Seven
How do you look at your life?
It seems to me that one of our great difficulties, especially where tradition is
strong, is that we have to apply our minds and hearts to find out how to live quite
differently. Isn’t it important that we should radically change our lives? Not
according to any particular plan or ideology or to fit into some kind of utopia, but
seeing what the world is, how extraordinarily violent, brutal, and laden with an
enormous amount of sorrow it is, it obviously becomes the responsibility of each
one of us to change our lives, the ways of our thinking, the ways of our behavior,
the attitudes and the impulses that we have. We are going to talk over together
what life actually is and what love is and what the meaning of death is; and, if we
can, find out for ourselves what a religious life is and whether such a religious
life is possible in the modern world. We are also going to talk together about
time, space, and meditation.
There are so many things to talk over, and probably most of you,
unfortunately, have already acquired a great deal of knowledge about all these
things, knowledge that others have given you, that your books, your gurus, your
systems, your culture have imposed upon you. That’s not knowledge; that’s
merely a repetition of what other people have said, whether it be the greatest of
teachers or your local guru. In understanding daily life we need no guru, no
authority, no book, no teacher. All we have to do is to observe, be aware of what
we are doing, what we are thinking, what our motives are, and whether it is at all
possible to change totally our human ways, beliefs, and despairs.
So first let us look at what our daily life actually is. Because if we don’t
understand that, if we don’t bring order into it, if we merely slur over our daily
activity or escape into some ideology or just remain superficially satisfied with
things as they are, then we have no basis for a life, a way of thinking, a way of
action which will be right, which will be true. Without order one must live in
confusion. Without understanding order, which is virtue, then all morality
becomes superficial, merely influenced by the environment, by the culture in
which one lives, which is not moral at all. So one must find out for oneself what
order is and whether order is a pattern, a design, a thing that has been put
together by man through various forms of compulsion, conformity, imitation, or
whether it is a living thing and therefore can never possibly be made into a
pattern, into conformity.
So to understand disorder we must examine our life as it is. What is our daily
living? If you can bear to look at it, if you can observe it, what actually is your
everyday life? You can see that in that living there is a great deal of confusion,
there is a great deal of conformity, contradiction, every person against another
person—in the business world you are ready to cut another’s throat. Politically,