Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

flower. So the image-maker is the observer. Watch it in yourself, please. So both
the image and the image-maker are the observer, and the observer is the past; the
“me” as the observer is the past. The “me” is the knowledge that I have
accumulated, knowledge of pain, sorrow, suffering, agony, despair, loneliness,
jealousy, the tremendous anxiety that one goes through. That is all the “me,”
which is the accumulated knowledge of the observer, which is the past. So when
you observe, the observer looks at that flower with the eyes of the past. You
don’t know how to look without the observer, and therefore you bring about
conflict.
So now our question is, Can you look, not only at the flower, but at your life,
at your agony, at your despair, your sorrow, without naming it, without saying to
yourself, “I must go beyond it; I must suppress it”? Just look at it without the
observer. Do it please as we are talking now. That is, take envy, which most
people have. You know what envy is very well, don’t you? You are very familiar
with that. Envy is comparison, the measurement of thought comparing what you
are with what should be, or with what you want to become. Now just look. You
are envious of your neighbor who has got a bigger car, a better house. When you
suddenly feel envious, you have compared yourself with him, and envy is born.
Can you look at that feeling without saying that it is right or wrong, without
naming it, without saying that it is envy? Look at it without any image; then you
go beyond it. Instead of struggling with envy, feeling that you should or should
not be envious, that you must suppress it, without going through all that struggle,
observe your envy without naming it. Because the naming is the movement of
the past memory that justifies or condemns. If you can look at it without naming
then you will see that you go beyond it.
The moment you know the possibility of going beyond what is, you are full of
energy. A person who doesn’t know how to go beyond what is, doesn’t know
how to deal with it, is afraid, escapes. Seeing the impossibility of it, a person
loses energy. If you have a problem and can solve it, then you have energy.
Someone who has a thousand problems and doesn’t know what to do with them
loses energy. So in the same way, look at your ugly, petty, shallow,
extraordinarily violent life. These are all words to describe what is actually going
on, not only the violence in sex, but the violence that abides with power,
position, prestige. Now, look at it with eyes that don’t immediately jump in with
images. Now, that’s your life.
And look at your life in which there is what you call love. What is love? We
are not discussing the theories of what love should be. We are observing what we
call love. I don’t know what you love. I doubt if you love anything at all. Do you
know what it means to love? Is love pleasure? Is love jealousy? Can a man love
who is ambitious? He may sleep with his wife, beget a few children. And there is
the person who is struggling politically to become an important person, or in the
business world, or in the religious world wanting to become a saint, wanting to
become desireless. All that is part of ambition, aggression, desire. Can a man
who is competitive love? And you are all competitive, aren’t you? You want a
better job, a better position, a better house, more noble ideas, more perfect
images of yourself. And is that love? Can you love if you are going through all