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So you see the fallacy of saying that through nationalism we can become international though lots of people talk of it. Nationalism in itself is an exclusive process and it is of recent growth caused by competition, economic frontiers, etc. It is not conducive to peace.
The more you are national, the more you are identifying yourself with what you call your country in order to be something. If you are nobody you feel rather frustrated. One of the effects of industrialisation is to make you more and more mechanical and less and less important.
How can you be more practical if you do not see the significance of nationalism in all its different layers so that it may drop away of its own accord? If you have the intelligence to see that it is a cobra, you do not have to take practical steps to fight it. You just leave it alone.
You want to have open relationship with others; you also see that nationalism is a poison which has degenerating effects in human relationship. Therefore nationalism drops away. You may have a little reaction when you hear that India beat Australia in cricket, but it does not become a problem.
So, your difficulty lies in seeing the thing clearly without any prejudice. The prejudice has been created by outside agencies as well as yourself. With regard to every subject, you are misinformed, you are badly educated and badly conditioned; and you try to interpret life through this misinformation.
When you realize that your information is wrong you immediately put it aside. You like to identify yourself with your country because it gives you a sense of warm feeling which can be whipped up to kill somebody. You become national and you like it because it gives you a warm sense of feeling that you are achieving something.
So there are more soldiers, more armies, more dreadfulness. That is what we are achieving and that is not progress. Progress does not obviously lie through bloodshed.
There are only six countries, I believe, that can feed themselves; every other country is dependent on somebody else. Therefore, why not destroy all the frontiers and come together as human beings to meet our necessities of food, clothing and shelter? You want to know who is to do this.
You and I have to do this. Who else is going to do it? Certainly not the capitalists, certainly not the political party - either the Left or the right - because they are committed.
So, who is to do it except those people who see the thing clearly? Nationalism is a modern invention, and it is really non-conducive to peace; it acts as a barrier between people. There is no practical step regarding it; either you see the thing or you do not.
Your prejudices stand in the way of your finding it out. You must see the whole significance of the idea of acquisitiveness which is expressed through property, through relationship and through ideation. I am not talking about merely the ethical, the moral or the religious, but the actual process of acquisition and what is implied in it.
What are the effects of acquisitiveness? One is nationalism and another is the competition between you and me; another is the moral and social degradation in which is involved the whole idea of division of the high and the low. Psychologically, it is very gratifying to own something; it feeds your vanity, you are somebody then.
The effect of acquisition gives you a sense of life, a sense of struggle, a sense of existence. If you do not acquire what are you? You are nobody if you have no title, no property, or no name; and therefore things become important.
Because inwardly you are nothing, you wish to acquire, which implies power, prestige, title and all the rest of it. Then, mentally, you want to acquire knowledge. You are anchored to acquisition and you become a mental addict who always reads.
A mind that is merely acquiring, ceases to function as an instrument of thought, it inevitably becomes dull without any pliability, it is slavish, it is uncreative, it is repetitive because it is merely acquiring what it calls knowledge. So, acquisition through experience, through memory or through knowledge and all the rest of it, is really a factor that dulls the mind and cripples thinking. To think, you must be free and not be anchored to acquisition, to property or to belief.
You may have no property, but mentally you may be anchored to acquisition, a mental addict who reads and reads. You should understand the significance of acquisition which is expressed in property, which does not mean that you must not have a little money, especially as the society around you is based on money. Some property, i.e.
food, clothes, and shelter, is necessary for you and you must have it; but it should not become a psychological need. When you understand the significance of acquisitiveness, it is very simple to deal with property. You may prevent, by legislation, the acquisition of property; but people may still be acquisitive in some other direction, which may be equally disastrous, like knowledge which gives one an extraordinary sense of superiority.
What is the practicability wanted here? The problem is how to give up the property or how to arrange the property to suit your convenience. You can only deal with it when you understand the full significance of it.
What is your attitude to property? Are you depending on legislation with regard to your conduct toward property? The world is confused; and the more it is confused, the more the individual wants security, i.e.
you want to be secure. This leads to conflict in you as well as outside you. This conflict will cease only when you understand and are aware of the significance of acquiring property; then there will not arise the question of how you will escape from the conflict.
There are various forms of relationship - such as relationship with things which are considered to be property, relationship to the bank account, relationship to law which sustains the property; and the relationship to human beings. The relationship to human beings is more difficult and more subtle; and the difficulty arises when there is no love. Love cannot be learned through Pelmanism, through practice, or through following some steps.
If there is love, you will understand relationship; love will then show the way out of this horrible mess of husband and wife and relationship between man and man. Why don't we love? What is preventing us from loving?
