Addiction to knowledge is like any other addiction; it offers an escape from the fear of emptiness, of loneliness, of frustration, the fear of being nothing. The.
Every demand for a method indicates the desire to escape. You want me to lay down a system so that you may imitate that system. In other words, you want a system invented for you to superimpose on those conditions which are creating conflict, so that you can escape from all conflict.
When you seek you are really only window-shopping.
As long as there is conflict, it indicates that we have not understood the conditions placed about us; and that movement of environment remains false so long as we do not inquire into its significance, and we can only discover it in that state of acute consciousness of suffering.
If you want to understand the beauty of a bird, a fly, or a leaf, or a person with all his complexities, you have to give your whole attention which is awareness. And you can give your whole attention only when you care, which means that you really love to understand – then you give your whole heart and mind to find out.
Attention is not the same thing as concentration. Concentration is exclusion; attention, which is total awareness, excludes nothing.
We think that if one loves one person, one can’t love the whole, and if one loves mankind then one can’t possibly love the particular. This all indicates, does it not, that we have ideas about what love should be? This is again the pattern, the code developed by the culture in which we live, or the pattern that one has cultivated for oneself. So for us, ideas about love matter much more than the fact; we have ideas of what love is, what it should be, what it is not.
If I run after it, it is not love, it is a reward. In my inquiry, slowly, carefully, without distortion, without illusion, I have negated everything that it is not, and the other is.
In this emptiness there was fury; the fury of a storm, the fury of exploding universe, the fury of creation which could never have any expression. It was the fury of all life, death and love. But yet it was empty, a vast, boundless emptiness which nothing could ever fill, transform or cover up.
In the present is eternity, and to understand that, mind must be free of the burden of the past; and to free the mind of the past there must be an intense questioning of the present, not the considering of how the “I” will continue in the future.
This identification puts an end to all creative under standing, and then one becomes a mere tool in the hands of the party boss, the priest or the favored leader.
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. Then you wander far on the floods of life.
Watching and listening are a great art – watching and listening without any reaction, without any sense of the listener or the see-er. By watching and listening we learn infinitely more than from any book. Books are necessary, but watching and listening sharpen your senses.
Life is action. Life is a series of continuous, endless action until you die. Action born of desire is distorted, is limited, and this limited action must invariably, do what you will, bring about endless conflict. Anything that is limited must in its very nature breed many problems, crises.
To be sensitive to the beauty of something is to perceive the totality of it. The mind that is thinking in terms of a part can never perceive the whole. In the whole the part is contained, but the part will never make up the whole, the total.
To forgive, there must have been a wound; and to be wounded, there must have been the gatherings of pride. There is no generosity of heart as long as there is a referential memory, the “me” and the “mine.
If you look closely you will see that your search is nothing but a search for comfort and security and escape; not a search for understanding, not a search for truth, but rather a search for an evasion and, therefore, a search for the conquering of all obstacles; after all, all conquering is but substitution, and in substitution there is no understanding.
We are human beings, not Asiatics and Americans, Russians and Germans, communists and capitalists. We all have the same human problems.
Is it not necessary for each to know for oneself what is the right means of livelihood? If we were avaricious, envious, seeking power, then our means of livelihood will correspond to our inward demands and so produce a world of competition, ruthlessness, oppression, ultimately ending in war.
So meditation implies a life of great order and, therefore, great virtue, morality. And it implies the understanding and the depth of beauty. And it implies the emptying of that consciousness which is you, with all your attachments, fears, hopes, despairs, the emptying of all that by observing. Then you have energy which alone can discover that which is eternal, which has no beginning and no ending.