Jean Klein - Where There is Happiness, Nobody is Happy

Do you live in a state of emptiness? I mean, when you are in meditation or even walking down the road, are you always in a state of emptiness?

Emptiness is not a state; I correct you, it is a non-state.

I’m curious to know whether, when thoughts spring up out of that emptiness, do they go on a quarter of your time, or three-quarters of your time, and if they do, how can you keep your mind still all the time like that? Aren’t you wanting to think about things?

I never think.

You never think. When you answer a question, are you not thinking?

No. I hear the question in silence, and the answer comes out of silence.

Don’t you yearn for something? Isn’t there a yearning, a magnet that is pulling you or bringing thoughts into you that makes you want to think? I’m trying to understand, because it used to be that I did not think; I used to space out when I was a child and I would just be nowhere. I would repeat a phrase over and over again or I would have a picture in my mind and would go through a whole picture and repeat the picture again and again. So I would not think. To get out of that, I worked to think, and now it is like a process—always wanting to go on. I always have to have my intellect going on.

What is the motive of this intentional thinking?

Knowledge, excitement, discovery.

But in the end what do you want really? Happiness? Joy? Peace?

Yes, joy; exciting joy.

So you think in order to find happiness. And have you found it?

Oh, yes.

So you are happy?

Yes, I am.

Well, marvelous!

I have states of spontaneous ecstasy where it… these time periods of incredible ecstasy, just joy and excitement and wonder… there have been time periods in my life, and then they go away and are not there any more….

You go away.

You mean, I go away?

Yes, be aware of these moments when you go away.

When I go away from the ecstasy, or when the ecstasy is not there any more?

You go away from your real self.

Oh, I see. So, you are saying that the joining of the self is the ecstasy?

You go away from your real self. Be aware in the moment when you go away. In happiness and in joy you cannot say, “I’m happy,” “I’m in joy”—it is not possible. When you think, “I’m happy,” you objectify it, make it a state. Where there is happiness, nobody is happy, nothing is happy. There is only happiness. You are still involved in calculative thinking, looking for a result, an experience. Real thinking is when you go away from thinking. When you look away from thinking, that is real thinking. All real thinking starts free from any thought. Real thinking comes out of silence. You may have a certain forefeeling of what you are looking for.

I get really confused with the terms: what is thinking and what is not.

What you understand by thinking starts with thinking. That is intentional thinking, superficial thinking, surface thinking. That is not thinking at all.

Just an exercise.

Yes. Real thinking starts from the unknown, from silence. This thinking has a completely other way of flowing, I would say. There is never assertion, there is never domination, never manipulation. This thinking is constantly in a state of “I don’t know.” The background of real thinking is “I don’t know.”

So is the excitement that comes out of the “I don’t know” the excitement of the non-state?

Yes. You are completely open to the unknown. In any case, what you are looking for you cannot know. All that you know is representation. When you say “I know,” you represent it. Thinking is in representation, but your totality—what you are fundamentally—can never be thought. You can only be it.

-Jean Klein

From Living Truth  

 This book can be purchased from Non-Duality Press

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