Jiddu Krishnamurti
If there is an awareness of the beginning of thought, then there is no contradiction in thought.
You have an image of yourself and if you don't live according to that image you are frightened. That is one of the fears, isn't it?
A mind that is habitual is insensitive, a mind that is functioning within the groove of a particular action is dull, unpliable, whereas awareness demands constant pliability, alertness.
To listen to something demands that your mind be quiet—not a mystical quietness, but just quietness. I am telling you something, and to listen to me you have to be quiet, not have all kinds of ideas buzzing in your mind. When you look at a flower, you look at it, not naming it, not classifying it, not saying that it belongs to a certain species—when you do these, you cease to look at it.
The beginning of meditation is self-knowledge, which means being aware of every movement of thought and feeling, knowing all the layers of my consciousness, not only the superficial layers but the hidden, the deeply concealed activities.
The mind that is seeking pleasure in any form is inviting sorrow.
Should not education help the students to be free from fear of every kind - which means, from now on to understand all the problems of life, problems of sex, problems of death, of public opinion, of authority?
It is only the dull, sleepy mind that creates and clings to habit. A mind that is attentive from moment to moment—attentive to what it is saying, attentive to the movement of its hands, of its thoughts, of its feelings—will discover that the formation of further habits has come to an end. This is very important to understand, because as long as the mind is breaking down one habit, and in that very process creating another, it can obviously never be free; and it is only the free mind that can perceive something beyond itself.
Love alone can transform insanity, confusion, and strife. No system, no theory of the left or of the right can bring peace and happiness to man. Where there is love, there is no possessiveness, no envy; there is mercy and compassion, not in theory, but actually to your wife and to your children, to your neighbor and to your servant. When you are respectful to your servant as well as to your guru, then you will know love. Love alone can transform the world. Love alone can bring about mercy and beauty, order and peace. There is love with its blessing when 'you' cease to be.
If one does completely put aside every form of belief, then there is no fear whatsoever.
Awareness is a state in which there is no condemnation, no justification or identification, and therefore there is understanding; in that state of passive, alert awareness there is neither the experiencer nor the experienced.
Love is not possible so long as there is the thinker, the centre of the 'me'.
As long as you remain within that field of the culture, of society, of greed, of envy, of achievement, you are not a free human being. You may think you have free will, but you are just part of this monstrous society, a conditioned human being.
A mind that is always comparing, always measuring, will always engender illusion. If I am measuring myself against you, who are clever, more intelligent, I am struggling to be like you and I am denying myself as I am, and I am creating an illusion.
A mind that is no longer caught in any form of belief, not caught in self-created belief, not seeking, not seeking anything - though it may be a little more arduous - is tremendously alive. Truth is something which is only from moment to moment, like virtue, like beauty, it is something which has no continuity. That which has continuity is the product of time, and time is thought; and time being sorrow, time.
To look, without comparison, one has to understand the mind, because it is the mind that looks, it is the mind that interprets what it seeks giving it a name. The very naming of a thing by the mind becomes the way of pushing it away.
It is only when the mind is free from idea that there can be experiencing. Ideas are not truth; and truth is something that must be experienced directly, from moment to moment. It is not an experience which you want—which is then merely sensation. Only when one can go beyond the bundle of ideas—which is the “me,” which is the mind, which has a partial or complete continuity only when one can go beyond that, when thought is completely silent, is there a state of experiencing. Then one shall know what truth is.
It matters very much the way you talk, the way you walk, the way you look at people. Search your mind, be aware, watch your gestures, watch the meaning of your speech. If you are really very alert, the mind becomes very sensitive, refined, simple. Without that simplicity and refinement, life is very superficial. But if you go beyond that superficiality, then there is the refinement of the self.
Being conditioned, life becomes fragmentary; life, which is the everyday living, the everyday thoughts, the aspirations, the sense of self improvement which is such an ugly thing that is all fragmentary. This conditioning makes each one of us a self-centred human being, fighting for his 'self', for his family, for his nation, for his belief. And so ideological differences arise; you are a Christian and another is a Muslim or a Hindu.
You cannot find truth through anybody else.
When you control or force the mind you are distorting it, aren't you? If I force myself to be kind, that is not kindness. If I force myself to be extremely polite to you that is not politeness.
One is full of theories, words, knowledge of what other people have said; one knows nothing about oneself, and therefore one does not know how to live.
When there is an understanding of fear, there is an understanding of all the problems related to that fear. When there is no fear there is freedom.
The understanding, the way of penetration, how to go very, very deeply, lies through awareness—just to be aware of our thoughts and feelings, without condemnation, without comparison, just to observe.
To understand relationship, there must be a passive awareness - which does not destroy relationship. On the contrary, it makes relationship much more vital, much more significant. Then there is in that relationship a possibility of real affection; there is a warmth, a sense of nearness, which is not mere sentiment or sensation.
To look at fear, to look at the tree, to look at your wife or your friends, to look with eyes that are completely untouched by thought... when you have done it you will say that fear has no reality whatsoever and that it is the product of thought and like all products of thought except technological products it has no validity at all.
The mind is the real cause of our problems, the mind that is working mechanically night and day, consciously and unconsciously. The mind is a most superficial thing and we have spent generations, we spend our whole lives, cultivating the mind, making it more and more clever, more and more subtle, more and more cunning, more and more dishonest and crooked, all of which is apparent in every activity of our life. The very nature of our mind is to be dishonest, crooked, incapable of facing facts, and that is the thing which creates problems; that is the thing which is the problem itself.
Our crisis is not in the world but in consciousness itself. It is not, how to stop a war, or reform universities, or give more work or less work and more pay and so on, on that level there is no answer; any reform gives more complication.
The mind cannot see the new because it is constantly living in the past, the past which is the system. When you say 'I am a Christian', or 'I am a Hindu', it is the past which speaks and cannot see anything new.
We want to run away from our loneliness, with its panicky fears, so we depend on another, we enrich ourselves with companionship, and so on.
Awareness is to understand the activities of the self, the 'I', in its relationship with people, with ideas and with things. That awareness is from moment to moment.
The question is not how to get out of confusion but how to understand it, and in understanding it, perhaps you will find the meaning of all these struggles, these pains, these anxieties, this constant battle within and without.
Most of us, lacking this extraordinary quality of love, slip into 'righteous' habits; and habits can never be righteous. Habit is neither good nor bad, there is only habit, a repetition, an imitation, a conformity to the past and to the tradition which is the outcome of inherited instinct and acquired knowledge.
There is a quietness, a stillness without any effort. That requires understanding of what effort is. And when you understand what effort, control, suppression is understand it not just verbally but really see the truth of it - in that very perception the mind becomes quiet.
Fear must exist as long as there is an urge to be or to become, which is the pursuit of success, with all its frustrations and tortuous contradictions. You can teach concentration, but attention cannot be taught, just as you cannot possibly teach freedom from fear, and in understanding these causes there is the elimination of fear.
Can the mind be fully aware of the fact that it is lonely, insufficient, empty? It is very difficult to be aware, to be fully cognizant of that fact, because we are always trying to escape from it; and we do temporarily escape from it through listening to the radio, and other forms of amusement, through going to church, performing rituals, acquiring knowledge, and through dependence on people and on ideas.
Co-operation is only possible when there is no 'authority'. You know, that is one of the most dangerous things in the world 'authority'. One assumes 'authority' in the name of an ideology, or in the name of God, or Truth, and an individual, or group of people, who have assumed that 'authority', cannot possibly bring about a world order.
A man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth- seeker.
To change the world I have to change myself, break away from my conditioning.
Quietness of the mind comes into being only when you see the whole implication of fear, of authority, of time and the separation between the observer and the observed when you see the whole structure. To see the whole structure, obviously your mind must be quiet; one has to learn how to look - not at the most complex things, but just to look at a tree or a flower, at a cloud - without any movement of thought - just to look.
As long as the mind is breaking down one habit, and in that very process creating another, it can obviously never be free; and it is only the free mind that can perceive something beyond itself.
One has to become aware of what it is that one is dependent upon. One has to find out why one depends on anything at all, psychologically - I don't mean technologically, or depending on the milkman - but psychologically, why do we depend, what is involved in dependence? This question is essential in investigating the dissipation, deterioration and distortion of energy - the energy we need so vitally to understand the many problems.
The old people have not created a beautiful world; they have made a mess of the world. Is it not the function of education, of the educator, to see that you grow in freedom, so that you can understand life, so that you can change things and not just grow dull, weary and die as most people do?
Education being not merely the acquisition of technical knowledge, but the understanding, with sensitivity and intelligence, of the whole problem of living - in which is included death, love, sex, meditation, relationship, and also conflict, anger, brutality and all the rest of it - that is the whole structure of human existence.
Most of us do not know what love means. So, out of that loneliness, out of that insufficiency, out of the privation of life, we are attached to something, attached to the family; we depend upon it. And when the wife or the husband turns away from us, we are jealous. Jealousy is not love; but the love which society acknowledges in the family is made respectable. That is another form of defense, another form of escape from ourselves. So every form of resistance breeds dependence. And a mind that is dependent can never be free.
It is only when one stops seeking, and faces the fact of what actually is and goes beyond, that one will discover it for oneself.
Awareness of the ways of desire is selfknowledge. Self-knowledge is the beginning of meditation.
A mind that is ambitious can never know what it is to sympathize, to have pity, to love. An ambitious mind is a cruel mind—whether spiritually or outwardly or inwardly.
The love of Country, the love of God, the love of fellow man, all that means absolutely nothing, it is just ideas.
We all depend, unfortunately, on something, it may be dependence on a relationship, or on the reading of an intellectual book, or on certain ideas and ideologies we have formulated; or we depend on solitude, isolation, denial, resistance - these obviously distort and dissipate energy.
To go beyond the self-enclosing activities of the mind, you must understand them; and to understand them is to be aware of action in relationship, relationship to things, to people and to ideas. In that relationship, which is the mirror, we begin to see ourselves, without any justification or condemnation; and from that wider and deeper knowledge of the ways of our own mind, it is possible to proceed further; it is possible for the mind to be quiet, to receive that which is real.
To observe means to be critical - not using criticism based on evaluation, on opinions, but to be critically watchful. But if that criticism is personal, hedged by fear or any form of prejudice, it ceases to be truly critical, it becomes merely fragmentary.
For the discovery of truth there is no path...When you want to find something new, when you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not? If your mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an impediment to the new; the difficulty for most of us is that the mind has become so important, so predominantly significant, that it interferes constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that may exist simultaneously with the known. Thus knowledge and learning are impediments for those who would seek, for those who would try to understand that which is timeless.
Only when the mind is completely silent not only on the upper level but fundamentally, right through, on both the superficial and the deeper levels of consciousness - only then can the unknown come into being. The unknown is not something to be experienced by the mind; silence alone can be experienced, nothing but silence.
To understand something totally you must give your complete attention to it.
Love cannot possibly be cultivated; it cannot be put together by thought. Thought is always old and love can never be old. All our relationship is based on thought; thought has created images which come between people, and it is these images that have relationships; so love doesn't exist. Love is always new - yet neither new nor old, something entirely different.
Meditation is the ending of sorrow, the ending of thought which breeds fear and sorrow the fear and sorrow in daily life.
Attention has no motive. When there is a motive for attention, is there attention? If I pay attention in order to acquire something, the acquisition, whether it be good or bad, is not attention it is a distraction. A division. There can be goodness only when there is a totality of attention in which there is no effort to be or not to be.
You have security in belief, in dogmas, but that is merely an idea which can be shattered by argument, by doubt, by questioning, by demanding freedom. When one realizes, not as an idea, that there is no such thing as security, permanency, then authority has no meaning whatsoever.
To escape from that fear—that fear of emptiness, that fear of loneliness, that fear of stagnation, of not arriving, not succeeding, not achieving, not being something, not becoming something—is surely one of the reasons, is it not, why we accept beliefs so eagerly and greedily?
Understanding does not lie through books. You can be students of books for many years, and if you do not know how to live, then all your knowledge withers; it has no substance, no value. Whereas, one moment of full awareness, full conscious understanding, brings about real, lasting peace; not a thing that is static, but that peace which is continually in movement, unlimited.
To see very clearly, without any confusion, the mind must be completely silent. If I want to see you, or understand you, my mind must stop chattering, obviously. in the state of incessant soliloquy, mental talking, chattering, it is not possible to see anything clearly. It is only when the mind is quiet that you do see clearly.
It is only when the mind is silent that we can understand anything. If I want to understand somebody, my mind must be quiet, not chattering, not prejudiced, not having innumerable opinions and experiences, for they prevent the observation and the understanding.
We rather cling to the known than face the unknown, the known being our loneliness, our sorrow, our embittered existence. And as we cannot face that thing called death, we invent all kinds of theories; in the East reincarnation, here resurrection, or whatever it is.
Truth has no tradition, it cannot be handed down.
Life is relationship. To be is to be related and without relationship there is no life. Nothing can exist in isolation; so long as the mind is seeking isolation, there must be fear. Fear is not an abstraction; it exists only in relation to something.
If the mind is not overcrowded, not ceaselessly occupied, then it can listen to that dog barking, to the sound of a train crossing the distant bridge, and also be fully aware of what is being said by a person talking here. Then the mind is a living thing, it is not dead.
Meditation is not something apart from life. When you are driving a car or sitting in a bus, when you are chatting aimlessly, when you are walking by yourself in a wood or watching a butterfly being carried along by the wind—to be choicelessly aware of all that is part of meditation.
Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real.
It is very important from childhood to have good taste, to be exposed to beauty, to good music, to good literature, so that the mind becomes very sensitive, not gross, not heavy. It requires a great deal of subtlety to understand the real depths of life and that is why it matters very much, while we are young, how we are educated, what we eat, what clothes we put on, what kind of house we live in. I assure you that the appreciation and love of beauty matters very much, and that without it the real thing can never be found.
