinds of things. But to look at it as you look at a child, a beautiful child, to hold it, never escape from it. Then you will see for yourself, if you really do it deeply, that there is an end to sorrow. And when there is an end to sorrow there is passion - not lust, not sensory stimulation, but passion.
(Talk 2, Washington DC, 1985)
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