Man's Search — The Tortured Mind — The
Traditional Approach — The Trap of Respectability
— The Human Being and the Individual — The
Battle of Existence — The Basic Nature of
Man — Responsibility — Truth — Self-transformation
— Dissipation of Energy — Freedom from
Authority
Man has throughout the ages been seeking something
beyond himself, beyond material welfare—something
we call truth or God or reality, a timeless
state—something that cannot be disturbed
by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.
Man has always asked the question: what is
it all about?
Has life any meaning at all?
He sees the enormous confusion of life, the
brutalities, the revolts, the wars, the endless
divisions of religion, ideology and nationality,
and with a sense of deep abiding frustration
he asks, what is one to do, what is this thing
we call living, is there anything beyond it?
And not finding this nameless thing of a thousand
names which he has always sought, he has cultivated
faith—faith in a saviour or an ideal—and
faith invariably breeds violence.
In this constant battle which we call living,
we try to set a code of conduct according
to the society in which we are brought up,
whether it be a Communist society or a so-called
free society; we accept a standard of behaviour
as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims
or Christians or whatever we happen to be.
We look to someone to tell us what is right
or wrong behaviour, what is right or wrong
thought, and in following this pattern our
conduct and our thinking become mechanical,
our responses automatic.
We can observe this very easily in ourselves.
For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our
teachers, by our authorities, by our books,
our saints.
We say, 'Tell me all about it—what lies
beyond the hills and the mountains and the
earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions,
which means that we live on words and our
life is shallow and empty.
We are secondhand people.
We have lived on what we have been told, either
guided by our inclinations, our tendencies,
or compelled to accept by circumstances and
environment.
We are the result of all kinds of influences
and there is nothing new in us, nothing that
we have discovered for ourselves; nothing
original, pristine, clear.
Throughout theological history we have been
assured by religious leaders that if we perform
certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or
mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress
our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate
our passions, limit our appetites and refrain
from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient
torture of the mind and body, find something
beyond this little life.
And that is what millions of so-called religious
people have done through the ages, either
in isolation, going off into the desert or
into the mountains or a cave or wandering
from village to village with a begging bowl,
or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing
their minds to conform to an established pattern.
But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind
which wants to escape from all turmoil, which
has denied the outer world and been made dull
through discipline and conformity—such a
mind, however long it seeks, will find only
according to its own distortion.
So to discover whether there actually is or
is not something beyond this anxious, guilty,
fearful, competitive existence, it seems to
me that one must have a completely different
approach altogether.
The traditional approach is from the periphery
inwards, and through time, practice and renunciation,
gradually to come upon that inner flower,
that inner beauty and love—in fact to do
everything to make oneself narrow, petty and
shoddy; peel off little by little; take time;
tomorrow will do, next life will do—and
when at last one comes to the centre one finds
there is nothing there, because one's mind
has been made incapable, dull and insensitive.
Having observed this process, one asks oneself,
is there not a different approach altogether—that
is, is it not possible to explode from the
centre?
The world accepts and follows the traditional
approach.
The primary cause of disorder in ourselves
is the seeking of reality promised by another;
we mechanically follow somebody who will assure
us a comfortable spiritual life.
It is a most extraordinary thing that although
most of us are opposed to political tyranny
and dictatorship, we inwardly accept the authority,
the tyranny, of another to twist our minds
and our way of life.
So if we completely reject, not intellectually
but actually, all so-called spiritual authority,
all ceremonies, rituals and dogmas, it means
that we stand alone and are already in conflict
with society; we cease to be respectable human
beings.
A respectable human being cannot possibly
come near to that infinite, immeasurable,
reality.
You have now started by denying something
absolutely false—the traditional approach—but
if you deny it as a reaction you will have
created another pattern in which you will
be trapped; if you tell yourself intellectually
that this denial is a very good idea but do
nothing about it, you cannot go any further.
If you deny it, however, because you understand
the stupidity and immaturity of it, if you
reject it with tremendous intelligence, because
you are free and not frightened, you will
create a great disturbance in yourself and
around you but you will step out of the trap
of respectability.
Then you will find that you are no longer
seeking.
That is the first thing to learn—not to
seek.
When you seek you are really only window-shopping.
The question of whether or not there is a
God or truth or reality, or whatever you like
to call it, can never be answered by books,
by priests, philosophers or saviours.
Nobody and nothing can answer the question
but you yourself and that is why you must
know yourself.
Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of
self.
To understand yourself is the beginning of
wisdom.
And what is yourself, the individual you?
I think there is a difference between the
human being and the individual.
The individual is a local entity, living in
a particular country, belonging to a particular
culture, particular society, particular religion.
The human being is not a local entity.
He is everywhere.
If the individual merely acts in a particular
corner of the vast field of life, then his
action is totally unrelated to the whole.
So one has to bear in mind that we are talking
of the whole not the part, because in the
greater the lesser is, but in the lesser the
greater is not.
The individual is the little conditioned,
miserable, frustrated entity, satisfied with
his little gods and his little traditions,
whereas a human being is concerned with the
total welfare, the total misery and total
confusion of the world.
We human beings are what we have been for
millions of years—colossally greedy, envious,
aggressive, jealous, anxious and despairing,
with occasional flashes of joy and affection.
We are a strange mixture of hate, fear and
gentleness; we are both violence and peace.
There has been outward progress from the bullock
cart to the jet plane but psychologically
the individual has not changed at all, and
the structure of society throughout the world
has been created by individuals.
The outward social structure is the result
of the inward psychological structure of our
human relationships, for the individual is
the result of the total experience, knowledge
and conduct of man.
Each one of us is the storehouse of all the
past.
The individual is the human who is all mankind.
The whole history of man is written in ourselves.
Do observe what is actually taking place within
yourself and outside yourself in the competitive
culture in which you live with its desire
for power, position, prestige, name, success
and all the rest of it—observe the achievements
of which you are so proud, this whole field
you call living in which there is conflict
in every form of relationship, breeding hatred,
antagonism, brutality and endless wars.
This field, this life, is all we know, and
being unable to understand the enormous battle
of existence we are naturally afraid of it
and find escape from it in all sorts of subtle
ways.
And we are frightened also of the unknown—frightened
of death, frightened of what lies beyond tomorrow.
So we are afraid of the known and afraid of
the unknown.
That is our daily life and in that there is
no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy,
every form of theological concept, is merely
an escape from the actual reality of what
is.
All outward forms of change brought about
by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and
ideologies have failed completely to change
the basic nature of man and therefore of society.
As human beings living in this monstrously
ugly world, let us ask ourselves, can this
society, based on competition, brutality and
fear, come to an end?
Not as an intellectual conception, not as
a hope, but as an actual fact, so that the
mind is made fresh, new and innocent and can
bring about a different world altogether?
It can only happen, I think, if each one of
us recognizes the central fact that we, as
individuals, as human beings, in whatever
part of the world we happen to live or whatever
culture we happen to belong to, are totally
responsible for the whole state of the world.
We are each one of us responsible for every
war because of the aggressiveness of our own
lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness,
our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all
of which divide us.
And only when we realize, not intellectually
but actually, as actually as we would recognize
that we are hungry or in pain, that you and
I are responsible for all this existing chaos,
for all the misery throughout the entire world
because we have contributed to it in our daily
lives and are part of this monstrous society
with its wars, divisions, its ugliness, brutality
and greed—only then will we act.
But what can a human being do—what can you
and I do—to create a completely different
society?
We are asking ourselves a very serious question.
Is there anything to be done at all?
What can we do?
Will somebody tell us?
People have told us.
The so-called spiritual leaders, who are supposed
to understand these things better than we
do, have told us by trying to twist and mould
us into a new pattern, and that hasn't led
us very far; sophisticated and learned men
have told us and that has led us no further.
We have been told that all paths lead to truth—you
have your path as a Hindu and someone else
has his path as a Christian and another as
a Muslim, and they all meet at the same door—which
is, when you look at it, so obviously absurd.
Truth has no path, and that is the beauty
of truth, it is living.
A dead thing has a path to it because it is
static, but when you see that truth is something
living, moving, which has no resting place,
which is in no temple, mosque or church, which
no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody
can lead you to—then you will also see that
this living thing is what you actually are—your
anger, your brutality, your violence, your
despair, the agony and sorrow you live in.
In the understanding of all this is the truth,
and you can understand it only if you know
how to look at those things in your life.
And you cannot look through an ideology, through
a screen of words, through hopes and fears.
So you see that you cannot depend upon anybody.
There is no guide, no teacher, no authority.
There is only you—your relationship with
others and with the world—there is nothing
else.
When you realize this, it either brings great
despair, from which comes cynicism and bitterness,
or, in facing the fact that you and nobody
else are responsible for the world and for
yourself, for what you think, what you feel,
how you act, all self-pity goes.
Normally we thrive on blaming others, which
is a form of self-pity.
Can you and I, then, bring about in ourselves
without any outside influence, without any
persuasion, without any fear of punishment—can
we bring about in the very essence of our
being a total revolution, a psychological
mutation, so that we are no longer brutal,
violent, competitive, anxious, fearful, greedy,
envious and all the rest of the manifestations
of our nature which have built up the rotten
society in which we live our daily lives?
It is important to understand from the very
beginning that I am not formulating any philosophy
or any theological structure of ideas or theological
concepts.
It seems to me that all ideologies are utterly
idiotic.
What is important is not a philosophy of life
but to observe what is actually taking place
in our daily life, inwardly and outwardly.
If you observe very closely what is taking
place and examine it, you will see that it
is based on an intellectual conception, and
the intellect is not the whole field of existence;
it is a fragment, and a fragment, however
cleverly put together, however ancient and
traditional, is still a small part of existence
whereas we have to deal with the totality
of life.
And when we look at what is taking place in
the world we begin to understand that there
is no outer and inner process; there is only
one unitary process, it is a whole, total
movement, the inner movement expressing itself
as the outer and the outer reacting again
on the inner.
To be able to look at this seems to me all
that is needed, because if we know how to
look, then the whole thing becomes very clear,
and to look needs no philosophy, no teacher.
Nobody need tell you how to look.
You just look.
Can you then, seeing this whole picture, seeing
it not verbally but actually, can you easily,
spontaneously, transform yourself?
That is the real issue.
Is it possible to bring about a complete revolution
in the psyche?
I wonder what your reaction is to such a question?
You may say, 'I don't want to change', and
most people don't, especially those who are
fairly secure socially and economically or
who hold dogmatic beliefs and are content
to accept themselves and things as they are
or in a slightly modified form.
With those people we are not concerned.
Or you may say more subtly, 'Well, it's too
difficult, it's not for me', in which case
you will have already blocked yourself, you
will have ceased to enquire and it will be
no use going any further.
Or else you may say, 'I see the necessity
for a fundamental inward change in myself
but how am I to bring it about?
Please show me the way, help me towards it.'
If you say that, then what you are concerned
with is not change itself; you are not really
interested in a fundamental revolution: you
are merely searching for a method, a system,
to bring about change.
If I were foolish enough to give you a system
and if you were foolish enough to follow it,
you would merely be copying, imitating, conforming,
accepting, and when you do that you have set
up in yourself the authority of another and
hence there is conflict between you and that
authority.
You feel you must do such and such a thing
because you have been told to do it and yet
you are incapable of doing it.
You have your own particular inclinations,
tendencies and pressures which conflict with
the system you think you ought to follow and
therefore there is a contradiction.
So you will lead a double life between the
ideology of the system and the actuality of
your daily existence.
In trying to conform to the ideology, you
suppress yourself—whereas what is actually
true is not the ideology but what you are.
If you try to study yourself according to
another you will always remain a secondhand
human being.
A man who says, 'I want to change, tell me
how to', seems very earnest, very serious,
but he is not.
He wants an authority whom he hopes will bring
about order in himself.
But can authority ever bring about inward
order?
Order imposed from without must always breed
disorder.
You may see the truth of this intellectually
but can you actually apply it so that your
mind no longer projects any authority, the
authority of a book, a teacher, a wife or
husband, a parent, a friend or of society?
Because we have always functioned within the
pattern of a formula, the formula becomes
the ideology and the authority; but the moment
you really see that the question, 'How can
I change?'
sets up a new authority, you have finished
with authority for ever.
Let us state it again clearly: I see that
I must change completely from the roots of
my being; I can no longer depend on any tradition
because tradition has brought about this colossal
laziness, acceptance and obedience; I cannot
possibly look to another to help me to change,
not to any teacher, any God, any belief, any
system, any outside pressure or influence.
What then takes place?
First of all, can you reject all authority?
If you can it means that you are no longer
afraid.
Then what happens?
When you reject something false which you
have been carrying about with you for generations,
when you throw off a burden of any kind, what
takes place?
You have more energy, haven't you?
You have more capacity, more drive, greater
intensity and vitality.
If you do not feel this, then you have not
thrown off the burden, you have not discarded
the dead weight of authority.
But when you have thrown it off and have this
energy in which there is no fear at all—no
fear of making a mistake, no fear of doing
right or wrong—then is not that energy itself
the mutation?
We need a tremendous amount of energy and
we dissipate it through fear but when there
is this energy which comes from throwing off
every form of fear, that energy itself produces
the radical inward revolution.
You do not have to do a thing about it.
So you are left with yourself, and that is
the actual state for a man to be who is very
serious about all this; and as you are no
longer looking to anybody or anything for
help, you are already free to discover.
And when there is freedom, there is energy;
and when there is freedom it can never do
anything wrong.
Freedom is entirely different from revolt.
There is no such thing as doing right or wrong
when there is freedom.
You are free and from that centre you act.
And hence there is no fear, and a mind that
has no fear is capable of great love.
And when there is love it can do what it will.
What we are now going to do, therefore, is
to learn about ourselves, not according to
me or to some analyst or philosopher—because
if we learn about ourselves according to someone
else, we learn about them, not ourselves—we
are going to learn what we actually are.
Having realized that we can depend on no outside
authority in bringing about a total revolution
within the structure of our own psyche, there
is the immensely greater difficulty of rejecting
our own inward authority, the authority of
our own particular little experiences and
accumulated opinions, knowledge, ideas and
ideals.
You had an experience yesterday which taught
you something and what it taught you becomes
a new authority—and that authority of yesterday
is as destructive as the authority of a thousand
years.
To understand ourselves needs no authority
either of yesterday or of a thousand years
because we are living things, always moving,
flowing, never resting.
When we look at ourselves with the dead authority
of yesterday we will fail to understand the
living movement and the beauty and quality
of that movement.
To be free of all authority, of your own and
that of another, is to die to everything of
yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh,
always young, innocent, full of vigour and
passion.
It is only in that state that one learns and
observes.
And for this a great deal of awareness is
required, actual awareness of what is going
on inside yourself, without correcting it
or telling it what it should or should not
be, because the moment you correct it you
have established another authority, a censor.
So now we are going to investigate ourselves
together—not one person explaining while
you read, agreeing or disagreeing with him
as you follow the words on the page, but taking
a journey together, a journey of discovery
into the most secret corners of our minds.
And to take such a journey we must travel
light; we cannot be burdened with opinions,
prejudices and conclusions—all that old
furniture we have collected for the last two
thousand years and more.
Forget all you know about yourself; forget
all you have ever thought about yourself;
we are going to start as if we knew nothing.
It rained last night heavily, and now the
skies are beginning to clear; it is a new
fresh day.
Let us meet that fresh day as if it were the
only day.
Let us start on our journey together with
all the remembrance of yesterday left behind—and
begin to understand ourselves for the first
time.
II
Learning About Ourselves — Simplicity and
Humility — Conditioning
If you think it is important to know about
yourself only because I or someone else has
told you it is important, then I am afraid
all communication between us comes to an end.
But if we agree that it is vital that we understand
ourselves completely, then you and I have
quite a different relationship, then we can
explore together with a happy, careful and
intelligent enquiry.
I do not demand your faith; I am not setting
myself up as an authority.
I have nothing to teach you—no new philosophy,
no new system, no new path to reality; there
is no path to reality any more than to truth.
All authority of any kind, especially in the
field of thought and understanding, is the
most destructive, evil thing.
Leaders destroy the followers and followers
destroy the leaders.
You have to be your own teacher and your own
disciple.
You have to question everything that man has
accepted as valuable, as necessary.
If you do not follow somebody you feel very
lonely.
Be lonely then.
Why are you frightened of being alone?
Because you are faced with yourself as you
are and you find that you are empty, dull,
stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious—a petty,
shoddy, secondhand entity.
Face the fact; look at it, do not run away
from it.
The moment you run away fear begins.
In enquiring into ourselves we are not isolating
ourselves from the rest of the world.
It is not an unhealthy process.
Man throughout the world is caught up in the
same daily problems as ourselves, so in enquiring
into ourselves we are not being in the least
neurotic because there is no difference between
the individual and the collective.
That is an actual fact.
I have created the world as I am.
So don't let us get lost in this battle between
the part and the whole.
I must become aware of the total field of
my own self, which is the consciousness of
the individual and of society.
It is only then, when the mind goes beyond
this individual and social consciousness,
that I can become a light to myself that never
goes out.
Now where do we begin to understand ourselves?
Here am I, and how am I to study myself, observe
myself, see what is actually taking place
inside myself?
I can observe myself only in relationship
because all life is relationship.
It is no use sitting in a corner meditating
about myself.
I cannot exist by myself.
I exist only in relationship to people, things
and ideas, and in studying my relationship
to outward things and people, as well as to
inward things, I begin to understand myself.
Every other form of understanding is merely
an abstraction and I cannot study myself in
abstraction; I am not an abstract entity;
therefore I have to study myself in actuality—as
I am, not as I wish to be.
Understanding is not an intellectual process.
Accumulating knowledge about yourself and
learning about yourself are two different
things, for the knowledge you accumulate about
yourself is always of the past and a mind
that is burdened with the past is a sorrowful
mind.
Learning about yourself is not like learning
a language or a technology or a science—then
you obviously have to accumulate and remember;
it would be absurd to begin all over again—but
in the psychological field learning about
yourself is always in the present and knowledge
is always in the past, and as most of us live
in the past and are satisfied with the past,
knowledge becomes extraordinarily important
to us.
That is why we worship the erudite, the clever,
the cunning.
But if you are learning all the time, learning
every minute, learning by watching and listening,
learning by seeing and doing, then you will
find that learning is a constant movement
without the past.
If you say you will learn gradually about
yourself, adding more and more, little by
little, you are not studying yourself now
as you are but through acquired knowledge.
Learning implies a great sensitivity.
There is no sensitivity if there is an idea,
which is of the past, dominating the present.
Then the mind is no longer quick, pliable,
alert.