Our mind is seeking permanent happiness, something that will last, that will continue. That very desire to continuity is corruption. But when the mind is free from `the me', there is a happiness, from moment to moment, which comes without your seeking, in which there is no gathering, no storing up no putting by of happiness. It is not something which you can hold on to.
The mind only knows the measurable, the compass of itself, the frontiers, ambitions, hopes, desperation, misery, sorrows, and joys. Such a mind cannot invite freedom. All that it can do is to be aware of itself and not condemn what it sees; not condemn the ugly or cling to the beautiful, but see what is. The mere perception of what is is the beginning of the breaking down of the measurement of the mind, of its frontiers, its patterns - just to see things as they are. Then you will find that the mind can come to that freedom involuntarily, without knowing.
Meditation has nothing to do with achieving a result. It is not a matter of breathing in a particular way, or looking at your nose, or awakening the power to perform certain tricks, or any of the rest of that immature nonsense.
Can I look at the fact of my loneliness, not running away from it, not trying to find an answer for it, or trying to have a motive to say, 'Look, what am I to do with it?' Can you just look at a fact and keep looking at it?
Love has no sorrow; sorrow and love cannot go together.
Relationship is not only between people but between ourselves and nature, between ourselves and property, between ourselves and ideas.
If you can give full attention without being absorbed in something, and without any sense of exclusion, then you will find out what it is to meditate; because in that attention there is no effort, no division, no struggle, no search for a result. So meditation is a process of freeing the mind from systems, and of giving attention without either being absorbed, or making an effort to concentrate.
God is not a thing of the mind, it does not come through self-projection, it comes only when there is virtue, which is freedom. Virtue is facing the fact of what is and the facing of the fact is a state of bliss. Only when the mind is blissful, quiet, without any movement of its own, without the projection of thought, conscious or unconscious - only then does the eternal come into being.
The man who possesses money is the money. The man who identifies himself with property is the property or the house or the furniture. Similarly with ideas or with people; when there is possessiveness, there is no relationship. Most of us possess because we have nothing else if we do not possess. We are empty shells if we do not possess, if we do not fill our life with furniture, with music, with knowledge, with this or that.
You have to be educated so as to meet all these problems rightly. That is what education is - not merely to pass a few examinations, some silly studies, some subjects in which you are not at all interested. Proper education is to help the student to meet this life, so that he understands it, he won't succumb, he won't be crushed under it as most of us are.
To observe clearly there must be no image coming in between the observer and the thing observed. When you look at a tree, can you look at it without the knowledge of that tree in botanical terms, or the knowledge of your pleasure or desire concerning it? Can you look at it so completely that the space between you - the observer - and the thing observed disappears? That doesn't mean that you become the tree! But when that space disappears, there is the cessation of the observer, and only the thing which is observed remains. In that observation there is perception, seeing the thing with extraordinary vitality, its colour, its shape, the beauty of the leaf or trunk; when there is not the centre of the `me' who is observing, you are intimately in contact with that which you observe.
The quiet mind is not possible through the use of any drug or through the repetition of words; you can reduce it to dullness, but it is not quiet.
As long as one is violent, aggressive, you contribute to the rest of the world, to the rest of mankind's aggression, violence. This is natural.
Self-knowledge is to know the total process of oneself, the ways of one's own thinking, feeling, and action.
I must love the very thing I am studying. If you want to understand a child, you must love and not condemn him. You must play with him, watch his movements, his idiosyncrasies, his ways of behavior; but if you merely condemn, resist or blame him, there is no comprehension of the child. Similarly, to understand what is, one must observe what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment. That is the actual.
Love implies great freedom—not to do what you like. But love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centered.
It is one of the most difficult things to listen—to listen to the communist, to the socialist, to the congressman, to the capitalist, to anybody, to your wife, to your children, to your neighbor, to the bus conductor, to the bird—just to listen. It is only when you listen without the idea, without thought, that you are directly in contact; and being in contact, you will understand whether what he is saying is true or false; you do not have to discuss.
What matters is to be totally conscious of habit; for then, as you will see for yourself there is no longer the formation of habit. To resist habit, to fight it, to deny it, only gives continuity to habit. When you fight a particular habit you give life to that habit, and then the very fighting of it becomes a further habit. But if you are simply aware of the whole structure of habit without resistance, then you will find there is freedom from habit, and in that freedom a new thing takes place.
What is important is not concentration, but the love of the thing; the very love of the thing for itself brings an astonishing energy, energy which is attention; without that, your learning, your looking, has no meaning; and you merely pass examinations or become glorified clerks.
What is important is not what is the goal of life, but to understand the confusion in which one is, the misery, the tears and other things of life. We do not understand the confusion but want to get rid of it. The real thing is here, not there. A man who is concerned with the understanding of all this confusion does not ask what is the purpose of life. He is concerned with the clearing up of the confusion, clearing up of the sorrow in which he is caught. When that is cleared, he does not ask a question like this.
A man who is seeking truth must invite disturbances, tribulations because it is only in moments of crisis that there is alertness, watchfulness, action. Then only that which is is discovered and understood.
If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.
To be a theist or an atheist, to me, are both absurd. If you knew what truth is, what God is, you would neither be a theist nor an atheist, because in that awareness belief is unnecessary. It is the man who is not aware, who only hopes and supposes, that looks to belief or to disbelief, to support him, and to lead him to act in a particular way.
Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action.
Without meditation, there is no self-knowledge; without self-knowledge, there is no meditation. So, you must begin to know what you are. You cannot go far without beginning near, without understanding your daily process of thought, feeling , and action.
To avoid suffering we cultivate detachment. Being forewarned that attachment sooner or later entails sorrow, we want to become detached. Attachment is gratifying, but perceiving the pain in it, we want to be gratified in another manner, through detachment. Detachment is the same as attachment as long as it yields gratification. So what we are really seeking is gratification, we crave to be satisfied by whatever means.
Do not force yourself to concentrate, but be interested, love the thing that you are doing, for itself. When you paint, paint for itself; when you look at a dance, enjoy it, look at it, see the beauty of it, so that your mind is not broken up into different parts. so that the mind is a whole thing, a complete thing, so that there is no fractional looking with a mind that is broken up in different parts
and which says `I must look.
Fear is obviously one of the barriers to intelligence, is it not? And surely it is the very essence of education to help the student - you and me - to be aware of and to understand the causes of fear, so that from childhood onwards he can live free of fear.
Most of us desire some kind of power; it may be over the son, or the wife or the husband; or, it may be over a group of people; or it may be in the name of an ideal or in the name of a country. This power, this desire to have power over others, is always operating - even over a servant, to order him about, to get angry with him, to push him around. Does not this desire for power spring from a sense of loneliness?
To be aware of every thought, to know from what source it springs and what is its intention — that is meditation. And to know the whole content of one thought reveals the whole process of the mind.
When the mind goes beyond the thought of “the me,” the experiencer, the observer, the thinker, then there is a possibility of a happiness that is incorruptible.
To respect another requires affection not fear.
If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems—if you really loved it—you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. To want to be famous is tawdry, trivial, stupid, it has no meaning; but , because we don’t love what we are doing, we want to enrich ourselves with fame.
It is extremely difficult to be aware of dullness, to be aware of greed, to be aware of ill will, ambition and so on. The very fact of being aware of what is is truth. It is truth that liberates, not your striving to be free. Thus reality is not far but we place it far away because we try to use it as a means of self-continuity. It is here, now, in the immediate.
Do not suppress but try to look at the conflict, try to understand it. You cannot understand it if you want to push it aside, if you want to run away. You have to put it, as it were, on a table, and look, and then out of that watching, comes understanding.
More important than communication is communion. Communication is verbal and communion is nonverbal. Two people who know each other very well can, without saying any words, understand each other completely, immediately, because they have established a certain form of communication between themselves.
Without understanding beauty and love and meditation - the real thing I mean - then life as it is, lived as it is, with its sorrow, pain, conflict, has very little meaning. You may take drugs to give it meaning, you may cling to your sexual appetites to give life a meaning, but dependence on any drug on any thought, or any demand of pleasure, only brings about more conflict, more misery, more confusion.
You know what fear is? Each one has his own particular form of fear - not one, but multiple fears. A mind that has any form of fear cannot obviously have the quality of love, sympathy, tenderness. Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs. If you see that fear is destructive, then how do you proceed to wipe the mind clean?
You cannot meditate if you are ambitious—you may play with the idea of meditation. If your mind is authority-ridden, bound by tradition, accepting, following, you will never know what it is to meditate on this extraordinary beauty.
A mind that is tortured, frustrated, shaped by environment, conforming to the social morality, must in itself be confused; and a confused mind cannot discover what is true.
The change must begin with the human being, not with the outward structure. The human being is confused, the human being is conditioned. He believes, and therefore there is a contradiction in himself. He is really, deeply confused and if he wants to change the social structure, the change from confusion only breeds more confusion. Whereas, if he could bring about clarity within himself, and from that clarity act, then such an action is really a deep psychological revolution. That revolution is absolutely necessary.
There is understanding only when there is no choice, no judgment, but merely observation. To die each day means not to carry over from yesterday all your ambitions, grievances, your memories of fulfilment, your grudges, your hatred.
We are responsible not only to the world but also responsible for ourselves, in what we do, what we think, how we act, how we feel.
In our search for kno wledge, in our acquisitive desires, we are losing love, we are blunting the feeling for beauty, the sensitivity to cruelty; we are becoming more and more specialized and less and less integrated.
To understand these problems one must have a very alert mind; not a sloppy mind, not a complex, erudite learned mind, but rather a mind that is willing to see clearly, willing to examine, explore - not in terms of its own idiosyncrasies, nor inclination, nor temperament, but rather to examine things as they are; and to examine things as they are one has to have attention, care.
We need a great deal of energy; to look at a tree without this space, without this division, between the seer and the seen, you need great energy of attention and also you need a sense of freedom. Freedom and attention must go together, which is love and that quality of attention in which the observer is not.
If we can understand the process of life without condemning, without saying it is right or wrong, then, I think, there comes a creative happiness which is not “yours” or “mine.” That creative happiness is like sunshine. If you want to keep the sunshine to yourself, it is no longer the clear, warm life- giving sun. Similarly, if you want happiness because you are suffering, or because you have lost somebody, or because you have not been successful, then that is merely a reaction. But when the mind can go beyond, then there is
a happiness that is not of the mind.
It is important to understand what this self-knowing is, just to be aware, without any choice, of the “me” which has its source in a bundle of memories—just to be conscious of it without interpretation, merely to observe the movement of the mind.
Unless one lays the foundation - which is to be free from fear, free from sorrow, anxiety, and all the traps that consciously or unconsciously one lays for oneself - I do not see how it is possible for a mind to be actually quiet.
We talk about love, and we are full of ambition, competitiveness, ruthless efficiency. So there is contradiction. The action which springs from that contradiction only brings about frustration and further contradiction.
Simplicity is not to be found; it does not lie as a choice between the essential and the non-essential. It comes into being only when the self is not; when the mind is not caught in speculations, conclusions, beliefs, ideations. Such a free mind only can find truth. Such a mind alone can receive that which is immeasurable, which is unnameable; and that is simplicity.
If I don't understand the ways of my thoughts, of my feelings, if I don't understand my motives, my desires, my demands, my pursuit of patterns of action, which are ideas - if I do not know myself, there is no foundation for thinking; the thinker who merely asks, prays, or excludes, without understanding himself, must inevitably end in confusion, in illusion.
Only when the mind is completely free from yesterday, and is therefore not using the present as a means to the future, is it capable of receiving the eternal.
What is the root cause of this conflict and contradiction? Ask this question of yourself. Do not try to put into words an explanation, but simply enquire non-verbally, if you can, into the basis of this contradiction and division, this strife and conflict.
Please watch all the things that are taking place about you, how the chicken fight each other, how the strong bulldog dominates everything else. You will find that the same spirit of domination, anger, hatred and animosity is in each one of us. To dispel this, we have only to be aware of it and not to consider it as wrong or right.
To live each moment now without the burden of the past or of the present, without that crippling memory created by the lack of understanding, mind must ever meet things anew. It is fatal to meet life with the burden of certainty, with the conceit of knowledge, because, after all, knowledge is merely a thing of the past. So when you come to that life with a freshness, then you will know what it is to live without conflict, without this continual straining effort.
Can you live without an image. Of course one can. But that demands attention. Attention at the moment when the image is being formed, when somebody insults you, at that moment to be completely attentive. Or at the moment when somebody flatters you, to be totally aware. Then you will find no image is formed, which means there is no recording of that insult or flattery on the brain.
One can see the totality of something only when thought doesn't interfere, then one sees not verbally and not intellectually but factually, as I see the fact of this microphone, without any like or dislike, there it is.
The problem is, how to see clearly so that there is this flowering of love. You know, without love and beauty there is no truth, there is no god, there is only a morality which becomes immoral.
There is only one central issue, crisis, or challenge for man, which is, that he must be completely free. As long as the mind is holding on to a structure, a method, a system, there is no freedom.
Surely truth, or that Godhead of understanding, is not to be found by clinging either to family or tradition or habit. It is to be found only when you are completely naked, stripped of your longings, hopes, securities; and in that direct simplicity there is the richness of life.
To find out what absolute truth is, thought must be understood - the whole movement and the nature of thought must be gone into, observed. And it has its relative place, and so the mind then becomes absolutely still and perhaps out of that, in that stillness, truth is perceived, which is not to be measured by words.
To find out the purpose of life, the mind must be free of measurement; then only can it find out - otherwise, you are merely projecting your own want. This is not mere intellection, and if you go into it deeply, you will see its significance. After all, it is according to my prejudice, to my want, to my desire, to my predilection, that I decide what the purpose of life is to be. So, my desire creates the purpose. Surely, that is not the purpose of life.
