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The beginning of thinking is memory. Without memory, there’s no thinking. Memory is stored up in the brain as knowledge. Knowledge is the outcome of experience.
Experience - knowledge - memory. And the response of memory is thought.
So, thought is the outcome of experience, of a thousand million years of experience, vast accumulation of knowledge: scientific, biological, archaeological, and so on.
It is there, in our brain, as memory, and from that memory, thought comes.
So, knowledge is always in the past. And the past is our life, projected perhaps into the future. So, we are living in the past - all our memories, our experiences. Past meeting the present, modifying itself and proceeding further as the future.
So, thought is a material process.
Memory is in the brain. Brain contains memory. And memory is the outcome of experience, knowledge, and knowledge can never be complete about anything. And so, thought is always incomplete.
Thought is not holistic. So, our actions, our behavior, our outlook is always limited. Is always partial. Because we rely on thought.
Thought guides us, and thought is the outcome of knowledge. And knowledge is always incomplete about anything, so our actions are incomplete. Our outlook is incomplete.
But, thought is necessary. Knowledge is necessary. Otherwise, we couldn’t go home. Otherwise, we couldn’t speak English. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know how to cook. So, knowledge, however limited, we must have.
So, is there any kind of knowledge? […] To be a good carpenter, I must know the nature of the wood, the tools. I must have great skill with my hands. Therefore, knowledge at a certain level is necessary, completely. That is, to survive physically, we must have knowledge.
And if you observe, psychologically, inwardly, the same process continues. That is, we must have knowledge to survive physically. And psychologically, inwardly, we think knowledge is necessary. The same movement, which is physical survival.
Psychologically, inwardly, what are we? We are memory, nothing else.
We are mass of collective memory, remembrance of things past, and we are operating, functioning psychologically on memory as the ‘me’ and the ‘you’.
Is there knowledge about oneself? Do we know ourselves? without going to the psychologists. The philosophers will tell us what we are, or going to the sacred books to find out what we are. Do we know, or observe? Are we aware of what we are?
What are we? What are you? As a human being, what are you? I know you’ve got a name, a form, a job, and so on and so on, outwardly.
But inwardly - which always overcomes the outer, right? - what you are inwardly conquers, whatever system, whatever ideology, always overcome that. So, it’s important from the beginning of these talks to understand what we are.
We are the name, the form, outwardly. Inwardly, the content of our consciousness is put together by thought.
Within my consciousness, and your consciousness, is the belief, the fears, the agony, the pain, the desperate loneliness, sorrow and all the hurts, wounds, psychologically, that we have, all that is our consciousness.
Our consciousness - both the conscious as well as the unconscious - that consciousness may invent super consciousness, but it’s still part of that consciousness. I may think that there is super consciousness beyond my consciousness, a super consciousness which I have to bring down into myself.
That super consciousness is still part of my thinking about it, so it is still part of my consciousness.
See, what we are doing, how we are deceiving ourselves, how dishonest we are, because we have never realized that thought can invent and live in an illusion of every kind.
So, our consciousness is the product of our thought.
I will go into it. You will see it, presently. This consciousness is common to all mankind. All mankind has belief, some kind of belief, he may not particularly have your belief, but he has belief.
He suffers, he is anxious, uncertain, insecure, depressed, lonely, great anxiety, and so on. This is common to all mankind. So, it’s not your consciousness, it is the consciousness of man.
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