soulful020542
BENGALURU:We human beings, as individuals, are totally responsible for the state of the world. Wars - we are responsible for wars, by the way we lead our lives. We chose to be nationalistic, German, French, Dutch, English, American, Russian; or we chose to be Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, belonging to Zen or this or that sect. We continue to divide, quarrel, and fight with each other. Our gods, and our nationalities have divided us. When one realises, not intellectually but actually, as actually as you would recognise that you are hungry, that you and I as human beings are responsible for all this chaos, for all this misery.
Because we contribute to it, we are part of it - when one realises that, not emotionally, not intellectually, not sentimentally, but actually, then the problem becomes tremendously serious. When that realisation has becomes serious, you will act. Not until then, not until you feel that you are completely responsible for this monstrous society, with its wars, with its divisions, with its ugliness, brutalities, greediness, and so on. Not until each one of us realises that we will begin to act. And you can only act when you know how this structure, not only outwardly, but inwardly, has been put together. That is why one must know more about oneself and the more one knows about oneself, the more mature one is. Immaturity lies only in one's ignorance of oneself.
What we are going to do is to learn about ourselves - not according to the speaker, or Freud, or Jung, or to some analyst or philosopher. But to learn actually what we are. If we learn about ourselves according to Freud we learn about Freud, not about ourselves. To learn about one self, all authority must come to an end. All authority. Whether it be the authority of the church, or of the local priest, or of the famous analyst, or of the greatest philosophers with their intellectual formulas. So the first thing that one has to realise when we become serious, demanding a total revolution within the structure of our own psyche, is that there is no authority of any kind. That is very difficult, for there is not only the outward authority, which one can easily reject, but there is an inward authority.
The inward authority of one's own experience, of one's own accumulated knowledge, of ideas and ideals that guide one's life. To be free of that authority is immensely difficult - authority, not only in great things, but in the authority of yesterday when you had an experience which taught you something. Do please understand this, the subtlety and the difficulty of it. There is not only the authority of accumulated knowledge as tradition, of every day experiences that has left a mark, but there is yesterday's authority which is as destructive as the authority of a thousand years. To understand ourselves, needs no authority of yesterday, or of a thousand years, because we ourselves are a living thing, moving, never resting, always flowing.
When we look at ourselves with the authority of yesterday, what is important is the authority and not the movement of life which we are. So we don't understand the movement, the flow, the beauty and the quality of that movement. What you understand is the authority you have accumulated, that with which you are examining and looking. To be free of that authority is to die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion. It is only in that state that one observes and learns. Such freedom is no longer an instrument to be used by authority according to our pleasure and pain. And for this is required a great deal of awareness, actual awareness of what is going on within the skin, without correcting it, without telling it what it should be, or what it should not be. Because if you correct it you have already established the authority, the censor.