Our concern in meditation is to know oneself, not only superficially, but the whole content of the inner, hidden consciousness. Without knowing all that and being free of its conditioning, you cannot possibly go beyond the mind’s limits. That is why the thought process must cease, and for this cessation there must be knowledge of oneself. Therefore meditation is the beginning of wisdom, which is the understanding of one’s own mind and heart.
The mind has been conditioned through centuries upon centuries in its demand for security and safety; it has built both physiologically and psychologically this self-centred activity and this activity pervades the daily life, as my family, my job, my possessions, and that produces this emptiness, this isolation.
In the flame of selfawareness, of self-knowledge, the causes of conflict are discovered and consumed.
Conflict is not only a waste of energy but it also makes the mind dull, heavy, stupid. Such a mind caught in habit is insensitive; from this insensitivity, from this dullness, it will not accept anything new because there is fear.
The eternal or the timeless is now and the now cannot be understood by a man who is caught in the net of time. To free thought from time demands action, but the mind is lazy, it is slothful, and therefore ever creates other hindrances. It is only possible by right meditation.
A man who would meditate must understand himself. Without knowing yourself, you cannot go far. However much you may attempt to go far, you can go only so far as your own projection; and your own projection is very near, is very close, and does not lead you anywhere.
The religious mind is entirely different from the mind that believes in religion. The religious mind is psychologically free from the culture of society; it is also free from any form of belief, any form of demand for experience or self-expression.
One of our greatest problems is sorrow. We have accepted sorrow as a way of life, just as we have accepted war as a way of life war not only on the battlefield but war within ourselves the everlasting struggle, both inwardly and outwardly. We have accepted sorrow as a way of life, yet we have never asked if it is at all possible to end sorrow, completely.
The source of violence is the “me”, the ego, the self, which expresses itself in so many ways—in division, in trying to become or be somebody—which divides itself as the “me” and the “not me”, as the unconscious and the conscious; the “me” that identifies with the family or not with the family, with the community or not with the community and so on. It is like a stone dropped in a lake; the waves spread and spread, at the centre is the “me”. As long as the “me” survives in any form, very subtly or grossly, there must be violence.
Without love we are destroying each other, we are living in fragments, one fragment in aggression with the other, one in revolt against the other.
To receive truth, to know its beauty, to know its joy, there must be instant receptivity, unclouded by theories, fears and answers.
Freedom is a state of mind in which love is and it is not the opposite of hate, or jealousy, or aggression. When we are dealing with opposites and trying to be free from one and achieve the other then the other has its root in its own opposite right? Through conflict freedom cannot possibly be understood.
As long as the mind is not sensitive, not alert and quick, it is not capable of living with the actuality of life, which is so fluid, so constantly undergoing change. Psychologically, inwardly, we refuse to follow the movement of life because our roots are deep in habit and tradition, in obedience to what has been told to us, in acceptance. And it seems to me that it is very important to understand this and to break away from it, for I do not see how man can continue to live without love.
Tranquillity comes only when I understand the whole process of myself the various entities in conflict with each other which compose the “me.” As that is an arduous task, we turn to others to learn various tricks which we call meditation. The tricks of the mind are not meditation. Meditation is the beginning of self-knowledge, and without meditation, there is no self-knowledge.
One cannot understand anything intellectually - you may hear words, give explanations, find out the cause, but that is not understanding. Understanding - as one observes oneself - takes place only when the mind, including the brain, is totally attentive. And one is not attentive when one is interpreting and translating what one sees according to one's background.
Success leads to fame, but that is an empty thing, is it not? It is like ashes. Every politician is known and it is his business to be known and therefore he is not great. Greatness is to be unknown, inwardly and outwardly to be as nothing; and that requires great penetration, great understanding, great affection.
It is this self-protective cunning that makes for attachment; and when attachment causes pain, it is this same cunning that seeks detachment and finds pleasure in the pride and vanity of renunciation. The understanding of the ways of cunning, the ways of the self, is the beginning of intelligence.
It is raining and you can hear the pattern of the drops. You can hear it with your ears, or you can hear it out of that deep silence. If you hear it with complete silence of the mind, then the beauty of it is such that cannot be put into words or onto canvas, because that beauty is something beyond self-expression.
Meditation is the beginning of self-knowledge and without self-knowledge there is no meditation.
Love is not habit, love cannot be cultivated habits can be cultivated and for most of us love is something so far away that we have never known the quality of it, we do not even know the nature of it. To come upon love there must be freedom; The mind is completely still, within its own freedom, then there is the 'impossible' which is love.
Truth can only come to the mind that is empty of the known. It comes in a state in which the known is absent, not functioning. The mind is the warehouse of the known, the residue of the known; for the mind to be in that state in which the unknown comes into being, it must be aware of itself, of its previous experiences, the conscious as well as the unconscious, of its responses, reactions, and structure.
To find out the true meaning of happiness, we must explore the river of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not an end in itself. Is there a source to a stream? Every drop of water from the beginning to the end makes the river. To imagine that we will find happiness at the source is to be mistaken. It is to be found where you are on the river of self-knowledge.
When you are controlled by another through money, through position, through status, the feeling that you are an individual, a human being, a single unit, is completely denied, destroyed.
Religion is not a matter of dogmas and beliefs, of rituals and superstitions; nor is it the cultivation of personal salvation, which is a self-centred activity. Religion is the total way of life; it is the understanding of truth, which is not a projection of the mind.
To discover God or truth—and I say such a thing does exist, I have
realized it—to recognize that, to realize that, mind must be free of all the hindrances which have been created throughout the ages, based on self-protection and security. You cannot be free of security by merely saying that you are free. To penetrate the walls of these hindrances, you need to have a great deal of intelligence, not mere intellect. Intelligence, to me, is mind and heart in full harmony; and then you will find out for yourself, without asking anyone, what that reality is.
Through observation you become a light to yourself.
All stimulation, whether of the church, of the drink or drug, or the speaker, will inevitably bring about a dependence and that dependence prevents one from having the vital energy to see clearly for oneself. Any form of dependence on any stimulation lessens the quickness and vitality of the mind.
There is an art of seeing things as they are, without naming, without being caught in the network of words, the whole operation of thinking interfering with perception.
If you understand fear—which can only take place when you come directly in contact with it, as you are in contact with hunger, as you are directly in contact when you are threatened with losing your job—then you do something; only then will you find that all fear ceases—we mean all fear, not fear of this kind or of that kind.
By meditation I mean to understand the operations of the old brain, to watch it, to know how it reacts, what its responses are, its tendencies, its demands, its aggressive pursuits—to know the whole of that, the unconscious as well as the conscious part of it. When you know it, when there is an awareness of it, without controlling it, without directing it, without saying, “This is good; this is bad; I’ll keep this; I won’t keep that,”—when you see the total movement of the old mind, when you see it totally, then it becomes quiet.
If you have followed this inquiry into what is meditation, and have understood the whole process of thinking, you will find that the mind is completely still. In that total stillness of the mind, there is no watcher, no observer, and therefore no experiencer at all; there is no entity who is gathering experience, which is the activity of a self-centered mind.
Can we look at ourselves without beliefs? If we remove these beliefs, the many beliefs that one has, is there anything left to look at? If we have no beliefs with which the mind has identified itself, then the mind, without identification, is capable of looking at itself as it is—and then, surely there is the beginning of the understand of oneself.
Any explanation is of little significance. All explanations are escapes, avoiding the reality of what is. This is the only thing that matters. The what is can be totally transformed with the energy that is wasted in explanations and in searching out the causes. Love is not in time nor in analysis, in regrets and recriminations. It is there when desire for money, position and the cunning deceit of the self are not.
A man who seeks to avoid the world is still related; he is running away from conflict and not understanding it. In relationship, which is activity between you and another, the ways of the self are revealed.
There is no freedom through slavery to an idea, or in acceptance of a certain theology, or in conforming to a certain pattern set by society or by myself.
Awareness means to observe the whole movement of like and dislike, of your suppressions. If you are old-fashioned you don't talk about sex, you suppress it, but you go on thinking about it - one has to be aware of all that.
When you see something very clearly, then you do not choose.
Self-knowledge is the beginning of meditation - not the knowledge that you pick up from my books, from authorities, from gurus, but the knowledge that comes into being through self-inquiry, which is self-awareness.
There is bliss which is not pleasure; when the mind is in that state of meditation, there is immense bliss; then the everyday living, with its contradictions, its brutalities and violence, has no place. But one must work very hard, every day, to lay the foundation; that is all that matters, nothing else. Out of that silence which is the very nature of a meditative mind may come love and beauty.
I feel very strongly that each one of us, being responsible for the chaos, misery and sorrow in the world, that each one of us as a human being must bring about a radical revolution in himself. Because each in himself is both the society and the individual, he is both violence and peace, he is this strange mixture of pleasure and hate and fear, aggressiveness, domination and gentleness; sometimes one predominates over the other and there is a great deal of unbalance in all of us.
It is only when the mind is empty that there is a possibility of creation; but I do not mean this superficial emptiness which most of us have. Most of us are superficially empty, and it shows itself through the desire for distraction. We want to be amused, so we turn to books, to the radio, we run to lectures, to authorities; the mind is everlastingly filling itself. I am not talking of that emptiness which is thoughtlessness. On the contrary, I am talking of the emptiness which comes through extraordinary thoughtfulness, when the mind sees its own power of creating illusion and goes beyond.
Things, relationship, and ideas are so transparently impermanent, we are ever made unhappy by them...Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency. So sorrow becomes our constant companion and overcoming it our problem.
Most of us thrive on self-pity, blaming others, and this occupation doesn't bring clarity.
Love is different from emotion and feeling. Love cannot be brought into the field of thought; whereas feeling and emotion can be brought. Love is a flame without smoke, ever fresh, creative, joyous.
Meditation is the constant understanding of the way of life, every minute, the mind being extraordinarily alive, alert, not burdened by any fear, any hope, any ideology, any sorrow.
When you look at a star or at a bird, or at a tree, find out what is happening to you as you look, and that will reveal a great deal about yourself.
If you can give full attention without being absorbed in something, and without any sense of exclusion, then you will find out what it is to meditate; because in that attention there is no effort, no division, no struggle, no search for a result. So meditation is a process of freeing the mind from systems, and of giving attention without either being absorbed, or making an effort to concentrate.
When there is no image about the tree, you are really observing what it actually is - which is quite a different state. In the same way if you have no image about another human being, the relationship is entirely different. Which means that there is the absence of thought, of the 'me', of the Memory, (which is actually of the past). Therefore you are facing something which is immediate - and because one has eliminated conflict, one has tremendous energy.
The object of attachment offers me the means of escape from my own emptiness. Attachment is escape, and it is escape that strengthens conditioning.
To observe my relationship with my wife or husband, I must observe without any previous, accumulated incidents, knowledge, all that.
We seek happiness through things, through relationship, through thoughts, ideas. So things, relationship, and ideas become all-important and not happiness. When we seek happiness through something, then the thing becomes of greater value than happiness itself.
If you can understand the confusion, the struggle, the misery, the deep longings that you have, then in that very understanding, you will find something about which you do not have to ask another.
Meditation is the way of life, it is not an escape from life.
All that you can do is to keep the room in order; which is to be virtuous, but not the virtuousness or morality of any society for what it will bring, but to be virtuous for itself, to be sane, rational, orderly. Then perhaps, if you're lucky, the window will open and the breezes will come in - and they may not. It depends on the state of your mind, and that state of mind can only be under stood by yourself, watching it yet never trying to shape it, which means watching it without any choice. Out of this choiceless awareness perhaps the door will open and you will know what that dimension is in which there is no conflict, no time, something which can never be put into words.
The function of relationship is to reveal the state of one’s whole being. Relationship is a process of self-revelation, of self-knowledge. This self- revelation is painful, demanding constant adjustment, pliability of thought-emotion. It is a painful struggle, with periods of enlightened peace.
All the gadgets, jets, the refrigerators, the rockets, the exploration into the atom, space, they are all the result of knowledge, thought. All these are not creation; invention is not creation; capacity is not creation; thought can never be creative because thought is always conditioned and can never be free. It is only that energy which is not the product of thought that is creative.
Our acquisitions are a means of covering up our own emptiness; our minds are like hollow drums, beaten upon by every passing hand and making a lot of noise. This is our life, the conflict of neversatisfying escapes and mounting misery. It is strange how we are never alone, never strictly alone. We are always with something with a problem, with a book, with a person; and when we are alone, our thoughts are with us. To be alone, naked, is essential. All escapes, all gatherings, all effort to be or not to be, must cease; and then only is there the aloneness that can receive the alone, the measureless.
The understanding of relationship comes only when this process of self-criticism is understood and the mind is quiet.
Relationship is a mirror in which I see myself as I am.
One can see directly that it is only when the mind is very quiet that there is a possibility of clarity; and the whole purpose of meditation in the East is to bring about such a state of mind.
Unless we understand this problem of opposites with its conflicts and miseries, our efforts will be in vain. Through self -awareness, craving to become, the cause of conflict, must be observed and understood; but understanding ceases if there is identification, if there is acceptance or denial or comparison. With kindly dispassion, craving must be deeply understood and so transcended.
Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still? Then you hear everything, don’t you? You hear the far off noises as well as those that are nearer and those that are very close by, the immediate sounds—which means really that you are listening to everything. Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel. If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change which comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.
Creative emptiness is not possible so long as there is the thinker who is waiting, watching, observing in order to gather experience, in order to strengthen himself.
Religions throughout the world have used fear as a means of controlling man. Have they not? They say that if you do not do certain things in this life, you will pay for it in the next life. Though all religions preach love, though they preach brotherhood, though they talk about the unity of man, they all subtly or very brutally, grossly, maintain this sense of fear.