Most of us are not sensitive even physically.
We overeat, we do not bother about the right
diet, we oversmoke and drink so that our bodies
become gross and insensitive; the quality
of attention in the organism itself is made
dull.
How can there be a very alert, sensitive,
clear mind if the organism itself is dull
and heavy?
We may be sensitive about certain things that
touch us personally but to be completely sensitive
to all the implications of life demands that
there be no separation between the organism
and the psyche.
It is a total movement.
To understand anything you must live with
it, you must observe it, you must know all
its content, its nature, its structure, its
movement.
Have you ever tried living with yourself?
If so, you will begin to see that yourself
is not a static state, it is a fresh living
thing.
And to live with a living thing your mind
must also be alive.
And it cannot be alive if it is caught in
opinions, judgements and values.
In order to observe the movement of your own
mind and heart, of your whole being, you must
have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and
disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing
over mere words, but rather following with
an intention to understand—a very difficult
thing to do because most of us don't know
how to look at, or listen to, our own being
any more than we know how to look at the beauty
of a river or listen to the breeze among the
trees.
When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly,
nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering;
then we do not observe what is; we look only
at the projections we have made of ourselves.
Each of us has an image of what we think we
are or what we should be, and that image,
that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing
ourselves as we actually are.
It is one of the most difficult things in
the world to look at anything simply.
Because our minds are very complex we have
lost the quality of simplicity.
I don't mean simplicity in clothes or food,
wearing only a loincloth or breaking a record
fasting or any of that immature nonsense the
saints cultivate, but the simplicity that
can look directly at things without fear—that
can look at ourselves as we actually are without
any distortion—to say when we lie we lie,
not cover it up or run away from it.
Also in order to understand ourselves we need
a great deal of humility.
If you start by saying, 'I know myself', you
have already stopped learning about yourself;
or if you say, 'There is nothing much to learn
about myself because I am just a bundle of
memories, ideas, experiences and traditions',
then you have also stopped learning about
yourself.
The moment you have achieved anything you
cease to have that quality of innocence and
humility; the moment you have a conclusion
or start examining from knowledge, you are
finished, for then you are translating every
living thing in terms of the old.
Whereas if you have no foothold, if there
is no certainty, no achievement, there is
freedom to look, to achieve.
And when you look with freedom it is always
new.
A confident man is a dead human being.
But how can we be free to look and learn when
our minds from the moment we are born to the
moment we die are shaped by a particular culture
in the narrow pattern of the 'me'?
For centuries we have been conditioned by
nationality, caste, class, tradition, religion,
language, education, literature, art, custom,
convention, propaganda of all kinds, economic
pressure, the food we eat, the climate we
live in, our family, our friends, our experiences—every
influence you can think of—and therefore
our responses to every problem are conditioned.
Are you aware that you are conditioned?
That is the first thing to ask yourself, not
how to be free of your conditioning.
You may never be free of it, and if you say,
'I must be free of it', you may fall into
another trap of another form of conditioning.
So are you aware that you are conditioned?
Do you know that even when you look at a tree
and say, 'That is an oak tree', or 'that is
a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which
is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned
your mind that the word comes between you
and actually seeing the tree?
To come in contact with the tree you have
to put your hand on it and the word will not
help you to touch it.
How do you know you are conditioned?
What tells you?
What tells you you are hungry?—not as a
theory but the actual fact of hunger?
In the same way, how do you discover the actual
fact that you are conditioned?
Isn't it by your reaction to a problem, a
challenge?
You respond to every challenge according to
your conditioning and your conditioning being
inadequate will always react inadequately.
When you become aware of it, does this conditioning
of race, religion and culture bring a sense
of imprisonment?
Take only one form of conditioning, nationality,
become seriously, completely aware of it and
see whether you enjoy it or rebel against
it, and if you rebel against it, whether you
want to break through all conditioning.
If you are satisfied with your conditioning
you will obviously do nothing about it, but
if you are not satisfied when you become aware
of it, you will realize that you never do
anything without it.
Never!
And therefore you are always living in the
past with the dead.
You will be able to see for yourself how you
are conditioned only when there is a conflict
in the continuity of pleasure or the avoidance
of pain.
If everything is perfectly happy around you,
your wife loves you, you love her, you have
a nice house, nice children and plenty of
money, then you are not aware of your conditioning
at all.
But when there is a disturbance—when your
wife looks at someone else or you lose your
money or are threatened with war or any other
pain or anxiety—then you know you are conditioned.
When you struggle against any kind of disturbance
or defend yourself against any outer or inner
threat, then you know you are conditioned.
And as most of us are disturbed most of the
time, either superficially or deeply, that
very disturbance indicates that we are conditioned.
So long as the animal is petted he reacts
nicely, but the moment he is antagonized the
whole violence of his nature comes out.
We are disturbed about life, politics, the
economic situation, the horror, the brutality,
the sorrow in the world as well as in ourselves,
and from that we realize how terribly narrowly
conditioned we are.
And what shall we do?
Accept that disturbance and live with it as
most of us do?
Get used to it as one gets used to living
with a backache?
Put up with it?
There is a tendency in all of us to put up
with things, to get used to them, to blame
them on circumstances.
'Ah, if things were right I would be different',
we say, or, 'Give me the opportunity and I
will fulfil myself', or, 'I am crushed by
the injustice of it all', always blaming our
disturbances on others or on our environment
or on the economic situation.
If one gets used to disturbance it means that
one's mind has become dull, just as one can
get so used to beauty around one that one
no longer notices it.
One gets indifferent, hard and callous, and
one's mind becomes duller and duller.
If we do not get used to it we try to escape
from it by taking some kind of drug, joining
a political group, shouting, writing, going
to a football match or to a temple or church
or finding some other form of amusement.
Why is it that we escape from actual facts?
We are afraid of death—I am just taking
that as an example—and we invent all kinds
of theories, hopes, beliefs, to disguise the
fact of death, but the fact is still there.
To understand a fact we must look at it, not
run away from it.
Most of us are afraid of living as well as
of dying.
We are afraid for our family, afraid of public
opinion, of losing our job, our security,
and hundreds of other things.
The simple fact is that we are afraid, not
that we are afraid of this or that.
Now why cannot we face that fact?
You can face a fact only in the present and
if you never allow it to be present because
you are always escaping from it, you can never
face it, and because we have cultivated a
whole network of escapes we are caught in
the habit of escape.
Now, if you are at all sensitive, at all serious,
you will not only be aware of your conditioning
but you will also be aware of the dangers
it results in, what brutality and hatred it
leads to.
Why, then, if you see the danger of your conditioning,
don't you act?
Is it because you are lazy, laziness being
lack of energy?
Yet you will not lack energy if you see an
immediate physical danger like a snake in
your path, or a precipice, or a fire.
Why, then, don't you act when you see the
danger of your conditioning?
If you saw the danger of nationalism to your
own security, wouldn't you act?
The answer is you don't see.
Through an intellectual process of analysis
you may see that nationalism leads to self-destruction
but there is no emotional content in that.
Only when there is an emotional content do
you become vital.
If you see the danger of your conditioning
merely as an intellectual concept, you will
never do anything about it.
In seeing a danger as a mere idea there is
conflict between the idea and action and that
conflict takes away your energy.
It is only when you see the conditioning and
the danger of it immediately, and as you would
see a precipice, that you act.
So seeing is acting.
Most of us walk through life inattentively,
reacting unthinkingly according to the environment
in which we have been brought up, and such
reactions create only further bondage, further
conditioning, but the moment you give your
total attention to your conditioning you will
see that you are free from the past completely,
that it falls away from you naturally.
III
Consciousness — The Totality of Life — Awareness
When you become aware of your conditioning
you will understand the whole of your consciousness.
Consciousness is the total field in which
thought functions and relationships exist.
All motives, intentions, desires, pleasures,
fears, inspirations, longings, hopes, sorrows,
joys are in that field.
But we have come to divide the consciousness
into the active and the dormant, the upper
and lower levels—that is, all the daily
thoughts, feelings and activities on the surface
and below them the so-called subconscious,
the things with which we are not familiar,
which express themselves occasionally through
certain intimations, intuitions and dreams.
We are occupied with one little corner of
consciousness which is most of our life; the
rest, which we call the subconscious, with
all its motives, its fears, its racial and
inherited qualities, we do not even know how
to get into.
Now I am asking you, is there such a thing
as the subconscious at all?
We use that word very freely.
We have accepted that there is such a thing
and all the phrases and jargon of the analysts
and psychologists have seeped into the language;
but is there such a thing?
And why is it that we give such extraordinary
importance to it?
It seems to me that it is as trivial and stupid
as the conscious mind—as narrow, bigoted,
conditioned, anxious and tawdry.
So is it possible to be totally aware of the
whole field of consciousness and not merely
a part, a fragment, of it?
If you are able to be aware of the totality,
then you are functioning all the time with
your total attention, not partial attention.
This is important to understand because when
you are being totally aware of the whole field
of consciousness there is no friction.
It is only when you divide consciousness,
which is all thought, feeling and action,
into different levels that there is friction.
We live in fragments.
You are one thing at the office, another at
home; you talk about democracy and in your
heart you are autocratic; you talk about loving
your neighbours, yet kill him with competition;
there is one part of you working, looking,
independently of the other.
Are you aware of this fragmentary existence
in yourself?
And is it possible for a brain that has broken
up its own functioning, its own thinking,
into fragments—is it possible for such a
brain to be aware of the whole field?
Is it possible to look at the whole of consciousness
completely, totally, which means to be a total
human being?
If, in order to try to understand the whole
structure of the 'me', the self, with all
its extraordinary complexity, you go step
by step, uncovering layer by layer, examining
every thought, feeling and motive, you will
get caught up in the analytical process which
may take you weeks, months, years—and when
you admit time into the process of understanding
yourself, you must allow for every form of
distortion because the self is a complex entity,
moving, living, struggling, wanting, denying,
with pressures and stresses and influences
of all sorts continually at work on it.
So you will discover for yourself that this
is not the way; you will understand that the
only way to look at yourself is totally, immediately,
without time; and you can see the totality
of yourself only when the mind is not fragmented.
What you see in totality is the truth.
Now can you do that?
Most of us cannot because most of us have
never approached the problem so seriously,
because we have never really looked at ourselves.
Never.
We blame others, we explain things away or
we are frightened to look.
But when you look totally you will give your
whole attention, your whole being, everything
of yourself, your eyes, your ears, your nerves;
you will attend with complete self-abandonment,
and then there is no room for fear, no room
for contradiction, and therefore no conflict.
Attention is not the same thing as concentration.
Concentration is exclusion; attention, which
is total awareness, excludes nothing.
It seems to me that most of us are not aware,
not only of what we are talking about but
of our environment, the colours around us,
the people, the shape of the trees, the clouds,
the movement of water.
Perhaps it is because we are so concerned
with ourselves, with our own petty little
problems, our own ideas, our own pleasures,
pursuits and ambitions that we are not objectively
aware.
And yet we talk a great deal about awareness.
Once in India I was travelling in a car.
There was a chauffeur driving and I was sitting
beside him.
There were three gentlemen behind discussing
awareness very intently and asking me questions
about awareness, and unfortunately at that
moment the driver was looking somewhere else
and he ran over a goat, and the three gentlemen
were still discussing awareness—totally
unaware that they had run over a goat.
When this lack of attention was pointed out
to those gentlemen who were trying to be aware
it was a great surprise to them.
And with most of us it is the same.
We are not aware of outward things or of inward
things.
If you want to understand the beauty of a
bird, a fly, or a leaf, or a person with all
his complexities, you have to give your whole
attention which is awareness.
And you can give your whole attention only
when you care, which means that you really
love to understand—then you give your whole
heart and mind to find out.
Such awareness is like living with a snake
in the room; you watch its every movement,
you are very, very sensitive to the slightest
sound it makes.
Such a state of attention is total energy;
in such awareness the totality of yourself
is revealed in an instant.
When you have looked at yourself so deeply
you can go much deeper.
When we use the word 'deeper' we are not being
comparative.
We think in comparisons—deep and shallow,
happy and unhappy.
We are always measuring, comparing.
Now is there such a state as the shallow and
the deep in oneself?
When I say, 'My mind is shallow, petty, narrow,
limited', how do I know all these things?
Because I have compared my mind with your
mind which is brighter, has more capacity,
is more intelligent and alert.
Do I know my pettiness without comparison?
When I am hungry, I do not compare that hunger
with yesterday's hunger.
Yesterday's hunger is an idea, a memory.
If I am all the time measuring myself against
you, struggling to be like you, then I am
denying what I am myself.
Therefore I am creating an illusion.
When I have understood that comparison in
any form leads only to greater illusion and
greater misery, just as when I analyse myself,
add to my knowledge of myself bit by bit,
or identify myself with something outside
myself, whether it be the State, a saviour
or an ideology—when I understand that all
such processes lead only to greater conformity
and therefore greater conflict—when I see
all this I put it completely away.
Then my mind is no longer seeking.
It is very important to understand this.
Then my mind is no longer groping, searching,
questioning.
This does not mean that my mind is satisfied
with things as they are, but such a mind has
no illusion.
Such a mind can then move in a totally different
dimension.
The dimension in which we usually live, the
life of every day which is pain, pleasure
and fear, has conditioned the mind, limited
the nature of the mind, and when that pain,
pleasure and fear have gone (which does not
mean that you no longer have joy: joy is something
entirely different from pleasure)—then the
mind functions in a different dimension in
which there is no conflict, no sense of 'otherness'.
Verbally we can go only so far: what lies
beyond cannot be put into words because the
word is not the thing.
Up to now we can describe, explain, but no
words or explanations can open the door.
What will open the door is daily awareness
and attention—awareness of how we speak,
what we say, how we walk, what we think.
It is like cleaning a room and keeping it
in order.
Keeping the room in order is important in
one sense but totally unimportant in another.
There must be order in the room but order
will not open the door or the window.
What will open the door is not your volition
or desire.
You cannot possibly invite the other.
All that you can do is to keep the room in
order, which is to be virtuous for itself,
not for what it will bring.
To be sane, rational, orderly.
Then perhaps, if you are lucky, the window
will open and the breeze will come in.
Or it may not.
It depends on the state of your mind.
And that state of mind can be understood only
by yourself, by watching it and never trying
to shape it, never taking sides, never opposing,
never agreeing, never justifying, never condemning,
never judging—which means watching it without
any choice.
And out of this choiceless awareness perhaps
the door will open and you will know what
that dimension is in which there is no conflict
and no time.
IV
Pursuit of Pleasure — Desire — Perversion
by Thought —Memory — Joy
We said in the last chapter that joy was something
entirely different from pleasure, so let us
find out what is involved in pleasure and
whether it is at all possible to live in a
world that does not contain pleasure but a
tremendous sense of joy, of bliss.
We are all engaged in the pursuit of pleasure
in some form or other—intellectual, sensuous
or cultural pleasure, the pleasure of reforming,
telling others what to do, of modifying the
evils of society, of doing good—the pleasure
of greater knowledge, greater physical satisfaction,
greater experience, greater understanding
of life, all the clever, cunning things of
the mind—and the ultimate pleasure is, of
course, to have God.
Pleasure is the structure of society.
From childhood until death we are secretly,
cunningly or obviously pursuing pleasure.
So whatever our form of pleasure is, I think
we should be very clear about it because it
is going to guide and shape our lives.
It is therefore important for each one of
us to investigate closely, hesitantly and
delicately this question of pleasure, for
to find pleasure, and then nourish and sustain
it, is a basic demand of life and without
it existence becomes dull, stupid, lonely
and meaningless.
You may ask why then should life not be guided
by pleasure?
For the very simple reason that pleasure must
bring pain, frustration, sorrow and fear,
and, out of fear, violence.
If you want to live that way, live that way.
Most of the world does, anyway, but if you
want to be free from sorrow you must understand
the whole structure of pleasure.
To understand pleasure is not to deny it.
We are not condemning it or saying it is right
or wrong, but if we pursue it, let us do so
with our eyes open, knowing that a mind that
is all the time seeking pleasure must inevitably
find its shadow, pain.
They cannot be separated, although we run
after pleasure and try to avoid pain.
Now, why is the mind always demanding pleasure?
Why is it that we do noble and ignoble things
with the undercurrent of pleasure?
Why is it we sacrifice and suffer on the thin
thread of pleasure?
What is pleasure and how does it come into
being?
I wonder if any of you have asked yourself
these questions and followed the answers to
the very end?
Pleasure comes into being through four stages—perception,
sensation, contact and desire.
I see a beautiful motor car, say; then I get
a sensation, a reaction, from looking at it;
then I touch it or imagine touching it, and
then there is the desire to own and show myself
off in it.
Or I see a lovely cloud, or a mountain clear
against the sky, or a leaf that has just come
in springtime, or a deep valley full of loveliness
and splendour, or a glorious sunset, or a
beautiful face, intelligent, alive, not self-conscious
and therefore no longer beautiful.
I look at these things with intense delight
and as I observe them there is no observer
but only sheer beauty like love.
For a moment I am absent with all my problems,
anxieties and miseries—there is only that
marvellous thing.
I can look at it with joy and the next moment
forget it, or else the mind steps in, and
then the problem begins; my mind thinks over
what it has seen and thinks how beautiful
it was; I tell myself I should like to see
it again many times.
Thought begins to compare, judge, and say,
'I must have it again tomorrow'.
The continuity of an experience that has given
delight for a second is sustained by thought.
It is the same with sexual desire or any other
form of desire.
There is nothing wrong with desire.
To react is perfectly normal.
If you stick a pin in me I shall react unless
I am paralysed.
But then thought steps in and chews over the
delight and turns it into pleasure.
Thought wants to repeat the experience, and
the more you repeat, the more mechanical it
becomes; the more you think about it, the
more strength thought gives to pleasure.
So thought creates and sustains pleasure through
desire, and gives it continuity, and therefore
the natural reaction of desire to any beautiful
thing is perverted by thought.
Thought turns it into a memory and memory
is then nourished by thinking about it over
and over again.
Of course, memory has a place at a certain
level.
In everyday life we could not function at
all without it.
In its own field it must be efficient but
there is a state of mind where it has very
little place.
A mind which is not crippled by memory has
real freedom.
Have you ever noticed that when you respond
to something totally, with all your heart,
there is very little memory?
It is only when you do not respond to a challenge
with your whole being that there is a conflict,
a struggle, and this brings confusion and
pleasure or pain.
And the struggle breeds memory.
That memory is added to all the time by other
memories and it is those memories which respond.
Anything that is the result of memory is old
and therefore never free.
There is no such thing as freedom of thought.
It is sheer nonsense.
