Excerpt from The Only Revolution
If you pass on through the meadows with their thousand flowers of every color imaginable, from bright red to yellow and purple, and their bright green grass washed clean by last night’s rain, rich and verdant – again without a single movement of the machinery of thought – then you will know what love is. To look at the blue sky, the high full-blown clouds, the green hills with their clear lines against the sky, the rich grass and the fading flower – to look without a word of yesterday; then, when the mind is completely quiet, silent, and undisturbed by any thought, when the observer is completely absent – then there is unity. Not that you are united with the flower, or with the cloud, or with those sweeping hills; rather, there is a feeling of complete non-being in which the division between you and another ceases. The woman carrying those provisions she bought in the market, the big black Alsatian dog, the two children playing with the ball – if you can look at all these without a word, without a measure, without any association, then the quarrel between you and another ceases. This state, without the word, without thought, is the expanse of mind that has no boundaries, no frontiers within which the I and the not-I can exist. Don’t think this is imagination, or some flight of fancy, or some desired mystical experience; it is not. It is as actual as the bee on that flower, or the little girl on her bicycle, or the man going up a ladder to paint the house – the whole conflict of the mind in its separation has come to an end. You look without the look of the observer; you look without the value of the word and the measurement of yesterday. The look of love is different from the look of thought. One leads in a direction where thought cannot follow, and the other leads to separation, conflict, and sorrow. From this sorrow, you cannot go to the other. The distance between the two is made by thought, and thought cannot by any stride reach the other.
As you walk back by the little farmhouses, the meadows, and the railway line, you will see that yesterday has come to an end: life begins where thought ends.