How difficult it is to look at anything beautiful without the mind interfering, without the mind with its memories saying `This is not such a good night as the other night. It is not as beautiful as it was last year,' `It is too cold I cannot look.' The mind never looks without words, without comparison. It is only when you can look without comparison or without words, that the stars and the earth
and the trees and the moon and the light on the water have an extraordinary significance. In that, there is great beauty.
Relationship has very little significance when we are merely seeking mutual gratification but becomes extraordinarily significant when it is a means of self-revelation and self-knowledge.
Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?
A mind that is merely inquiring through thought, through reason, through logic, moving from conclusion to conclusion - surely such a mind can never find out what is true, and whether there is a reality.
Transformation in the mind itself is the true revolution. All other revolutions are reactions, even though they use the word freedom and promise Utopia, the heavens, everything. There is only true revolution in the quality of the mind.
Intelligence is not conceptual thinking, nor its expression through words; but intelligence is this awareness of seeing what 'actually is', and seeing my relationship to the world, which I as a human being have created; to actually see it in my life: my activity, my thought, my conservatism, my fears, my love of the new which becomes acceptance, and so on (which is my daily life).
To understand relationship, there must be a passive awareness, which does not destroy relationship. On the contrary, it makes relationship much more vital, much more significant. Then there is in that relationship a possibility of real affection; there is a warmth, a sense of nearness, which is not mere sentiment or sensation.
God is something entirely, totally, unfathomable by us, and that comes into being when our minds are quiet, when our minds are not projecting, struggling. When the mind is still, then perhaps we shall know what God is.
A still mind is not seeking experience of any kind. And if it is not seeking and therefore is completely still, without any movement from the past and therefore free from the known, then you will find, if you have gone that far, that there is a movement of the unknown which is not recognized, which is not translatable, which cannot be put into words—then you will find that there is a movement which is of the immense. That movement is of the timeless because in that there is no time, nor is there space, nor something in which to experience, nor something to gain, to achieve. Such a mind knows what is creation—not the creation of the painter, the poet, the verbalizer; but that creation which has no motive, which has no expression. That creation is love and death.
To be aware of the whole content of relationship is action, and from that action there is a possibility of true relationship, a possibility of discovering its great depth, its great significance and of knowing what love is.
When one realizes that this process of analysis does not lead anywhere, discovers for oneself that this analytical process has no end and has no meaning, then perhaps one will have a mind that begins totally to be aware of the whole problem.
When the mind understands the futility, the utter uselessness of trying to fill its own emptiness through dependence, through knowledge, through belief, then it is capable of looking at it without fear.
It is observing and watching the facts of that life looking at it; and out of this observation the mind becomes highly intelligent. It is this intelligence that is going to answer non-fragmentarily, as an action which will be right under all circumstances. It is this intelligence that is going to act, not a formula, of what action should be.
You watch your own mind and you will see that the moment the mind ceases to think in terms of becoming something, there is a cessation of action which is not stagnation; it is a state of total attention, which is goodness.
God or truth cannot be thought about. If you think about it, it is not truth. Truth cannot be sought: it comes to you. You can go only after what is known. When the mind is not tortured by the known, by the effects of the known, then only can truth reveal itself. Truth is in every leaf, in every tear; it is to be known from moment to moment. No one can lead you to truth; and if anyone leads you, it can only be to the known
The image you have about a person, the image you have about your politicians, the prime minister, your god, your wife, your children—that image is being looked at. And that image has been created through your relationship, or through your fears, or through your hopes. The sexual and other pleasures you have had with your wife, your husband, the anger, the flattery, the comfort, and all the things that your family life brings—a deadly life it is—have created an image about your wife or husband. With that image you look.
If you seek security in relationship, it becomes an investment in comfort, in illusion and the greatness of relationship is its very insecurity. By seeking security in relationship you are hindering its function, which brings its own peculiar actions and misfortunes.
It is only the perception of truth that liberates; and to see, to receive truth, there must be the focusing of attention, which means that you must give your heart and mind to see and to understand.
Mind is memory, at whatever level, by whatever name you call it; mind is the product of the past, it is founded on the past, which is memory, a conditioned state.
A mind that is caught in tradition, that is merely the instrument of memory, living in the pattern of many yesterdays, is surely incapable of finding out what is true. And without the perfume of that reality, life becomes merely mechanical.
Observing is meditation, it is not that in order to observe you must meditate. To observe is one of the most, difficult things. To observe a tree, for example, is very difficult, and that is because you have ideas, images, about that tree, and these ideas - botanical knowledge - prevent you from looking at that tree. To observe your wife or your husband is even more difficult, again because you have an image about your wife and she has an image about you, and the relationship is between those two images.
In this quality of awareness there is no judgment value at all. The moment I'm aware in that way, all values, judgments come to an end.
The images have been put together by thought, from various forms of insults, pleasures, pains, all the rest of it, between human beings. The relationship is only between the images. When there are no images at all, then there is real relationship - then you are directly in contact.
Can I be a light that never goes out? To find that out I must go deeply within myself, I must know myself totally, completely, every corner of myself, there must be no secret corners, everything must be exposed. I must be aware of the total field of my own self, which is the consciousness of the individual and of society. It is only when the mind goes beyond this individual and social consciousness that there is a possibility of being a light to oneself which never goes out.
It is important to know oneself, to have complete knowledge of oneself, not from others, not from psychologists, brain specialists and so on, but to know what you are. Because you are the story of mankind. Do you understand all this? If you know how to read that book which is yourself, then you know all the activities and the brutalities and the stupidities of mankind because you are the rest of the world.
Society is the product of relationship, of yours and mine together. If we change in our relationship, society changes.
We can only understand something when we see the totality of it, when we see its whole structure and the meaning of it.
Conflict of any kind—physically, psychologically, intellectually—is a waste of energy.
To look at fear, there must be no escape. We have all of us, cultivated escapes as a way of avoiding fear. The very avoidance of fear only increases fear that again is very simple. So the first thing is to see that the flight from fear is a form of fear. When we avoid it we are merely turning our backs on it, but it is always there.
If you have any kind of fear, it twists your mind, and you can never be intelligent. Fear is like a dark cloud and, when you have fear, it is like walking in sunshine with a dark cloud in your mind, always frightened.
When I have understood that comparisons in any form only lead to greater illusion and greater misery, that when I analyse myself, or when I identify myself with something greater, whether it be the state, a saviour, an ideology, when I understand that all such comparative thinking leads to greater conformity and therefore greater conflict, then I put it completely away. Then my mind is no longer seeking, no longer groping, searching, asking, questioning, demanding, waiting - which does not mean that my mind is satisfied with things as they are - then my mind has no illusion or imagination. Such a mind can move in a totally different dimension. The dimension in which we live, the life of everyday, the pain, pleasure, and fear that has conditioned the mind, that has limited the nature of the mind, all that is completely gone.
One cannot learn about oneself unless one is free. And to learn about oneself one must observe, not according to any pattern, formula, or concept but actually observe as one is. And that observation, that perception, that seeing, brings about its own discipline, its own learning in which there is no conformity, imitation, suppression, control whatsoever.
The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world’s problems.
Love alone can bring about a radical revolution or transformation in relationship; and love is not a thing of the mind. Thought can plan and formulate magnificent structures of hope, but thought will only lead to further conflict, confusion and misery. Love is when the cunning, self-enclosing mind is not.
When you can look at fear without any avoidance, there is a different quality to that fear.
To be free, the mind must not only see and understand its pendulum- like swing between the past and the futur e but also be aware of the interval between thoughts.
The mind must be free from the very beginning to find out what God is. And the mind is not free when it is seeking security, when it is seeking permanency, when it is caught in fear.
All relationships between human beings are based on images. You have an image about your friend, or your wife or your husband, and he or she has an image about you, the relationship is between these two images - this is obvious.
Before you can look at the most complex structure of memory, you must be able to look at a tree, at the ant, at the movement of the river, to look - we really don't. It is far more important to look at the past as memory, and this we don't know how to do.
One must first see the extraordinarily subtle activities of the 'me', of the mind, one must become aware of the ideas, beliefs, speculations and put them all aside, for they are deceptions, are they not? Others may have experienced reality; but if you have not experienced it, what is the good of speculating about it or imagining that you are in essence something real, immortal, godly?
If you watch your own mind at work, you will see that the movement to the past and to the future is a process in which the present is not. Either the past is a means of escape from the present, which may be unpleasant, or the future is a hope away from the present. So the mind is occupied with the past or with the future and sloughs off the present. That is the mind is conditioned by the past, conditioned as an Indian, a Brahmin or a non-Brahmin, a Christian, a Buddhist and so on, and that conditioned mind projects itself into the future; therefore it is never capable of looking directly and impartially at any fact. It either condemns and rejects the fact or accepts and identifies itself with the fact. Such a mind is obviously not capable of seeing any fact as a fact.
This conditioning not only makes us self-centred but also in that very self-centredness there is the process of isolation, of separation, of division and this makes it utterly impossible for us to co-operate.
I cannot live in the present if the present is in the shadow of the past. To understand this the mind must be capable of looking and you can only look when there is no condemnation, no identification, no judgement - as you can look at a tree, a cloud - simply look at it.
To inquire there must be freedom to look; there must be freedom from prejudice, from conclusions, concepts, ideals, prejudices, so that you can observe actually for yourself.
Our energies must be directed, not merely to the understanding of the outward pressures and demands for which we are responsible, but to the comprehension of ourselves, of our loneliness, our fears, demands, and frailties.
Can the mind be free from occupation? This means—can the mind be completely without being occupied and let memory, the thoughts good and bad, go by without choosing? The moment the mind is occupied with one thought, good or bad, then it is concerned with the past...If you really listen—not just merely verbally, but really profoundly—then you will see that there is stability which is not of the mind, which is the freedom from the past.
Without relationship, there is no existence: to be is to be related...Most of us do not seem to realize this—that the world is my relationship with others, whether one or many. My problem is that of relationship. What I am, that I project; and obviously, if I do not understand myself, the whole of relationship is one of confusion in ever-widening circles.
To know your own emptiness, you must look at it; but you cannot look at it if your mind is all the time seeking a distraction from the fact that it is empty. And that distraction takes the form of attachment to a person, to the idea of God, to a particular dogma or belief, and so on.
Why do we accept, why do we follow? We follow another’s authority, another’s experience and then doubt it; this search for authority and its sequel, disillusionment, is a painful process for most of us. We blame or criticize the once accepted authority, the leader, the teacher, but we do not examine our own craving for an authority who can direct our conduct. Once we understand this craving we shall comprehend the significance of doubt.
We human beings are not free, we are heavily conditioned by the culture we live in, by the social environment, by religion, by the vested interest of the army, or politics, or the ideological commitment to which we have given ourselves over.
Meditation is not a repetition of words.
One is frightened because one has not looked at fear, one has avoided it at all costs. The avoidance only creates fear, conflict and struggle, which produce various forms of neurotic action, violence, hate, sorrow and so on.
When the mind is fully aware that it escapes, runs away from itself; when it realizes the futility of running away, and sees that the very process of running away creates fear - when it realizes the truth of that, then it can face what is. Now, what do we mean when we say that we are facing what is?
Awareness is observation without condemnation. Awareness brings understanding, because there is no condemnation or identification but silent observation. If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent observation of a fact.
To break away from one tradition and conform to another, to leave this leader and follow that, is but a superficial gesture. If we are to be aware of the whole process of authority, if we are to see the inwardness of it, if we are to understand and transcend the desire for certainty, then we must have extensive awareness and insight, we must be free, not at the end, but at the beginning.
Without freedom from the past there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent. It is only the fresh, innocent mind that is free. Freedom has nothing to do with age, it has nothing to do with experience; and it seems to me that the very essence of freedom lies in understanding the whole mechanism of habit, both conscious and unconscious.
The mind is frightened, it wants something to rely on, something on which it can depend. The mind wants something to which it can cling, as permanent. With this desire for permanence, it seeks authority negatively or positively. When it seeks authority in those who say there is no God, it repeats and says `There is no God.' It is perfectly satisfied in that belief.
The crisis is in the mind itself, in your mind, in your consciousness. And, unless you respond to that crisis, to that challenge, you will add, consciously or unconsciously, to the confusion, the misery and to this immensity of sorrow.
Awareness is freedom, it brings freedom, it yields freedom.
Meditation is the understanding of the nature of life with its dual activity, its conflict; seeing the true significance and truth of it, so that the mind though it has been conditioned for thousands of years, living in conflict, in struggle, in battle becomes clear, without distortion. The mind sees that distortion must take place when it follows an ideology, the idea of what should be as opposed to what is, hence a duality, a conflict, a contradiction and so a mind that is tortured, distorted, perverted.
Our nationalities, the division of people, racial and so on, is the result of our education and of the influence of the society which we have built.
When we seek fulfillment in any form, whether through painting, through music, through relationship, or what you will, there is always fear. So, what is important is to be aware of this whole process of oneself, to observe, to learn about it, and not ask how to get rid of fear. When you merely want to get rid of fear, you will find ways and means of escaping from it, and so there can never be freedom from fear.
You must become aware of the process of attachment and dependence, become aware of it without condemnation, without judgment, and then you will perceive the significance of this conflict of opposites.
To have this self-knowledge, the mind must be aware of itself from moment to moment; it must see all its own movements, its urges, its motives, the operations of memory, and how, through tradition, it is caught in mediocrity. If the mind can be aware of all that within itself, then you will find there is a possibility of being free from all conditioning and discovering something totally new. Then the mind itself is made new - and perhaps that is the real, the immeasurable.
Life is empty, and realizing that, we want to fill it, we are seeking - seeking ways and means, not only to fill this emptiness but also to find something that is not to be measured by man. Some may take drugs, LSD, or another of the diverse forms of psychedelic drugs that give expansion of consciousness; and in that state one acquires or experiences certain states, because a certain sensitivity has been given to the brain. But these are chemical results. They are the results of extraneous outside agents.
You have an image of yourself and if you don't live according to that image you are frightened. That is one of the fears, isn't it?
