A meditative mind is silent. It is not the silence which thought can conceive of; it is not the silence of a still evening; it is the silence when thought - with all its images, its words and perceptions - has entirely ceased. This meditative mind is the religious mind - the religion that is not touched by the church, the temples or by chants.
     The religious mind is the explosion of love. It is this love that knows no separation. To it, far is near. It is not the one or the many, but rather that state of love in which all division ceases. Like beauty, it is not of the measure of words. From this silence alone the meditative mind acts.
     It had rained the day before and in the evening the sky had been full of clouds. In the distance the hills were covered with clouds of delight, full of light, and as you watched them they were taking different shapes.
     The setting sun, with its golden light, was touching only one or two mountains of cloud, but those clouds seemed as solid as the dark cypress. As you looked at them you naturally became silent. The vast space and the solitary tree on the hill, the distant dome, and the talking going on around one - were all part of this silence. You knew that the next morning it would be lovely, for the sunset was red. And it was lovely; there wasn't a cloud in the sky and it was very blue. The yellow flowers and the white flowering tree against the dark hedge of cypress, and the smell of spring, filled the land. The dew was on the grass, and slowly spring was coming out of darkness.
     He said he had just lost his son who had had a very good job and who would soon have become one of the directors of a large company. He was still under the shock of it, but he had great control over himself. He wasn't the type that cried - tears would not come to him easily. He had been schooled all his life by hard work in a matter-of-fact technology. He was not an imaginative man, and the complex, subtle, psychological problems of life had hardly touched him. The recent death of his son was an unacknowledged blow. He said: "It is a sad event."
     This sadness was a terrible thing for his wife and children. "How can I explain to them the ending of sorrow, of which you have talked? I myself have studied and perhaps can understand it, but what of the others who are involved in it?"
     Sorrow is in every house, round every corner. Every human being has this engulfing grief, caused by so many incidents and accidents. Sorrow seems like an endless wave that comes upon man, almost drowning him; and the pity of sorrow breeds bitterness and cynicism.
     Is the sorrow for your son, or for yourself, or for the break in the continuity of yourself through your son? Is there the sorrow of self-pity? Or is there sorrow because he was so promising in the worldly sense?
     If it is self-pity, then this self-concern, this isolating factor in life - though there is the outward semblance of relation: ship - must inevitably cause misery. This isolating process, this activity of self-concern in everyday life, this ambition, this pursuit of one's own self-importance, this separative way of living, whether one is aware of it or not, must bring about the loneliness from which we try to escape in so many different ways. Self-pity is the ache of loneliness, and this pain is called sorrow.
     Then there is also the sorrow of ignorance - not the ignorance of the lack of books or of technical knowledge or the lack of experience, but the ignorance we have accepted as time, as evolution, the evolution from what is to what should be - the ignorance which makes us accept authority with all its violence, the ignorance of conformity with its dangers and pains, the ignorance of not knowing the whole structure of oneself. This is the sorrow that man has spread wherever he has been.
     So we must be clear about what it is that we call sorrow - sorrow being grief, the loss of what was the supposed good, the sorrow of insecurity and the constant demand for security. Which is it that you are caught in? Unless this is clear there is no ending to sorrow.
     This clarity is not a verbal explanation nor is it the result of a clever intellectual analysis. You must be aware, of what your sorrow is as clearly as you become aware, sensually, when you touch that flower.
     Without understanding this whole way of sorrow, how can you end it? You can escape from it by going to the temple or the church or taking to drink - but all escapes, whether to God or to sex, are the same, for they do not solve sorrow.
     So you have to lay down the map of sorrow and trace every path and road. If you allow time to cover this map, then time will strengthen the brutality of sorrow. You have to see this whole map at a glance - seeing the whole and then the detail, not the detail first and then the whole. In ending sorrow, time must come to an end.
     Sorrow cannot end by thought. When time stops, thought as the way of sorrow, ceases. It is thought and time that divide and separate, and love is not thought or time.
     See the map of sorrow not with the eyes of memory. Listen to the whole murmur of it; be of it, for you are both the observer and the observed. Then only can sorrow end. There is no other way.