Thought is never new, for thought is the response
of memory, experience, knowledge.
Thought, because it is old, makes this thing
which you have looked at with delight and
felt tremendously for the moment, old.
From the old you derive pleasure, never from
the new.
There is no time in the new.
So if you can look at all things without allowing
pleasure to creep in—at a face, a bird,
the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet
of water shimmering in the sun, or anything
that gives delight—if you can look at it
without wanting the experience to be repeated,
then there will be no pain, no fear, and therefore
tremendous joy.
It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate
pleasure which turns it into pain.
Watch it in yourself.
The very demand for the repetition of pleasure
brings about pain, because it is not the same
as it was yesterday.
You struggle to achieve the same delight,
not only to your aesthetic sense but the same
inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt
and disappointed because it is denied to you.
Have you observed what happens to you when
you are denied a little pleasure?
When you don't get what you want you become
anxious, envious, hateful.
Have you noticed when you have been denied
the pleasure of drinking or smoking or sex
or whatever it is—have you noticed what
battles you go through?
And all that is a form of fear, isn't it?
You are afraid of not getting what you want
or of losing what you have.
When some particular faith or ideology which
you have held for years is shaken or torn
away from you by logic or life, aren't you
afraid of standing alone?
That belief has for years given you satisfaction
and pleasure, and when it is taken away you
are left stranded, empty, and the fear remains
until you find another form of pleasure, another
belief.
It seems to me so simple and because it is
so simple we refuse to see its simplicity.
We like to complicate everything.
When your wife turns away from you, aren't
you jealous?
Aren't you angry?
Don't you hate the man who has attracted her?
And what is all that but fear of losing something
which has given you a great deal of pleasure,
a companionship, a certain quality of assurance
and the satisfaction of possession?
So if you understand that where there is a
search for pleasure there must be pain, live
that way if you want to, but don't just slip
into it.
If you want to end pleasure, though, which
is to end pain, you must be totally attentive
to the whole structure of pleasure—not cut
it out as monks and sannyasis do, never looking
at a woman because they think it is a sin
and thereby destroying the vitality of their
understanding—but seeing the whole meaning
and significance of pleasure.
Then you will have tremendous joy in life.
You cannot think about joy.
Joy is an immediate thing and by thinking
about it, you turn it into pleasure.
Living in the present is the instant perception
of beauty and the great delight in it without
seeking pleasure from it.
V
Self-concern — Craving for Position — Fears
and Total Fear — Frag-mentation of Thought
— Ending of Fear
Before we go any further I would like to ask
you what is your fundamental, lasting interest
in life?
Putting all oblique answers aside and dealing
with this question directly and honestly,
what would you answer?
Do you know?
Isn't it yourself?
Anyway, that is what most of us would say
if we answered truthfully.
I am interested in my progress, my job, my
family, the little corner in which I live,
in getting a better position for myself, more
prestige, more power, more domination over
others and so on.
I think it would be logical, wouldn't it,
to admit to ourselves that that is what most
of us are primarily interested in—'me' first?
Some of us would say that it is wrong to be
primarily interested in ourselves.
But what is wrong about it except that we
seldom decently, honestly, admit it?
If we do, we are rather ashamed of it.
So there it is—one is fundamentally interested
in oneself, and for various ideological or
traditional reasons one thinks it is wrong.
But what one thinks is irrelevant.
Why introduce the factor of its being wrong?
That is an idea, a concept.
What is a fact is that one is fundamentally
and lastingly interested in oneself.
You may say that it is more satisfactory to
help another than to think about yourself.
What is the difference?
It is still self-concern.
If it gives you greater satisfaction to help
others, you are concerned about what will
give you greater satisfaction.
Why bring any ideological concept into it?
Why this double thinking?
Why not say, 'What I really want is satisfaction,
whether in sex, or in helping others, or in
becoming a great saint, scientist or politician'?
It is the same process, isn't it?
Satisfaction in all sorts of ways, subtle
and obvious, is what we want.
When we say we want freedom we want it because
we think it may be wonderfully satisfying,
and the ultimate satisfaction, of course,
is this peculiar idea of self-realization.
What we are really seeking is a satisfaction
in which there is no dissatisfaction at all.
Most of us crave the satisfaction of having
a position in society because we are afraid
of being nobody.
Society is so constructed that a citizen who
has a position of respect is treated with
great courtesy, whereas a man who has no position
is kicked around.
Everyone in the world wants a position, whether
in society, in the family or to sit on the
right hand of God, and this position must
be recognized by others, otherwise it is no
position at all.
We must always sit on the platform.
Inwardly we are whirlpools of misery and mischief
and therefore to be regarded outwardly as
a great figure is very gratifying.
This craving for position, for prestige, for
power, to be recognized by society as being
outstanding in some way, is a wish to dominate
others, and this wish to dominate is a form
of aggression.
The saint who seeks a position in regard to
his saintliness is as aggressive as the chicken
pecking in the farmyard.
And what is the cause of this aggressiveness?
It is fear, isn't it?
Fear is one of the greatest problems in life.
A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion,
in conflict, and therefore must be violent,
distorted and aggressive.
It dare not move away from its own patterns
of thinking, and this breeds hypocrisy.
Until we are free from fear, climb the highest
mountain, invent every kind of God, we will
always remain in darkness.
Living in such a corrupt, stupid society as
we do, with the competitive education we receive
which engenders fear, we are all burdened
with fears of some kind, and fear is a dreadful
thing which warps, twists and dulls our days.
There is physical fear but that is a response
we have inherited from the animals.
It is psychological fears we are concerned
with here, for when we understand the deep-rooted
psychological fears we will be able to meet
the animal fears, whereas to be concerned
with the animal fears first will never help
us to understand the psychological fears.
We are all afraid about something; there is
no fear in abstraction, it is always in relation
to something.
Do you know your own fears—fear of losing
your job, of not having enough food or money,
or what your neighbours or the public think
about you, or not being a success, of losing
your position in society, of being despised
or ridiculed—fear of pain and disease, of
domination, of never knowing what love is
or of not being loved, of losing your wife
or children, of death, of living in a world
that is like death, of utter boredom, of not
living up to the image others have built about
you, of losing your faith—all these and
innumerable other fears—do you know your
own particular fears?
And what do you usually do about them?
You run away from them, don't you, or invent
ideas and images to cover them?
But to run away from fear is only to increase
it.
One of the major causes of fear is that we
do not want to face ourselves as we are.
So, as well as the fears themselves, we have
to examine the network of escapes we have
developed to rid ourselves of them.
If the mind, in which is included the brain,
tries to overcome fear, to suppress it, discipline
it, control it, translate it into terms of
something else, there is friction, there is
conflict, and that conflict is a waste of
energy.
The first thing to ask ourselves then is what
is fear and how does it arise?
What do we mean by the word fear itself?
I am asking myself what is fear not what I
am afraid of.
I lead a certain kind of life; I think in
a certain pattern; I have certain beliefs
and dogmas and I don't want those patterns
of existence to be disturbed because I have
my roots in them.
I don't want them to be disturbed because
the disturbance produces a state of unknowing
and I dislike that.
If I am torn away from everything I know and
believe, I want to be reasonably certain of
the state of things to which I am going.
So the brain cells have created a pattern
and those brain cells refuse to create another
pattern which may be uncertain.
The movement from certainty to uncertainty
is what I call fear.
At the actual moment as I am sitting here
I am not afraid; I am not afraid in the present,
nothing is happening to me, nobody is threatening
me or taking anything away from me.
But beyond the actual moment there is a deeper
layer in the mind which is consciously or
unconsciously thinking of what might happen
in the future or worrying that something from
the past may overtake me.
So I am afraid of the past and of the future.
I have divided time into the past and the
future.
Thought steps in, says, 'Be careful it does
not happen again', or 'Be prepared for the
future.
The future may be dangerous for you.
You have got something now but you may lose
it.
You may die tomorrow, your wife may run away,
you may lose your job.
You may never become famous.
You may be lonely.
You want to be quite sure of tomorrow.'
Now take your own particular form of fear.
Look at it.
Watch your reactions to it.
Can you look at it without any movement of
escape, justification, condemnation or suppression?
Can you look at that fear without the word
which causes the fear?
Can you look at death, for instance, without
the word which arouses the fear of death?
The word itself brings a tremor, doesn't it,
as the word love has its own tremor, its own
image?
Now is the image you have in your mind about
death, the memory of so many deaths you have
seen and the associating of yourself with
those incidents—is it that image which is
creating fear?
Or are you actually afraid of coming to an
end, not of the image creating the end?
Is the word death causing you fear or the
actual ending?
If it is the word or the memory which is causing
you fear then it is not fear at all.
You were ill two years ago, let us say, and
the memory of that pain, that illness, remains,
and the memory now functioning says, 'Be careful,
don't get ill, again'.
So the memory with its associations is creating
fear, and that is not fear at all because
actually at the moment you have very good
health.
Thought, which is always old, because thought
is the response of memory and memories are
always old—thought creates, in time, the
feeling that you are afraid which is not an
actual fact.
The actual fact is that you are well.
But the experience, which has remained in
the mind as a memory, rouses the thought,
'Be careful, don't fall ill again'.
So we see that thought engenders one kind
of fear.
But is there fear at all apart from that?
Is fear always the result of thought and,
if it is, is there any other form of fear?
We are afraid of death—that is, something
that is going to happen tomorrow or the day
after tomorrow, in time.
There is a distance between actuality and
what will be.
Now thought has experienced this state; by
observing death it says, 'I am going to die.'
Thought creates the fear of death, and if
it doesn't is there any fear at all?
Is fear the result of thought?
If it is, thought being always old, fear is
always old.
As we have said, there is no new thought.
If we recognize it, it is already old.
So what we are afraid of is the repetition
of the old—the thought of what has been
projecting into the future.
Therefore thought is responsible for fear.
This is so, you can see it for yourself.
When you are confronted with something immediately
there is no fear.
It is only when thought comes in that there
is fear.
Therefore our question now is, is it possible
for the mind to live completely, totally,
in the present?
It is only such a mind that has no fear.
But to understand this, you have to understand
the structure of thought, memory and time.
And in understanding it, understanding not
intellectually, not verbally, but actually
with your heart, your mind, your guts, you
will be free from fear; then the mind can
use thought without creating fear.
Thought, like memory, is, of course, necessary
for daily living.
It is the only instrument we have for communication,
working at our jobs and so forth.
Thought is the response to memory, memory
which has been accumulated through experience,
knowledge, tradition, time.
And from this background of memory we react
and this reaction is thinking.
So thought is essential at certain levels
but when thought projects itself psychologically
as the future and the past, creating fear
as well as pleasure, the mind is made dull
and therefore inaction is inevitable.
So I ask myself, 'Why, why, why, do I think
about the future and the past in terms of
pleasure and pain, knowing that such thought
creates fear?
Isn't it possible for thought psychologically
to stop, for otherwise fear will never end?'
One of the functions of thought is to be occupied
all the time with something.
Most of us want to have our minds continually
occupied so that we are prevented from seeing
ourselves as we actually are.
We are afraid to be empty.
We are afraid to look at our fears.
Consciously you can be aware of your fears
but at the deeper levels of your mind are
you aware of them?
And how are you going to find out the fears
that are hidden, secret?
Is fear to be divided into the conscious and
the subconscious?
This is a very important question.
The specialist, the psychologist, the analyst,
have divided fear into deep and superficial
layers, but if you follow what the psychologist
says or what I say, you are understanding
our theories, our dogmas, our knowledge, you
are not understanding yourself.
You cannot understand yourself according to
Freud or Jung, or according to me.
Other people's theories have no importance
whatever.
It is of yourself that you must ask the question,
is fear to be divided into the conscious and
subconscious?
Or is there only fear which you translate
into different forms?
There is only one desire; there is only desire.
You desire.
The objects of desire change, but desire is
always the same.
So perhaps in the same way there is only fear.
You are afraid of all sorts of things but
there is only one fear.
When you realize that fear cannot be divided
you will see that you have put away altogether
this problem of the subconscious and so have
cheated the psychologists and the analysts.
When you understand that fear is a single
movement which expresses itself in different
ways and when you see the movement and not
the object to which the movement goes, then
you are facing an immense question: how can
you look at it without the fragmentation which
the mind has cultivated?
There is only total fear, but how can the
mind which thinks in fragments observe this
total picture?
Can it?
We have lived a life of fragmentation, and
can look at that total fear only through the
fragmentary process of thought.
The whole process of the machinery of thinking
is to break up everything into fragments:
I love you and I hate you; you are my enemy,
you are my friend; my peculiar idiosyncrasies
and inclinations, my job, my position, my
prestige, my wife, my child, my country and
your country, my God and your God—all that
is the fragmentation of thought.
And this thought looks at the total state
of fear, or tries to look at it, and reduces
it to fragments.
Therefore we see that the mind can look at
this total fear only when there is no movement
of thought.
Can you watch fear without any conclusion,
without any interference of the knowledge
you have accumulated about it?
If you cannot, then what you are watching
is the past, not fear; if you can, then you
are watching fear for the first time without
the interference of the past.
You can watch only when the mind is very quiet,
just as you can listen to what someone is
saying only when your mind is not chattering
with itself, carrying on a dialogue with itself
about its own problems and anxieties.
Can you in the same way look at your fear
without trying to resolve it, without bringing
in its opposite, courage—actually look at
it and not try to escape from it?
When you say, 'I must control it, I must get
rid of it, I must understand it', you are
trying to escape from it.
You can observe a cloud or a tree or the movement
of a river with a fairly quiet mind because
they are not very important to you, but to
watch yourself is far more difficult because
there the demands are so practical, the reactions
so quick.
So when you are directly in contact with fear
or despair, loneliness or jealousy, or any
other ugly state of mind, can you look at
it so completely that your mind is quiet enough
to see it?
Can the mind perceive fear and not the different
forms of fear—perceive total fear, not what
you are afraid of?
If you look merely at the details of fear
or try to deal with your fears one by one,
you will never come to the central issue which
is to learn to live with fear.
To live with a living thing such as fear requires
a mind and heart that are extraordinarily
subtle, that have no conclusion and can therefore
follow every movement of fear.
Then if you observe and live with it—and
this doesn't take a whole day, it can take
a minute or a second to know the whole nature
of fear—if you live with it so completely
you inevitably ask, 'Who is the entity who
is living with fear?
Who is it who is observing fear, watching
all the movements of the various forms of
fear as well as being aware of the central
fact of fear?
Is the observer a dead entity, a static being,
who has accumulated a lot of knowledge and
information about himself, and is it that
dead thing who is observing and living with
the movement of fear?
Is the observer the past or is he a living
thing?'
What is your answer?
Do not answer me, answer yourself.
Are you, the observer, a dead entity watching
a living thing or are you a living thing watching
a living thing?
Because in the observer the two states exist.
The observer is the censor who does not want
fear; the observer is the totality of all
his experiences about fear.
So the observer is separate from that thing
he calls fear; there is space between them;
he is forever trying to overcome it or escape
from it and hence this constant battle between
himself and fear—this battle which is such
a waste of energy.
As you watch, you learn that the observer
is merely a bundle of ideas and memories without
any validity or substance, but that fear is
an actuality and that you are trying to understand
a fact with an abstraction which, of course,
you cannot do.
But, in fact, is the observer who says, 'I
am afraid', any different from the thing observed
which is fear?
The observer is fear and when that is realized
there is no longer any dissipation of energy
in the effort to get rid of fear, and the
time-space interval between the observer and
the observed disappears.
When you see that you are a part of fear,
not separate from it—that you are fear—then
you cannot do anything about it; then fear
comes totally to an end.
VI
Violence — Anger — Justification and Condemnation
— The Ideal and the Actual
Fear, pleasure, sorrow, thought and violence
are all interrelated.
Most of us take pleasure in violence, in disliking
somebody, hating a particular race or group
of people, having antagonistic feelings towards
others.
But in a state of mind in which all violence
has come to an end there is a joy which is
very different from the pleasure of violence
with its conflicts, hatreds and fears.
Can we go to the very root of violence and
be free from it?
Otherwise we shall live everlastingly in battle
with each other.
If that is the way you want to live—and
apparently most people do—then carry on;
if you say, 'Well, I'm sorry, violence can
never end', then you and I have no means of
communication, you have blocked yourself;
but if you say there might be a different
way of living, then we shall be able to communicate
with each other.
So let us consider together, those of us who
can communicate, whether it is at all possible
totally to end every form of violence in ourselves
and still live in this monstrously brutal
world.
I think it is possible.
I don't want to have a breath of hate, jealousy,
anxiety or fear in me.
I want to live completely at peace.
Which doesn't mean that I want to die.
I want to live on this marvellous earth, so
full, so rich, so beautiful.
I want to look at the trees, flowers, rivers,
meadows, women, boys and girls, and at the
same time live completely at peace with myself
and with the world.
What can I do?
If we know how to look at violence, not only
outwardly in society—the wars, the riots,
the national antagonisms and class conflicts—but
also in ourselves, then perhaps we shall be
able to go beyond it.
Here is a very complex problem.
For centuries upon centuries man has been
violent; religions have tried to tame him
throughout the world and none of them have
succeeded.
So if we are going into the question we must,
it seems to me, be at least very serious about
it because it will lead us into quite a different
domain, but if we want merely to play with
the problem for intellectual entertainment
we shall not get very far.
You may feel that you yourself are very serious
about the problem but that as long as so many
other people in the world are not serious
and are not prepared to do anything about
it, what is the good of your doing anything?
I don't care whether they take it seriously
or not.
I take it seriously, that is enough.
I am not my brother's keeper.
I myself, as a human being, feel very strongly
about this question of violence and I will
see to it that in myself I am not violent—but
I cannot tell you or anybody else, 'Don't
be violent.'
It has no meaning—unless you yourself want
it.
So if you yourself really want to understand
this problem of violence let us continue on
our journey of exploration together.
Is this problem of violence out there or here?
Do you want to solve the problem in the outside
world or are you questioning violence itself
as it is in you?
If you are free of violence in yourself the
question arises, 'How am I to live in a world
full of violence, acquisitiveness, greed,
envy, brutality?
Will I not be destroyed?'
That is the inevitable question which is invariably
asked.
When you ask such a question it seems to me
you are not actually living peacefully.
If you live peacefully you will have no problem
at all.
You may be imprisoned because you refuse to
join the army or shot because you refuse to
fight—but that is not a problem; you will
be shot.
It is extraordinarily important to understand
this.
We are trying to understand violence as a
fact, not as an idea, as a fact which exists
in the human being, and the human being is
myself.
And to go into the problem I must be completely
vulnerable, open, to it.
