So let’s begin. You are not learning from the speaker. You are your own guru
and your own teacher, your own disciple, because you yourself have to come
upon this. You have to learn and not imitate, not conform to any authority.
The first thing is that you must know yourself. You must understand yourself,
because otherwise you have no rational basis for any thought, any structure. If
you don’t understand yourself, how can you understand anything else, let alone
something which may or may not exist? So the first movement is to understand
yourself, understand yourself actually as you are, not what you would like to be.
Understand the ugliness, the brutality, the violence, the greed, the envy, the
agonizing loneliness, despair; that is what you are. And because you have not
been able to solve that and to go beyond it, you introduce the super-self, the
Atman. That is one of your tricks. So you have a conflict between what you are
and what you should be, or what your Atman tells you that you should be. So you
play a game. That doesn’t help you to understand yourself.
To understand yourself you have to look at yourself. You have to look. If I
want to look at a tree or a bird, I have to look. And I have to look at myself. I
don’t know what I am. I must learn about myself, not according to any
philosopher or any psychologist or any book or any guide or guru. For goodness’
sake, let us put all that aside; let us find out what we are. We are the bank
account; we are envious; we are ambitious, corrupt; we are double-talkers saying
one thing and doing another; we are hypocrites putting on masks, pretending.
And through all this there is the sense of sorrow, pain, anxiety, tears, the ache of
loneliness. That is what we are. If we don’t understand that and go beyond it,
how can we understand something that is so extraordinarily beautiful?
To learn about oneself can be a great difficulty because oneself is in constant
movement. Oneself is changing; oneself isn’t permanently greedy or permanently
violent or permanently sexual. There is a constant change, moving, living. One
has to learn about the living thing. To learn about the living thing, you have to
watch it, learn about it anew each minute. You see the difficulty? To learn about
myself, which is a living entity, not a dead thing, this living thing has to be
observed. And what you have learned about it in one minute must be dropped
and picked up again the next minute so that you are learning about a living thing
all the time anew. It is not that you have learned, and then from that knowledge
observe what a living thing is. This is really, if you do it, one of the most
fascinating things, because your mind then retains very little, contains essential
technological knowledge and nothing else. So your mind is watching this
movement of the “me,” which is such a complex entity, not only at the
superficial level but at the deeper level.
You may be conscious; you may watch yourself superficially and learn anew
each minute. But how are you going to learn about the secret chambers of your
mind, the hidden motives, the complex heritage? It’s all there, hidden. How are
you going to learn about that? To learn about it is not to analyze it, but to watch it
during the day—all the movements and the intimations and the hints of the secret
desires. Watch it; be open to discover the motives, the intentions, the tradition,
the heritage. Do it as we go along so that when you do it all day and then go to
sleep, the mind is completely quiet. There are no dreams, because dreams are
michael s
(Michael S)
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