Sorrow, the word and the symbol, has extraordinary hold on us. The word, the symbol, from the centuries of religious propaganda of two thousand years or ten thousand years, that you must bear sorrow, that through sorrow you’ll find out – all that has conditioned the mind, and so we never break through. But to be free of sorrow, you must shatter all the symbols, all the words, and be able to look at the fact. And you cannot look at a fact if you are self-pitying, if the picture of someone on the mantelpiece becomes all-important. Then you have identified yourself with that picture, with an idea, with a memory, with something that is dead and gone. So we live in the past, and to break away from the past, to totally deny and destroy the past, with all its stories, with all the memories, is the ending of sorrow. And only then there is a living.
From Public Talk 2, London, 7 June 1962