(Truth is immediate and needs no authority)
Truth can be discovered by anyone, without the help of any authority and, as life is ever-present, in an instant.
“What the speaker is saying has very little importance in itself. The really important thing is for the mind to be so effortlessly aware that it is in a state of understanding all the time. If we don’t understand and merely listen to words, we invariably go away with a series of concepts or ideas, thereby establishing a pattern to which we then try to adjust ourselves in our daily or so-called spiritual lives.”
(The quality of listening that allows transformation)
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?
Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel. If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change that comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.
Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?
To listen there must be an inward quietness, a freedom from the strain of acquiring, a relaxed attention.
Most of us are after results, achieving goals; we are forever overcoming and conquering, and so there is no listening. It is only in listening that one hears the song of the words.
Be simple … and don’t try to become something or to capture some experience.
You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen—it is only then that there is a struggle.
You are listening to yourself, and not to the speaker. If you are listening to the speaker, he becomes your leader, your way to understanding—which is a horror, an abomination, because you have then established the hierarchy of authority.
(Knowledge as impediment to the timeless)
For the discovery of truth there is no path…. When you want to find something new, when you are experimenting with anything, your mind has to be very quiet, has it not? If your mind is crowded, filled with facts, knowledge, they act as an impediment to the new; the difficulty for most of us is that the mind has become so important, so predominantly significant, that it interferes constantly with anything that may be new, with anything that may exist simultaneously with the known. Thus knowledge and learning are impediments for those who would seek, for those who would try to understand that which is timeless.
(Self-knowledge as the only ground of wisdom)
Wisdom is something that has to be discovered by each one, and it is not the result of knowledge. Knowledge and wisdom do not go together. Wisdom comes when there is the maturity of self-knowing. Without knowing oneself, order is not possible, and therefore there is no virtue.
No authority here or hereafter can give you knowledge of yourself; without self-knowledge there is no liberation from ignorance, from sorrow.
can learn self-knowledge through a book. Self-knowledge is obviously a process, not an end in itself; and to know oneself, one must be aware of oneself in action, which is relationship. You discover yourself, not in isolation, not in withdrawal, but in relationship—in relationship to society, to your wife, your husband, your brother, to man; but to discover how you react, what your responses are, requires an extraordinary alertness of mind, a keenness of perception.
To know yourself, there must be the awareness, the alertness of mind in which there is freedom from all beliefs, from all idealization, because beliefs and ideals only give you a color, perverting true perception. If you want to know what you are, you cannot imagine or have belief in something which you are not. If I am greedy, envious, violent, merely having an ideal of non-violence, of non-greed, is of little value…. The understanding of what you are, whatever it be—ugly or beautiful, wicked or mischievous—the understanding of what you are, without distortion, is the beginning of virtue. Virtue is essential, for it gives freedom.
(Becoming as suffering — the will to be is the will to conflict)
Becoming Is Strife Life as we know it, our daily life, is a process of becoming. I am poor and I act with an end in view, which is to become rich. I am ugly and I want to become beautiful. Therefore my life is a process of becoming something. The will to be is the will to become, at different levels of consciousness, in different states, in which there is challenge, response, naming, and recording. Now, this becoming is strife, this becoming is pain, is it not? It is a constant struggle: I am this, and I want to become that.
Listen to the question, to the meaning behind the words. Can the crude mind become sensitive? If I say my mind is crude and I try to become sensitive, the very effort to become sensitive is crudity. Please see this. Don’t be intrigued, but watch it. Whereas, if I recognize that I am crude without wanting to change, without trying to become sensitive, if I begin to understand what crudeness is, observe it in my life from day to day—the greedy way I eat, the roughness with which I treat people, the pride, the arrogance, the coarseness of my habits and thoughts—then that very observation transforms what is.
Either you love, or do not love; but do not make the lack of love into a long-drawn-out process whose end is love. When you know you do not love, when you are choicelessly aware of that fact, then there is a possibility of transformation; but to sedulously cultivate this distinction between the Master and the pupil, between those who have attained and those who have not, between the savior and the sinner, is to deny love. The exploiter, who is in turn exploited, finds a happy hunting-ground in this darkness and illusion.
The division is not between the real and yourself; it is in yourself. … What is essential is to understand the increasing conflict of desire; and this understanding comes only through self-knowledge and constant awareness of the movements of the self.
Creation is when the self is not there, because creation is not intellectual, is not of the mind, is not self-projected, is something beyond all experiencing, as we know it. Is it possible for the mind to be quite still, in a state of nonrecognition, which is, non-experiencing, to be in a state in which creation can take place—which means, when the self is not there, when the self is absent? Am I making myself clear or not? … The problem is this, is it not? Any movement of the mind, positive or negative, is an experience which actually strengthens the “me.” Is it possible for the mind not to recognize? That can only take place when there is complete silence, but not the silence which is an experience of the self and which therefore strengthens the self.
A mind that is confused in the false can never find the truth. Therefore, I must understand what is false in my relationships, in my ideas, in the things about me, because to perceive the truth requires the understanding of the false.
One can find that out only if one can study oneself in relationship to a belief. Is it possible to live in this world without a belief—not change beliefs, not substitute one belief for another, but be entirely free from all beliefs, so that one meets life anew each minute? This, after all, is the truth: to have the capacity of meeting everything anew, from moment to moment, without the conditioning reaction of the past, so that there is not the cumulative effect which acts as a barrier between oneself and that which is.
If we have no beliefs with which the mind has identified itself, then the mind, without identification, is capable of looking at itself as it is—and then, surely there is the beginning of the understanding of oneself.
You may run away, you may do all kinds of things; the facts are there—the fact that one is angry, the fact that one is ambitious, the fact that one is sexual, a dozen things. You may suppress them; you may transmute them, which is another form of suppression; you may control them, but they are all suppressed, controlled, disciplined with ideas…. Do not ideas waste our energy? Do not ideas dull the mind? You may be clever in speculation, in quotations; but it is obviously a dull mind that quotes, that has read a lot and quotes.
I abolish altogether all sense of the opposite, and my mind then is completely concerned with what is, and with the understanding of what is.
(Ideas, conflict, and what blocks peace)
We are attached to the world of ideas and not to peace. We search for new social and political patterns and not for peace; we are concerned with the reconciliation of effects and not in putting aside the cause of war.
Acting Without Idea Is the Way of Love Thought must always be limited by the thinker who is conditioned; the thinker is always conditioned and is never free; if thought occurs, immediately idea follows. Idea in order to act is bound to create more confusion.
(Beyond good and evil — the awakened state)
there is no such thing as evil or good; there is only an awakened state.
A Free Mind Has Humility Have you ever gone into the question of psychological dependence? If you go into it very deeply, you will find that most of us are terribly lonely. Most of us have such shallow, empty minds. Most of us do not know what love means. So, out of that loneliness, out of that insufficiency, out of the privation of life, we are attached to something, attached to the family; we depend upon it.