Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

what should be—the hero, the image that you have projected from what you are.
Now, if you don’t compare at all, you are what you are. And what you are then is
totally different from what you have thought you are through comparison. That
is, I compare myself with you who are very clever, bright, intelligent, awake, and
I say to myself that I am dull. But if there is no comparison at all, am I dull? I am
what I am. I don’t call it dull. Then I can do something, act, change, go beyond
what is. But if I compare myself with another, I cannot go beyond.
And why do we obey at all? I don’t know if you have ever gone into the
question of why you obey anybody. You know, the root meaning of the word
obey is “to hear.” When you hear over and over and over and over and over again
that you are a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Christian, a communist, it
conditions your mind, doesn’t it? Listen to this, please. You have been told in
this country, and now it is unfortunately spreading to other countries, that you
need a guru. You repeat this and you instinctively follow, obey. That’s your
tradition, repeated over and over again. Look what you have done to yourself,
what has been done to the mind. A mind that obeys, that conforms, that compares
is not a religious mind at all. See the logic of it; see the reasoning of it first, and
then you can’t avoid it. You may say that you don’t like what I say. That’s
perfectly all right, but first you must see it.
You see, sirs, we have to learn what virtue is, which is order. Virtue is order,
not the thing that you practice. You cannot practice humility. When you
understand vanity, humility is naturally there.
And we have to go also into the question of meditation. What is the
meditation of a religious mind? We said the religious mind is free of all belief. It
completely sets aside all systems, all authority, all practice. A state of mind that
has come to see logically with reason and is free of all this is part of meditation.
Meditation isn’t something you do five minutes a day and then the rest of the day
you are an ugly human being. Meditation is something from the beginning to the
end. And to go into what meditation is cannot possibly be done in a few minutes,
because it is really a complicated subject, about which we are going to learn, not
be instructed by the speaker on how to meditate. The moment you put the “how”
you are wrong. Never, if I may most respectfully suggest, never ask of anybody
the “how.” They are all only too eager to give you a method. But if you see the
mischief of the “how,” that very perception is enough.