Thought as knowledge has its right place, but it has no place in the psyche.
See what we have done. I am struggling, struggling, struggling to end struggling sometime in the future. See what tricks I have played on myself. I am caught in time. I don’t say, “Why should I struggle at all?” If I can end this struggle that is enlightenment.
If you do not allow time, or never think in terms of time, then the fact is not. Because we allow time the fact becomes important. If there is no time it is resolved.
A mind that is innocent means a mind that is incapable of being hurt. Because it is incapable of being hurt, it will not hurt another.
To love a person with your whole being, with your mind, heart, and body, requires great intensity; and when love is intense, desire soon disappears. But most of us have never had this intensity about anything, except about our own profit, conscious or unconscious; we never feel for anything without seeking something else out of it.
You see, as long as we try to overcome, the very overcoming has to be overcome. But if you say, “Yes, it is a fact and I won’t move from that,” then the thing dissolves – completely, not relatively, not gone one day and then the next day is full of fears. It is gone when you have given complete attention to.
Before you try to change and alter thought and feeling, find out the manner of their working, and you will see that they are continually adjusting themselves within the limitations established by that point fixed by desire and the fulfillment of that desire. In awareness there is no discipline.
If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.
It is only in virtue that you can discover, that you can live – not in the cultivation of a virtue, which merely brings about respectability, not understanding and freedom.
I am just saying that when the mind is tethered to any particular conclusion, whether temporary or permanent, it is incapable of discovering something new.
The desire to use others for your psychological necessities makes for dependence, and when you depend you must hold, possess; and what you possess possesses you.
One who possesses no worldly things may be attached to knowledge, to ideas; another may be attached to virtue, another to experience, another to name and fame, and so on. Without possessions, the “me” is not; the “me” is the possession, the furniture, the virtue, the name. In its fear of not being, the mind is attached to name, to furniture, to value; and it will drop these in order to be at a higher level, the higher being the more gratifying, the more permanent.
You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.
So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in – at a face, a bird, the color of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight – if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear and, therefore, tremendous joy.
Learning implies the love of understanding and the love of doing a thing for itself. Learning is possible only when there is no coercion of any kind. And coercion takes many forms, does it not? There is coercion through influence, through attachment or threat, through persuasive encouragement or subtle forms of reward.
With so much poverty and degradation, one must have a very thick skin to be rich. Some.
There can be fundamental and lasting change in the world, there can be love and intelligent fulfillment, only when you wake up and begin to free yourself from the net of illusions, the many illusions which you have created about yourself through fear.
Before you can act fully and truly, you must know the prison in which you are living, how it has been created; and in examining it without any self-defense you will find out for yourself its true significance, which no other can convey to you. Through your own awakening of intelligence, through your own suffering you will discover the manner of true fulfillment.
The mind conforms, imitates, because there is more security in conformity, in following a pattern.
Self-expansion in any form, whether through wealth or through virtue, is a process of conflict, causing antagonism and confusion.