A mind that is habitual is insensitive, a mind that is functioning within the groove of a particular action is dull, unpliable, whereas awareness demands constant pliability, alertness.
To listen to something demands that your mind be quiet—not a mystical quietness, but just quietness. I am telling you something, and to listen to me you have to be quiet, not have all kinds of ideas buzzing in your mind. When you look at a flower, you look at it, not naming it, not classifying it, not saying that it belongs to a certain species—when you do these, you cease to look at it.
The beginning of meditation is self-knowledge, which means being aware of every movement of thought and feeling, knowing all the layers of my consciousness, not only the superficial layers but the hidden, the deeply concealed activities.
The mind that is seeking pleasure in any form is inviting sorrow.
Should not education help the students to be free from fear of every kind - which means, from now on to understand all the problems of life, problems of sex, problems of death, of public opinion, of authority?
It is only the dull, sleepy mind that creates and clings to habit. A mind that is attentive from moment to moment—attentive to what it is saying, attentive to the movement of its hands, of its thoughts, of its feelings—will discover that the formation of further habits has come to an end. This is very important to understand, because as long as the mind is breaking down one habit, and in that very process creating another, it can obviously never be free; and it is only the free mind that can perceive something beyond itself.
Love alone can transform insanity, confusion, and strife. No system, no theory of the left or of the right can bring peace and happiness to man. Where there is love, there is no possessiveness, no envy; there is mercy and compassion, not in theory, but actually to your wife and to your children, to your neighbor and to your servant. When you are respectful to your servant as well as to your guru, then you will know love. Love alone can transform the world. Love alone can bring about mercy and beauty, order and peace. There is love with its blessing when 'you' cease to be.
If one does completely put aside every form of belief, then there is no fear whatsoever.
Awareness is a state in which there is no condemnation, no justification or identification, and therefore there is understanding; in that state of passive, alert awareness there is neither the experiencer nor the experienced.
Love is not possible so long as there is the thinker, the centre of the 'me'.
As long as you remain within that field of the culture, of society, of greed, of envy, of achievement, you are not a free human being. You may think you have free will, but you are just part of this monstrous society, a conditioned human being.
A mind that is always comparing, always measuring, will always engender illusion. If I am measuring myself against you, who are clever, more intelligent, I am struggling to be like you and I am denying myself as I am, and I am creating an illusion.
A mind that is no longer caught in any form of belief, not caught in self-created belief, not seeking, not seeking anything - though it may be a little more arduous - is tremendously alive. Truth is something which is only from moment to moment, like virtue, like beauty, it is something which has no continuity. That which has continuity is the product of time, and time is thought; and time being sorrow, time.
To look, without comparison, one has to understand the mind, because it is the mind that looks, it is the mind that interprets what it seeks giving it a name. The very naming of a thing by the mind becomes the way of pushing it away.
It is only when the mind is free from idea that there can be experiencing. Ideas are not truth; and truth is something that must be experienced directly, from moment to moment. It is not an experience which you want—which is then merely sensation. Only when one can go beyond the bundle of ideas—which is the “me,” which is the mind, which has a partial or complete continuity only when one can go beyond that, when thought is completely silent, is there a state of experiencing. Then one shall know what truth is.
It matters very much the way you talk, the way you walk, the way you look at people. Search your mind, be aware, watch your gestures, watch the meaning of your speech. If you are really very alert, the mind becomes very sensitive, refined, simple. Without that simplicity and refinement, life is very superficial. But if you go beyond that superficiality, then there is the refinement of the self.
Being conditioned, life becomes fragmentary; life, which is the everyday living, the everyday thoughts, the aspirations, the sense of self improvement which is such an ugly thing that is all fragmentary. This conditioning makes each one of us a self-centred human being, fighting for his 'self', for his family, for his nation, for his belief. And so ideological differences arise; you are a Christian and another is a Muslim or a Hindu.
You cannot find truth through anybody else.
When you control or force the mind you are distorting it, aren't you? If I force myself to be kind, that is not kindness. If I force myself to be extremely polite to you that is not politeness.
One is full of theories, words, knowledge of what other people have said; one knows nothing about oneself, and therefore one does not know how to live.
When there is an understanding of fear, there is an understanding of all the problems related to that fear. When there is no fear there is freedom.
The understanding, the way of penetration, how to go very, very deeply, lies through awareness—just to be aware of our thoughts and feelings, without condemnation, without comparison, just to observe.
To understand relationship, there must be a passive awareness - which does not destroy relationship. On the contrary, it makes relationship much more vital, much more significant. Then there is in that relationship a possibility of real affection; there is a warmth, a sense of nearness, which is not mere sentiment or sensation.
To look at fear, to look at the tree, to look at your wife or your friends, to look with eyes that are completely untouched by thought... when you have done it you will say that fear has no reality whatsoever and that it is the product of thought and like all products of thought except technological products it has no validity at all.
The mind is the real cause of our problems, the mind that is working mechanically night and day, consciously and unconsciously. The mind is a most superficial thing and we have spent generations, we spend our whole lives, cultivating the mind, making it more and more clever, more and more subtle, more and more cunning, more and more dishonest and crooked, all of which is apparent in every activity of our life. The very nature of our mind is to be dishonest, crooked, incapable of facing facts, and that is the thing which creates problems; that is the thing which is the problem itself.
Our crisis is not in the world but in consciousness itself. It is not, how to stop a war, or reform universities, or give more work or less work and more pay and so on, on that level there is no answer; any reform gives more complication.
The mind cannot see the new because it is constantly living in the past, the past which is the system. When you say 'I am a Christian', or 'I am a Hindu', it is the past which speaks and cannot see anything new.
We want to run away from our loneliness, with its panicky fears, so we depend on another, we enrich ourselves with companionship, and so on.
Awareness is to understand the activities of the self, the 'I', in its relationship with people, with ideas and with things. That awareness is from moment to moment.
The question is not how to get out of confusion but how to understand it, and in understanding it, perhaps you will find the meaning of all these struggles, these pains, these anxieties, this constant battle within and without.
Most of us, lacking this extraordinary quality of love, slip into 'righteous' habits; and habits can never be righteous. Habit is neither good nor bad, there is only habit, a repetition, an imitation, a conformity to the past and to the tradition which is the outcome of inherited instinct and acquired knowledge.
There is a quietness, a stillness without any effort. That requires understanding of what effort is. And when you understand what effort, control, suppression is understand it not just verbally but really see the truth of it - in that very perception the mind becomes quiet.
Fear must exist as long as there is an urge to be or to become, which is the pursuit of success, with all its frustrations and tortuous contradictions. You can teach concentration, but attention cannot be taught, just as you cannot possibly teach freedom from fear, and in understanding these causes there is the elimination of fear.
Can the mind be fully aware of the fact that it is lonely, insufficient, empty? It is very difficult to be aware, to be fully cognizant of that fact, because we are always trying to escape from it; and we do temporarily escape from it through listening to the radio, and other forms of amusement, through going to church, performing rituals, acquiring knowledge, and through dependence on people and on ideas.
Co-operation is only possible when there is no 'authority'. You know, that is one of the most dangerous things in the world 'authority'. One assumes 'authority' in the name of an ideology, or in the name of God, or Truth, and an individual, or group of people, who have assumed that 'authority', cannot possibly bring about a world order.
A man who is protecting himself constantly through knowledge is obviously not a truth- seeker.
To change the world I have to change myself, break away from my conditioning.
Quietness of the mind comes into being only when you see the whole implication of fear, of authority, of time and the separation between the observer and the observed when you see the whole structure. To see the whole structure, obviously your mind must be quiet; one has to learn how to look - not at the most complex things, but just to look at a tree or a flower, at a cloud - without any movement of thought - just to look.
As long as the mind is breaking down one habit, and in that very process creating another, it can obviously never be free; and it is only the free mind that can perceive something beyond itself.
One has to become aware of what it is that one is dependent upon. One has to find out why one depends on anything at all, psychologically - I don't mean technologically, or depending on the milkman - but psychologically, why do we depend, what is involved in dependence? This question is essential in investigating the dissipation, deterioration and distortion of energy - the energy we need so vitally to understand the many problems.
The old people have not created a beautiful world; they have made a mess of the world. Is it not the function of education, of the educator, to see that you grow in freedom, so that you can understand life, so that you can change things and not just grow dull, weary and die as most people do?
Education being not merely the acquisition of technical knowledge, but the understanding, with sensitivity and intelligence, of the whole problem of living - in which is included death, love, sex, meditation, relationship, and also conflict, anger, brutality and all the rest of it - that is the whole structure of human existence.
Most of us do not know what love means. So, out of that loneliness, out of that insufficiency, out of the privation of life, we are attached to something, attached to the family; we depend upon it. And when the wife or the husband turns away from us, we are jealous. Jealousy is not love; but the love which society acknowledges in the family is made respectable. That is another form of defense, another form of escape from ourselves. So every form of resistance breeds dependence. And a mind that is dependent can never be free.
It is only when one stops seeking, and faces the fact of what actually is and goes beyond, that one will discover it for oneself.
Awareness of the ways of desire is selfknowledge. Self-knowledge is the beginning of meditation.
A mind that is ambitious can never know what it is to sympathize, to have pity, to love. An ambitious mind is a cruel mind—whether spiritually or outwardly or inwardly.
The love of Country, the love of God, the love of fellow man, all that means absolutely nothing, it is just ideas.
We all depend, unfortunately, on something, it may be dependence on a relationship, or on the reading of an intellectual book, or on certain ideas and ideologies we have formulated; or we depend on solitude, isolation, denial, resistance - these obviously distort and dissipate energy.
To go beyond the self-enclosing activities of the mind, you must understand them; and to understand them is to be aware of action in relationship, relationship to things, to people and to ideas. In that relationship, which is the mirror, we begin to see ourselves, without any justification or condemnation; and from that wider and deeper knowledge of the ways of our own mind, it is possible to proceed further; it is possible for the mind to be quiet, to receive that which is real.
To observe means to be critical - not using criticism based on evaluation, on opinions, but to be critically watchful. But if that criticism is personal, hedged by fear or any form of prejudice, it ceases to be truly critical, it becomes merely fragmentary.
For the discovery of truth there is no path...When you want to find something new, when you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not? If your mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an impediment to the new; the difficulty for most of us is that the mind has become so important, so predominantly significant, that it interferes constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that may exist simultaneously with the known. Thus knowledge and learning are impediments for those who would seek, for those who would try to understand that which is timeless.
Only when the mind is completely silent not only on the upper level but fundamentally, right through, on both the superficial and the deeper levels of consciousness - only then can the unknown come into being. The unknown is not something to be experienced by the mind; silence alone can be experienced, nothing but silence.
To understand something totally you must give your complete attention to it.
Love cannot possibly be cultivated; it cannot be put together by thought. Thought is always old and love can never be old. All our relationship is based on thought; thought has created images which come between people, and it is these images that have relationships; so love doesn't exist. Love is always new - yet neither new nor old, something entirely different.
Meditation is the ending of sorrow, the ending of thought which breeds fear and sorrow the fear and sorrow in daily life.
Attention has no motive. When there is a motive for attention, is there attention? If I pay attention in order to acquire something, the acquisition, whether it be good or bad, is not attention it is a distraction. A division. There can be goodness only when there is a totality of attention in which there is no effort to be or not to be.
You have security in belief, in dogmas, but that is merely an idea which can be shattered by argument, by doubt, by questioning, by demanding freedom. When one realizes, not as an idea, that there is no such thing as security, permanency, then authority has no meaning whatsoever.
To escape from that fear—that fear of emptiness, that fear of loneliness, that fear of stagnation, of not arriving, not succeeding, not achieving, not being something, not becoming something—is surely one of the reasons, is it not, why we accept beliefs so eagerly and greedily?
Understanding does not lie through books. You can be students of books for many years, and if you do not know how to live, then all your knowledge withers; it has no substance, no value. Whereas, one moment of full awareness, full conscious understanding, brings about real, lasting peace; not a thing that is static, but that peace which is continually in movement, unlimited.
To see very clearly, without any confusion, the mind must be completely silent. If I want to see you, or understand you, my mind must stop chattering, obviously. in the state of incessant soliloquy, mental talking, chattering, it is not possible to see anything clearly. It is only when the mind is quiet that you do see clearly.
It is only when the mind is silent that we can understand anything. If I want to understand somebody, my mind must be quiet, not chattering, not prejudiced, not having innumerable opinions and experiences, for they prevent the observation and the understanding.
We rather cling to the known than face the unknown, the known being our loneliness, our sorrow, our embittered existence. And as we cannot face that thing called death, we invent all kinds of theories; in the East reincarnation, here resurrection, or whatever it is.
Truth has no tradition, it cannot be handed down.
Life is relationship. To be is to be related and without relationship there is no life. Nothing can exist in isolation; so long as the mind is seeking isolation, there must be fear. Fear is not an abstraction; it exists only in relation to something.
If the mind is not overcrowded, not ceaselessly occupied, then it can listen to that dog barking, to the sound of a train crossing the distant bridge, and also be fully aware of what is being said by a person talking here. Then the mind is a living thing, it is not dead.
Meditation is not something apart from life. When you are driving a car or sitting in a bus, when you are chatting aimlessly, when you are walking by yourself in a wood or watching a butterfly being carried along by the wind—to be choicelessly aware of all that is part of meditation.
Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real.
It is very important from childhood to have good taste, to be exposed to beauty, to good music, to good literature, so that the mind becomes very sensitive, not gross, not heavy. It requires a great deal of subtlety to understand the real depths of life and that is why it matters very much, while we are young, how we are educated, what we eat, what clothes we put on, what kind of house we live in. I assure you that the appreciation and love of beauty matters very much, and that without it the real thing can never be found.
