Nine
What is love? What is death?
I think we ought to go into how important it is for human beings to change
themselves when the environment, the society, the culture, is so corrupt, so
disintegrating. We see the necessity of changing the environment—the
environment being the society, the religion, the culture, and so on. Can the whole
social structure, the community, the world about us be changed by an individual,
by one human being? What significance has one individual, one human being,
transforming himself, when around him there is so much chaos, so much misery,
such confusion, such madness? I think we can use that word validly. I think that
question is wrong because that human being is the result of the culture in which
he lives. He has built the culture, the society, the environment, and in changing
the human being he is changing his environment, because he is the world and the
world around him is himself. There is no division between himself and the world.
I think we must very clearly understand right from the beginning that there is
no division as the individual and the community. The word individual means an
entity who in himself is indivisible, not dividable, not divisible. And most human
beings are divisible, are fragmented, which is partly the result of society, the
culture in which they live.
I think it is important to understand that human beings, as we are now, are the
result of the environment in which we live. I think that’s fairly clear. So the
human being is the world and the world is the human being. We may accept this
logically, intellectually, as an idea, as a something which appeals to reason, but
there it stops, because we seem to be incapable of really acting on that fact.
If we may, we are going to discuss the conflict in man and therefore in the
world, the conflict within himself and in his relationship with the world. There is
conflict between the various factors of fragmentation, each fragment in
opposition to other fragments of which a person is made up. Is it possible for the
human mind to be totally free from all conflict? Because then only is it possible
to know what it means to love. And also then perhaps we shall comprehend fully
the full meaning of death and what living is.
So first it is necessary that we should understand what conflict does to the
human mind. Please, as we said the other day, we are sharing this common
problem together. This is our problem; you and the speaker are going to share
together this question of whether the mind can ever end its conflict. When we
share together, the sharing implies partaking, not merely hearing a few sets of
ideas or words but actually sharing together, investigating, exploring together.
Therefore you have to take tremendous interest in this because it’s your problem.
And if you are not concerned with this problem there is something very wrong