observed why in your own life that has become of such significant importance?
Let’s go into it.
Have you noticed how extraordinarily mechanical your life is? You go to the
office every day for forty years. You repeat, repeat. When you quote your
religious books, perform rituals, when you call yourself a Hindu, a Muslim, a
Christian, a communist, it’s a mechanical habit, a routine, a repetition. When you
name yourself as a bureaucrat, as a politician, as a sociologist and so on, it is a
habit, a mechanical acquisition of knowledge which you can repeat, repeat,
repeat. Isn’t your life mechanical? Haven’t you noticed it? So, what have you?
Your life, your thinking, your ways of acting are all mechanical, repetitive; so
you have only one thing that is not repetitive—but which you can reduce to
repetitiveness—which is sex. So that becomes your release from the mechanical
way of life. Do inquire.
So you have made love into a mechanical, pleasurable affair. Is that love?
You know, to find out what it is you have to deny completely what it is not. The
denial is the understanding of what pleasure is and fear is. The understanding of
it, not saying, “Well, I mustn’t have pleasure,” which is sheer nonsense. It’s like
a man saying he must have no desire. That’s what you are trained to do; you
accept by your tradition that desire is completely wrong and that you must go
beyond it. You know, when you look at a tree, the beauty of a leaf, the shadow,
the movement of the leaf, to look at it is a delight. What’s wrong with it?
Because you have denied beauty, your life has become mechanical. You never
look at a tree; on the contrary, you are cutting down trees. You never look at the
sky, the clouds, the beauty of the land, because you have an idea at the back of
your mind that to be a really religious person you must never look at anything
beautiful, because beauty might remind you of the woman. It is so disgusting, so
childish. And that is what you call religion, and that is the way you are going to
find God. It is so infantile—you torture the mind to find God. Think of that. To
find reality you must have a free mind, not a tortured mind. There must be a
sense of love, not with all its jealousies, fears. You don’t know what it means to
love, the beauty of it, because you don’t know what it means to live a beautiful
life, a life without conflict. You only know a life that is committed to some form
or another and therefore is broken up—as you have broken up living from dying.
You put death far away from you but you jolly well know it is going to come
one of these days. So you invent theories like reincarnation. Is there a next life?
If you really believe in reincarnation, really believe that you will be born in a
next life according to what you do in this life, then this life matters much more
than a next life. That means that what you do now matters, how you behave now
matters. But you really don’t believe in reincarnation. It means absolutely
nothing. It’s just a theory that gives you temporary comfort, so you say that must
be so. But if you really in your heart of hearts believe it, then every minute of the
day counts, every action has significance. Therefore now is the moment of
righteousness, not in a next life. You have innumerable shoddy theories about
death, and you have never faced it.
So we are going to look to find out the nature of death while living, while we
are full of vitality, energy, not when we are diseased, unconscious, in pain and
michael s
(Michael S)
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