merely a continuation, in symbolic form, of daily conflicts. But if you have
understood the daily movement of life, your greed, your envy, your anger, all
that, then you will see that you are emptying the mind of everything of the past.
So there must be self-knowing—not having learned you apply, but knowing all
the time. That is, knowing implies the active present.
Then you need discipline. The word itself means “to learn.” But see what we
have done with that word. We have suppressed, controlled, conformed, imitated,
and that’s what we call discipline, like a soldier. We have reduced discipline to a
practice. In that kind of discipline which all the gurus have, there is no freedom;
there is decay, deterioration. Whereas learning about oneself—learning all the
time, not having learned—brings about its own order. If I am learning about this
whole process of living, that very learning brings its own order. Order is its own
virtue. The thing that you cultivate is not virtue. So there must be knowing
oneself, there must be this order, which is discipline, and there must be no action
of will. We’ll go into that a little bit.
What is will? Have you studied it? When you say, “I will; I won’t; I must; I
should,” what does that mean? It is the assertion, the decision, the statement of a
desire to be. In the action of will there is choice: “I will not do this, but I will do
that.” Do, please, follow this, because, you see, unless you learn all this from
yourself, you will have a miserable life. You can escape from it by dancing away
from, fighting what you are. All you know are these two things: resist or escape.
Resist means fight. Escape means to go to temples, gurus, take drugs, marijuana,
drink, sex, the whole gamut of escapes. And will is implied in all this.
Can one lead a daily life without the movement and the action of will? That
means a life in which there is no choice at all, because when you have choice,
you have contradiction. Choice exists when you are confused, doesn’t it? When
you don’t know what to do, you are confused, and out of confusion comes
choice, and out of choice the action of will. Why are you confused? Most people
are. Why? Because you don’t accept what actually is. You try to alter what is to
something else; and the moment you do that there is conflict, and out of that
conflict, confusion. So the action of will is the outcome of confusion. So
meditation is a movement in which there is no action of will whatsoever.
If you are doing all this, then you have the problem of illusion. The brain is
the result of the past. The brain structures, the cells, are the result of centuries
upon centuries of evolution. It has collected tremendous knowledge to survive.
That is all it is concerned with—to survive. And physical survival is becoming
more and more difficult because of the explosion of population, national
divisions. And where there is division there is conflict, there is war, there is
misery. And the brain, demanding security, safety, survival, tries one thing after
the other. It tries belief; it hopes in nationalism, in the family, in the bank
account, in neuroticism. And not being able to find security, it hopes to find
permanency in some belief, in some god, in some experience. Then it finds that
there is security in a kind of illusion; and that illusion becomes tremendously
important. That is what you are doing. Your nationalism is an illusion. Your gods
are an illusion; you have invented them. In all your gurus, your systems of
morality, there is no safety.
michael s
(Michael S)
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