“Extract from the second conversation with Pupul Jayakar at Brockwood Park, 1983”

Krishnamurti: All one’s education, all one’s past experience and knowledge is a movement in becoming, both inwardly, psychologically as well as outwardly.

Becoming is the accumulation of memory. Right? More and more and more memories, which is called knowledge. Right? Now, as long as that movement exists, there is fear of being nothing.

But when one really sees the insight of the fallacy, the illusion of becoming something, therefore that very perception, that insight, to see there is nothing, this becoming is endless time-thought and conflict, there is an ending of that.

That is, the ending of the movement which is the psyche, which is time-thought. The ending of that is to be nothing. Right?

Nothing then contains the whole universe. Not my petty little fears and petty little anxieties and problems, and my sorrow with regard to – you know – a dozen things. After all, Pupulji, nothing means the entire world of compassion. Compassion is nothing. And therefore that nothingness is supreme intelligence. That’s all there is.

I don’t know if I am conveying this. So why are human beings – just ordinary, intelligent – frightened of being nothing? If I see that I am really a verbal illusion, that I am nothing but dead memories, that’s a fact!

But I don’t like to think I am just nothing but memories. But the truth is I am memories. If I had no memory, either I am in a state of amnesia, or I understand the whole movement of memory, which is time-thought, and see the fact: as long as there is this movement there must be endless conflict, struggle, pain.

And when there is an insight into that nothing means something entirely different. And that nothing is the present. It is not varying present, it is not one day this, and one day the next day. Being nothing is: no time, therefore it is not ending one day and beginning another day. You see, it is really quite interesting if one goes into this problem, not theoretically but actually.

The astrophysicists are trying to understand the universe. They can only understand in terms of gases, and… but the immensity of it, as part of this human being, not out there, here. Which means… There must be no shadow of time and thought.

Pupul, after all, that is real meditation, that’s what ‘shunya’ means in Sanskrit. But we have interpreted it ten, hundred different ways, commentaries, about this and that, but the actual fact is we are nothing! Except words. And opinions, judgements – that’s all petty affairs.

And therefore our life becomes petty. So to grasp, to understand that in the zero contains all the numbers. Right? So in nothing, all the world – not the pain, etc… that’s all so small.

I know, it sounds… when I am suffering that is the only thing I have. Or when there is fear, that is the only thing. But I don’t see it is such a petty little thing!

So having listened to all this, what is it you realise? If you could put it into words, Pupulji, it would be rather good.

What is it that you, and those who are going to listen to all this – it may be rubbish, it may be true – who are going to listen to all this, what do they capture, realise, see the immensity of all this?

P: It is really an ending of the psychological nature of the self, because that is becoming…

K: Wait a minute, Pupulji, I have asked a question because it is going to be very helpful to all of us if you could, as you listen to all this, what is your response, what is your reaction, what have you realised, what have you… say ‘By Jove! I have got it, I have got the perfume of it’?

P: Sir, it’s very… Don’t ask me that question, because anything I say would sound… Because… as you were speaking there was immensity.

K: Yes. Now wait a minute. There was that, I could feel it. There was the tension of that. But is it temporary, is it for the moment, for a second and it is gone? And then the whole business of remembering it, capturing it, inviting it…

P: Oh no, I think one has moved from there at least. And another thing one realises, the most difficult thing in the world is to be totally simple.

K: To be simple, that’s right. If one is really simple, from that, you can understand the enormous complexity of things. But we start with all the complexities and never see the simplicity. That’s our training. We have trained our brain to see the complexity and then try to find an answer to the complexity. But we don’t see the extraordinary simplicity of life – of facts, rather.

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