The military spirit makes you obedient, it makes you physically very disciplined; but inwardly your mind is gradually destroyed because you are imitating, following, copying. You become a mere tool of the older people, of the politician, an instrument of propaganda.
If you realize that you are the master of time, that time is in your hands, which is an extraordinarily important thing to find out, that means you face the fact of violence. You don’t pursue non-violence, but face the fact of violence, and in that observation there is no time at all, because in that observation there is neither the observer nor all the past accumulation, there is only pure observation. In that there is no time.
You and I Are the Problem, Not the World The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world’s problems.
What is important is to consider life not as an inner and outer, but as a whole, as a total undivided movement. Then action has quite a different meaning, for then it is not partial. It is fragmented or partial action that adds to the cloud of misery. The good is not the opposite of evil. The good has no relation to evil, and the good cannot be pursued. It flowers only when suffering is not.
The more externalized we are, the more sensations and distractions there must be, and this gives rise to a mind that is never quiet, that is not capable of deep search and discovery.
Imagination and romanticism deny love, for love is its own eternity. Man has sought through various gods, ideologies and hopes, something that is not bound by time. The birth of a new baby is not the indication of something eternal. Life comes and goes. There is death, there is suffering and all the mischief that man can make, and this movement of change, decay and birth is still within the cycle of time.
But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity.
Meditation is to find out if there is a field not already contaminated by the known.
Freedom is space, and space is order.
Perception can take place only in the present; but if you say : “I will do it tomorrow”; the wave of confusion over takes you, and you are then always involved in confusion.
Learning is possible only when there is no coercion of any kind.
What matters is to understand pleasure, not try to get rid of it – that is too stupid. Nobody can get rid of pleasure.
So can I live with death, which means that everything that I have done and collected ends? Ending is more important than continuity. The ending means the beginning of something new. If you merely continue, it is the same pattern being repeated in a different mold. So can I live with death? That means freedom, complete, total, holistic freedom. And in that freedom there is great love and compassion, and that intelligence which has not an end, which is immense.
The flower is strong in its beauty as it can be forgotten, set aside, or destroyed. The ambitious do not know beauty. The feeling of essence is beauty.
That is the first thing to learn – not to seek. When you seek you are really only window-shopping.
To understand death is to understand something which is closely related to life.
So there must be a revolution in thinking, a revolution in the mind itself, and not in what the mind thinks about. There is surely a vast difference between the two.
It is really extraordinarily interesting to watch the operation of one’s own thinking, just to observe how one thinks, where that reaction we call thinking, springs from. Obviously from memory. Is there a beginning to thought at all? If there is, can we find out its beginning – that is, the beginning of memory, because if we had no memory we would have no thought?
Dying is part of living. You cannot love without dying, dying to everything which is not love, dying to all ideals which are the projection of your own demands, dying to all the past, to the experience, so that you know what love means and therefore what living means. So living, loving and dying are the same thing, which consists in living wholly, completely, now.
Are we ever alone? Or are we carrying with us all the burdens of yesterday?