Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

you see that flower through the image you have of it. You don’t actually see it;
your mind sees it more than your eye. Right? Please do understand this very
simple fact. Nature is being destroyed by human beings through pollution and all
that is going on in this terrible world, but we look at nature with eyes that have
accumulated knowledge about nature, and therefore with an image. We also look
at human beings with our various forms of conclusions, opinions, judgments, and
values. That is, you are a Hindu, another is a Muslim; you are a Catholic, another
is a Protestant, communist, and so on and on and on. There is division. So when
you observe yourself, your life, you observe it through the image, through the
conclusions that you have already formed. You say, “This is good,” or “This is
bad,” or “This should be,” and “That should not be.” You are looking with the
images, conclusions, that you have formed, and therefore you are not actually
looking at life.
So in order to look at our life as it is, there must be freedom of observation.
You must not look at it as a Hindu, as a bureaucrat, as a family man, as God
knows what else! You must look at it with freedom. And that is the difficulty.
You look at your life, the despair, the agony, the sorrow, this vast struggle with
eyes and ears that have said, “This must be changed into something else. This
must be transformed in order to make it more beautiful.” So actually when you
are doing that, you are not directly in relationship with what you see. Are you
following this? Not the explanation that the speaker is giving, but are you
actually observing your life and actually observing how you look at it? Do you
look at it with an image, with a conclusion, and therefore are not coming directly
into contact with it? When you look at the life of your daily existence—not at a
theoretical life, not at an abstract life where “all human beings are one, all is
love” and all that tommyrot—when you observe it, you see that you are looking
with your past knowledge. You are looking with all the images, the tradition, the
accumulation of human experience. That prevents you from actually looking. It’s
a fact which must be realized that to observe your life actually you must look at it
afresh; that is, to look at it without any condemnation, without any ideal, without
any desire to suppress it or change it; just to observe.
Are you doing this? Are you using the speaker as a mirror in which you are
seeing your own life? And are you seeing that looking from a conclusion
prevents you from looking at it directly, being in contact with it? Are you doing
this? If you don’t do it now you won’t do it later. If you are not doing it then
don’t bother to listen. Look at the sky, look at a tree, look at the beauty of light,
look at the clouds with their curve, with their delicacy. If you look without any
image, you have understood your own life.
When you are looking as an observer at yourself, at your life as something to
be observed, there is a division between the observer and the observed. Isn’t that
simple? If you are looking at your life as an observer separate from your life,
there is a division between the observer and the observed. Now, this division is
the essence of all conflict, the essence of all struggle, pain, fear, despair. Where
there is division between human beings—of nationalities, of religions, socially—
there must be conflict. This is law; this is reason, logic. Externalized division