Religion is the sense of comprehension of the totality of existence.
We carry our burdens all the time; we never die to them, we never leave them behind. It is only when we give complete attention to a problem and solve it immediately – never carrying it over to the next day, the next minute – that there is solitude. Then, even, if we live in a crowded house or are in a bus, we have solitude. And that solitude indicates a fresh mind, an innocent mind.
You know, it is one of the most marvellous things in life to discover something unexpectedly, spontaneously, to come upon something without premeditation, and instantly to see the beauty, the sacredness, the reality of it. But a mind that is seeking and wanting to find is never in that position at all.
A mind that is burdened with fear is incapable of understanding, of seeing things as they are and going beyond them.
To know the mind, must you not be aware of its activities? The mind is only experience, not just the immediate, but also the accumulated. The mind is the past in response to the present, which makes for the future. The total process of the mind has to be understood.
When there is complete attention, there is no confusion. It is only when there is no attention that confusion arises. Confusion arises when there is division, which is inattention.
Teaching is the noblest profession – if it can be called a profession at all. It is an art that requires, not just intellectual attainments, but infinite patience and love.
The mind that has learned to meditate, which is to concentrate, the mind that has learned the technique of shutting out everything and narrowing down to a particular point – such a mind is incapable of meditation. That is what most of us want. We want to learn to concentrate, to be occupied with one thought to the exclusion of every other thought, and we call that meditation. But it is not meditation. Meditation is something entirely different, which we are going to find out.
When there is smoke, how can there be a pure flame?
Observing Thought 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.
A man who knows that he is silent, who knows that he loves, does not know what love is or what silence is.
Life has no answer. Life has only one thing, one problem – which is, living. The man who lives totally, completely, every minute without choice, neither accepting nor rejecting the thing as it is, such a man is not seeking an answer, he is not asking what the purpose of life is, nor is he seeking a way out of life. But that requires great insight into oneself.
You do not say, “I love the whole world,” but when you know how to love one, you know how to love the whole. Because we do not know how to love one, our love of humanity is fictitious. When you love, there is neither one nor many: there is only love.
Therefore thought is responsible for fear. This is so, you can see it for yourself. When you are confronted with something immediately there is no fear. It is only when thought comes in that there is fear.
Thought with its emotional and sensational content, is not love. Thought.
Have you ever tried living with yourself? If so, you will begin to see that your self is not a static state, it is a fresh living thing. And to live with a living thing your mind must also be alive. And it cannot be alive if it is caught in opinions, judgments, and values.
Do you use the opposite as a means of avoiding the actual which you don’t know how to deal with? Or is it because you have been told by thousands of years of propaganda that you must have an ideal – the opposite of ‘what is’ – in order to cope with the present? When you have an ideal you think it helps you to get rid of ‘what is’, but it never does. You may preach non-violence for.
So long as there is a desire for self-continuance in any form, there must be fear, which creates authority, and from this there come the subtle cruelty and stupidity of submitting oneself to exploitation. This exploitation is so subtle, so refined, that one becomes enamored of it, calling it spiritual progress and advancement toward perfection.
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. The fear of uncertainty, of not being, makes for attachment, for possession. When the possession is unsatisfactory or painful, we renounce it for a more pleasurable attachment. The ultimate gratifying possession is the word God, or its substitute, the State.
Mere intellect is not chastity. The man who tries to be chaste in thought is unchaste, because he has no love. Only the man who loves is chaste, pure, incorruptible.