Most people familiar with both Buddhism and K would probably agree that there is a great similarity between the two. For the Buddhists in these dialogues, K’s teachings give perfect expression, in a modern idiom, to what Siddhartha Gautama taught 2,500 years ago. It is also well known among students of K’s work that he considered the Buddha as perhaps the only historical teacher who discovered the truth. The subsequent exploration into the nature, causes and ending of suffering does indeed cover much common ground between them. However, this seemingly total agreement in the expression raises the fundamental challenge of whether it is knowledge or insight that liberates the human mind. For K the use of knowledge as the raft to cross to the other shore implies a gradual approach. Although he accepts biological and technological evolution, he denies it in the psyche. For him the realization of truth has nothing to do with the time-bound movement between psychological opposites. Facts have no opposite and staying with them means the ending of duality in daily life. To see facts time is not necessary. This instant seeing is without the word and it does not require discipline, practice or guidance. So there is no need for methods, sacred books, gurus and ecclesiastical authorities.

The dialogues go on to explore such central questions as the nature of the self, desire, thought and time, tracing out their mutually dependent originations. For K the essence of the self is the process of identification. First there is sensation, then thought recognizes and identifies with it, giving rise to desire and the pursuit of pleasure. Then thought doesn’t give up pleasure because the thought of doing so is painful. Thought conditions itself by the continued remembrance of pleasure and the fear and pain of giving it up. This cycle makes the brain irrational. Thus thought, which has a place in all manner of practical activities, goes wrong in this psychological identifying process. The question is how to observe all this without a motive, without a cause, reward or punishment. If one sees the self as a whole, then it comes to an end. Such dying while living is to love without attachment or identification. From this there is an action that is complete and right under all circumstances.

This we might call the laying of the foundation of order that is traditionally considered to be necessary for awakening to truth in its deeper sense. Thought projects truth as something to be achieved in time. Time exists physically and it is necessary there. But psychologically, time is a means of postponing action. So to come upon the truth, the mind must be totally free of psychological time. This means that the whole movement of thought must be observed and understood so that it has its own relative place. Then the mind becomes absolutely still. This stillness is the ground of insight. To have an insight into this whole movement of time-thought is real meditation. In the ending of the stream of consciousness, intelligence, love and compassion are in operation. The content of consciousness is common to all humanity therefore the idea of individuality is an illusion. At death the stream goes on, not the individual ‘me’. With the ending of the stream, which is the ending of time, there is truth and immortality.

The above is a rough summary of these five dialogues and their unfolding inquiry of ever deeper and wider implications. The answer to the question whether humanity can change is that it most definitely can if this journey is undertaken. So why don’t we change? The excerpts in the last section of the book indicate that we don’t change either because we don’t think it’s possible, we don’t want to change or we go about it the wrong way. We don’t want to change because we are lazy, fear change, and may even find it profitable to continue with our violence. We don’t change because we accept authority, conform to systems, and seek security and power in the identification with nationalism and other divisive labels. We don’t change because we exercise will in the pursuit of ideals and results; because our life is centred on desire, on attachment and sensate values; because we try to bring it about through analysis, thought and time; because we fear to be nothing. In other words, we don’t change because we don’t see the dangerous errors of our ways.

Seeing is the real issue. The total denial of the usual means employed in the pursuit of truth divests one of all preconceived ideas, schemes and identities. One is just a human being facing one’s own reality in its starkest and most uncompromising nakedness. The simplicity, honesty and austerity of this non-dual perception is the fundamental discipline in which truth brings about inward freedom. What brings about change is not knowledge, however accurate in its description, but insight into what is being described. This involves the whole question of communication, which implies meeting at the same level, with the same intensity, at the same time. Communication then goes beyond words. This means not being identified with the language. Words have an entirely different meaning when language is not a factor of conditioning. Words then are not even necessary, for such total communication is love. In this sense, communication is of the same nature as inward change. So we can say that we don’t change because we do not love, because we do not communicate, because we do not commune with one another in the common perception of ‘what is’.

Throughout this book, and especially in the dialogues with Buddhists, I felt a certain quality of suspense and unease, not only in relation to the participants themselves but also for myself as a reader, regarding whether this communication, this awakening of the heart in direct perception is actually taking place or one is merely gathering abstractions. This is the abysmal edge on which so many of us seem to be perched. One can gather knowledge of the truth as expressed by the great teachers and still be as deluded as ever. It may even be that one was closer to the truth when one didn’t have any knowledge of the matter, for then the mind was perhaps more open to the new, to that which admits no representation. This divide between truth and the known seems to be absolute.

But, one might ask, how can memory and thought, so seemingly fragile and evanescent, keep the truth at bay armed with such flimsy inventions as self and time? Many of us must have posed the question as to why truth does not infuse itself directly into our very being, wiping out illusion, conflict and sorrow from the world. The answer to this simple question regarding the apparent impotence of truth in relation to human suffering, as given in a quote from this book in this issue of The Link (see pg. 64), seems to be that it is akin to love, therefore totally vulnerable, without power or utilitarian use. At bottom we understand this very well, for there have been those strange or rare moments when we have been there, in that total emptiness of self that is the ground of truth and love. But, in our consciousness, knowing and owning have become so closely identified with being that to suggest a radical divorce between them awakens a primal fear not unlike the fear of death. And we also make the assumption that life necessitates just such structures of identification. But isn’t that fear itself an escape from one’s own essential nothingness, the veil of continuity that thought casts over the present to hide its unfathomable and timeless depth? And here lies the basic challenge, namely in seeing through and into the structures of self-deception by means of which thought distorts and obscures the quality of direct perception. That is why perceiving without the word and its conditioned ideational and emotional associations becomes so important, as it opens the door to truth in daily life.

This book is not essentially for Buddhists but for anyone who, like them, is concerned with an inquiry into the nature and ending of suffering. The crisis is there, the challenge is set and the seeing is now or never.