Our mind is seeking permanent happiness, something that will last, that will continue. That very desire to continuity is corruption. But when the mind is free from `the me', there is a happiness, from moment to moment, which comes without your seeking, in which there is no gathering, no storing up no putting by of happiness. It is not something which you can hold on to.
The mind only knows the measurable, the compass of itself, the frontiers, ambitions, hopes, desperation, misery, sorrows, and joys. Such a mind cannot invite freedom. All that it can do is to be aware of itself and not condemn what it sees; not condemn the ugly or cling to the beautiful, but see what is. The mere perception of what is is the beginning of the breaking down of the measurement of the mind, of its frontiers, its patterns - just to see things as they are. Then you will find that the mind can come to that freedom involuntarily, without knowing.
Meditation has nothing to do with achieving a result. It is not a matter of breathing in a particular way, or looking at your nose, or awakening the power to perform certain tricks, or any of the rest of that immature nonsense.
Can I look at the fact of my loneliness, not running away from it, not trying to find an answer for it, or trying to have a motive to say, 'Look, what am I to do with it?' Can you just look at a fact and keep looking at it?
Love has no sorrow; sorrow and love cannot go together.
Relationship is not only between people but between ourselves and nature, between ourselves and property, between ourselves and ideas.
If you can give full attention without being absorbed in something, and without any sense of exclusion, then you will find out what it is to meditate; because in that attention there is no effort, no division, no struggle, no search for a result. So meditation is a process of freeing the mind from systems, and of giving attention without either being absorbed, or making an effort to concentrate.
God is not a thing of the mind, it does not come through self-projection, it comes only when there is virtue, which is freedom. Virtue is facing the fact of what is and the facing of the fact is a state of bliss. Only when the mind is blissful, quiet, without any movement of its own, without the projection of thought, conscious or unconscious - only then does the eternal come into being.
The man who possesses money is the money. The man who identifies himself with property is the property or the house or the furniture. Similarly with ideas or with people; when there is possessiveness, there is no relationship. Most of us possess because we have nothing else if we do not possess. We are empty shells if we do not possess, if we do not fill our life with furniture, with music, with knowledge, with this or that.
You have to be educated so as to meet all these problems rightly. That is what education is - not merely to pass a few examinations, some silly studies, some subjects in which you are not at all interested. Proper education is to help the student to meet this life, so that he understands it, he won't succumb, he won't be crushed under it as most of us are.
To observe clearly there must be no image coming in between the observer and the thing observed. When you look at a tree, can you look at it without the knowledge of that tree in botanical terms, or the knowledge of your pleasure or desire concerning it? Can you look at it so completely that the space between you - the observer - and the thing observed disappears? That doesn't mean that you become the tree! But when that space disappears, there is the cessation of the observer, and only the thing which is observed remains. In that observation there is perception, seeing the thing with extraordinary vitality, its colour, its shape, the beauty of the leaf or trunk; when there is not the centre of the `me' who is observing, you are intimately in contact with that which you observe.
The quiet mind is not possible through the use of any drug or through the repetition of words; you can reduce it to dullness, but it is not quiet.
As long as one is violent, aggressive, you contribute to the rest of the world, to the rest of mankind's aggression, violence. This is natural.
Self-knowledge is to know the total process of oneself, the ways of one's own thinking, feeling, and action.
I must love the very thing I am studying. If you want to understand a child, you must love and not condemn him. You must play with him, watch his movements, his idiosyncrasies, his ways of behavior; but if you merely condemn, resist or blame him, there is no comprehension of the child. Similarly, to understand what is, one must observe what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment. That is the actual.
Love implies great freedom—not to do what you like. But love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centered.
It is one of the most difficult things to listen—to listen to the communist, to the socialist, to the congressman, to the capitalist, to anybody, to your wife, to your children, to your neighbor, to the bus conductor, to the bird—just to listen. It is only when you listen without the idea, without thought, that you are directly in contact; and being in contact, you will understand whether what he is saying is true or false; you do not have to discuss.
What matters is to be totally conscious of habit; for then, as you will see for yourself there is no longer the formation of habit. To resist habit, to fight it, to deny it, only gives continuity to habit. When you fight a particular habit you give life to that habit, and then the very fighting of it becomes a further habit. But if you are simply aware of the whole structure of habit without resistance, then you will find there is freedom from habit, and in that freedom a new thing takes place.
What is important is not concentration, but the love of the thing; the very love of the thing for itself brings an astonishing energy, energy which is attention; without that, your learning, your looking, has no meaning; and you merely pass examinations or become glorified clerks.
What is important is not what is the goal of life, but to understand the confusion in which one is, the misery, the tears and other things of life. We do not understand the confusion but want to get rid of it. The real thing is here, not there. A man who is concerned with the understanding of all this confusion does not ask what is the purpose of life. He is concerned with the clearing up of the confusion, clearing up of the sorrow in which he is caught. When that is cleared, he does not ask a question like this.
A man who is seeking truth must invite disturbances, tribulations because it is only in moments of crisis that there is alertness, watchfulness, action. Then only that which is is discovered and understood.
If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.
To be a theist or an atheist, to me, are both absurd. If you knew what truth is, what God is, you would neither be a theist nor an atheist, because in that awareness belief is unnecessary. It is the man who is not aware, who only hopes and supposes, that looks to belief or to disbelief, to support him, and to lead him to act in a particular way.
Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action.
Without meditation, there is no self-knowledge; without self-knowledge, there is no meditation. So, you must begin to know what you are. You cannot go far without beginning near, without understanding your daily process of thought, feeling , and action.
To avoid suffering we cultivate detachment. Being forewarned that attachment sooner or later entails sorrow, we want to become detached. Attachment is gratifying, but perceiving the pain in it, we want to be gratified in another manner, through detachment. Detachment is the same as attachment as long as it yields gratification. So what we are really seeking is gratification, we crave to be satisfied by whatever means.
Do not force yourself to concentrate, but be interested, love the thing that you are doing, for itself. When you paint, paint for itself; when you look at a dance, enjoy it, look at it, see the beauty of it, so that your mind is not broken up into different parts. so that the mind is a whole thing, a complete thing, so that there is no fractional looking with a mind that is broken up in different parts
and which says `I must look.
Fear is obviously one of the barriers to intelligence, is it not? And surely it is the very essence of education to help the student - you and me - to be aware of and to understand the causes of fear, so that from childhood onwards he can live free of fear.
Most of us desire some kind of power; it may be over the son, or the wife or the husband; or, it may be over a group of people; or it may be in the name of an ideal or in the name of a country. This power, this desire to have power over others, is always operating - even over a servant, to order him about, to get angry with him, to push him around. Does not this desire for power spring from a sense of loneliness?
To be aware of every thought, to know from what source it springs and what is its intention — that is meditation. And to know the whole content of one thought reveals the whole process of the mind.
When the mind goes beyond the thought of “the me,” the experiencer, the observer, the thinker, then there is a possibility of a happiness that is incorruptible.
To respect another requires affection not fear.
If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems—if you really loved it—you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. To want to be famous is tawdry, trivial, stupid, it has no meaning; but , because we don’t love what we are doing, we want to enrich ourselves with fame.
It is extremely difficult to be aware of dullness, to be aware of greed, to be aware of ill will, ambition and so on. The very fact of being aware of what is is truth. It is truth that liberates, not your striving to be free. Thus reality is not far but we place it far away because we try to use it as a means of self-continuity. It is here, now, in the immediate.
Do not suppress but try to look at the conflict, try to understand it. You cannot understand it if you want to push it aside, if you want to run away. You have to put it, as it were, on a table, and look, and then out of that watching, comes understanding.
More important than communication is communion. Communication is verbal and communion is nonverbal. Two people who know each other very well can, without saying any words, understand each other completely, immediately, because they have established a certain form of communication between themselves.
Without understanding beauty and love and meditation - the real thing I mean - then life as it is, lived as it is, with its sorrow, pain, conflict, has very little meaning. You may take drugs to give it meaning, you may cling to your sexual appetites to give life a meaning, but dependence on any drug on any thought, or any demand of pleasure, only brings about more conflict, more misery, more confusion.
You know what fear is? Each one has his own particular form of fear - not one, but multiple fears. A mind that has any form of fear cannot obviously have the quality of love, sympathy, tenderness. Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs. If you see that fear is destructive, then how do you proceed to wipe the mind clean?
You cannot meditate if you are ambitious—you may play with the idea of meditation. If your mind is authority-ridden, bound by tradition, accepting, following, you will never know what it is to meditate on this extraordinary beauty.
A mind that is tortured, frustrated, shaped by environment, conforming to the social morality, must in itself be confused; and a confused mind cannot discover what is true.
The change must begin with the human being, not with the outward structure. The human being is confused, the human being is conditioned. He believes, and therefore there is a contradiction in himself. He is really, deeply confused and if he wants to change the social structure, the change from confusion only breeds more confusion. Whereas, if he could bring about clarity within himself, and from that clarity act, then such an action is really a deep psychological revolution. That revolution is absolutely necessary.
There is understanding only when there is no choice, no judgment, but merely observation. To die each day means not to carry over from yesterday all your ambitions, grievances, your memories of fulfilment, your grudges, your hatred.
We are responsible not only to the world but also responsible for ourselves, in what we do, what we think, how we act, how we feel.
In our search for kno wledge, in our acquisitive desires, we are losing love, we are blunting the feeling for beauty, the sensitivity to cruelty; we are becoming more and more specialized and less and less integrated.
To understand these problems one must have a very alert mind; not a sloppy mind, not a complex, erudite learned mind, but rather a mind that is willing to see clearly, willing to examine, explore - not in terms of its own idiosyncrasies, nor inclination, nor temperament, but rather to examine things as they are; and to examine things as they are one has to have attention, care.
We need a great deal of energy; to look at a tree without this space, without this division, between the seer and the seen, you need great energy of attention and also you need a sense of freedom. Freedom and attention must go together, which is love and that quality of attention in which the observer is not.
If we can understand the process of life without condemning, without saying it is right or wrong, then, I think, there comes a creative happiness which is not “yours” or “mine.” That creative happiness is like sunshine. If you want to keep the sunshine to yourself, it is no longer the clear, warm life- giving sun. Similarly, if you want happiness because you are suffering, or because you have lost somebody, or because you have not been successful, then that is merely a reaction. But when the mind can go beyond, then there is
a happiness that is not of the mind.
It is important to understand what this self-knowing is, just to be aware, without any choice, of the “me” which has its source in a bundle of memories—just to be conscious of it without interpretation, merely to observe the movement of the mind.
Unless one lays the foundation - which is to be free from fear, free from sorrow, anxiety, and all the traps that consciously or unconsciously one lays for oneself - I do not see how it is possible for a mind to be actually quiet.
We talk about love, and we are full of ambition, competitiveness, ruthless efficiency. So there is contradiction. The action which springs from that contradiction only brings about frustration and further contradiction.
Simplicity is not to be found; it does not lie as a choice between the essential and the non-essential. It comes into being only when the self is not; when the mind is not caught in speculations, conclusions, beliefs, ideations. Such a free mind only can find truth. Such a mind alone can receive that which is immeasurable, which is unnameable; and that is simplicity.
If I don't understand the ways of my thoughts, of my feelings, if I don't understand my motives, my desires, my demands, my pursuit of patterns of action, which are ideas - if I do not know myself, there is no foundation for thinking; the thinker who merely asks, prays, or excludes, without understanding himself, must inevitably end in confusion, in illusion.
Only when the mind is completely free from yesterday, and is therefore not using the present as a means to the future, is it capable of receiving the eternal.
What is the root cause of this conflict and contradiction? Ask this question of yourself. Do not try to put into words an explanation, but simply enquire non-verbally, if you can, into the basis of this contradiction and division, this strife and conflict.
Please watch all the things that are taking place about you, how the chicken fight each other, how the strong bulldog dominates everything else. You will find that the same spirit of domination, anger, hatred and animosity is in each one of us. To dispel this, we have only to be aware of it and not to consider it as wrong or right.
To live each moment now without the burden of the past or of the present, without that crippling memory created by the lack of understanding, mind must ever meet things anew. It is fatal to meet life with the burden of certainty, with the conceit of knowledge, because, after all, knowledge is merely a thing of the past. So when you come to that life with a freshness, then you will know what it is to live without conflict, without this continual straining effort.
Can you live without an image. Of course one can. But that demands attention. Attention at the moment when the image is being formed, when somebody insults you, at that moment to be completely attentive. Or at the moment when somebody flatters you, to be totally aware. Then you will find no image is formed, which means there is no recording of that insult or flattery on the brain.
One can see the totality of something only when thought doesn't interfere, then one sees not verbally and not intellectually but factually, as I see the fact of this microphone, without any like or dislike, there it is.
The problem is, how to see clearly so that there is this flowering of love. You know, without love and beauty there is no truth, there is no god, there is only a morality which becomes immoral.
There is only one central issue, crisis, or challenge for man, which is, that he must be completely free. As long as the mind is holding on to a structure, a method, a system, there is no freedom.
Surely truth, or that Godhead of understanding, is not to be found by clinging either to family or tradition or habit. It is to be found only when you are completely naked, stripped of your longings, hopes, securities; and in that direct simplicity there is the richness of life.
To find out what absolute truth is, thought must be understood - the whole movement and the nature of thought must be gone into, observed. And it has its relative place, and so the mind then becomes absolutely still and perhaps out of that, in that stillness, truth is perceived, which is not to be measured by words.
To find out the purpose of life, the mind must be free of measurement; then only can it find out - otherwise, you are merely projecting your own want. This is not mere intellection, and if you go into it deeply, you will see its significance. After all, it is according to my prejudice, to my want, to my desire, to my predilection, that I decide what the purpose of life is to be. So, my desire creates the purpose. Surely, that is not the purpose of life.
