San Diego, 1974

A: I'm going to be swallowing hard about that for a long time. Please go on.

K: So if it is divorced from life then meditation has no meaning. It's just an escape from life, escape from all our travails and miseries, sorrows, confusions. And therefore it's not worth even touching.

A: Yes. Right.

K: If it is not, and it is not for me, then what is meditation? You follow? Is it an achievement, an attainment of a goal? Or is it a perfume, a beauty that pervades all my activities, therefore it has tremendous significance? Meditation has tremendous significance.

Then the next question is: is it the result of a search? Joining Zen group, then another group, one after the after, one after the other, practise this, practise that, don't practise, take a vow of celibacy, poverty, or don't speak at all, fast, in order to get there. For me all those are totally unnecessary. Because what is important is the seeing, as we said yesterday, the false, not I judge the false as true or false, but the very perception reveals the truth or the falseness of it. I must look at it. My eyes must look at it without any prejudices, without any reactions. Then I can say this is false, I won't touch it. That's what happens. I won't. People have come to me and said, 'Oh, you have no idea of all the things', they have said, 'You must', I have said, 'Nothing doing.' To me this is false because it doesn't include your life.

A: Yes.