I must expose myself to myself—not necessarily
expose myself to you because you may not be
interested—but I must be in a state of mind
that demands to see this thing right to the
end and at no point stops and says I will
go no further.
Now it must be obvious to me that I am a violent
human being.
I have experienced violence in anger, violence
in my sexual demands, violence in hatred,
creating enmity, violence in jealousy and
so on—I have experienced it, I have known
it, and I say to myself, 'I want to understand
this whole problem not just one fragment of
it expressed in war, but this aggression in
man which also exists in the animals and of
which I am a part.'
Violence is not merely killing another.
It is violence when we use a sharp word, when
we make a gesture to brush away a person,
when we obey because there is fear.
So violence isn't merely organized butchery
in the name of God, in the name of society
or country.
Violence is much more subtle, much deeper,
and we are enquiring into the very depths
of violence.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim
or a Christian or a European, or anything
else, you are being violent.
Do you see why it is violent?
Because you are separating yourself from the
rest of mankind.
When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality,
by tradition, it breeds violence.
So a man who is seeking to understand violence
does not belong to any country, to any religion,
to any political party or partial system;
he is concerned with the total understanding
of mankind.
Now there are two primary schools of thought
with regard to violence, one which says, 'Violence
is innate in man' and the other which says,
'Violence is the result of the social and
cultural heritage in which man lives.'
We are not concerned with which school we
belong to—it is of no importance.
What is important is the fact that we are
violent, not the reason for it.
One of the most common expressions of violence
is anger.
When my wife or sister is attacked I say I
am righteously angry; when my country is attacked,
my ideas, my principles, my way of life, I
am righteously angry.
I am also angry when my habits are attacked
or my petty little opinions.
When you tread on my toes or insult me I get
angry, or if you run away with my wife and
I get jealous, that jealousy is called righteous
because she is my property.
And all this anger is morally justified.
But to kill for my country is also justified.
So when we are talking about anger, which
is a part of violence, do we look at anger
in terms of righteous and unrighteous anger
according to our own inclinations and environmental
drive, or do we see only anger?
Is there righteous anger ever?
Or is there only anger?
There is no good influence or bad influence,
only influence, but when you are influenced
by something which doesn't suit me I call
it an evil influence.
The moment you protect your family, your country,
a bit of coloured rag called a flag, a belief,
an idea, a dogma, the thing that you demand
or that you hold, that very protection indicates
anger.
So can you look at anger without any explanation
or justification, without saying, 'I must
protect my goods', or 'I was right to be angry',
or 'How stupid of me to be angry'?
Can you look at anger as if it were something
by itself?
Can you look at it completely objectively,
which means neither defending it nor condemning
it?
Can you?
Can I look at you if I am antagonistic to
you or if I am thinking what a marvellous
person you are?
I can see you only when I look at you with
a certain care in which neither of these things
is involved.
Now, can I look at anger in the same way,
which means that I am vulnerable to the problem,
I do not resist it, I am watching this extraordinary
phenomenon without any reaction to it?
It is very difficult to look at anger dispassionately
because it is a part of me, but that is what
I am trying to do.
Here I am, a violent human being, whether
I am black, brown, white or purple.
I am not concerned with whether I have inherited
this violence or whether society has produced
it in me; all I am concerned with is whether
it is at all possible to be free from it.
To be free from violence means everything
to me.
It is more important to me than sex, food,
position, for this thing is corrupting me.
It is destroying me and destroying the world,
and I want to understand it, I want to be
beyond it.
I feel responsible for all this anger and
violence in the world.
I feel responsible—it isn't just a lot of
words—and I say to myself, 'I can do something
only if I am beyond anger myself, beyond violence,
beyond nationality'.
And this feeling I have that I must understand
the violence in myself brings tremendous vitality
and passion to find out.
But to be beyond violence I cannot suppress
it, I cannot deny it, I cannot say, 'Well,
it is a part of me and that's that', or 'I
don't want it'.
I have to look at it, I have to study it,
I must become very intimate with it and I
cannot become intimate with it if I condemn
it or justify it.
We do condemn it, though; we do justify it.
Therefore I am saying, stop for the time being
condemning it or justifying it.
Now, if you want to stop violence, if you
want to stop wars, how much vitality, how
much of yourself, do you give to it?
Isn't it important to you that your children
are killed, that your sons go into the army
where they are bullied and butchered?
Don't you care?
My God, if that doesn't interest you, what
does?
Guarding your money?
Having a good time?
Taking drugs?
Don't you see that this violence in yourself
is destroying your children?
Or do you see it only as some abstraction?
All right then, if you are interested, attend
with all your heart and mind to find out.
Don't just sit back and say, 'Well, tell us
all about it'.
I point out to you that you cannot look at
anger nor at violence with eyes that condemn
or justify and that if this violence is not
a burning problem to you, you cannot put those
two things away.
So first you have to learn; you have to learn
how to look at anger, how to look at your
husband, your wife, your children; you have
to listen to the politician, you have to learn
why you are not objective, why you condemn
or justify.
You have to learn that you condemn and justify
because it is part of the social structure
you live in, your conditioning as a German
or an Indian or a Negro or an American or
whatever you happen to have been born, with
all the dulling of the mind that this conditioning
results in.
To learn, to discover, something fundamental
you must have the capacity to go deeply.
If you have a blunt instrument, a dull instrument,
you cannot go deeply.
So what we are doing is sharpening the instrument,
which is the mind—the mind which has been
made dull by all this justifying and condemning.
You can penetrate deeply only if your mind
is as sharp as a needle and as strong as a
diamond.
It is no good just sitting back and asking,
'How am I to get such a mind?'
You have to want it as you want your next
meal, and to have it you must see that what
makes your mind dull and stupid is this sense
of invulnerability which has built walls round
itself and which is part of this condemnation
and justification.
If the mind can be rid of that, then you can
look, study, penetrate, and perhaps come to
a state that is totally aware of the whole
problem.
So let us come back to the central issue—is
it possible to eradicate violence in ourselves?
It is a form of violence to say, 'You haven't
changed, why haven't you?'
I am not doing that.
It doesn't mean a thing to me to convince
you of anything.
It is your life, not my life.
The way you live is your affair.
I am asking whether it is possible for a human
being living psychologically in any society
to clear violence from himself inwardly?
If it is, the very process will produce a
different way of living in this world.
Most of us have accepted violence as a way
of life.
Two dreadful wars have taught us nothing except
to build more and more barriers between human
beings—that is, between you and me.
But for those of us who want to be rid of
violence, how is it to be done?
I do not think anything is going to be achieved
through analysis, either by ourselves or by
a professional.
We might be able to modify ourselves slightly,
live a little more quietly with a little more
affection, but in itself it will not give
total perception.
But I must know how to analyse which means
that in the process of analysis my mind becomes
extraordinarily sharp, and it is that quality
of sharpness, of attention, of seriousness,
which will give total perception.
One hasn't the eyes to see the whole thing
at a glance; this clarity of the eye is possible
only if one can see the details, then jump.
Some of us, in order to rid ourselves of violence,
have used a concept, an ideal, called non-violence,
and we think by having an ideal of the opposite
to violence, non-violence, we can get rid
of the fact, the actual—but we cannot.
We have had ideals without number, all the
sacred books are full of them, yet we are
still violent—so why not deal with violence
itself and forget the word altogether?
If you want to understand the actual you must
give your whole attention, all your energy,
to it.
That attention and energy are distracted when
you create a fictitious, ideal world.
So can you completely banish the ideal?
The man who is really serious, with the urge
to find out what truth is, what love is, has
no concept at all.
He lives only in what is.
To investigate the fact of your own anger
you must pass no judgement on it, for the
moment you conceive of its opposite you condemn
it and therefore you cannot see it as it is.
When you say you dislike or hate someone that
is a fact, although it sounds terrible.
If you look at it, go into it completely,
it ceases, but if you say, 'I must not hate;
I must have love in my heart', then you are
living in a hypocritical world with double
standards.
To live completely, fully, in the moment is
to live with what is, the actual, without
any sense of condemnation or justification—then
you understand it so totally that you are
finished with it.
When you see clearly the problem is solved.
But can you see the face of violence clearly—the
face of violence not only outside you but
inside you, which means that you are totally
free from violence because you have not admitted
ideology through which to get rid of it?
This requires very deep meditation not just
a verbal agreement or disagreement.
You have now read a series of statements but
have you really understood?
Your conditioned mind, your way of life, the
whole structure of the society in which you
live, prevent you from looking at a fact and
being entirely free from it immediately.
You say, 'I will think about it; I will consider
whether it is possible to be free from violence
or not.
I will try to be free.'
That is one of the most dreadful statements
you can make, 'I will try'.
There is no trying, no doing your best.
Either you do it or you don't do it.
You are admitting time while the house is
burning.
The house is burning as a result of the violence
throughout the world and in yourself and you
say, 'Let me think about it.
Which ideology is best to put out 
the fire?'
When the house is on fire, do you argue about
the colour of the hair of the man who brings
the water?
VII
Relationship — Conflict — Society — Poverty
— Drugs — Dependence — Comparison — Desire
— Ideals — Hypocrisy
The cessation of violence, which we have just
been considering, does not necessarily mean
a state of mind which is at peace with itself
and therefore at peace in all its relationships.
Relationship between human beings is based
on the image-forming, defensive mechanism.
In all our relationships each one of us builds
an image about the other and these two images
have relationship, not the human beings themselves.
The wife has an image about the husband—perhaps
not consciously but nevertheless it is there—and
the husband has an image about the wife.
One has an image about one's country and about
oneself, and we are always strengthening these
images by adding more and more to them.
And it is these images which have relationship.
The actual relationship between two human
beings or between many human beings completely
ends when there is the formation of images.
Relationship based on these images can obviously
never bring about peace in the relationship
because the images are fictitious and one
cannot live in an abstraction.
And yet that is what we are all doing: living
in ideas, in theories, in symbols, in images
which we have created about ourselves and
others and which are not realities at all.
All our relationships, whether they be with
property, ideas or people, are based essentially
on this image-forming, and hence there is
always conflict.
How is it possible then to be completely at
peace within ourselves and in all our relationships
with others?
After all, life is a movement in relationship,
otherwise there is no life at all, and if
that life is based on an abstraction, an idea,
or a speculative assumption, then such abstract
living must inevitably bring about a relationship
which becomes a battlefield.
So is it at all possible for man to live a
completely orderly inward life without any
form of compulsion, imitation, suppression
or sublimation?
Can he bring about such order within himself
that it is a living quality not held within
the framework of ideas—an inward tranquillity
which knows no disturbance at any moment—not
in some fantastic mythical abstract world
but in the daily life of the home and the
office?
I think we should go into this question very
carefully because there is not one spot in
our consciousness untouched by conflict.
In all our relationships, whether with the
most intimate person or with a neighbour or
with society, this conflict exists—conflict
being contradiction, a state of division,
separation, a duality.
Observing ourselves and our relationships
to society we see that at all levels of our
being there is conflict—minor or major conflict
which brings about very superficial responses
or devastating results.
Man has accepted conflict as an innate part
of daily existence because he has accepted
competition, jealousy, greed, acquisitiveness
and aggression as a natural way of life.
When we accept such a way of life we accept
the structure of society as it is and live
within the pattern of respectability.
And that is what most of us are caught in
because most of us want to be terribly respectable.
When we examine our own minds and hearts,
the way we think, the way we feel and how
we act in our daily lives, we observe that
as long as we conform to the pattern of society,
life must be a battlefield.
If we do not accept it—and no religious
person can possibly accept such a society—then
we will be completely free from the psychological
structure of society.
Most of us are rich with the things of society.
What society has created in us and what we
have created in ourselves, are greed, envy,
anger, hate, jealousy, anxiety—and with
all these we are very rich.
The various religions throughout the world
have preached poverty.
The monk assumes a robe, changes his name,
shaves his head, enters a cell and takes a
vow of poverty and chastity; in the East he
has one loincloth, one robe, one meal a day—and
we all respect such poverty.
But those men who have assumed the robe of
poverty are still inwardly, psychologically,
rich with the things of society because they
are still seeking position and prestige; they
belong to this order or that order, this religion
or that religion; they still live in the divisions
of a culture, a tradition.
That is not poverty.
Poverty is to be completely free of society,
though one may have a few more clothes, a
few more meals—good God, who cares?
But unfortunately in most people there is
this urge for exhibitionism.
Poverty becomes a marvellously beautiful thing
when the mind is free of society.
One must become poor inwardly for then there
is no seeking, no asking, no desire, no—nothing!
It is only this inward poverty that can see
the truth of a life in which there is no conflict
at all.
Such a life is a benediction not to be found
in any church or any temple.
How is it possible then to free ourselves
from the psychological structure of society,
which is to free ourselves from the essence
of conflict?
It is not difficult to trim and lop off certain
branches of conflict, but we are asking ourselves
whether it is possible to live in complete
inward and therefore outward tranquillity?
Which does not mean that we shall vegetate
or stagnate.
On the contrary, we shall become dynamic,
vital, full of energy.
To understand and to be free of any problem
we need a great deal of passionate and sustained
energy, not only physical and intellectual
energy but an energy that is not dependent
on any motive, any psychological stimulus
or drug.
If we are dependent on any stimulus that very
stimulus makes the mind dull and insensitive.
By taking some form of drug we may find enough
energy temporarily to see things very clearly
but we revert to our former state and therefore
become dependent on that drug more and more.
So all stimulation, whether of the church
or of alcohol or of drugs or of the written
or spoken word, will inevitably bring about
dependence, and that dependence prevents us
from seeing clearly for ourselves and therefore
from having vital energy.
We all unfortunately depend psychologically
on something.
Why do we depend?
Why is there this urge to depend?
We are taking this journey together; you are
not waiting for me to tell you the causes
of your dependence.
If we enquire together we will both discover
and therefore that discovery will be your
own, and hence, being yours, it will give
you vitality.
I discover for myself that I depend on something—an
audience, say, which will stimulate me.
I derive from that audience, from addressing
a large group of people, a kind of energy.
And therefore I depend on that audience, on
those people, whether they agree or disagree.
The more they disagree the more vitality they
give me.
If they agree it becomes a very shallow, empty
thing.
So I discover that I need an audience because
it is a very stimulating thing to address
people.
Now why?
Why do I depend?
Because in myself I am shallow, in myself
I have nothing, in myself I have no source
which is always full and rich, vital, moving,
living.
So I depend.
I have discovered the cause.
But will the discovery of the cause free me
from being dependent?
The discovery of the cause is merely intellectual,
so obviously it does not free the mind from
its dependency.
The mere intellectual acceptance of an idea,
or the emotional acquiescence in an ideology,
cannot free the mind from being dependent
on something which will give it stimulation.
What frees the mind from dependence is seeing
the whole structure and nature of stimulation
and dependence and how that dependence makes
the mind stupid, dull and inactive.
Seeing the totality of it alone frees the
mind.
So I must enquire into what it means to see
totally.
As long as I am looking at life from a particular
point of view or from a particular experience
I have cherished, or from some particular
knowledge I have gathered, which is my background,
which is the 'me', I cannot see totally.
I have discovered intellectually, verbally,
through analysis, the cause of my dependence,
but whatever thought investigates must inevitably
be fragmentary, so I can see the totality
of something only when thought does not interfere.
Then I see the fact of my dependence; I see
actually what is.
I see it without any like or dislike; I do
not want to get rid of that dependence or
to be free from the cause of it.
I observe it, and when there is observation
of this kind I see the whole picture, not
a fragment of the picture, and when the mind
sees the whole picture there is freedom.
Now I have discovered that there is a dissipation
of energy when there is fragmentation.
I have found the very source of the dissipation
of energy.
You may think there is no waste of energy
if you imitate, if you accept authority, if
you depend on the priest, the ritual, the
dogma, the party or on some ideology, but
the following and acceptance of an ideology,
whether it is good or bad, whether it is holy
or unholy, is a fragmentary activity and therefore
a cause of conflict, and conflict will inevitably
arise so long as there is a division between
'what should be' and 'what is', and any conflict
is a dissipation of energy.
If you put the question to yourself, 'How
am I to be free from conflict?', you are creating
another problem and hence you are increasing
conflict, whereas if you just see it as a
fact—see it as you would see some concrete
object—clearly, directly—then you will
understand essentially the truth of a life
in which there is no conflict at all.
Let us put it another way.
We are always comparing what we are with what
we should be.
The should-be is a projection of what we think
we ought to be.
Contradiction exists when there is comparison,
not only with something or somebody, but with
what you were yesterday, and hence there is
conflict between what has been and what is.
There is what is only when there is no comparison
at all, and to live with what is, is to be
peaceful.
Then you can give your whole attention without
any distraction to what is within yourself—whether
it be despair, ugliness, brutality, fear,
anxiety, loneliness—and live with it completely;
then there is no contradiction and hence no
conflict.
But all the time we are comparing ourselves—with
those who are richer or more brilliant, more
intellectual, more affectionate, more famous,
more this and more that.
The 'more' plays an extraordinarily important
part in our lives; this measuring ourselves
all the time against something or someone
is one of the primary causes of conflict.
Now why is there any comparison at all?
Why do you compare yourself with another?
This comparison has been taught from childhood.
In every school A is compared with B, and
A destroys himself in order to be like B.
When you do not compare at all, when there
is no ideal, no opposite, no factor of duality,
when you no longer struggle to be different
from what you are—what has happened to your
mind?
Your mind has ceased to create the opposite
and has become highly intelligent, highly
sensitive, capable of immense passion, because
effort is a dissipation of passion—passion
which is vital energy—and you cannot do
anything without passion.
If you do not compare yourself with another
you will be what you are.
Through comparison you hope to evolve, to
grow, to become more intelligent, more beautiful.
But will you?
The fact is what you are, and by comparing
you are fragmenting the fact which is a waste
of energy.
To see what you actually are without any comparison
gives you tremendous energy to look.
When you can look at yourself without comparison
you are beyond comparison, which does not
mean that the mind is stagnant with contentment.
So we see in essence how the mind wastes energy
which is so necessary to understand the totality
of life.
I don't want to know with whom I am in conflict;
I don't want to know the peripheral conflicts
of my being.
What I want to know is why conflict should
exist at all.
When I put that question to myself I see a
fundamental issue which has nothing to do
with peripheral conflicts and their solutions.
I am concerned with the central issue and
I see—perhaps you see also?—that the very
nature of desire, if not properly understood,
must inevitably lead to conflict.
Desire is always in contradiction.
I desire contradictory things—which doesn't
mean that I must destroy desire, suppress,
control or sublimate it—I simply see that
desire itself is contradictory.
