Transcription
3rd question: Would you please clarify what you mean by brain, mind and consciousness? Would you please clarify what you mean by brain, mind and consciousness?
K: I am not going to clarify, we will talk over together. First of all, we are not professionals, thank God. We are enquiring. Not that professionals don't enquire, I don't mean that. We are ordinary laymen. We are enquiring into this very, very complex problem which is consciousness. What is the quality? Not the structure, the nature, the cells and all that, but the brain and the mind. Please don't look at me, look at yourselves.
First of all, consciousness, to be conscious, which is to be aware, which is to be attentive, not negligent, but diligently enquire into the nature of our consciousness. There has been the division as the unconscious and the conscious. The unconscious is all the past, all the inheritance, all the memories of thousands of years of man. Unconsciously, you may have the memories of being conditioned in Protestantism, Hindu, all the rest of it. Two thousand years of Christianity and propaganda has sown deeply the fear of heaven and hell, the saviour – it is there, deeply. And if you go to the Islamic world, it is there also. And the Hindu world, and so on. So the unconscious is the movement of the past. We won't go into too many details because it is a very complex question we are going into. The past is a thousand memories, thousand years of pain, struggle, and all the travail of man. The unconscious is the idea that you are British, French, and so on.
And the conscious, as far as one observes, – one may be wrong, one must always be doubting – the conscious is all the recent covering: education, technology – the covering. That is, the conscious mind has often the intimations of the unconscious. Right? You are following all this? And the conscious mind is always – if one is at all aware – is being guided by the unconscious. Following? So there is actually, if one is at all alive, aware, there is no unconscious and the conscious. It is one unitary movement if one is alive, fully aware. And one is fully aware when there is a crisis. When there is some deep, disturbing challenge, everything, your whole consciousness comes into action. And our consciousness is everything that thought has put there: our belief, our tradition, our faith, our fears of heaven and hell, the whole movement of our life is our consciousness.
That consciousness is part of our brain, of course. If I have no brains, I have no consciousness. So the brain is part, and the necessary movement of consciousness acting through or in the brain. Now, the brain – I am not a professional, please, I have discussed this point with professionals, but they won't accept what what we are saying, but that doesn't matter. I may be false, I may be wrong – we are saying, which is, the brain is now conditioned. Technologically – look how much energy has gone into technology. Our brain is limited, conditioned through vast experience, knowledge – it is conditioned. But to discover the quality of the brain which is not conditioned and therefore infinite capacity. Look at what the technological people are doing. They are not conditioned. They are enquiring, pushing, driving to find out, and therefore, they have got extraordinary capacity. The atom bomb, the things that the technicians, the scientists are creating some of you don't even know about it – the horrors they are doing. So the brain has infinite capacity, but it is conditioned now as British, as French, as all the rest: I believe, I don't believe, I believe in God. He is my guru. That guru is better than this guru. All that nonsense is going on. So as it is conditioned, its capacity is limited. And only when that conditioning is totally free, that means no faith, no fear – you follow? No attachment of any kind to anything, to past memories, past experiences. And they are that way. When they are technologically involved, they are tremendously alive. I have talked to them. They have no time, they brush you off.
So is it possible for the brain to be unconditioned? Which means is it possible for the brain to be free of the known? That is, I have to know where I have to go home, which road to take, what language I speak. I have to know, there is knowledge. But to be free, psychologically, which is the conditioning which the brain has been conditioned, conditioned by knowledge – to be free of that. Then it has got extraordinary capacity. Then, we are saying, what is the mind? We talked of consciousness, the brain and the mind. When the brain is completely free of that psychological knowledge, then the brain is the mind, because mind is infinite. So to understand all this, you have to study yourself, not from books, not from other people. You have to look at your own life, give time, energy, patience, probing. We haven't time because we are chattering all the time. So, mind, brain and consciousness are really one when there is total freedom of all conditioning. Shall we go on?