Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

there is no radical change in the structure of memory, in the structure of the brain
cells.
And there is this matter of seeking experiences. People say that you must
experience something fantastic, transcendental. Now, first of all, why do you
want to experience something beyond the ordinary? Why do you want to
experience something extraordinary? For the very simple reason that you are
tired of your daily experiences; you are bored with the daily experience of sex or
no sex, the daily experiences of anger and so on. You are bored with all that, and
you say, “By Jove, there must be some other kind of experience.” Now, that very
word experience means “to go through”—to go through something, finish with it,
not carry it over. And who is it that is seeking experience? Isn’t it the entity that
says, “I’m tired of all these superficial things and I want something more”? That
entity is part of the desire to have more, and that entity projects what it wants.
Being a Hindu or a Muslim or a Christian and God knows what else, being
conditioned, you want to experience Christ or Buddha or Krishna or whatever it
is. And you will, because what you are going to experience is projected from
your past because you are conditioned. So your nirvana, your heaven, your
experience, your future is according to your ugly little past. A mind that seeks
experience, that wants more, has not understood totally what is, which is the
“me” that is craving for all this. A mind that seeks experience is bound to time, is
bound to sorrow, for thought is time, for time is sorrow.
Now, can the mind be totally awake without any challenge, experience? Most
of us need to be challenged; otherwise, we will go to sleep. If you were not
challenged every day, questioned, criticized, you would naturally go off to sleep.
So can the mind keep so totally awake that it needs no experience at all? That can
happen only when the mind has understood the whole structure and nature of
thought.
The traditional people say to sit straight, to breathe this way and that way, to
stand on your head for twenty minutes. What does it all mean? You can sit in the
right posture, with your back straight, breathing correctly, and all the rest for the
next ten thousand years and you will be nowhere near perceiving what is true,
because you will not have understood yourself at all—the way you think, the way
you live—and you haven’t ended your sorrow. Yet you want to find
enlightenment. So one has to drop all that.
You know, there are powers, siddhis as they are called, and that seems to
entice people. If you can levitate, if you can read thoughts, if you can do all kinds
of twists and turns with your body, it seems to fascinate people. That way you get
power, prestige. Now, all these powers are like candles in the sun. They are like
candlelight when the brilliant sun is shining. Therefore they are utterly valueless
if a person would understand what truth is. They have a therapeutic, physical
value, nothing else.
Without following any system, without any compulsion or comparison, how
can the mind, which has so long been conditioned, be completely empty of the
past? Can it empty completely so that it sees clearly and ends what it sees clearly
so that it is always renewing itself in emptiness, which is, renewing itself in
innocence? Now, the word innocence means “a mind that can never be hurt.” It