It is not the objects of desire but the very
nature of desire which is contradictory.
And I have to understand the nature of desire
before I can understand conflict.
In ourselves we are in a state of contradiction,
and that state of contradiction is brought
about by desire—desire being the pursuit
of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, which
we have already been into.
So we see desire as the root of all contradiction—wanting
something and not wanting it—a dual activity.
When we do something pleasurable there is
no effort involved at all, is there?
But pleasure brings pain and then there is
a struggle to avoid the pain, and that again
is a dissipation of energy.
Why do we have duality at all?
There is, of course, duality in nature—man
and woman, light and shade, night and day—but
inwardly, psychologically, why do we have
duality?
Please think this out with me, don't wait
for me to tell you.
You have to exercise your own mind to find
out.
My words are merely a mirror in which to observe
yourself.
Why do we have this psychological duality?
Is it that we have been brought up always
to compare 'what is' with 'what should be'?
We have been conditioned in what is right
and what is wrong, what is good and what is
bad, what is moral and what is immoral.
Has this duality come into being because we
believe that thinking about the opposite of
violence, the opposite of envy, of jealousy,
of meanness, will help us to get rid of those
things?
Do we use the opposite as a lever to get rid
of what is?
Or is it an escape from the actual?
Do you use the opposite as a means of avoiding
the actual which you don't know how to deal
with?
Or is it because you have been told by thousands
of years of propaganda that you must have
an ideal—the opposite of 'what is'—in
order to cope with the present?
When you have an ideal you think it helps
you to get rid of 'what is', but it never
does.
You may preach non-violence for the rest of
your life and all the time be sowing the seeds
of violence.
You have a concept of what you should be and
how you should act, and all the time you are
in fact acting quite differently; so you see
that principles, beliefs and ideals must inevitably
lead to hypocrisy and a dishonest life.
It is the ideal that creates the opposite
to what is, so if you know how to be with
'what is', then the opposite is not necessary.
Trying to become like somebody else, or like
your ideal, is one of the main causes of contradiction,
confusion and conflict.
A mind that is confused, whatever it does,
at any level, will remain confused; any action
born of confusion leads to further confusion.
I see this very clearly; I see it as clearly
as I see an immediate physical danger.
So what happens?
I cease to act in terms of confusion any more.
Therefore inaction is complete action.
VIII
Freedom — Revolt — Solitude — Innocence
— Living with Ourselves as We Are
None of the agonies of suppression, nor the
brutal discipline of conforming to a pattern
has led to truth.
To come upon truth the mind must be completely
free, without a spot of distortion.
But first let us ask ourselves if we really
want to be free?
When we talk of freedom are we talking of
complete freedom or of freedom from some inconvenient
or unpleasant or undesirable thing?
We would like to be free from painful and
ugly memories and unhappy experiences but
keep our pleasurable, satisfying ideologies,
formulas and relationships.
But to keep the one without the other is impossible,
for, as we have seen, pleasure is inseparable
from pain.
So it is for each one of us to decide whether
or not we want to be completely free.
If we say we do, then we must understand the
nature and structure of freedom.
Is it freedom when you are free from something—free
from pain, free from some kind of anxiety?
Or is freedom itself something entirely different?
You can be free from jealousy, say, but isn't
that freedom a reaction and therefore not
freedom at all?
You can be free from dogma very easily, by
analysing it, by kicking it out, but the motive
for that freedom from dogma has its own reaction
because the desire to be free from a dogma
may be that it is no longer fashionable or
convenient.
Or you can be free from nationalism because
you believe in internationalism or because
you feel it is no longer economically necessary
to cling to this silly nationalistic dogma
with its flag and all that rubbish.
You can easily put that away.
Or you may react against some spiritual or
political leader who has promised you freedom
as a result of discipline or revolt.
But has such rationalism, such logical conclusion,
anything to do with freedom?
If you say you are free from something, it
is a reaction which will then become another
reaction which will bring about another conformity,
another form of domination.
In this way you can have a chain of reactions
and accept each reaction as freedom.
But it is not freedom; it is merely a continuity
of a modified past which the mind clings to.
The youth of today, like all youth, are in
revolt against society, and that is a good
thing in itself, but revolt is not freedom
because when you revolt it is a reaction and
that reaction sets up its own pattern and
you get caught in that pattern.
You think it is something new.
It is not; it is the old in a different mould.
Any social or political revolt will inevitably
revert to the good old bourgeois mentality.
Freedom comes only when you see and act, never
through revolt.
The seeing is the acting and such action is
as instantaneous as when you see danger.
Then there is no cerebration, no discussion
or hesitation; the danger itself compels the
act, and therefore to see is to act and to
be free.
Freedom is a state of mind—not freedom from
something but a sense of freedom, a freedom
to doubt and question everything and therefore
so intense, active and vigorous that it throws
away every form of dependence, slavery, conformity
and acceptance.
Such freedom implies being completely alone.
But can the mind brought up in a culture so
dependent on environment and its own tendencies
ever find that freedom which is complete solitude
and in which there is no leadership, no tradition
and no authority?
This solitude is an inward state of mind which
is not dependent on any stimulus or any knowledge
and is not the result of any experience or
conclusion.
Most of us, inwardly, are never alone.
There is a difference between isolation, cutting
oneself off, and aloneness, solitude.
We all know what it is to be isolated—building
a wall around oneself in order never to be
hurt, never to be vulnerable, or cultivating
detachment which is another form of agony,
or living in some dreamy ivory tower of ideology.
Aloneness is something quite different.
You are never alone because you are full of
all the memories, all the conditioning, all
the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is
never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated.
To be alone you must die to the past.
When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging
to any family, any nation, any culture, any
particular continent, there is that sense
of being an outsider.
The man who is completely alone in this way
is innocent and it is this innocency that
frees the mind from sorrow.
We carry about with us the burden of what
thousands of people have said and the memories
of all our misfortunes.
To abandon all that totally is to be alone,
and the mind that is alone is not only innocent
but young—not in time or age, but young,
innocent, alive at whatever age—and only
such a mind can see that which is truth and
that which is not measurable by words.
In this solitude you will begin to understand
the necessity of living with yourself as you
are, not as you think you should be or as
you have been.
See if you can look at yourself without any
tremor, any false modesty, any fear, any justification
or condemnation—just live with yourself
as you actually are.
It is only when you live with something intimately
that you begin to understand it.
But the moment you get used to it—get used
to your own anxiety or envy or whatever it
is—you are no longer living with it.
If you live by a river, after a few days you
do not hear the sound of the water any more,
or if you have a picture in the room which
you see every day you lose it after a week.
It is the same with the mountains, the valleys,
the trees—the same with your family, your
husband, your wife.
But to live with something like jealousy,
envy or anxiety you must never get used to
it, never accept it.
You must care for it as you would care for
a newly planted tree, protect it against the
sun, against the storm.
You must care for it, not condemn it or justify
it.
Therefore you begin to love it.
When you care for it, you are beginning to
love it.
It is not that you love being envious or anxious,
as so many people do, but rather that you
care for watching.
So can you—can you and I—live with what
we actually are, knowing ourselves to be dull,
envious, fearful, believing we have tremendous
affection when we have not, getting easily
hurt, easily flattered and bored—can we
live with all that, neither accepting it nor
denying it, but just observing it without
becoming morbid, depressed or elated?
Now let us ask ourselves a further question.
Is this freedom, this solitude, this coming
into contact with the whole structure of what
we are in ourselves—is it to be come upon
through time?
That is, is freedom to be achieved through
a gradual process?
Obviously not, because as soon as you introduce
time you are enslaving yourself more and more.
You cannot become free gradually.
It is not a matter of time.
The next question is, can you become conscious
of that freedom?
If you say, 'I am free', then you are not
free.
It is like a man saying, 'I am happy'.
The moment he says, 'I am happy' he is living
in a memory of something that has gone.
Freedom can only come about naturally, not
through wishing, wanting, longing.
Nor will you find it by creating an image
of what you think it is.
To come upon it the mind has to learn to look
at life, which is a vast movement, without
the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond
the field of consciousness.
IX
Time — Sorrow — Death
I am tempted to repeat a story about a great
disciple going to God and demanding to be
taught truth.
This poor God says, 'My friend, it is such
a hot day, please get me a glass of water.'
So the disciple goes out and knocks on the
door of the first house he comes to and a
beautiful young lady opens the door.
The disciple falls in love with her and they
marry and have several children.
Then one day it begins to rain, and keeps
on raining, raining, raining—the torrents
are swollen, the streets are full, the houses
are being washed away.
The disciple holds on to his wife and carries
his children on his shoulders and as he is
being swept away he calls out, 'Lord, please
save me', and the Lord says, 'Where is that
glass of water I asked for?'
It is rather a good story because most of
us think in terms of time.
Man lives by time.
Inventing the future has been his favourite
game of escape.
We think that changes in ourselves can come
about in time, that order in ourselves can
be built up little by little, added to day
by day.
But time doesn't bring order or peace, so
we must stop thinking in terms of gradualness.
This means that there is no tomorrow for us
to be peaceful in.
We have to be orderly on the instant.
When there is real danger time disappears,
doesn't it?
There is immediate action.
But we do not see the danger of many of our
problems and therefore we invent time as a
means of overcoming them.
Time is a deceiver as it doesn't do a thing
to help us bring about a change in ourselves.
Time is a movement which man has divided into
past, present and future, and as long as he
divides it he will always be in conflict.
Is learning a matter of time?
We have not learnt after all these thousands
of years that there is a better way to live
than by hating and killing each other.
The problem of time is a very important one
to understand if we are to resolve this life
which we have helped to make as monstrous
and meaningless as it is.
The first thing to understand is that we can
look at time only with that freshness and
innocency of mind which we have already been
into.
We are confused about our many problems and
lost in that confusion.
Now if one is lost in a wood, what is the
first thing one does?
One stops, doesn't one?
One stops and looks round.
But the more we are confused and lost in life
the more we chase around, searching, asking,
demanding, begging.
So the first thing, if I may suggest it, is
that you completely stop inwardly.
And when you do stop inwardly, psychologically,
your mind becomes very peaceful, very clear.
Then you can really look at this question
of time.
Problems exist only in time, that is when
we meet an issue incompletely.
This incomplete coming together with the issue
creates the problem.
When we meet a challenge partially, fragmentarily,
or try to escape from it—that is, when we
meet it without complete attention—we bring
about a problem.
And the problem continues so long as we continue
to give it incomplete attention, so long as
we hope to solve it one of these days.
Do you know what time is?
Not by the watch, not chronological time,
but psychological time?
It is the interval between idea and action.
An idea is for self-protection obviously;
it is the idea of being secure.
Action is always immediate; it is not of the
past or of the future; to act must always
be in the present, but action is so dangerous,
so uncertain, that we conform to an idea which
we hope will give us a certain safety.
Do look at this in yourself.
You have an idea of what is right or wrong,
or an ideological concept about yourself and
society, and according to that idea you are
going to act.
Therefore the action is in conformity with
that idea, approximating to the idea, and
hence there is always conflict.
There is the idea, the interval and action.
And in that interval is the whole field of
time.
That interval is essentially thought.
When you think you will be happy tomorrow,
then you have an image of yourself achieving
a certain result in time.
Thought, through observation, through desire,
and the continuity of that desire sustained
by further thought, says, 'Tomorrow I shall
be happy.
Tomorrow I shall have success.
Tomorrow the world will be a beautiful place.'
So thought creates that interval which is
time.
Now we are asking, can we put a stop to time?
Can we live so completely that there is no
tomorrow for thought to think about?
Because time is sorrow.
That is, yesterday or a thousand yesterdays
ago, you loved, or you had a companion who
has gone, and that memory remains and you
are thinking about that pleasure and that
pain—you are looking back, wishing, hoping,
regretting, so thought, going over it again
and again, breeds this thing we call sorrow
and gives continuity to time.
So long as there is this interval of time
which has been bred by thought, there must
be sorrow, there must be continuity of fear.
So one asks oneself can this interval come
to an end?
If you say, 'Will it ever end?', then it is
already an idea, something you want to achieve,
and therefore you have an interval and you
are caught again.
Now take the question of death which is an
immense problem to most people.
You know death, there it is walking every
day by your side.
Is it possible to meet it so completely that
you do not make a problem of it at all?
In order to meet it in such a way all belief,
all hope, all fear about it must come to an
end, otherwise you are meeting this extraordinary
thing with a conclusion, an image, with a
premeditated anxiety, and therefore you are
meeting it with time.
Time is the interval between the observer
and the observed.
That is, the observer, you, is afraid to meet
this thing called death.
You don't know what it means; you have all
kinds of hopes and theories about it; you
believe in reincarnation or resurrection,
or in something called the soul, the atman,
a spiritual entity which is timeless and which
you call by different names.
Now have you found out for yourself whether
there is a soul?
Or is it an idea that has been handed down
to you?
Is there something permanent, continuous,
which is beyond thought?
If thought can think about it, it is within
the field of thought and therefore it cannot
be permanent because there is nothing permanent
within the field of thought.
To discover that nothing is permanent is of
tremendous importance for only then is the
mind free, then you can look, and in that
there is great joy.
You cannot be frightened of the unknown because
you do not know what the unknown is and so
there is nothing to be frightened of.
Death is a word, and it is the word, the image,
that creates fear.
So can you look at death without the image
of death?
As long as the image exists from which springs
thought, thought must always create fear.
Then you either rationalize your fear of death
and build a resistance against the inevitable
or you invent innumerable beliefs to protect
you from the fear of death.
Hence there is a gap between you and the thing
of which you are afraid.
In this time-space interval there must be
conflict which is fear, anxiety and self-pity.
Thought, which breeds the fear of death, says,
'Let's postpone it, let's avoid it, keep it
as far away as possible, let's not think about
it'—but you are thinking about it.
When you say, 'I won't think about it', you
have already thought out how to avoid it.
You are frightened of death because you have
postponed it.
We have separated living from dying, and the
interval between the living and the dying
is fear.
That interval, that time, is created by fear.
Living is our daily torture, daily insult,
sorrow and confusion, with occasional opening
of a window over enchanted seas.
That is what we call living, and we are afraid
to die, which is to end this misery.
We would rather cling to the known than face
the unknown—the known being our house, our
furniture, our family, our character, our
work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness,
our gods—that little thing that moves around
incessantly within itself with its own limited
pattern of embittered existence.
We think that living is always in the present
and that dying is something that awaits us
at a distant time.
But we have never questioned whether this
battle of everyday life is living at all.
We want to know the truth about reincarnation,
we want proof of the survival of the soul,
we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants
and to the conclusions of psychical research,
but we never ask, never, how to live—to
live with delight, with enchantment, with
beauty every day.
We have accepted life as it is with all its
agony and despair and have got used to it,
and think of death as something to be carefully
avoided.
But death is extraordinarily like life when
we know how to live.
You cannot live without dying.
You cannot live if you do not die psychologically
every minute.
This is not an intellectual paradox.
To live completely, wholly, every day as if
it were a new loveliness, there must be dying
to everything of yesterday, otherwise you
live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can
never know what love is or what freedom is.
Most of us are frightened of dying because
we don't know what it means to live.
We don't know how to live, therefore we don't
know how to die.
As long as we are frightened of life we shall
be frightened of death.
The man who is not frightened of life is not
frightened of being completely insecure for
he understands that inwardly, psychologically,
there is no security.
When there is no security there is an endless
movement and then life and death are the same.
The man who lives without conflict, who lives
with beauty and love, is not frightened of
death because to love is to die.
If you die to everything you know, including
your family, your memory, everything you have
felt, then death is a purification, a rejuvenating
process; then death brings innocence and it
is only the innocent who are passionate, not
the people who believe or who want to find
out what happens after death.
To find out actually what takes place when
you die you must die.
This isn't a joke.
You must die—not physically but psychologically,
inwardly, die to the things you have cherished
and to the things you are bitter about.
If you have died to one of your pleasures,
the smallest or the greatest, naturally, without
any enforcement or argument, then you will
know what it means to die.
To die is to have a mind that is completely
empty of itself, empty of its daily longings,
pleasures and agonies.
Death is a renewal, a mutation, in which thought
does not function at all because thought is
old.
When there is death there is something totally
new.
Freedom from the known is death, and then
you are living.
X
Love
The demand to be safe in relationship inevitably
breeds sorrow and fear.
This seeking for security is inviting insecurity.
Have you ever found security in any of your
relationships?
Have you?
Most of us want the security of loving and
being loved, but is there love when each one
of us is seeking his own security, his own
particular path?
We are not loved because we don't know how
to love.
What is love?
The word is so loaded and corrupted that I
hardly like to use it.
Everybody talks of love—every magazine and
newspaper and every missionary talks everlastingly
of love.
I love my country, I love my king, I love
some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure,
I love my wife, I love God.
Is love an idea?
If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished,
cherished, pushed around, twisted in any way
you like.
When you say you love God what does it mean?
It means that you love a projection of your
own imagination, a projection of yourself
clothed in certain forms of respectability
according to what you think is noble and holy;
so to say, 'I love God', is absolute nonsense.
When you worship God you are worshipping yourself—and
that is not love.
Because we cannot solve this human thing called
love we run away into abstractions.
Love may be the ultimate solution to all man's
difficulties, problems and travails, so how
are we going to find out what love is?
By merely defining it?
The church has defined it one way, society
another, and there are all sorts of deviations
and perversions.
Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the
emotional exchange, the companionship—is
that what we mean by love?
That has been the norm, the pattern, and it
has become so tremendously personal, sensuous,
and limited that religions have declared that
love is something much more than this.
In what they call human love they see there
is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire
to possess, to hold, to control and to interfere
with another's thinking, and knowing the complexity
of all this they say there must be another
kind of love, divine, beautiful, untouched,
uncorrupted.
Throughout the world, so-called holy men have
maintained that to look at a woman is something
totally wrong: they say you cannot come near
to God if you indulge in sex, therefore they
push it aside although they are eaten up with
it.
But by denying sexuality they put out their
eyes and cut out their tongues for they deny
the whole beauty of the earth.
They have starved their hearts and minds;
they are dehydrated human beings; they have
banished beauty because beauty is associated
with woman.
Can love be divided into the sacred and the
profane, the human and the divine, or is there
only love?
Is love of the one and not of the many?
If I say, 'I love you', does that exclude
the love of the other?
Is love personal or impersonal?
Moral or immoral?
Family or non-family?
If you love mankind can you love the particular?
Is love sentiment?
Is love emotion?
Is love pleasure and desire?
All these questions indicate, don't they,
that we have ideas about love, ideas about
what it should or should not be, a pattern
or a code developed by the culture in which
we live.