Our concern in meditation is to know oneself, not only superficially, but the whole content of the inner, hidden consciousness. Without knowing all that and being free of its conditioning, you cannot possibly go beyond the mind’s limits. That is why the thought process must cease, and for this cessation there must be knowledge of oneself. Therefore meditation is the beginning of wisdom, which is the understanding of one’s own mind and heart.
The mind has been conditioned through centuries upon centuries in its demand for security and safety; it has built both physiologically and psychologically this self-centred activity and this activity pervades the daily life, as my family, my job, my possessions, and that produces this emptiness, this isolation.
In the flame of selfawareness, of self-knowledge, the causes of conflict are discovered and consumed.
Conflict is not only a waste of energy but it also makes the mind dull, heavy, stupid. Such a mind caught in habit is insensitive; from this insensitivity, from this dullness, it will not accept anything new because there is fear.
The eternal or the timeless is now and the now cannot be understood by a man who is caught in the net of time. To free thought from time demands action, but the mind is lazy, it is slothful, and therefore ever creates other hindrances. It is only possible by right meditation.
A man who would meditate must understand himself. Without knowing yourself, you cannot go far. However much you may attempt to go far, you can go only so far as your own projection; and your own projection is very near, is very close, and does not lead you anywhere.
The religious mind is entirely different from the mind that believes in religion. The religious mind is psychologically free from the culture of society; it is also free from any form of belief, any form of demand for experience or self-expression.
One of our greatest problems is sorrow. We have accepted sorrow as a way of life, just as we have accepted war as a way of life war not only on the battlefield but war within ourselves the everlasting struggle, both inwardly and outwardly. We have accepted sorrow as a way of life, yet we have never asked if it is at all possible to end sorrow, completely.
The source of violence is the “me”, the ego, the self, which expresses itself in so many ways—in division, in trying to become or be somebody—which divides itself as the “me” and the “not me”, as the unconscious and the conscious; the “me” that identifies with the family or not with the family, with the community or not with the community and so on. It is like a stone dropped in a lake; the waves spread and spread, at the centre is the “me”. As long as the “me” survives in any form, very subtly or grossly, there must be violence.
Without love we are destroying each other, we are living in fragments, one fragment in aggression with the other, one in revolt against the other.
To receive truth, to know its beauty, to know its joy, there must be instant receptivity, unclouded by theories, fears and answers.
Freedom is a state of mind in which love is and it is not the opposite of hate, or jealousy, or aggression. When we are dealing with opposites and trying to be free from one and achieve the other then the other has its root in its own opposite right? Through conflict freedom cannot possibly be understood.
As long as the mind is not sensitive, not alert and quick, it is not capable of living with the actuality of life, which is so fluid, so constantly undergoing change. Psychologically, inwardly, we refuse to follow the movement of life because our roots are deep in habit and tradition, in obedience to what has been told to us, in acceptance. And it seems to me that it is very important to understand this and to break away from it, for I do not see how man can continue to live without love.
Tranquillity comes only when I understand the whole process of myself the various entities in conflict with each other which compose the “me.” As that is an arduous task, we turn to others to learn various tricks which we call meditation. The tricks of the mind are not meditation. Meditation is the beginning of self-knowledge, and without meditation, there is no self-knowledge.
One cannot understand anything intellectually - you may hear words, give explanations, find out the cause, but that is not understanding. Understanding - as one observes oneself - takes place only when the mind, including the brain, is totally attentive. And one is not attentive when one is interpreting and translating what one sees according to one's background.
Success leads to fame, but that is an empty thing, is it not? It is like ashes. Every politician is known and it is his business to be known and therefore he is not great. Greatness is to be unknown, inwardly and outwardly to be as nothing; and that requires great penetration, great understanding, great affection.
It is this self-protective cunning that makes for attachment; and when attachment causes pain, it is this same cunning that seeks detachment and finds pleasure in the pride and vanity of renunciation. The understanding of the ways of cunning, the ways of the self, is the beginning of intelligence.
It is raining and you can hear the pattern of the drops. You can hear it with your ears, or you can hear it out of that deep silence. If you hear it with complete silence of the mind, then the beauty of it is such that cannot be put into words or onto canvas, because that beauty is something beyond self-expression.
Meditation is the beginning of self-knowledge and without self-knowledge there is no meditation.
Love is not habit, love cannot be cultivated habits can be cultivated and for most of us love is something so far away that we have never known the quality of it, we do not even know the nature of it. To come upon love there must be freedom; The mind is completely still, within its own freedom, then there is the 'impossible' which is love.
Truth can only come to the mind that is empty of the known. It comes in a state in which the known is absent, not functioning. The mind is the warehouse of the known, the residue of the known; for the mind to be in that state in which the unknown comes into being, it must be aware of itself, of its previous experiences, the conscious as well as the unconscious, of its responses, reactions, and structure.
To find out the true meaning of happiness, we must explore the river of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not an end in itself. Is there a source to a stream? Every drop of water from the beginning to the end makes the river. To imagine that we will find happiness at the source is to be mistaken. It is to be found where you are on the river of self-knowledge.
When you are controlled by another through money, through position, through status, the feeling that you are an individual, a human being, a single unit, is completely denied, destroyed.
Religion is not a matter of dogmas and beliefs, of rituals and superstitions; nor is it the cultivation of personal salvation, which is a self-centred activity. Religion is the total way of life; it is the understanding of truth, which is not a projection of the mind.
To discover God or truth—and I say such a thing does exist, I have
realized it—to recognize that, to realize that, mind must be free of all the hindrances which have been created throughout the ages, based on self-protection and security. You cannot be free of security by merely saying that you are free. To penetrate the walls of these hindrances, you need to have a great deal of intelligence, not mere intellect. Intelligence, to me, is mind and heart in full harmony; and then you will find out for yourself, without asking anyone, what that reality is.
Through observation you become a light to yourself.
All stimulation, whether of the church, of the drink or drug, or the speaker, will inevitably bring about a dependence and that dependence prevents one from having the vital energy to see clearly for oneself. Any form of dependence on any stimulation lessens the quickness and vitality of the mind.
There is an art of seeing things as they are, without naming, without being caught in the network of words, the whole operation of thinking interfering with perception.
If you understand fear—which can only take place when you come directly in contact with it, as you are in contact with hunger, as you are directly in contact when you are threatened with losing your job—then you do something; only then will you find that all fear ceases—we mean all fear, not fear of this kind or of that kind.
By meditation I mean to understand the operations of the old brain, to watch it, to know how it reacts, what its responses are, its tendencies, its demands, its aggressive pursuits—to know the whole of that, the unconscious as well as the conscious part of it. When you know it, when there is an awareness of it, without controlling it, without directing it, without saying, “This is good; this is bad; I’ll keep this; I won’t keep that,”—when you see the total movement of the old mind, when you see it totally, then it becomes quiet.
If you have followed this inquiry into what is meditation, and have understood the whole process of thinking, you will find that the mind is completely still. In that total stillness of the mind, there is no watcher, no observer, and therefore no experiencer at all; there is no entity who is gathering experience, which is the activity of a self-centered mind.
Can we look at ourselves without beliefs? If we remove these beliefs, the many beliefs that one has, is there anything left to look at? If we have no beliefs with which the mind has identified itself, then the mind, without identification, is capable of looking at itself as it is—and then, surely there is the beginning of the understand of oneself.
Any explanation is of little significance. All explanations are escapes, avoiding the reality of what is. This is the only thing that matters. The what is can be totally transformed with the energy that is wasted in explanations and in searching out the causes. Love is not in time nor in analysis, in regrets and recriminations. It is there when desire for money, position and the cunning deceit of the self are not.
A man who seeks to avoid the world is still related; he is running away from conflict and not understanding it. In relationship, which is activity between you and another, the ways of the self are revealed.
There is no freedom through slavery to an idea, or in acceptance of a certain theology, or in conforming to a certain pattern set by society or by myself.
Awareness means to observe the whole movement of like and dislike, of your suppressions. If you are old-fashioned you don't talk about sex, you suppress it, but you go on thinking about it - one has to be aware of all that.
When you see something very clearly, then you do not choose.
Self-knowledge is the beginning of meditation - not the knowledge that you pick up from my books, from authorities, from gurus, but the knowledge that comes into being through self-inquiry, which is self-awareness.
There is bliss which is not pleasure; when the mind is in that state of meditation, there is immense bliss; then the everyday living, with its contradictions, its brutalities and violence, has no place. But one must work very hard, every day, to lay the foundation; that is all that matters, nothing else. Out of that silence which is the very nature of a meditative mind may come love and beauty.
I feel very strongly that each one of us, being responsible for the chaos, misery and sorrow in the world, that each one of us as a human being must bring about a radical revolution in himself. Because each in himself is both the society and the individual, he is both violence and peace, he is this strange mixture of pleasure and hate and fear, aggressiveness, domination and gentleness; sometimes one predominates over the other and there is a great deal of unbalance in all of us.
It is only when the mind is empty that there is a possibility of creation; but I do not mean this superficial emptiness which most of us have. Most of us are superficially empty, and it shows itself through the desire for distraction. We want to be amused, so we turn to books, to the radio, we run to lectures, to authorities; the mind is everlastingly filling itself. I am not talking of that emptiness which is thoughtlessness. On the contrary, I am talking of the emptiness which comes through extraordinary thoughtfulness, when the mind sees its own power of creating illusion and goes beyond.
Things, relationship, and ideas are so transparently impermanent, we are ever made unhappy by them...Things are impermanent, they wear out and are lost; relationship is constant friction and death awaits; ideas and beliefs have no stability, no permanency. We seek happiness in them and yet do not realize their impermanency. So sorrow becomes our constant companion and overcoming it our problem.
Most of us thrive on self-pity, blaming others, and this occupation doesn't bring clarity.
Love is different from emotion and feeling. Love cannot be brought into the field of thought; whereas feeling and emotion can be brought. Love is a flame without smoke, ever fresh, creative, joyous.
Meditation is the constant understanding of the way of life, every minute, the mind being extraordinarily alive, alert, not burdened by any fear, any hope, any ideology, any sorrow.
When you look at a star or at a bird, or at a tree, find out what is happening to you as you look, and that will reveal a great deal about yourself.
If you can give full attention without being absorbed in something, and without any sense of exclusion, then you will find out what it is to meditate; because in that attention there is no effort, no division, no struggle, no search for a result. So meditation is a process of freeing the mind from systems, and of giving attention without either being absorbed, or making an effort to concentrate.
When there is no image about the tree, you are really observing what it actually is - which is quite a different state. In the same way if you have no image about another human being, the relationship is entirely different. Which means that there is the absence of thought, of the 'me', of the Memory, (which is actually of the past). Therefore you are facing something which is immediate - and because one has eliminated conflict, one has tremendous energy.
The object of attachment offers me the means of escape from my own emptiness. Attachment is escape, and it is escape that strengthens conditioning.
To observe my relationship with my wife or husband, I must observe without any previous, accumulated incidents, knowledge, all that.
We seek happiness through things, through relationship, through thoughts, ideas. So things, relationship, and ideas become all-important and not happiness. When we seek happiness through something, then the thing becomes of greater value than happiness itself.
If you can understand the confusion, the struggle, the misery, the deep longings that you have, then in that very understanding, you will find something about which you do not have to ask another.
Meditation is the way of life, it is not an escape from life.
All that you can do is to keep the room in order; which is to be virtuous, but not the virtuousness or morality of any society for what it will bring, but to be virtuous for itself, to be sane, rational, orderly. Then perhaps, if you're lucky, the window will open and the breezes will come in - and they may not. It depends on the state of your mind, and that state of mind can only be under stood by yourself, watching it yet never trying to shape it, which means watching it without any choice. Out of this choiceless awareness perhaps the door will open and you will know what that dimension is in which there is no conflict, no time, something which can never be put into words.
The function of relationship is to reveal the state of one’s whole being. Relationship is a process of self-revelation, of self-knowledge. This self- revelation is painful, demanding constant adjustment, pliability of thought-emotion. It is a painful struggle, with periods of enlightened peace.
All the gadgets, jets, the refrigerators, the rockets, the exploration into the atom, space, they are all the result of knowledge, thought. All these are not creation; invention is not creation; capacity is not creation; thought can never be creative because thought is always conditioned and can never be free. It is only that energy which is not the product of thought that is creative.
Our acquisitions are a means of covering up our own emptiness; our minds are like hollow drums, beaten upon by every passing hand and making a lot of noise. This is our life, the conflict of neversatisfying escapes and mounting misery. It is strange how we are never alone, never strictly alone. We are always with something with a problem, with a book, with a person; and when we are alone, our thoughts are with us. To be alone, naked, is essential. All escapes, all gatherings, all effort to be or not to be, must cease; and then only is there the aloneness that can receive the alone, the measureless.
The understanding of relationship comes only when this process of self-criticism is understood and the mind is quiet.
Relationship is a mirror in which I see myself as I am.
One can see directly that it is only when the mind is very quiet that there is a possibility of clarity; and the whole purpose of meditation in the East is to bring about such a state of mind.
Unless we understand this problem of opposites with its conflicts and miseries, our efforts will be in vain. Through self -awareness, craving to become, the cause of conflict, must be observed and understood; but understanding ceases if there is identification, if there is acceptance or denial or comparison. With kindly dispassion, craving must be deeply understood and so transcended.
Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still? Then you hear everything, don’t you? You hear the far off noises as well as those that are nearer and those that are very close by, the immediate sounds—which means really that you are listening to everything. Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel. If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change which comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.
Creative emptiness is not possible so long as there is the thinker who is waiting, watching, observing in order to gather experience, in order to strengthen himself.
Religions throughout the world have used fear as a means of controlling man. Have they not? They say that if you do not do certain things in this life, you will pay for it in the next life. Though all religions preach love, though they preach brotherhood, though they talk about the unity of man, they all subtly or very brutally, grossly, maintain this sense of fear.
