Every experience is conditioned by the past experience. So there is no new experience; it is always colored by the past. In the very process of experiencing, there is the distortion which comes into being from the past - the past being knowledge, memory, the various accumulated experiences, not only of the individual, but also of the race, the community. Now, is it possible to deny all that experience?

I do not know if you have gone into the question of denial, what it means to deny something. It means the capacity to deny the authority of knowledge, to deny the authority of experience, to deny the authority of memory, to deny the priests, the church, everything that has been imposed on the psyche. There are only two means of denial for most of us - either through knowledge or through reaction. You deny the authority of the priest, the church, the written word, the book, either because you have studied, inquired, accumulated other knowledge, or because you do not like it, you react against it. Whereas true denial implies, does it not, that you deny without knowing what is going to happen, without any future hope. To say, 'I do not know what is true, but this is false,' is surely the only true denial because that denial is not out of calculated knowledge, not out of reaction. After all, if you know what your denial is leading to, then it is merely an exchange, a thing of the marketplace, and therefore it is not true denial at all.

I think one has to understand this a little, to go into it rather deeply because I want to find out, through denial, what is the religious mind. I feel that through negation one can find out what is true. You cannot find out what is true by assertion. You must sweep the slate completely clean of the known before you can find out.