So to go into the question of what love is
we must first free it from the encrustation
of centuries, put away all ideals and ideologies
of what it should or should not be.
To divide anything into what should be and
what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing
with life.
Now how am I going to find out what this flame
is which we call love—not how to express
it to another but what it means in itself?
I will first reject what the church, what
society, what my parents and friends, what
every person and every book has said about
it because I want to find out for myself what
it is.
Here is an enormous problem that involves
the whole of mankind, there have been a thousand
ways of defining it and I myself am caught
in some pattern or other according to what
I like or enjoy at the moment—so shouldn't
I, in order to understand it, first free myself
from my own inclinations and prejudices?
I am confused, torn by my own desires, so
I say to myself, 'First clear up your own
confusion.
Perhaps you may be able to discover what love
is through what it is not.'
The government says, 'Go and kill for the
love of your country'.
Is that love?
Religion says, 'Give up sex for the love of
God'.
Is that love?
Is love desire?
Don't say no.
For most of us it is—desire with pleasure,
the pleasure that is derived through the senses,
through sexual attachment and fulfilment.
I am not against sex, but see what is involved
in it.
What sex gives you momentarily is the total
abandonment of yourself, then you are back
again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition
over and over again of that state in which
there is no worry, no problem, no self.
You say you love your wife.
In that love is involved sexual pleasure,
the pleasure of having someone in the house
to look after your children, to cook.
You depend on her; she has given you her body,
her emotions, her encouragement, a certain
feeling of security and well-being.
Then she turns away from you; she gets bored
or goes off with someone else, and your whole
emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance,
which you don't like, is called jealousy.
There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence.
So what you are really saying is, 'As long
as you belong to me I love you but the moment
you don't I begin to hate you.
As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my
demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you,
but the moment you cease to supply what I
want I don't like you.'
So there is antagonism between you, there
is separation, and when you feel separate
from another there is no love.
But if you can live with your wife without
thought creating all these contradictory states,
these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps—perhaps—you
will know what love is.
Then you are completely free and so is she,
whereas if you depend on her for all your
pleasure you are a slave to her.
So when one loves there must be freedom, not
only from the other person but from oneself.
This belonging to another, being psychologically
nourished by another, depending on another—in
all this there must always be anxiety, fear,
jealousy, guilt, and so long as there is fear
there is no love; a mind ridden with sorrow
will never know what love is; sentimentality
and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to
do with love.
And so love is not to do with pleasure and
desire.
Love is not the product of thought which is
the past.
Thought cannot possibly cultivate love.
Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy,
for jealousy is of the past.
Love is always active present.
It is not 'I will love' or 'I have loved'.
If you know love you will not follow anybody.
Love does not obey.
When you love there is neither respect nor
disrespect.
Don't you know what it means really to love
somebody—to love without hate, without jealousy,
without anger, without wanting to interfere
with what he is doing or thinking, without
condemning, without comparing—don't you
know what it means?
Where there is love is there comparison?
When you love someone with all your heart,
with all your mind, with all your body, with
your entire being, is there comparison?
When you totally abandon yourself to that
love there is not the other.
Does love have responsibility and duty, and
will it use those words?
When you do something out of duty is there
any love in it?
In duty there is no love.
The structure of duty in which the human being
is caught is destroying him.
So long as you are compelled to do something
because it is your duty you don't love what
you are doing.
When there is love there is no duty and no
responsibility.
Most parents unfortunately think they are
responsible for their children and their sense
of responsibility takes the form of telling
them what they should do and what they should
not do, what they should become and what they
should not become.
The parents want their children to have a
secure position in society.
What they call responsibility is part of that
respectability they worship; and it seems
to me that where there is respectability there
is no order; they are concerned only with
becoming a perfect bourgeois.
When they prepare their children to fit into
society they are perpetuating war, conflict
and brutality.
Do you call that care and love?
Really to care is to care as you would for
a tree or a plant, watering it, studying its
needs, the best soil for it, looking after
it with gentleness and tenderness—but when
you prepare your children to fit into society
you are preparing them to be killed.
If you loved your children you would have
no war.
When you lose someone you love you shed tears—are
your tears for yourself or for the one who
is dead?
Are you crying for yourself or for another?
Have you ever cried for another?
Have you ever cried for your son who was killed
on the battlefield?
You have cried, but do those tears come out
of self-pity or have you cried because a human
being has been killed?
If you cry out of self-pity your tears have
no meaning because you are concerned about
yourself.
If you are crying because you are bereft of
one in whom you have invested a great deal
of affection, it was not really affection.
When you cry for your brother who dies cry
for him.
It is very easy to cry for yourself because
he is gone.
Apparently you are crying because your heart
is touched, but it is not touched for him,
it is only touched by self-pity and self-pity
makes you hard, encloses you, makes you dull
and stupid.
When you cry for yourself, is it love—crying
because you are lonely, because you have been
left, because you are no longer powerful—complaining
of your lot, your environment—always you
in tears?
If you understand this, which means to come
in contact with it as directly as you would
touch a tree or a pillar or a hand, then you
will see that sorrow is self-created, sorrow
is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome
of time.
I had my brother three years ago, now he is
dead, now I am lonely, aching, there is no
one to whom I can look for comfort or companionship,
and it brings tears to my eyes.
You can see all this happening inside yourself
if you watch it.
You can see it fully, completely, in one glance,
not take analytical time over it.
You can see in a moment the whole structure
and nature of this shoddy little thing called
'me', my tears, my family, my nation, my belief,
my religion—all that ugliness, it is all
inside you.
When you see it with your heart, not with
your mind, when you see it from the very bottom
of your heart, then you have the key that
will end sorrow.
Sorrow and love cannot go together, but in
the Christian world they have idealized suffering,
put it on a cross and worshipped it, implying
that you can never escape from suffering except
through that one particular door, and this
is the whole structure of an exploiting religious
society.
So when you ask what love is, you may be too
frightened to see the answer.
It may mean complete upheaval; it may break
up the family; you may discover that you do
not love your wife or husband or children—do
you?—you may have to shatter the house you
have built, you may never go back to the temple.
But if you still want to find out, you will
see that fear is not love, dependence is not
love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness
and domination are not love, responsibility
and duty are not love, self-pity is not love,
the agony of not being loved is not love,
love is not the opposite of hate any more
than humility is the opposite of vanity.
So if you can eliminate all these, not by
forcing them but by washing them away as the
rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf,
then perhaps you will come upon this strange
flower which man always hungers after.
If you have not got love—not just in little
drops but in abundance—if you are not filled
with it—the world will go to disaster.
You know intellectually that the unity of
mankind is essential and that love is the
only way, but who is going to teach you how
to love?
Will any authority, any method, any system,
tell you how to love?
If anyone tells you, it is not love.
Can you say, 'I will practise love.
I will sit down day after day and think about
it.
I will practise being kind and gentle and
force myself to pay attention to others'?
Do you mean to say that you can discipline
yourself to love, exercise the will to love?
When you exercise discipline and will to love,
love goes out of the window.
By practising some method or system of loving
you may become extraordinarily clever or more
kindly or get into a state of non-violence,
but that has nothing whatsoever to do with
love.
In this torn desert world there is no love
because pleasure and desire play the greatest
roles, yet without love your daily life has
no meaning.
And you cannot have love if there is no beauty.
Beauty is not something you see—not a beautiful
tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building
or a beautiful woman.
There is beauty only when your heart and mind
know what love is.
Without love and that sense of beauty there
is no virtue, and you know very well that,
do what you will, improve society, feed the
poor, you will only be creating more mischief,
for without love there is only ugliness and
poverty in your own heart and mind.
But when there is love and beauty, whatever
you do is right, whatever you do is in order.
If you know how to love, then you can do what
you like because it will solve all other problems.
So we reach the point: can the mind come upon
love without discipline, without thought,
without enforcement, without any book, any
teacher or leader—come upon it as one comes
upon a lovely sunset?
It seems to me that one thing is absolutely
necessary and that is passion without motive—passion
that is not the result of some commitment
or attachment, passion that is not lust.
A man who does not know what passion is will
never know love because love can come into
being only when there is total self-abandonment.
A mind that is seeking is not a passionate
mind and to come upon love without seeking
it is the only way to find it—to come upon
it unknowingly and not as the result of any
effort or experience.
Such a love, you will find, is not of time;
such a love is both personal and impersonal,
is both the one and the many.
Like a flower that has perfume you can smell
it or pass it by.
That flower is for everybody and for the one
who takes trouble to breathe it deeply and
look at it with delight.
Whether one is very near in the garden, or
very far away, it is the same to the flower
because it is full of that perfume and therefore
it is sharing with everybody.
Love is something that is new, fresh, alive.
It has no yesterday and no tomorrow.
It is beyond the turmoil of thought.
It is only the innocent mind which knows what
love is, and the innocent mind can live in
the world which is not innocent.
To find this extraordinary thing which man
has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through
worship, through relationship, through sex,
through every form of pleasure and pain, is
only possible when thought comes to understand
itself and comes naturally to an end.
Then love has no opposite, then love has no
conflict.
You may ask, 'If I find such a love, what
happens to my wife, my children, my family?
They must have security.'
When you put such a question you have never
been outside the field of thought, the field
of consciousness.
When once you have been outside that field
you will never ask such a question because
then you will know what love is in which there
is no thought and therefore no time.
You may read this mesmerized and enchanted,
but actually to go beyond thought and time—which
means going beyond sorrow—is to be aware
that there is a different dimension called
love.
But you don't know how to come to this extraordinary
fount—so what do you do?
If you don't know what to do, you do nothing,
don't you?
Absolutely nothing.
Then inwardly you are completely silent.
Do you understand what that means?
It means that you are not seeking, not wanting,
not pursuing; there is no centre at all.
Then there is love.
XI
To Look and to Listen — Art — Beauty — Austerity
— Images — Problems — Space
We have been enquiring into the nature of
love and have come to a point, I think, which
needs much greater penetration, a much greater
awareness of the issue.
We have discovered that for most people love
means comfort, security, a guarantee for the
rest of their lives of continuous emotional
satisfaction.
Then someone like me comes along and says,
'Is that really love?' and questions you and
asks you to look inside yourself.
And you try not to look because it is very
disturbing—you would rather discuss the
soul or the political or economic situation—but
when you are driven into a corner to look,
you realize that what you have always thought
of as love is not love at all; it is a mutual
gratification, a mutual exploitation.
When I say, 'Love has no tomorrow and no yesterday',
or, 'When there is no centre then there is
love', it has reality for me but not for you.
You may quote it and make it into a formula
but that has no validity.
You have to see it for yourself, but to do
so there must be freedom to look, freedom
from all condemnation, all judgement, all
agreeing or disagreeing.
Now, to look is one of the most difficult
things in life—or to listen—to look and
listen are the same.
If your eyes are blinded with your worries,
you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.
Most of us have lost touch with nature.
Civilization is tending more and more towards
large cities; we are becoming more and more
an urban people, living in crowded apartments
and having very little space even to look
at the sky of an evening and morning, and
therefore we are losing touch with a great
deal of beauty.
I don't know if you have noticed how few of
us look at a sunrise or a sunset or the moonlight
or the reflection of light on water.
Having lost touch with nature we naturally
tend to develop intellectual capacities.
We read a great many books, go to a great
many museums and concerts, watch television
and have many other entertainments.
We quote endlessly from other people's ideas
and think and talk a great deal about art.
Why is it that we depend so much upon art?
Is it a form of escape, of stimulation?
If you are directly in contact with nature;
if you watch the movement of a bird on the
wing, see the beauty of every movement of
the sky, watch the shadows on the hills or
the beauty on the face of another, do you
think you will want to go to any museum to
look at any picture?
Perhaps it is because you do not know how
to look at all the things about you that you
resort to some form of drug to stimulate you
to see better.
There is a story of a religious teacher who
used to talk every morning to his disciples.
One morning he got on to the platform and
was just about to begin when a little bird
came and sat on the window sill and began
to sing, and sang away with full heart.
Then it stopped and flew away and the teacher
said, 'The sermon for this morning is over'.
It seems to me that one of our greatest difficulties
is to see for ourselves really clearly, not
only outward things but inward life.
When we say we see a tree or a flower or a
person, do we actually see them?
Or do we merely see the image that the word
has created?
That is, when you look at a tree or at a cloud
of an evening full of light and delight, do
you actually see it, not only with your eyes
and intellectually, but totally, completely?
Have you ever experimented with looking at
an objective thing like a tree without any
of the associations, any of the knowledge
you have acquired about it, without any prejudice,
any judgement, any words forming a screen
between you and the tree and preventing you
from seeing it as it actually is?
Try it and see what actually takes place when
you observe the tree with all your being,
with the totality of your energy.
In that intensity you will find that there
is no observer at all; there is only attention.
It is when there is inattention that there
is the observer and the observed.
When you are looking at something with complete
attention there is no space for a conception,
a formula or a memory.
This is important to understand because we
are going into something which requires very
careful investigation.
It is only a mind that looks at a tree or
the stars or the sparkling waters of a river
with complete self-abandonment that knows
what beauty is, and when we are actually seeing
we are in a state of love.
We generally know beauty through comparison
or through what man has put together, which
means that we attribute beauty to some object.
I see what I consider to be a beautiful building
and that beauty I appreciate because of my
knowledge of architecture and by comparing
it with other buildings I have seen.
But now I am asking myself, 'Is there a beauty
without object?'
When there is an observer who is the censor,
the experiencer, the thinker, there is no
beauty because beauty is something external,
something the observer looks at and judges,
but when there is no observer—and this demands
a great deal of meditation, of enquiry—then
there is beauty without the object.
Beauty lies in the total abandonment of the
observer and the observed and there can be
self-abandonment only when there is total
austerity—not the austerity of the priest
with its harshness, its sanctions, rules and
obedience—not austerity in clothes, ideas,
food and behaviour—but the austerity of
being totally simple which is complete humility.
Then there is no achieving, no ladder to climb;
there is only the first step and the first
step is the everlasting step.
Say you are walking by yourself or with somebody
and you have stopped talking.
You are surrounded by nature and there is
no dog barking, no noise of a car passing
or even the flutter of a bird.
You are completely silent and nature around
you is also wholly silent.
In that state of silence both in the observer
and the observed—when the observer is not
translating what he observes into thought—in
that silence there is a different quality
of beauty.
There is neither nature nor the observer.
There is a state of mind wholly, completely,
alone; it is alone—not in isolation—alone
in stillness and that stillness is beauty.
When you love, is there an observer?
There is an observer only when love is desire
and pleasure.
When desire and pleasure are not associated
with love, then love is intense.
It is, like beauty, something totally new
every day.
As I have said, it has no yesterday and no
tomorrow.
It is only when we see without any preconception,
any image, that we are able to be in direct
contact with anything in life.
All our relationships are really imaginary—that
is, based on an image formed by thought.
If I have an image about you and you have
an image about me, naturally we don't see
each other at all as we actually are.
What we see is the images we have formed about
each other which prevent us from being in
contact, and that is why our relationships
go wrong.
When I say I know you, I mean I knew you yesterday.
I do not know you actually now.
All I know is my image of you.
That image is put together by what you have
said in praise of me or to insult me, what
you have done to me—it is put together by
all the memories I have of you—and your
image of me is put together in the same way,
and it is those images which have relationship
and which prevent us from really communing
with each other.
Two people who have lived together for a long
time have an image of each other which prevents
them from really being in relationship.
If we understand relationship we can cooperate
but cooperation cannot possibly exist through
images, through symbols, through ideological
conceptions.
Only when we understand the true relationship
between each other is there a possibility
of love, and love is denied when we have images.
Therefore it is important to understand, not
intellectually but actually in your daily
life, how you have built images about your
wife, your husband, your neighbour, your child,
your country, your leaders, your politicians,
your gods—you have nothing but images.
These images create the space between you
and what you observe and in that space there
is conflict, so what we are going to find
out now together is whether it is possible
to be free of the space we create, not only
outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space
which divides people in all their relationships.
Now the very attention you give to a problem
is the energy that solves that problem.
When you give your complete attention—I
mean with everything in you—there is no
observer at all.
There is only the state of attention which
is total energy, and that total energy is
the highest form of intelligence.
Naturally that state of mind must be completely
silent and that silence, that stillness, comes
when there is total attention, not disciplined
stillness.
That total silence in which there is neither
the observer nor the thing observed is the
highest form of a religious mind.
But what takes place in that state cannot
be put into words because what is said in
words is not the fact.
To find out for yourself you have to go through
it.
Every problem is related to every other problem
so that if you can solve one problem completely—it
does not matter what it is—you will see
that you are able to meet all other problems
easily and resolve them.
We are talking, of course, of psychological
problems.
We have already seen that a problem exists
only in time, that is when we meet the issue
incompletely.
So not only must we be aware of the nature
and structure of the problem and see it completely,
but meet it as it arises and resolve it immediately
so that it does not take root in the mind.
If one allows a problem to endure for a month
or a day, or even for a few minutes, it distorts
the mind.
So is it possible to meet a problem immediately
without any distortion and be immediately,
completely, free of it and not allow a memory,
a scratch on the mind, to remain?
These memories are the images we carry about
with us and it is these images which meet
this extraordinary thing called life and therefore
there is a contradiction and hence conflict.
Life is very real—life is not an abstraction—and
when you meet it with images there are problems.
Is it possible to meet every issue without
this space-time interval, without the gap
between oneself and the thing of which one
is afraid?
It is possible only when the observer has
no continuity, the observer who is the builder
of the image, the observer who is a collection
of memories and ideas, who is a bundle of
abstractions.
When you look at the stars there is you who
are looking at the stars in the sky; the sky
is flooded with brilliant stars, there is
cool air, and there is you, the observer,
the experiencer, the thinker, you with your
aching heart, you, the centre, creating space.
You will never understand about the space
between yourself and the stars, yourself and
your wife or husband, or friend, because you
have never looked without the image, and that
is why you do not know what beauty is or what
love is.
You talk about it, you write about it, but
you have never known it except perhaps at
rare intervals of total self-abandonment.
So long as there is a centre creating space
around itself there is neither love nor beauty.
When there is no centre and no circumference
then there is love.
And when you love you are beauty.
When you look at a face opposite, you are
looking from a centre and the centre creates
the space between person and person, and that
is why our lives are so empty and callous.
You cannot cultivate love or beauty, nor can
you invent truth, but if you are all the time
aware of what you are doing, you can cultivate
awareness and out of that awareness you will
begin to see the nature of pleasure, desire
and sorrow and the utter loneliness and boredom
of man, and then you will begin to come upon
that thing called 'the space'.
