Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

something not to be bought through another; it’s not something fixed, something
that you can repeatedly add information about in order to discover it. Please do
realize this, that if you are really serious you must totally negate all the
propaganda, for religion is continuous propaganda. You have been told what to
do, what to think, either for five thousand years or two thousand years. So, if you
are serious you must totally put aside all that and find out for yourself what truth
is, if there is such a thing.
It is important to understand yourself, not what others say about yourself. If
you follow what the psychologists, the analysts, the religious teachers, and the
religious books say that you are, you are not discovering yourself; you are
discovering what others say. Is that simple and clear? If you follow a
psychologist or a philosopher or an analytical, intellectual person or one of the
ancient teachers, you are merely following what they tell you about yourself.
You have to deny all that to begin to find out what you are. Meditation is part of
this, because without knowing yourself not only superficially but at the very
depths of your being, you have no basis for any action, you have no foundation
whatsoever on which you can build—on which the mind can build—a house that
is stable, orderly. So it is absolutely necessary if you would really take this
extraordinary journey. We are going together to journey into this enormous
complex problem of understanding oneself. Please see the absolute essential
necessity of it, that nobody can teach you about yourself except yourself. You
have to be the guru, the disciple, the teacher, yourself and learn from yourself.
What you learn from another is not truth. You have to find out for yourself what
you are and to learn how to observe yourself.
You know, it is one of the most arduous tasks to go into this. It’s like taking a
journey together. When you walk together you must be friends, you must love
walking together, you must love. That is one of the most difficult things. To learn
about oneself is not to accumulate knowledge about oneself. To learn about
myself, I have to observe myself. If I learn about myself through the
accumulation of knowledge I do not learn about myself.
There are two ways of learning. There is learning in order to accumulate
knowledge and learning from knowledge observing through the screen of the
past. I learn about myself, observe myself having experiences and accumulating
knowledge from those experiences and look at myself through those experiences.
That is, I look at myself through the past, for knowledge is the past. That’s one
way of looking at oneself. The other is to observe and watch the movement of all
the thought, of all the motives, and never accumulate, so learning is a constant
process. Let’s go into it.
I see myself being violent, and I have condemned it or justified it. I have
learned from it that there should be no violence. I have learned from it. The next
time I observe myself being violent, I respond according to my knowledge of
what I have learned. And therefore there is no fresh observation. I am looking at
the new experience of violence with old eyes, with previous knowledge, and
therefore I am not learning. Learning implies a constant movement, not from the
past, movement from moment to moment so that there is no accumulation.