Can Thought Be Silent?: Four Public Talks - Berkeley USA 1969

1. Can the mind be free? - 3 February 1969

Duration: 99 minutes

• The society in which we live is the result of our psychological state.

• Where there is fear there is aggression.

• For most of us, freedom is something that we don’t want.

• Inaction is total action.

• What is the machinery that builds images?

Questions from the audience followed the talk.



2. Thought sustains fear and pleasure - 4 February 1969

Duration: 67 minutes

• To understand relationship and to end the conflict in it is our entire problem.

• Can man live at peace, within himself and outwardly?

• In relationship one becomes aware of the actual state of oneself.

• The man that has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free man, a peaceful

man.

• What is fear?

• Can thought be silent?

• Conduct becomes virtuous only when thought doesn’t cultivate what it

considers virtue.

• How is it possible to look at the sunset without thought weaving pleasure or

pain around it?

Questions from the audience followed the talk.





3. Life, death and love - 5 February 1969

Duration: 69 minutes

• What is it that we call living?

• How can a confused mind find somebody who will tell the truth?

• When there is no comparison, no opposite, you are actually faced with the fact

of anger, then is there anger?

• Without knowing what sorrow is, understanding its nature and structure, we

shall not know what love is.

• What is it to die?

• One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an

end.

• It is only the mind that has shed all its burdens every day, ended every problem,

that is an innocent mind. Then life has a different meaning altogether. Then one

can find out what love is.



4. True revolution - 6 February 1969 J. KRISHNAMURTI

Duration: 67 minutes

• What is a religious mind?

• Must one go to an expert to tell us what the unconscious is or can one find it for

oneself?

• Through the negation of disorder, order comes into being.

• It is only the meditative mind that can find out, not the curious mind or the

mind that is everlastingly searching.

• To meditate implies to see very clearly. It is not possible to see clearly when

there is space between the observer and the thing observed.

• It is only in silence that there is quite a different dimension.