Full Heart, Empty Mind

There is no path to truth, it must come to you. Truth can come to you only when your mind and heart are simple, clear, and there is love in your heart; not if your heart is filled with the things of the mind. When there is love in your heart, you do not talk about organizing for brotherhood; you do not talk about belief, you do not talk about division or the powers that create division, you need not seek reconciliation. Then you are a simply a human being without a label, without a country. This means that you must strip yourself of all those things and allow truth to come into being; and it can come only when the mind is empty, when the mind ceases to create. Then it will come without your invitation. Then it will come as swiftly as the wind and unbeknown. It comes obscurely, not when you are watching, wanting. It is there as sudden as sunlight, as pure as the night; but to receive it, the heart must be full and the mind empty. Now you have the mind full and your heart empty.

Be in communion with sorrow 

 Most of us are not in communion with anything. We are not directly in communion with our friends, with our wives, with our children. So 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 verbalization. So words prevent me from being in communion with sorrow. Words prevent me -words of explanations, rationalizations, 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.

Live with sorrow    
   
We all have sorrow. Don't you have sorrow in one form or another? And do you want to know about it? If you do, you can analyze it and explain why you suffer. You can read books on the subject, or go to the church, and you will soon know something about sorrow. But I am not talking about that; I am talking about the ending of sorrow. Knowledge does not end sorrow. 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.
You know, to live with the beauty of those mountains and not get accustomed to it is very difficult. You have beheld those mountains, heard the stream, and seen the shadows creep across the valley, day after day; and have you not noticed how easily you get used to it all? You say, 'Yes, it is quite beautiful,' and you pass by. To live with beauty, or to live with an ugly thing, and not become habituated to it requires enormous energy,an awareness that does not allow your mind to grow dull. In the same way, sorrow dulls the mind if you merely get used to it,and most of us do get used to it. But you need not get used to sorrow. You can live with sorrow, understand it, go into it -but not in order to know about it. You know that sorrow is there; it is a fact, and there is nothing more to know. You have to live. 

An immensity beyond all measure                                                              

What happens when you lose someone by death? The immediate reaction is a sense of paralysis, and when you come out of that state of shock, there is what we call sorrow. Now, what does that word sorrow mean? The companionship, the happy words, the walks, the many pleasant things you did and hoped to do together -all this is taken away in a second, and you are left empty, naked, lonely. That is what you are objecting to, that is what the mind rebels against: being suddenly left to itself, utterly lonely, empty, without any support. Now, what matters is to live with that emptiness, just to live with it without any reaction, without rationalizing it, without running away from it to mediums, to the theory of reincarnation, and all that stupid nonsense,to live with it with your whole being. And if you go into it step by step you will find that there is an ending of sorrow,a real ending, not just a verbal ending, not the superficial ending that comes through escape, through identification with a concept, or commitment to an idea. Then you will find there is nothing to protect, because the mind is completely empty and is no longer reacting in the sense of trying to fill that emptiness; and when all sorrow has thus come to an end, you will have started on another journey,a journey that has no ending and no beginning. There is an immensity that is beyond all measure, but you cannot possibly enter into that world without the total ending of sorrow.

J.Krishnamurti- Book of life