It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.
You are waiting for me to describe what this silence is so that you can compare it, interpret it, carry it away and bury it. It cannot be described. What can be described is the known, and the freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries, to all the images you have made, to all your experiences – dying every day so that the brain cells themselves become fresh, young, innocent.
Freedom is entirely different from revolt. There is no such thing as doing right or wrong when there is freedom. You are free and from that centre you act. And hence there is no fear, and a mind that has no fear is capable of great love. And when there is love it can do what it will.
Only the innocent mind can inquire into the unknown. But the calculated innocence which may wear a loincloth or the robe of a monk is not that passion of self-abandonment from which come courtesy, gentleness, humility, patience – the expressions of love.
Most of us are frightened of dying because we don’t know what it means to live. We don’t know how to live, therefore we don’t know how to die. As long as we are frightened of life we shall be frightened of death.
To talk about another, pleasantly or viciously, is an escape from oneself, and escape is the cause of restlessness.
To experience what is solitude and what is meditation, one must be in a state of inquiry; only a mind that is in a state of inquiry is capable of learning. But when inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learned without experiencing it.
When you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble and holy; so to say, ‘I love God’, is absolute nonsense. When you worship God you are worshipping yourself – and that is not love.
When you act according to your principles you are being dishonest because when you act according to what you think you ought to be you are not what you are. It is a brutal thing to have ideals.
Attention is not the same thing as concentration. Concentration is exclusion; attention, which is total awareness, excludes nothing. It seems to me that most of us are not aware, not only of what we are talking about but of our environment, the colours around us, the people, the shape of the trees, the clouds, the movement of water.
Seeing everything that goes on in your daily life, your daily activities – when you pick up a pen, when you talk, when you go out for a drive or when you are walking alone in the woods – can you with one breath, with one look, know yourself very simply as you are? When you know yourself as you are, then you understand the whole structure of man’s endeavour, his deceptions, his hypocrisies, his search. To do this you must be tremendously honest with yourself throughout your being.
The bliss of truth comes when the mind is not occupied with its own activities and struggles.
This society conditions the mind to a particular pattern of thought, the pattern of self-improvement, self-adjustment, self-sacrifice, and only those who are capable of breaking away from all conditioning can discover that which is not measurable by the mind.
He who has identified him self can never know freedom, in which alone all truth comes into being.
Truth is not to be conquered; you cannot storm it; it will slip through your hands if you try to grasp it. Truth comes silently, without your knowing. What you know is not truth, it is only an idea, a symbol. The shadow is not the real.
Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.
Your mind must be completely quiet, without a word, without a symbol, without an idea. And then you will discover – or there will come into being – that state in which what we have called love and what we have called sorrow and what we have called death are the same.
To understand oneself requires, not impetuous urges, conclusions, but great patience. One must go slowly, millimeter by millimeter, never missing a step – which doesn’t mean that you must everlastingly keep awake. You can’t. It does imply that you must watch and drop what you have watched, let it go and pick it up again, so that the mind does not become a mere accumulation of what it has learned but is capable of watching each thing anew.
It is always this impermanency that has made man seek something beyond the hills, investing it with permanency, with divinity, with beauty, which he in himself has not. But this doesn’t answer his agonies, allay his sorrow or mischief. On the contrary it gives new life to his violence and cruelties. His gods, his utopias, his worship of the State do not end his suffering.
We are not only slaves of the culture in which we have been brought up; we are also slaves to the vast cloud of misery and sorrow of all humanity, to the vastness of its confusion, violence and brutality. We never seem to pay attention to the accumulated sorrow of man. Nor are we aware of the terrible violence which has been gathering generation after generation.