Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

vanities, the agonies, the despairs are disorder, and by being aware of them,
choicelessly, you will see that when you go to sleep your mind then has no
dreams at all. Therefore such a mind, such a brain is made fresh during sleep; it
renews itself and therefore the next morning you will find the brain has an
extraordinary capacity. And that’s part of understanding oneself.
And one has to give time. You must love this, you know. You must give your
life to this because it’s your life; you must give your life to understand your life.
Because you are the world and the world is you. If you change, you change the
world. This is not a mere intellectual idea. You must burn with this; you must
have passion. And meditation is the release of tremendous energy. Now we are
going to go into that some more.
You know, to change the environment there must be a system, a method to
act efficiently. If you want to change the environment you must plan what to do.
If you want to build a house you have to plan. But when you establish a system,
what takes place? Outwardly, what takes place? There must be a few who will be
capable of running that system. Then what happens to them, the people who run
the system? They become much more important than the system or the
consideration of changing the environment. Haven’t you noticed all this? They
are the bosses; they are the people who use the system to become important
themselves, like politicians the world over. Have you noticed this? To bring
about an environmental change there needs to be an efficient group of people
with a system. But the efficient people are human beings: they are angry, jealous,
envious, wanting position, and therefore they use the system and forget the
environment.
Now, we want a system to meditate. See the relationship between the two.
We think we can be efficient in our meditation, in our thinking, in our inquiry if
there is a system. Now, what does a system imply? Please bear in mind very
clearly the distinction between the two. If you want to change the physical
environment, there must be a group of people who are efficient to carry out a
system. They must be impersonal, not egotistic, not lining their own pockets,
metaphorically and physically. And therefore human beings matter more than the
system. So we say the same thing about bringing about a change in ourselves,
that only through a system can we change, only through a system can we learn
what meditation is, because that appears to offer efficiency. Does it? You know,
every potty little guru in India, and elsewhere, has a system of meditation—come
together, meditate together, do this, don’t do that, you know, all the racket that
goes on in the name of meditation. Now systems imply a repetition, practice,
following a method. If you follow a method, a system, a practice, it becomes a
routine. And when the mind becomes a mechanical thing, then you have conflict,
then there is an escape through sex, or through other forms of activity. Therefore,
at all costs avoid any system of meditation, because a mechanical mind can never
possibly find out what truth is. The mechanical mind can become very
disciplined, orderly, but that orderliness is in contradiction to the order that we
were talking about. In that orderliness of repetition there is contradiction between
what you are and what you should be, between the ideal, the perfect, and all the
rest. There is contradiction in that; and where there is contradiction there is