How difficult it is to look at anything beautiful without the mind interfering, without the mind with its memories saying `This is not such a good night as the other night. It is not as beautiful as it was last year,' `It is too cold I cannot look.' The mind never looks without words, without comparison. It is only when you can look without comparison or without words, that the stars and the earth
and the trees and the moon and the light on the water have an extraordinary significance. In that, there is great beauty.
Relationship has very little significance when we are merely seeking mutual gratification but becomes extraordinarily significant when it is a means of self-revelation and self-knowledge.
Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?
A mind that is merely inquiring through thought, through reason, through logic, moving from conclusion to conclusion - surely such a mind can never find out what is true, and whether there is a reality.
Transformation in the mind itself is the true revolution. All other revolutions are reactions, even though they use the word freedom and promise Utopia, the heavens, everything. There is only true revolution in the quality of the mind.
Intelligence is not conceptual thinking, nor its expression through words; but intelligence is this awareness of seeing what 'actually is', and seeing my relationship to the world, which I as a human being have created; to actually see it in my life: my activity, my thought, my conservatism, my fears, my love of the new which becomes acceptance, and so on (which is my daily life).
To understand relationship, there must be a passive awareness, which does not destroy relationship. On the contrary, it makes relationship much more vital, much more significant. Then there is in that relationship a possibility of real affection; there is a warmth, a sense of nearness, which is not mere sentiment or sensation.
God is something entirely, totally, unfathomable by us, and that comes into being when our minds are quiet, when our minds are not projecting, struggling. When the mind is still, then perhaps we shall know what God is.
A still mind is not seeking experience of any kind. And if it is not seeking and therefore is completely still, without any movement from the past and therefore free from the known, then you will find, if you have gone that far, that there is a movement of the unknown which is not recognized, which is not translatable, which cannot be put into words—then you will find that there is a movement which is of the immense. That movement is of the timeless because in that there is no time, nor is there space, nor something in which to experience, nor something to gain, to achieve. Such a mind knows what is creation—not the creation of the painter, the poet, the verbalizer; but that creation which has no motive, which has no expression. That creation is love and death.
To be aware of the whole content of relationship is action, and from that action there is a possibility of true relationship, a possibility of discovering its great depth, its great significance and of knowing what love is.
When one realizes that this process of analysis does not lead anywhere, discovers for oneself that this analytical process has no end and has no meaning, then perhaps one will have a mind that begins totally to be aware of the whole problem.
When the mind understands the futility, the utter uselessness of trying to fill its own emptiness through dependence, through knowledge, through belief, then it is capable of looking at it without fear.
It is observing and watching the facts of that life looking at it; and out of this observation the mind becomes highly intelligent. It is this intelligence that is going to answer non-fragmentarily, as an action which will be right under all circumstances. It is this intelligence that is going to act, not a formula, of what action should be.
You watch your own mind and you will see that the moment the mind ceases to think in terms of becoming something, there is a cessation of action which is not stagnation; it is a state of total attention, which is goodness.
God or truth cannot be thought about. If you think about it, it is not truth. Truth cannot be sought: it comes to you. You can go only after what is known. When the mind is not tortured by the known, by the effects of the known, then only can truth reveal itself. Truth is in every leaf, in every tear; it is to be known from moment to moment. No one can lead you to truth; and if anyone leads you, it can only be to the known
The image you have about a person, the image you have about your politicians, the prime minister, your god, your wife, your children—that image is being looked at. And that image has been created through your relationship, or through your fears, or through your hopes. The sexual and other pleasures you have had with your wife, your husband, the anger, the flattery, the comfort, and all the things that your family life brings—a deadly life it is—have created an image about your wife or husband. With that image you look.
If you seek security in relationship, it becomes an investment in comfort, in illusion and the greatness of relationship is its very insecurity. By seeking security in relationship you are hindering its function, which brings its own peculiar actions and misfortunes.
It is only the perception of truth that liberates; and to see, to receive truth, there must be the focusing of attention, which means that you must give your heart and mind to see and to understand.
Mind is memory, at whatever level, by whatever name you call it; mind is the product of the past, it is founded on the past, which is memory, a conditioned state.
A mind that is caught in tradition, that is merely the instrument of memory, living in the pattern of many yesterdays, is surely incapable of finding out what is true. And without the perfume of that reality, life becomes merely mechanical.
Observing is meditation, it is not that in order to observe you must meditate. To observe is one of the most, difficult things. To observe a tree, for example, is very difficult, and that is because you have ideas, images, about that tree, and these ideas - botanical knowledge - prevent you from looking at that tree. To observe your wife or your husband is even more difficult, again because you have an image about your wife and she has an image about you, and the relationship is between those two images.
In this quality of awareness there is no judgment value at all. The moment I'm aware in that way, all values, judgments come to an end.
The images have been put together by thought, from various forms of insults, pleasures, pains, all the rest of it, between human beings. The relationship is only between the images. When there are no images at all, then there is real relationship - then you are directly in contact.
Can I be a light that never goes out? To find that out I must go deeply within myself, I must know myself totally, completely, every corner of myself, there must be no secret corners, everything must be exposed. I must be aware of the total field of my own self, which is the consciousness of the individual and of society. It is only when the mind goes beyond this individual and social consciousness that there is a possibility of being a light to oneself which never goes out.
It is important to know oneself, to have complete knowledge of oneself, not from others, not from psychologists, brain specialists and so on, but to know what you are. Because you are the story of mankind. Do you understand all this? If you know how to read that book which is yourself, then you know all the activities and the brutalities and the stupidities of mankind because you are the rest of the world.
Society is the product of relationship, of yours and mine together. If we change in our relationship, society changes.
We can only understand something when we see the totality of it, when we see its whole structure and the meaning of it.
Conflict of any kind—physically, psychologically, intellectually—is a waste of energy.
To look at fear, there must be no escape. We have all of us, cultivated escapes as a way of avoiding fear. The very avoidance of fear only increases fear that again is very simple. So the first thing is to see that the flight from fear is a form of fear. When we avoid it we are merely turning our backs on it, but it is always there.
If you have any kind of fear, it twists your mind, and you can never be intelligent. Fear is like a dark cloud and, when you have fear, it is like walking in sunshine with a dark cloud in your mind, always frightened.
When I have understood that comparisons in any form only lead to greater illusion and greater misery, that when I analyse myself, or when I identify myself with something greater, whether it be the state, a saviour, an ideology, when I understand that all such comparative thinking leads to greater conformity and therefore greater conflict, then I put it completely away. Then my mind is no longer seeking, no longer groping, searching, asking, questioning, demanding, waiting - which does not mean that my mind is satisfied with things as they are - then my mind has no illusion or imagination. Such a mind can move in a totally different dimension. The dimension in which we live, the life of everyday, the pain, pleasure, and fear that has conditioned the mind, that has limited the nature of the mind, all that is completely gone.
One cannot learn about oneself unless one is free. And to learn about oneself one must observe, not according to any pattern, formula, or concept but actually observe as one is. And that observation, that perception, that seeing, brings about its own discipline, its own learning in which there is no conformity, imitation, suppression, control whatsoever.
The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world’s problems.
Love alone can bring about a radical revolution or transformation in relationship; and love is not a thing of the mind. Thought can plan and formulate magnificent structures of hope, but thought will only lead to further conflict, confusion and misery. Love is when the cunning, self-enclosing mind is not.
When you can look at fear without any avoidance, there is a different quality to that fear.
To be free, the mind must not only see and understand its pendulum- like swing between the past and the futur e but also be aware of the interval between thoughts.
The mind must be free from the very beginning to find out what God is. And the mind is not free when it is seeking security, when it is seeking permanency, when it is caught in fear.
All relationships between human beings are based on images. You have an image about your friend, or your wife or your husband, and he or she has an image about you, the relationship is between these two images - this is obvious.
Before you can look at the most complex structure of memory, you must be able to look at a tree, at the ant, at the movement of the river, to look - we really don't. It is far more important to look at the past as memory, and this we don't know how to do.
One must first see the extraordinarily subtle activities of the 'me', of the mind, one must become aware of the ideas, beliefs, speculations and put them all aside, for they are deceptions, are they not? Others may have experienced reality; but if you have not experienced it, what is the good of speculating about it or imagining that you are in essence something real, immortal, godly?
If you watch your own mind at work, you will see that the movement to the past and to the future is a process in which the present is not. Either the past is a means of escape from the present, which may be unpleasant, or the future is a hope away from the present. So the mind is occupied with the past or with the future and sloughs off the present. That is the mind is conditioned by the past, conditioned as an Indian, a Brahmin or a non-Brahmin, a Christian, a Buddhist and so on, and that conditioned mind projects itself into the future; therefore it is never capable of looking directly and impartially at any fact. It either condemns and rejects the fact or accepts and identifies itself with the fact. Such a mind is obviously not capable of seeing any fact as a fact.
This conditioning not only makes us self-centred but also in that very self-centredness there is the process of isolation, of separation, of division and this makes it utterly impossible for us to co-operate.
I cannot live in the present if the present is in the shadow of the past. To understand this the mind must be capable of looking and you can only look when there is no condemnation, no identification, no judgement - as you can look at a tree, a cloud - simply look at it.
To inquire there must be freedom to look; there must be freedom from prejudice, from conclusions, concepts, ideals, prejudices, so that you can observe actually for yourself.
Our energies must be directed, not merely to the understanding of the outward pressures and demands for which we are responsible, but to the comprehension of ourselves, of our loneliness, our fears, demands, and frailties.
Can the mind be free from occupation? This means—can the mind be completely without being occupied and let memory, the thoughts good and bad, go by without choosing? The moment the mind is occupied with one thought, good or bad, then it is concerned with the past...If you really listen—not just merely verbally, but really profoundly—then you will see that there is stability which is not of the mind, which is the freedom from the past.
Without relationship, there is no existence: to be is to be related...Most of us do not seem to realize this—that the world is my relationship with others, whether one or many. My problem is that of relationship. What I am, that I project; and obviously, if I do not understand myself, the whole of relationship is one of confusion in ever-widening circles.
To know your own emptiness, you must look at it; but you cannot look at it if your mind is all the time seeking a distraction from the fact that it is empty. And that distraction takes the form of attachment to a person, to the idea of God, to a particular dogma or belief, and so on.
Why do we accept, why do we follow? We follow another’s authority, another’s experience and then doubt it; this search for authority and its sequel, disillusionment, is a painful process for most of us. We blame or criticize the once accepted authority, the leader, the teacher, but we do not examine our own craving for an authority who can direct our conduct. Once we understand this craving we shall comprehend the significance of doubt.
We human beings are not free, we are heavily conditioned by the culture we live in, by the social environment, by religion, by the vested interest of the army, or politics, or the ideological commitment to which we have given ourselves over.
Meditation is not a repetition of words.
One is frightened because one has not looked at fear, one has avoided it at all costs. The avoidance only creates fear, conflict and struggle, which produce various forms of neurotic action, violence, hate, sorrow and so on.
When the mind is fully aware that it escapes, runs away from itself; when it realizes the futility of running away, and sees that the very process of running away creates fear - when it realizes the truth of that, then it can face what is. Now, what do we mean when we say that we are facing what is?
Awareness is observation without condemnation. Awareness brings understanding, because there is no condemnation or identification but silent observation. If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent observation of a fact.
To break away from one tradition and conform to another, to leave this leader and follow that, is but a superficial gesture. If we are to be aware of the whole process of authority, if we are to see the inwardness of it, if we are to understand and transcend the desire for certainty, then we must have extensive awareness and insight, we must be free, not at the end, but at the beginning.
Without freedom from the past there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent. It is only the fresh, innocent mind that is free. Freedom has nothing to do with age, it has nothing to do with experience; and it seems to me that the very essence of freedom lies in understanding the whole mechanism of habit, both conscious and unconscious.
The mind is frightened, it wants something to rely on, something on which it can depend. The mind wants something to which it can cling, as permanent. With this desire for permanence, it seeks authority negatively or positively. When it seeks authority in those who say there is no God, it repeats and says `There is no God.' It is perfectly satisfied in that belief.
The crisis is in the mind itself, in your mind, in your consciousness. And, unless you respond to that crisis, to that challenge, you will add, consciously or unconsciously, to the confusion, the misery and to this immensity of sorrow.
Awareness is freedom, it brings freedom, it yields freedom.
Meditation is the understanding of the nature of life with its dual activity, its conflict; seeing the true significance and truth of it, so that the mind though it has been conditioned for thousands of years, living in conflict, in struggle, in battle becomes clear, without distortion. The mind sees that distortion must take place when it follows an ideology, the idea of what should be as opposed to what is, hence a duality, a conflict, a contradiction and so a mind that is tortured, distorted, perverted.
Our nationalities, the division of people, racial and so on, is the result of our education and of the influence of the society which we have built.
When we seek fulfillment in any form, whether through painting, through music, through relationship, or what you will, there is always fear. So, what is important is to be aware of this whole process of oneself, to observe, to learn about it, and not ask how to get rid of fear. When you merely want to get rid of fear, you will find ways and means of escaping from it, and so there can never be freedom from fear.
You must become aware of the process of attachment and dependence, become aware of it without condemnation, without judgment, and then you will perceive the significance of this conflict of opposites.
To have this self-knowledge, the mind must be aware of itself from moment to moment; it must see all its own movements, its urges, its motives, the operations of memory, and how, through tradition, it is caught in mediocrity. If the mind can be aware of all that within itself, then you will find there is a possibility of being free from all conditioning and discovering something totally new. Then the mind itself is made new - and perhaps that is the real, the immeasurable.
Life is empty, and realizing that, we want to fill it, we are seeking - seeking ways and means, not only to fill this emptiness but also to find something that is not to be measured by man. Some may take drugs, LSD, or another of the diverse forms of psychedelic drugs that give expansion of consciousness; and in that state one acquires or experiences certain states, because a certain sensitivity has been given to the brain. But these are chemical results. They are the results of extraneous outside agents.
