You are your best teacher

BENGALURU: The speaker is not important at all; what is important is for you to find out these things for yourself, so that you are free and not second-hand human beings. You must look to find out, to find out whether or not it is possible for the mind to be completely and totally free of this violence, pride and arrogance, and so come upon a different quality altogether. And to find that out you must look most intimately and discover for yourself; then it is your own, not somebody else’s, not something that you have been told, because there is no teacher and no follower. Unfortunately that word “guru” has been bandied about recently in this country; the word in Sanskrit means “the one who points”, like a signpost by the roadside. However, you don’t worship that post, hang garlands around it; neither do you follow it around and carry out all the mysterious orders a guru is supposed to give; he is just a signpost by the roadside, you read and pass by.

So you have to be your own teacher and your own disciple, and there is no teacher outside, no saviour, no master; you yourself have to change, and therefore you have to learn to observe, to know yourself. This learning about yourself is a fascinating and joyous business.It is the same with the problem of existence, the problem of bread, the problem of love, the problem of sex, the problem of relationship, the problem of death. These are all enormous problems, and we approach them with a small mind; we try to resolve them with a mind that is very limited. Though it has extraordinary capacities and is capable of invention, of subtle, cunning thought, the mind is still petty. It may be able to quote Marx, or the Gita, or some other religious book, but it is still a small mind, and a small mind confronted with a complex problem can only translate that problem in terms of itself, and therefore the problem, the misery increases. So the question is: Can the mind that is small, petty, be transformed into something which is not bound by its own limitations?  

From childhood we are trained to have problems. When we are sent to school, we have to learn how to write, how to read, and all the rest of it. How to write becomes a problem to the child.  Mathematics becomes a problem, history becomes a problem, as does chemistry. So the child is educated, from childhood, to live with problems—the problem of God, problem of a dozen things. So our brains are conditioned, trained, educated to live with problems. What happens when a brain is educated in problems? It can never solve problems; it can only create more problems. It is only the free brain that is not conditioned to problems that can solve problems. It is one of our constant burdens to have problems all the time. Therefore our brains are never quiet, free to observe, to look. So we are asking: Is it possible not to have a single problem but to face problems? But to understand those problems, and to totally resolve them, the brain must be free.