Most young people don’t feel secure because they are frightened. They are afraid of their elders, of their teachers, of their mothers and fathers, so they never really feel at home. But when you do feel at home, there happens a very strange thing. When you can go to your room, lock the door and be there by yourself unnoticed, with no one telling you what to do, you feel completely secure; and then you begin to flower, to understand, to unfold.
Your parents and society use that word duty as a means of molding you, shaping you according to their particular idiosyncrasies, their habits of thought, their likes and dislikes, hoping thereby to guarantee their own safety.
Study then, but study first that which will most help you to help others. Work patiently at your studies, not that men may think you wise, not even that you may have the happiness of being wise, but because only the wise man can be wisely helpful.
So you must do right for the sake of the right, not in the hope of reward; you must work for the sake of the work, not in the hope of seeing the result; you must give yourself to the service of the world because you love it, and cannot help giving yourself to it.
Self-reliance brings a certain freedom in which you discover; and that freedom is denied to you when you are comparing.
What we are trying to do is to understand this confusion and not cover it up with quotations.
If, living in the world, you refuse to be a part of it, you will help other out of this chaos – not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.
There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation surely we cease to be creative.
Authority in its very nature prevents the full awareness of oneself and therefore ultimately destroys freedom; in freedom alone can there be creativeness.
Patriotism, whether it is of the Western kind, or of the Eastern kind, is the same, a poison in human beings that is really distorting thought. So patriotism is a disease, and when you begin to realize, become aware that it is a disease, then you will see how your mind is reacting to that disease. When, in time of war, the whole world talks of patriotism, you will know the falseness of it, and therefore you will act as a true human being.
But death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
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?
Most people have lost that relationship with Nature; they look at all those mountains, valleys, the streams and the thousand trees as they pass by in their cars or walk up the hills chattering, but they are too absorbed in their own problems to look and be quiet.
Real peace is as creative and as pure as war is destructive; and to find that peace, one must understand beauty.
The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.
The individual has to awaken his intelligence, not through any form of discipline, resistance, compulsion, coercion, but through freedom.
To understand ourselves needs no authority either of yesterday or of a thousand years because we are living things, always moving, flowing, never resting.
NONE OF THE agonies of suppression, nor the brutal discipline of conforming to a pattern has led to truth. To come upon truth the mind must be completely free, without a spot of distortion.
If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious – a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins.
Any feeling of malice or envy, however slight it may be, is also destructive of this creative understanding without which there is no happiness.