Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

your particular guru, your savior—test what you think, what you see. Then you
are free from authority.
Please listen, and as you are listening, act. That is, as you listen, see the truth
of it. We have lived on other people’s experiences in religious, so-called
spiritual, matters. We have to rely on scientific knowledge, other people’s
experiments, other people’s accumulation of mathematical, geographical,
scientific, biological knowledge; that is inevitable. If you would become an
engineer, you have to have the accumulated knowledge of mathematics,
structures, strains, and so on. But if you would find out for yourself what truth is,
if there is such a thing, you cannot possibly accept the accumulated knowledge of
what others have said; which is what you have done. You are full of knowledge
of the Gita, the Upanishads, the endless commentaries about them made by
experts. That really doesn’t matter at all. What matters is what you live, what you
think, how you live. And to find out how you live, how you act, what you do,
you have to discard totally all the knowledge of the experts, the professionals
who have given you instructions on how you should live. Freedom isn’t
permissiveness. Freedom is necessary for the human mind so that it can function
healthily, normally, sanely.
We must inquire together, learn together, not accept the speaker. If you make
the speaker into an authority, you’re not free; you substitute one guru for another
guru. And the speaker refuses totally to be your stupid guru, because it’s only
dull, stupid people who follow, not the person who really wants to find out what
freedom is. So we are going to learn together by listening not only to the speaker
but also listening to what you think—not somebody else—what you observe,
perceive in the meaning of that word and the application of that word freedom
and whether the mind is ever capable of freedom. That’s what we are going to
inquire into.
As I said, freedom from something, like freedom from anger, freedom from
jealousy, freedom from aggression, is an abstraction and therefore not real. A
man who says to himself, “I must be free from anger or from jealousy,” is not
free. It is not by cultivation of the opposite, but through observing directly by
yourself, the fact of anger, what it actually is, and learning the whole structure of
anger, the nature of anger, that there is freedom.
That is, to cultivate bravery when one is not brave is not freedom. But a mind
that understands the nature and the structure of what cowardice is and remains
with it, does not try to suppress it or go beyond it, but looks at it, learns all about
it, perceives the truth of it instantly, is free from cowardice and bravery. That is,
direct perception is freedom, not the cultivation of the opposite. The cultivation
of the opposite implies time.
Again, if I am greedy, acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, my cultural
response is not to be greedy, because the books and the gurus have said so. If
they are at all intelligent, they have said it. So my response is not to be greedy, to
strive after not being greedy—I am and I must not be. The “must not” involves
time; the factor between what is, which is greed, and what should be is a time
interval. In that time interval a great many other factors come in; therefore the
mind is never free from greed. Whereas direct perception of the fact of greed, not