couldn’t possibly go home. You couldn’t do anything. Knowledge is necessary.
Through learning a language you acquire a technique. That’s necessary. If you
would be an engineer, a scientist, what you will, you must have knowledge. One
learns Italian or French, and there is accumulation of words, knowledge, and
speech. The acquiring is the past, which is knowledge. Knowledge is always the
past and that knowledge which is the past acts when necessary. Now there is
another kind of learning altogether, which is not acquiring. We are going to go
into that.
There is no acquisition at all in learning to observe. To learn what order is, is
not accumulating knowledge of what order should be according to your particular
design, or a prophet’s or saint’s. How are you going to learn what order is?
Please listen carefully; learn, don’t accumulate. We live in disorder, that’s all we
know. We live in contradiction, we live in confusion, we live in constant battle.
That is disorder. Right? Now, to observe disorder, to learn all about disorder, is
order. And that is discipline. Do you get it? Observe what disorder is. Do not try
to bring order out of disorder, but just observe what disorder is. That is, negating
all positive action but watching disorder.
So, what is disorder? Observe within yourself how disorderly, contradictory
we are, pursuing this and that, conforming, measuring, comparing and therefore
never having freedom at all. But when you no longer trust your guru, when you
have no book, no priest, that means you have no authority—except the authority
of the law, that’s quite a different matter. When the mind rejects all sense of
inward spiritual authority—and one must, because the moment you obey, there is
no freedom, and a mind must be totally free to inquire—such a mind faces its
own loneliness, its own despair, its own confusion. This is the disorder in us. We
are learning together, please.
Now, what does a mind that is learning about confusion do? When you are
confused, you want to act, don’t you? When you are confused and don’t know
what to do, you want to do something. You don’t look at that confusion; you
don’t observe it; you don’t study it; you don’t learn all about it. You want to do
something about it, and therefore you get more and more and more confused. A
mind that doesn’t know what to do, in which direction to go, whether to become
a communist, a socialist, an activist, or a contemplative withdrawing altogether
from the world, is confused.
Why is there confusion? Please follow this. There is confusion because there
is conformity. Conformity implies measurement, measuring myself, what I am,
against what I should be. Once you really see the truth of this, it’s finished. There
is confusion because the mind through education, through all kinds of stresses,
strains, through various forms of compulsions is always measuring itself,
comparing what it is with what it should be, the ideal. That is one reason for its
confusion: comparing, conforming, obeying.
Now, why do we conform? Why do we measure? Why do we obey? If you go
very deeply into yourself you see that you conform because from childhood you
have been taught to compare yourself with another. Watch it in yourself.
Comparing means that what you are is not important, but what you should be is
important. So there is a contradiction, the denial of what is for the acceptance of
michael s
(Michael S)
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