When you give a child who has been chattering, naughty, playing around, shouting, a complicated toy he becomes totally absorbed in it,

he becomes very quiet, enjoying the mechanics of it. The child becomes completely concentrated, completely involved with that toy; all

the mischief has been absorbed.

And we have toys, toys of ideals, toys of belief, which absorb us. If you worship an image - of all the images on earth none is sacred, they are all made by man’s mind, by their thought - then we are absorbed, just as the child is

absorbed in a toy, and we become extraordinarily quiet and gentle. When we see a marvelous mountain, snow capped against the blue sky and the deep shadowed valleys, that great

grandeur and majesty absorb us completely; for a moment we are completely silent because its majesty takes us over, we forget ourselves.

Beauty is where “you” are not. The essence of beauty is the absence of the self. (To know this)

we should understand the qualitative difference between concentration and attention. Most of us know concentration. We learn at school, in college, to concentrate.

The boy looks out of the window and the teacher says, “Concentrate on your book.” So we learn what it means. To concentrate

implies bringing all your energy to focus on a certain point;

but thought wanders away and so you have a perpetual battle between the desire to concentrate, to give all your energy to look at a page, and the mind which is wandering, and which you try to control.

Whereas attention has no control, no concentration. It is complete attention, which means giving all your energy, your nerves,

the capacity, the energy of the brain, your heart, everything, to attending. Probably you have never so completely attended. When you do attend so

completely there is no recording and no action from memory. When you are attending the brain does not record.

Whereas when you are concentrating, making an effort, you are always acting from memory like a looped recording.

Understand the nature of a brain that has no need of recording except that which is necessary.

It is necessary to record where you live, and the practical activities of life. But it is not necessary to record psychologically, inwardly, either the insult, or the flattery and so on. Have you ever tried it?

It is probably all so new to you. When you do, the brain, the mind, is entirely free from all conditioning. We are all slaves to tradition and we think we are also totally

different from each other. We are not.

We all go through the same great miseries, unhappiness, shed tears, we are all human beings, not Asians, Muslims, or Russians - those are all labels without meaning.

The mind must be totally free; which means that one has to stand completely alone; and we are so frightened to stand alone.

It is only the silent mind, the mind that is free, that can come upon that which is beyond time. Where there is silence there is space - not from one point to another point as we usually think of it.

Where there is silence there is no point but only silence. And that silence has that extraordinary energy of the universe.