When there is space between you and the object
you are observing you will know there is no
love, and without love, however hard you try
to reform the world or bring about a new social
order or however much you talk about improvements,
you will only create agony.
So it is up to you.
There is no leader, there is no teacher, there
is nobody to tell you what to do.
You are alone in this mad brutal world.
XII
The Observer and the Observed
Please go on with me a little further.
It may be rather complex, rather subtle, but
please go on with it.
Now, when I build an image about you or about
anything, I am able to watch that image, so
there is the image and the observer of the
image.
I see someone, say, with a red shirt on and
my immediate reaction is that I like it or
that I don't like it.
The like or dislike is the result of my culture,
my training, my associations, my inclinations,
my acquired and inherited characteristics.
It is from that centre that I observe and
make my judgement, and thus the observer is
separate from the thing he observes.
But the observer is aware of more than one
image; he creates thousands of images.
But is the observer different from these images?
Isn't he just another image?
He is always adding to and subtracting from
what he is; he is a living thing all the time
weighing, comparing, judging, modifying and
changing as a result of pressures from outside
and within—living in the field of consciousness
which is his own knowledge, influence and
innumerable calculations.
At the same time when you look at the observer,
who is yourself, you see that he is made up
of memories, experiences, accidents, influences,
traditions and infinite varieties of suffering,
all of which are the past.
So the observer is both the past and the present,
and tomorrow is waiting and that is also a
part of him.
He is half alive and half dead and with this
death and life he is looking, with the dead
and living leaf.
And in that state of mind, which is within
the field of time, you (the observer) look
at fear, at jealousy, at war, at the family
(that ugly enclosed entity called the family)
and try to solve the problem of the thing
observed which is the challenge, the new;
you are always translating the new in terms
of the old and therefore you are everlastingly
in conflict.
One image, as the observer, observes dozens
of other images around himself and inside
himself, and he says, 'I like this image,
I'm going to keep it' or 'I don't like that
image so I'll get rid of it', but the observer
himself has been put together by the various
images which have come into being through
reaction to various other images.
So we come to a point where we can say, 'The
observer is also the image, only he has separated
himself and observes.
This observer who has come into being through
various other images thinks himself permanent
and between himself and the images he has
created there is a division, a time interval.
This creates conflict between himself and
the images he believes to be the cause of
his troubles.
So then he says, "I must get rid of this conflict",
but the very desire to get rid of the conflict
creates another image.'
Awareness of all this, which is real meditation,
has revealed that there is a central image
put together by all the other images, and
this central image, the observer, is the censor,
the experiencer, the evaluator, the judge
who wants to conquer or subjugate the other
images or destroy them altogether.
The other images are the result of judgements,
opinions and conclusions by the observer,
and the observer is the result of all the
other images—therefore the observer is the
observed.
So awareness has revealed the different states
of one's mind, has revealed the various images
and the contradiction between the images,
has revealed the resulting conflict and the
despair at not being able to do anything about
it and the various attempts to escape from
it.
All this has been revealed through cautious
hesitant awareness, and then comes the awareness
that the observer is the observed.
It is not a superior entity who becomes aware
of this, it is not a higher self (the superior
entity, the higher self, are merely inventions,
further images); it is the awareness itself
which has revealed that the observer is the
observed.
If you ask yourself a question, who is the
entity who is going to receive the answer?
And who is the entity who is going to enquire?
If the entity is part of consciousness, part
of thought, then it is incapable of finding
out.
What it can find out is only a state of awareness.
But if in that state of awareness there is
still an entity who says, 'I must be aware,
I must practise awareness', that again is
another image.
This awareness that the observer is the observed
is not a process of identification with the
observed.
To identify ourselves with something is fairly
easy.
Most of us identify ourselves with something—with
our family, our husband or wife, our nation—and
that leads to great misery and great wars.
We are considering something entirely different
and we must understand it not verbally but
in our core, right at the root of our being.
In ancient China before an artist began to
paint anything—a tree, for instance—he
would sit down in front of it for days, months,
years, it didn't matter how long, until he
was the tree.
He did not identify himself with the tree
but he was the tree.
This means that there was no space between
him and the tree, no space between the observer
and the observed, no experiencer experiencing
the beauty, the movement, the shadow, the
depth of a leaf, the quality of colour.
He was totally the tree, and in that state
only could he paint.
Any movement on the part of the observer,
if he has not realized that the observer is
the observed, creates only another series
of images and again he is caught in them.
But what takes place when the observer is
aware that the observer is the observed?
Go slowly, go very slowly, because it is a
very complex thing we are going into now.
What takes place?
The observer does not act at all.
The observer has always said, 'I must do something
about these images, I must suppress them or
give them a different shape'; he is always
active in regard to the observed, acting and
reacting passionately or casually, and this
action of like and dislike on the part of
the observer is called positive action—'I
like, therefore I must hold.
I dislike therefore I must get rid of.'
But when the observer realizes that the thing
about which he is acting is himself, then
there is no conflict between himself and the
image.
He is that.
He is not separate from that.
When he was separate, he did, or tried to
do, something about it, but when the observer
realizes that he is that, then there is no
like or dislike and conflict ceases.
For what is he to do?
If something is you, what can you do?
You cannot rebel against it or run away from
it or even accept it.
It is there.
So all action that is the outcome of reaction
to like and dislike has come to an end.
Then you will find that there is an awareness
that has become tremendously alive.
It is not bound to any central issue or to
any image—and from that intensity of awareness
there is a different quality of attention
and therefore the mind—because the mind
is this awareness—has become extraordinarily
sensitive and highly intelligent.
XIII
What is Thinking?
— Ideas and Action — Challenge — Matter
— The Beginning of Thought
Let us now go into the question of what is
thinking, the significance of that thought
which must be exercised with care, logic and
sanity (for our daily work) and that which
has no significance at all.
Unless we know the two kinds, we cannot possibly
understand something much deeper which thought
cannot touch.
So let us try to understand this whole complex
structure of what is thinking, what is memory,
how thought originates, how thought conditions
all our actions; and in understanding all
this we shall perhaps come across something
which thought has never discovered, which
thought cannot open the door to.
Why has thought become so important in all
our lives—thought being ideas, being the
response to the accumulated memories in the
brain cells?
Perhaps many of you have not even asked such
a question before, or if you have you may
have said, 'It's of very little importance—what
is important is emotion.'
But I don't see how you can separate the two.
If thought doesn't give continuity to feeling,
feeling dies very quickly.
So why in our daily lives, in our grinding,
boring, frightened lives, has thought taken
on such inordinate importance?
Ask yourself as I am asking myself—why is
one a slave to thought—cunning, clever,
thought which can organize, which can start
things, which has invented so much, bred so
many wars, created so much fear, so much anxiety,
which is forever making images and chasing
its own tail—thought which has enjoyed the
pleasure of yesterday and given that pleasure
continuity in the present and also in the
future—thought which is always active, chattering,
moving, constructing, taking away, adding,
supposing?
Ideas have become far more important to us
than action—ideas so cleverly expressed
in books by the intellectuals in every field.
The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas
are the more we worship them and the books
that contain them.
We are those books, we are those ideas, so
heavily conditioned are we by them.
We are forever discussing ideas and ideals
and dialectically offering opinions.
Every religion has its dogma, its formula,
its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when
enquiring into the beginning of thought we
are questioning the importance of this whole
edifice of ideas.
We have separated ideas from action because
ideas are always of the past and action is
always the present—that is, living is always
the present.
We are afraid of living and therefore the
past, as ideas, has become so important to
us.
It is really extraordinarily interesting to
watch the operation of one's own thinking,
just to observe how one thinks, where that
reaction we call thinking, springs from.
Obviously from memory.
Is there a beginning to thought at all?
If there is, can we find out its beginning—that
is, the beginning of memory, because if we
had no memory we would have no thought?
We have seen how thought sustains and gives
continuity to a pleasure that we had yesterday
and how thought also sustains the reverse
of pleasure which is fear and pain, so the
experiencer, who is the thinker, is the pleasure
and the pain and also the entity who gives
nourishment to the pleasure and pain.
The thinker separates pleasure from pain.
He doesn't see that in the very demand for
pleasure he is inviting pain and fear.
Thought in human relationships is always demanding
pleasure which it covers by different words
like loyalty, helping, giving, sustaining,
serving.
I wonder why we want to serve?
The petrol station offers good service.
What do those words mean, to help, to give,
to serve?
What is it all about?
Does a flower full of beauty, light and loveliness
say, 'I am giving, helping, serving'?
It is!
And because it is not trying to do anything
it covers the earth.
Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it
distorts everything for its own convenience.
Thought in its demand for pleasure brings
its own bondage.
Thought is the breeder of duality in all our
relationships: there is violence in us which
gives us pleasure but there is also the desire
for peace, the desire to be kind and gentle.
This is what is going on all the time in all
our lives.
Thought not only breeds this duality in us,
this contradiction, but it also accumulates
the innumerable memories we have had of pleasure
and pain, and from these memories it is reborn.
So thought is the past, thought is always
old, as I have already said.
As every challenge is met in terms of the
past—a challenge being always new—our
meeting of the challenge will always be totally
inadequate, hence contradiction, conflict
and all the misery and sorrow we are heir
to.
Our little brain is in conflict whatever it
does.
Whether it aspires, imitates, conforms, suppresses,
sublimates, takes drugs to expand itself—whatever
it does—it is in a state of conflict and
will produce conflict.
Those who think a great deal are very materialistic
because thought is matter.
Thought is matter as much as the floor, the
wall, the telephone, are matter.
Energy functioning in a pattern becomes matter.
There is energy and there is matter.
That is all life is.
We may think thought is not matter but it
is.
Thought is matter as an ideology.
Where there is energy it becomes matter.
Matter and energy are interrelated.
The one cannot exist without the other, and
the more harmony there is between the two,
the more balance, the more active the brain
cells are.
Thought has set up this pattern of pleasure,
pain, fear, and has been functioning inside
it for thousands of years and cannot break
the pattern because it has created it.
A new fact cannot be seen by thought.
It can be understood later by thought, verbally,
but the understanding of a new fact is not
reality to thought.
Thought can never solve any psychological
problem.
However clever, however cunning, however erudite,
whatever the structure thought creates through
science, through an electronic brain, through
compulsion or necessity, thought is never
new and therefore it can never answer any
tremendous question.
The old brain cannot solve the enormous problem
of living.
Thought is crooked because it can invent anything
and see things that are not there.
It can perform the most extraordinary tricks,
and therefore it cannot be depended upon.
But if you understand the whole structure
of how you think, why you think, the words
you use, the way you behave in your daily
life, the way you talk to people, the way
you treat people, the way you walk, the way
you eat—if you are aware of all these things
then your mind will not deceive you, then
there is nothing to be deceived.
The mind then is not something that demands,
that subjugates; it becomes extraordinarily
quiet, pliable, sensitive, alone, and in that
state there is no deception whatsoever.
Have you ever noticed that when you are in
a state of complete attention the observer,
the thinker, the centre, the 'me', comes to
an end?
In that state of attention thought begins
to wither away.
If one wants to see a thing very clearly,
one's mind must be very quiet, without all
the prejudices, the chattering, the dialogue,
the images, the pictures—all that must be
put aside to look.
And it is only in silence that you can observe
the beginning of thought—not when you are
searching, asking questions, waiting for a
reply.
So it is only when you are completely quiet,
right through your being, having put that
question, 'What is the beginning of thought?',
that you will begin to see, out of that silence,
how thought takes shape.
If there is an awareness of how thought begins
then there is no need to control thought.
We spend a great deal of time and waste a
great deal of energy all through our lives,
not only at school, trying to control our
thoughts—'This is a good thought, I must
think about it a lot.
This is an ugly thought, I must suppress it.'
There is a battle going on all the time between
one thought and another, one desire and another,
one pleasure dominating all other pleasures.
But if there is an awareness of the beginning
of thought, then there is no contradiction
in thought.
Now when you hear a statement like 'Thought
is always old' or 'Time is sorrow', thought
begins to translate it and interpret it.
But the translation and interpretation are
based on yesterday's knowledge and experience,
so you will invariably translate according
to your conditioning.
But if you look at those statements and do
not interpret them all but just give them
your complete attention (not concentration)
you will find there is neither the observer
nor the observed, neither the thinker nor
the thought.
Don't say, 'Which began first?'
That is a clever argument which leads nowhere.
You can observe in yourself that as long as
there is no thought—which doesn't mean a
state of amnesia, of blankness—as long as
there is no thought derived from memory, experience
or knowledge, which are all of the past, there
is no thinker at all.
This is not a philosophical or mystical affair.
We are dealing with actual facts, and you
will see, if you have gone this far in the
journey, that you will respond to a challenge,
not with the old brain, but totally anew.
XIV
The Burdens of Yesterday — The Quiet Mind
— Communication — Achievement — Discipline
— Silence — Truth and Reality
In the life we generally lead there is very
little solitude.
Even when we are alone our lives are crowded
by so many influences, so much knowledge,
so many memories of so many experiences, so
much anxiety, misery and conflict that our
minds become duller and duller, more and more
insensitive, functioning in a monotonous routine.
Are we ever alone?
Or are we carrying with us all the burdens
of yesterday?
There is a rather nice story of two monks
walking from one village to another and they
come upon a young girl sitting on the bank
of a river, crying.
And one of the monks goes up to her and says,
'Sister, what are you crying about?'
She says, 'You see that house over there across
the river?
I came over this morning early and had no
trouble wading across but now the river has
swollen and I can't get back.
There is no boat.'
'Oh,' says the monk, 'that is no problem at
all', and he picks her up and carries her
across the river and leaves her on the other
side.
And the two monks go on together.
After a couple of hours, the other monk says,
'Brother, we have taken a vow never to touch
a woman.
What you have done is a terrible sin.
Didn't you have pleasure, a great sensation,
in touching a woman?' and the other monk replies,
'I left her behind two hours ago.
You are still carrying her, aren't you?'
That is what we do.
We carry our burdens all the time; we never
die to them, we never leave them behind.
It is only when we give complete attention
to a problem and solve it immediately—never
carrying it over to the next day, the next
minute—that there is solitude.
Then, even, if we live in a crowded house
or are in a bus, we have solitude.
And that solitude indicates a fresh mind,
an innocent mind.
To have inward solitude and space is very
important because it implies freedom to be,
to go, to function, to fly.
After all, goodness can only flower in space
just as virtue can flower only when there
is freedom.
We may have political freedom but inwardly
we are not free and therefore there is no
space.
No virtue, no quality that is worthwhile,
can function or grow without this vast space
within oneself.
And space and silence are necessary because
it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced,
untrained, not held by infinite varieties
of experience, that it can come upon something
totally new.
One can see directly that it is only when
the mind is silent that there is a possibility
of clarity.
The whole purpose of meditation in the East
is to bring about such a state of mind—that
is, to control thought, which is the same
as constantly repeating a prayer to quieten
the mind and in that state hoping to understand
one's problems.
But unless one lays the foundation, which
is to be free from fear, free from sorrow,
anxiety and all the traps one lays for oneself,
I do not see how it is possible for a mind
to be actually quiet.
This is one of the most difficult things to
communicate.
Communication between us implies, doesn't
it, that not only must you understand the
words I am using but that we must both, you
and I, be intense at the same time, not a
moment later or a moment sooner and capable
of meeting each other on the same level?
And such communication is not possible when
you are interpreting what you are reading
according to your own knowledge, pleasure
or opinions, or when you are making a tremendous
effort to comprehend.
It seems to me that one of the greatest stumbling
blocks in life is this constant struggle to
reach, to achieve, to acquire.
We are trained from childhood to acquire and
to achieve—the very brain cells themselves
create and demand this pattern of achievement
in order to have physical security, but psychological
security is not within the field of achievement.
We demand security in all our relationships,
attitudes and activities but, as we have seen,
there is actually no such thing as security.
To find out for yourself that there is no
form of security in any relationship—to
realize that psychologically there is nothing
permanent—gives a totally different approach
to life.
It is essential, of course, to have outward
security—shelter, clothing, food—but that
outward security is destroyed by the demand
for psychological security.
Space and silence are necessary to go beyond
the limitations of consciousness, but how
can a mind which is so endlessly active in
its self-interest be quiet?
One can discipline it, control it, shape it,
but such torture does not make the mind quiet;
it merely makes it dull.
Obviously the mere pursuit of the ideal of
having a quiet mind is valueless because the
more you force it the more narrow and stagnant
it becomes.
Control in any form, like suppression, produces
only conflict.
So control and outward discipline are not
the way, nor has an undisciplined life any
value.
Most of our lives are outwardly disciplined
by the demands of society, by the family,
by our own suffering, by our own experience,
by conforming to certain ideological or factual
patterns—and that form of discipline is
the most deadening thing.
Discipline must be without control, without
suppression, without any form of fear.
How is this discipline to come about?
It is not discipline first and then freedom;
freedom is at the very beginning, not at the
end.
To understand this freedom, which is the freedom
from the conformity of discipline, is discipline
itself.
The very act of learning is discipline (after
all the root meaning of the word discipline
is to learn), the very act of learning becomes
clarity.
To understand the whole nature and structure
of control, suppression and indulgence demands
attention.
You don't have to impose discipline in order
to study it, but the very act of studying
brings about its own discipline in which there
is no suppression.
In order to deny authority (we are talking
of psychological authority, not the law)—to
deny the authority of all religious organizations,
traditions and experience, one has to see
why one normally obeys—actually study it.
And to study it there must be freedom from
condemnation, justification, opinion or acceptance.
Now we cannot accept authority and yet study
it—that is impossible.
To study the whole psychological structure
of authority within ourselves there must be
freedom.
And when we are studying we are denying the
whole structure, and when we do deny, that
very denial is the light of the mind that
is free from authority.
Negation of everything that has been considered
worthwhile, such as outward discipline, leadership,
idealism, is to study it; then that very act
of studying is not only discipline but the
negative of it, and the very denial is a positive
act.
So we are negating all those things that are
considered important to bring about the quietness
of the mind.
Thus we see it is not control that leads to
quietness.
Nor is the mind quiet when it has an object
which is so absorbing that it gets lost in
that object.
This is like giving a child an interesting
toy; he becomes very quiet, but remove the
toy and he returns to his mischief-making.
We all have our toys which absorb us and we
think we are very quiet but if a man is dedicated
to a certain form of activity, scientific,
literary or whatever it is, the toy merely
absorbs him and he is not really quiet at
all.
The only silence we know is the silence when
noise stops, the silence when thought stops—but
that is not silence.
Silence is something entirely different, like
beauty, like love.
