Thought has put all this together, hasn’t it? Thought says, “I am frightened; I
am anxious; I love; I am full of fear; I may lose my job; I want a bigger house,
more furniture, more applause; I must have power, position, prestige.” All that is
the product of thought, isn’t it? Do be simple about it. It is not created by
whatever it is; it’s created by the everyday activity of thought, the image that
thought has put together. Is there anything permanent? The moment you think
about there being a permanent thing, whatever you like to call it, it is already the
product of thought. And thought is not permanent. Thought is old, never free,
never new, because thought is the response of memory. And that’s all you have:
memory, words, recognition, association, identification is all you have. That’s all
you are. Do face it; look at it. You are your furniture; you are your bank account;
you are your memories, your pleasures, your hurts, your anxieties; you are all
that. And you don’t know how to solve it, how to be free of it. So you say that
there must be some permanent thing which is beyond all this. Thought thinking
about something creates it; what thought thinks about it can produce, and thought
is of that.
If there is something real, something that is beyond time, time can never
touch it. You say from one of your traditions, one of your beliefs, one of your
habitual processes of thought that you believe in reincarnation, which is karma—
that past life determines future life, so behave. If you really believe in
reincarnation, that in a next life you are going to pay for what you are doing now,
it means that you must behave now, doesn’t it? You must be righteous now, not
tomorrow. You must have rectitude now, not in a next life, which means that you
have to pay tremendous attention to what you are doing now, because if you
don’t, you are going to pay for it. Therefore you don’t believe it; it’s just a
comforting, ugly idea, this everlasting talking about what will happen next life:
“Is there something permanent? Will I continue in a next incarnation?” So you
are not religious; you are just verbalizing in order to have some comfort, because
you don’t know how to meet death. See what deceptions, what hypocrisies we
live through because of fear.
See the falseness of all our ways. It is time that says, “I will behave next life;
I will be good; I will cultivate virtue; I will be less brutal, less violent”; it is all
avoiding, avoiding, avoiding. All that involves time, because you are frightened
of this thing called death, the ending of the things that you have called living.
The living is your anxiety, your fears, your furniture, the petty little things that
you have collected, such as “the Hindu,” “the Sikh,” “the Muslim,” “the
Christian.” It is words, words, words that you have collected, because in them
you seek shelter and comfort, because you don’t know how to face this enormous
thing called death. It is the ending of the things known, not of something
unknown. You are never frightened of the unknown because you don’t know
what it is. What you are really frightened of is letting go of the known. Do look
at it, please. It’s your life, not the speaker’s: your beliefs, your customs, your
habits, the traditions, the accumulation of your memories, your so-called love of
the family.
You really don’t love the family; you don’t love your children. If you did love
them with your heart and not with your little brain, then you would have a
michael s
(Michael S)
#1