Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

We are going together to find out why man is in conflict and whether that
conflict can ever end—totally, not at different levels. You may have an
extraordinarily peaceful household but be at war with your neighbor. Now, to
find out you need energy, don’t you? You need a great deal of energy to find out
for yourself why humanity, you, live in conflict. When you inquire into the cause
of it, you are employing the intellect as an instrument of analysis, aren’t you?
You are using intellect as an instrument of analysis with which you hope to find
the cause. The intellect is partial, is a fragment of the total, and you hope to find
the cause of a tremendous question like why man is in conflict through a
fragmentary thing called the intellect, which is the only instrument you have. So
when you begin to inquire into the cause through the intellect, your answer will
be partial, won’t it? Therefore that is not the instrument. This means that you
must discard that instrument and find a different kind of instrument. Up to now
we have used the intellect as an analytical means to find out why man suffers,
why man is in conflict, but the intellect is a fragment of the total. Man isn’t just
an intellect. There is the whole nervous organism, the emotions, the whole
structure, and if you take one part of it and try to use that part to find the cause,
your understanding will always be partial and therefore incomplete.
To see that, you need energy, don’t you? Again, we have divided, fragmented
energy. There is energy in the fragments: hate has its own energy and the control
of that energy is also energy. We have divided energy into fragments, but human
energy and cosmic energy, every kind of energy is a unitary movement. So one
has to have that energy to understand the structure and the nature of conflict and
the ending of conflict. You must have intense energy and not fragmented energy.
Fragmented energy says, “I must get rid of conflict.” Who is the “I” that says, “I
must get rid of it or suppress it”? It is one part of that energy describing another
part of energy. So the energies are in conflict.
We are asking the reason for this conflict. One can observe it very simply as
the observer and the observed. There is in you the observer and you observe. You
observe the tree as an observer; the observer watches the tree with all his
knowledge, his past conditioning; he looks at the tree as something separate from
himself. Right?
Just listen to it, don’t agree or disagree. You haven’t gone into this question at
all, so you first have to find out what the speaker has to say. And when you are
listening to what the speaker is saying, watch yourself. Don’t merely listen to the
speaker; that is absolutely valueless, but use the speaker to watch yourself. Then
you will see that in yourself there is always the observer and the observed. The
observer says, “Do this; don’t do that.” The observer has certain values, certain
judgments; he is really the censor, who is always watching, denying, controlling,
separating himself from that which he is watching.
When you are angry or jealous or not generous, as most people are, if you
observe it very closely, there is the observer who says, “I am jealous; I am
angry.” The naming of the reaction, which he calls anger, separates him. Right?
Can you look at a tree without naming, without the interference of thought,
which is the response of memory; just observe? When you look at the tree
through the image that you have about the tree, you are not really looking at the