And this silence is not the product of a quiet
mind, it is not the product of the brain cells
which have understood the whole structure
and say, 'For God's sake be quiet'; then the
brain cells themselves produce the silence
and that is not silence.
Nor is silence the outcome of attention in
which the observer is the observed; then there
is no friction, but that is not silence.
You are waiting for me to describe what this
silence is so that you can compare it, interpret
it, carry it away and bury it.
It cannot be described.
What can be described is the known, and the
freedom from the known can come into being
only when there is a dying every day to the
known, to the hurts, the flatteries, to all
the images you have made, to all your experiences—dying
every day so that the brain cells themselves
become fresh, young, innocent.
But that innocency, that freshness, that quality
of tenderness and gentleness, does not produce
love; it is not the quality of beauty or silence.
That silence which is not the silence of the
ending of noise is only a small beginning.
It is like going through a small hole to an
enormous, wide, expansive ocean, to an immeasurable,
timeless state.
But this you cannot understand verbally unless
you have understood the whole structure of
consciousness and the meaning of pleasure,
sorrow and despair, and the brain cells themselves
have become quiet.
Then perhaps you may come upon that mystery
which nobody can reveal to you and nothing
can destroy.
A living mind is a still mind, a living mind
is a mind that has no centre and therefore
no space and time.
Such a mind is limitless and that is the only
truth, that is the only reality.
XV
Experience — Satisfaction — Duality — Meditation
We all want experiences of some kind—the
mystical experience, the religious experience,
the sexual experience, the experience of having
a great deal of money, power, position, domination.
As we grow older we may have finished with
the demands of our physical appetites but
then we demand wider, deeper and more significant
experiences, and we try various means to obtain
them—expanding our consciousness, for instance,
which is quite an art, or taking various kinds
of drugs.
This is an old trick which has existed from
time immemorial—chewing a piece of leaf
or experimenting with the latest chemical
to bring about a temporary alteration in the
structure of the brain cells, a greater sensitivity
and heightened perception which give a semblance
of reality.
This demand for more and more experiences
shows the inward poverty of man.
We think that through experiences we can escape
from ourselves but these experiences are conditioned
by what we are.
If the mind is petty, jealous, anxious, it
may take the very latest form of drug but
it will still see only its own little creation,
its own little projections from its own conditioned
background.
Most of us demand completely satisfying, lasting
experiences which cannot be destroyed by thought.
So behind this demand for experience is the
desire for satisfaction, and the demand for
satisfaction dictates the experience, and
therefore we have not only to understand this
whole business of satisfaction but also the
thing that is experienced.
To have some great satisfaction is a great
pleasure; the more lasting, deep and wide
the experience the more pleasurable it is,
so pleasure dictates the form of experience
we demand, and pleasure is the measure by
which we measure the experience.
Anything measurable is within the limits of
thought and is apt to create illusion.
You can have marvellous experiences and yet
be completely deluded.
You will inevitably see visions according
to your conditioning; you will see Christ
or Buddha or whoever you happen to believe
in, and the greater a believer you are the
stronger will be your visions, the projections
of your own demands and urges.
So if in seeking something fundamental, such
as what is truth, pleasure is the measure,
you have already projected what that experience
will be and therefore it is no longer valid.
What do we mean by experience?
Is there anything new or original in experience?
Experience is a bundle of memories responding
to a challenge and it can respond only according
to its background, and the cleverer you are
at interpreting the experience the more it
responds.
So you have to question not only the experience
of another but your own experience.
If you don't recognize an experience it isn't
an experience at all.
Every experience has already been experienced
or you wouldn't recognize it.
You recognize an experience as being good,
bad, beautiful, holy and so on according to
your conditioning, and therefore the recognition
of an experience must inevitably be old.
When we demand an experience of reality—as
we all do, don't we?—to experience it we
must know it and the moment we recognize it
we have already projected it and therefore
it is not real because it is still within
the field of thought and time.
If thought can think about reality it cannot
be reality.
We cannot recognize a new experience.
It is impossible.
We recognize only something we have already
known and therefore when we say we have had
a new experience it is not new at all.
To seek further experience through expansion
of consciousness, as is being done through
various psychedelic drugs, is still within
the field of consciousness and therefore very
limited.
So we have discovered a fundamental truth,
which is that a mind that is seeking, craving,
for wider and deeper experience is a very
shallow and dull mind because it lives always
with its memories.
Now if we didn't have any experience at all,
what would happen to us?
We depend on experiences, on challenges, to
keep us awake.
If there were no conflicts within ourselves,
no changes, no disturbances, we would all
be fast asleep.
So challenges are necessary for most of us;
we think that without them our minds will
become stupid and heavy, and therefore we
depend on a challenge, an experience, to give
us more excitement, more intensity, to make
our minds sharper.
But in fact this dependence on challenges
and experiences to keep us awake, only makes
our minds duller—it doesn't really keep
us awake at all.
So I ask myself, is it possible to keep awake
totally, not peripherally at a few points
of my being, but totally awake without any
challenge or any experience?
This implies a great sensitivity, both physical
and psychological; it means I have to be free
of all demands, for the moment I demand I
will experience.
And to be free of demand and satisfaction
necessitates investigation into myself and
an understanding of the whole nature of demand.
Demand is born out of duality: 'I am unhappy
and I must be happy'.
In that very demand that I must be happy is
unhappiness.
When one makes an effort to be good, in that
very goodness is its opposite, evil.
Everything affirmed contains its own opposite,
and effort to overcome strengthens that against
which it strives.
When you demand an experience of truth or
reality, that very demand is born out of your
discontent with what is, and therefore the
demand creates the opposite.
And in the opposite there is what has been.
So one must be free of this incessant demand,
otherwise there will be no end to the corridor
of duality.
This means knowing yourself so completely
that the mind is no longer seeking.
Such a mind does not demand experience; it
cannot ask for a challenge or know a challenge;
it does not say, 'I am asleep' or 'I am awake'.
It is completely what it is.
Only the frustrated, narrow, shallow mind,
the conditioned mind, is always seeking the
more.
Is it possible then to live in this world
without the more—without this everlasting
comparison?
Surely it is?
But one has to find out for oneself.
Investigation into this whole question is
meditation.
That word has been used both in the East and
the West in a most unfortunate way.
There are different schools of meditation,
different methods and systems.
There are systems which say, 'Watch the movement
of your big toe, watch it, watch it, watch
it'; there are other systems which advocate
sitting in a certain posture, breathing regularly
or practising awareness.
All this is utterly mechanical.
Another method gives you a certain word and
tells you that if you go on repeating it you
will have some extraordinary transcendental
experience.
This is sheer nonsense.
It is a form of self-hypnosis.
By repeating Amen or Om or Coca-Cola indefinitely
you will obviously have a certain experience
because by repetition the mind becomes quiet.
It is a well known phenomenon which has been
practised for thousands of years in India—Mantra
Yoga it is called.
By repetition you can induce the mind to be
gentle and soft but it is still a petty, shoddy,
little mind.
You might as well put a piece of stick you
have picked up in the garden on the mantelpiece
and give it a flower every day.
In a month you will be worshipping it and
not to put a flower in front of it will become
a sin.
Meditation is not following any system; it
is not constant repetition and imitation.
Meditation is not concentration.
It is one of the favourite gambits of some
teachers of meditation to insist on their
pupils learning concentration—that is, fixing
the mind on one thought and driving out all
other thoughts.
This is a most stupid, ugly thing, which any
schoolboy can do because he is forced to.
It means that all the time you are having
a battle between the insistence that you must
concentrate on the one hand and your mind
on the other which wanders away to all sorts
of other things, whereas you should be attentive
to every movement of the mind wherever it
wanders.
When your mind wanders off it means you are
interested in something else.
Meditation demands an astonishingly alert
mind; meditation is the understanding of the
totality of life in which every form of fragmentation
has ceased.
Meditation is not control of thought, for
when thought is controlled it breeds conflict
in the mind, but when you understand the structure
and origin of thought, which we have already
been into, then thought will not interfere.
That very understanding of the structure of
thinking is its own discipline which is meditation.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought
and of every feeling, never to say it is right
or wrong but just to watch it and move with
it.
In that watching you begin to understand the
whole movement of thought and feeling.
And out of this awareness comes silence.
Silence put together by thought is stagnation,
is dead, but the silence that comes when thought
has understood its own beginning, the nature
of itself, understood how all thought is never
free but always old—this silence is meditation
in which the meditator is entirely absent,
for the mind has emptied itself of the past.
If you have read this book for a whole hour
attentively, that is meditation.
If you have merely taken away a few words
and gathered a few ideas to think about later,
then it is no longer meditation.
Meditation is a state of mind which looks
at everything with complete attention, totally,
not just parts of it.
And no one can teach you how to be attentive.
If any system teaches you how to be attentive,
then you are attentive to the system and that
is not attention.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in
life—perhaps the greatest, and one cannot
possibly learn it from anybody, that is the
beauty of it.
It has no technique and therefore no authority.
When you learn about yourself, watch yourself,
watch the way you walk, how you eat, what
you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy—if
you are aware of all that in yourself, without
any choice, that is part of meditation.
So meditation can take place when you are
sitting in a bus or walking in the woods full
of light and shadows, or listening to the
singing of birds or looking at the face of
your wife or child.
In the understanding of meditation there is
love, and love is not the product of systems,
of habits, of following a method.
Love cannot be cultivated by thought.
Love can perhaps come into being when there
is complete silence, a silence in which the
meditator is entirely absent; and the mind
can be silent only when it understands its
own movement as thought and feeling.
To understand this movement of thought and
feeling there can be no condemnation in observing
it.
To observe in such a way is the discipline,
and that kind of discipline is fluid, free,
not the discipline of conformity.
XVI
Total Revolution — The Religious Mind — Energy
— Passion
What we have been concerned with all through
this book is the bringing about in ourselves,
and therefore in our lives, of a total revolution
that has nothing whatsoever to do with the
structure of society as it is.
Society as it is, is a horrifying thing with
its endless wars of aggression, whether that
aggression be defensive or offensive.
What we need is something totally new—a
revolution, a mutation, in the psyche itself.
The old brain cannot possibly solve the human
problem of relationship.
The old brain is Asiatic, European, American
or African, so what we are asking ourselves
is whether it is possible to bring about a
mutation in the brain cells themselves?
Let us ask ourselves again, now that we have
come to understand ourselves better, is it
possible for a human being living an ordinary
everyday life in this brutal, violent, ruthless
world—a world which is becoming more and
more efficient and therefore more and more
ruthless—is it possible for him to bring
about a revolution not only in his outward
relationships but in the whole field of his
thinking, feeling, acting and reacting?
Every day we see or read of appalling things
happening in the world as the result of violence
in man.
You may say, 'I can't do anything about it',
or, 'How can I influence the world?'
I think you can tremendously influence the
world if in yourself you are not violent,
if you lead actually every day a peaceful
life—a life which is not competitive, ambitious,
envious—a life which does not create enmity.
Small fires can become a blaze.
We have reduced the world to its present state
of chaos by our self-centred activity, by
our prejudices, our hatreds, our nationalism,
and when we say we cannot do anything about
it, we are accepting disorder in ourselves
as inevitable.
We have splintered the world into fragments
and if we ourselves are broken, fragmented,
our relationship with the world will also
be broken.
But if, when we act, we act totally, then
our relationship with the world undergoes
a tremendous revolution.
After all, any movement which is worthwhile,
any action which has any deep significance,
must begin with each one of us.
I must change first; I must see what is the
nature and structure of my relationship with
the world—and in the very seeing is the
doing; therefore I, as a human being living
in the world, bring about a different quality,
and that quality, it seems to me, is the quality
of the religious mind.
The religious mind is something entirely different
from the mind that believes in religion.
You cannot be religious and yet be a Hindu,
a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist.
A religious mind does not seek at all, it
cannot experiment with truth.
Truth is not something dictated by your pleasure
or pain, or by your conditioning as a Hindu
or whatever religion you belong to.
The religious mind is a state of mind in which
there is no fear and therefore no belief whatsoever
but only what is—what actually is.
In the religious mind there is that state
of silence we have already examined which
is not produced by thought but is the outcome
of awareness, which is meditation when the
meditator is entirely absent.
In that silence there is a state of energy
in which there is no conflict.
Energy is action and movement.
All action is movement and all action is energy.
All desire is energy.
All feeling is energy.
All thought is energy.
All living is energy.
All life is energy.
If that energy is allowed to flow without
any contradiction, without any friction, without
any conflict, then that energy is boundless,
endless.
When there is no friction there are no frontiers
to energy.
It is friction which gives energy limitations.
So, having once seen this, why is it that
the human being always brings friction into
energy?
Why does he create friction in this movement
which we call life?
Is pure energy, energy without limitation,
just an idea to him?
Does it have no reality?
We need energy not only to bring about a total
revolution in ourselves but also in order
to investigate, to look, to act.
And as long as there is friction of any kind
in any of our relationships, whether between
husband and wife, between man and man, between
one community and another or one country and
another or one ideology and another—if there
is any inward friction or any outward conflict
in any form, however subtle it may be—there
is a waste of energy.
As long as there is a time interval between
the observer and the observed it creates friction
and therefore there is a waste of energy.
That energy is gathered to its highest point
when the observer is the observed, in which
there is no time interval at all.
Then there will be energy without motive and
it will find its own channel of action because
then the 'I' does not exist.
We need a tremendous amount of energy to understand
the confusion in which we live, and the feeling,
'I must understand', brings about the vitality
to find out.
But finding out, searching, implies time,
and, as we have seen, gradually to uncondition
the mind is not the way.
Time is not the way.
Whether we are old or young it is now that
the whole process of life can be brought into
a different dimension.
Seeking the opposite of what we are is not
the way either, nor is the artificial discipline
imposed by a system, a teacher, a philosopher
or priest—all that is so very childish.
When we realize this, we ask ourselves is
it possible to break through this heavy conditioning
of centuries immediately and not enter into
another conditioning—to be free, so that
the mind can be altogether new, sensitive,
alive, aware, intense, capable?
That is our problem.
There is no other problem because when the
mind is made new it can tackle any problem.
That is the only question we have to ask ourselves.
But we do not ask.
We want to be told.
One of the most curious things in the structure
of our psyche is that we all want to be told
because we are the result of the propaganda
of ten thousand years.
We want to have our thinking confirmed and
corroborated by another, whereas to ask a
question is to ask it of yourself.
What I say has very little value.
You will forget it the moment you shut this
book, or you will remember and repeat certain
phrases, or you will compare what you have
read here with some other book—but you will
not face your own life.
And that is all that matters—your life,
yourself, your pettiness, your shallowness,
your brutality, your violence, your greed,
your ambition, your daily agony and endless
sorrow—that is what you have to understand
and nobody on earth or in heaven is going
to save you from it but yourself.
Seeing everything that goes on in your daily
life, your daily activities—when you pick
up a pen, when you talk, when you go out for
a drive or when you are walking alone in the
woods—can you with one breath, with one
look, know yourself very simply as you are?
When you know yourself as you are, then you
understand the whole structure of man's endeavour,
his deceptions, his hypocrisies, his search.
To do this you must be tremendously honest
with yourself throughout your being.
When you act according to your principles
you are being dishonest because when you act
according to what you think you ought to be
you are not what you are.
It is a brutal thing to have ideals.
If you have any ideals, beliefs or principles
you cannot possibly look at yourself directly.
So can you be completely negative, completely
quiet, neither thinking nor afraid, and yet
be extraordinarily, passionately alive?
That state of mind which is no longer capable
of striving is the true religious mind, and
in that state of mind you may come upon this
thing called truth or reality or bliss or
God or beauty or love.
This thing cannot be invited.
Please understand that very simple fact.
It cannot be invited, it cannot be sought
after, because the mind is too silly, too
small, your emotions are too shoddy, your
way of life too confused for that enormity,
that immense something, to be invited into
your little house, your little corner of living
which has been trampled and spat upon.
You cannot invite it.
To invite it you must know it and you cannot
know it.
It doesn't matter who says it, the moment
he says, 'I know', he does not know.
The moment you say you have found it you have
not found it.
If you say you have experienced it, you have
never experienced it.
Those are all ways of exploiting another man—your
friend or your enemy.
One asks oneself then whether it is possible
to come upon this thing without inviting,
without waiting, without seeking or exploring—just
for it to happen like a cool breeze that comes
in when you leave the window open?
You cannot invite the wind but you must leave
the window open, which doesn't mean that you
are in a state of waiting; that is another
form of deception.
It doesn't mean you must open yourself to
receive; that is another kind of thought.
Haven't you ever asked yourself why it is
that human beings lack this thing?
They beget children, they have sex, tenderness,
a quality of sharing something together in
companionship, in friendship, in fellowship,
but this thing—why is it they haven't got
it?
Haven't you ever wondered lazily on occasion
when you are walking by yourself in a filthy
street or sitting in a bus or are on holiday
by the seaside or walking in a wood with a
lot of birds, trees, streams and wild animals—hasn't
it ever come upon you to ask why it is that
man, who has lived for millions and millions
of years, has not got this thing, this extraordinary
unfading flower?
Why is it that you, as a human being, who
are so capable, so clever, so cunning, so
competitive, who have such marvellous technology,
who go to the skies and under the earth and
beneath the sea, and invent extraordinary
electronic brains—why is it that you haven't
got this one thing which matters?
I don't know whether you have ever seriously
faced this issue of why your heart is empty.
What would your answer be if you put the question
to yourself—your direct answer without any
equivocation or cunningness?
Your answer would be in accordance with your
intensity in asking the question and the urgency
of it.
But you are neither intense nor urgent, and
that is because you haven't got energy, energy
being passion—and you cannot find any truth
without passion—passion with a fury behind
it, passion in which there is no hidden want.
Passion is a rather frightening thing because
if you have passion you don't know where it
will take you.
So is fear perhaps the reason why you have
not got the energy of that passion to find
out for yourself why this quality of love
is missing in you, why there is not this flame
in your heart?
If you have examined your own mind and heart
very closely, you will know why you haven't
got it.
If you are passionate in your discovery to
find why you haven't got it, you will know
it is there.
Through complete negation alone, which is
the highest form of passion, that thing which
is love, comes into being.
Like humility you cannot cultivate love.
Humility comes into being when there is a
total ending of conceit—then you will never
know what it is to be humble.
A man who knows what it is to have humility
is a vain man.
In the same way when you give your mind and
your heart, your nerves, your eyes, your whole
being to find out the way of life, to see
what actually is and go beyond it, and deny
completely, totally, the life you live now—in
that very denial of the ugly, the brutal,
the other comes into being.
And you will never know it either.
A man who knows that he is silent, who knows
that he loves, does not know what love is
or what silence is.