If you can find out the cause, perhaps you may know how to love. Love is not something abstract, but it is an extraordinary sense of intelligence, a heightened form of intelligence. If you are intelligent then perhaps there will be love.
Why is it that the relationship between man and man has become so difficult? It may be because they are not dealing with it intelligently and they do not know what intelligence is. Perhaps you can find out what intelligence is, negatively.
My relation with you is society. The society is non-existent without you and me. The group is you and me; you and I create the whole structure of society.
When we examine the relationship between one another now, we find there is conflict. Average existence is a conflict. To deal with this conflict intelligently, I must examine the relationship as it is and not as I would like it to be.
I notice conflict in my relationship with my wife. To understand this, I must, first of all, know if I am related at all. If I am related, there should be communion, exchange of feeling and thinking out of the problem together.
To be is to be related. I have taken it for granted that I am related to my wife; perhaps I am not. There is no real contact with her so I remain isolated.
Yet, I think I am in relationship with her; and so, 'relationship' may be merely an expression or a term without any meaning because if I am related to her, it will have a different meaning. Can two entities in isolation live together? If my whole motive is to be self-protected, is there any relationship?
So, the problem is not that I do not love her or she does not love me, or she dominates over me; but perhaps she and I are not related for the very simple reason that she is exclusive in herself and I am exclusive in myself. That is our daily activity - I with my interests and my purposes and she with hers. We say we are related, but we two are working exclusively in ourselves.
Therefore the next question why am I doing it? It is suggested that common interest brings about communion. Is it so?
You and I are interested in education, we both have common interests and we belong to the same society. We meet in the temple; but, in the market, we cut each other's throat. Why does each one of us, in our relationship with one another, try to isolate oneself?
Is this inevitable in the sense of a rose becoming a rose? Is this process natural? If it is natural or inevitable, then there is nothing more to be said about it, and there will be constant conflict between you and me; there will be no peace between you and society, between you and myself.
If it is inevitable, there can never be love, not a moment of complete quietness between us. We know of moments when there is creation, though such moments are rare. Creation takes place not in conflict but only when the conflict ceases, when there is silence, when there is a sense of fullness.
So, we find that the conflict is not inevitable. We have now to understand why we isolate ourselves in relationship. It is said in all religious literature that, to find God, you must withdraw and be alone.
When you seek God, Reality, Truth, you are alone not because you want to be alone but because a lot of stupid people around you force you to be alone. You say nationalism is wrong, Brahmanism is wrong, etc. ; but society will not accept all this because it does not like to change.
So, though you do not push yourself away from it, the society pushes you out and then says that you must be alone to find out Truth. Nobody can be alone; he is always in relationship with the person who gives him food. He is alone only in repudiating the faiths and refusing the things which society accepts.
So, it is a wrong conclusion leading to illusion, that you must be alone to find God. I now see that I would be acting falsely if I am isolating myself because society has been telling me that I should be alone to find Reality. On examining further, we find that one of the reasons for exclusion is labour, functional existence.
We are isolating ourselves according to function. Functions have become very important in our life for the very simple reason that our life is based on sensate values. Through functions, I am isolating myself because I have divided life into categories of functions, higher and lower, like minister and scavenger, etc.
Why are we isolating psychologically? I am living in isolation and my whole struggle is to live in more and more isolation. I live with my neighbour and he is also doing exactly the same as I am doing.
I know that isolation is not an inevitable process. Then why do I psychologically isolate myself? My strife is to protect myself.
Similarly you are protecting yourself. This means mutual self-protection for avoiding a conflict. But, we have not understood self-protection.
After all, any enclosure, psychological or physical, is self-protection, is isolation. I put a wall around myself, psychologically, for the obvious reason to protect myself. The more I try to protect myself, the greater the isolation, the greater is the conflict.
Protecting myself by putting a wall psychologically around me creates a barrier. You have a wall around you and I have a wall around me and we keep on strengthening our respective walls. When you and I thus come in contact, what will be our relationship?
The more I am enclosed in myself the more violent I become, the more aggressive I am; similarly you. To have right relationship, this barrier of psychological enclosure around each one of us has to be pulled down. Obviously, as I cannot do anything with others, I must first start with myself and set about to pull down the enclosure which I am putting up around me for self-protection.
.. Relationship, as it exists now, is one series of conflicts, giving in at one time and getting upset at another time and so on. It is a constant battle between yourself and your wife, between yourself and society, a constant friction, maladjustment, struggle and contradiction between two people.
We are not discussing what should be the ideal form of relationship. The ideal is a real curse because it really prevents you from understanding what is; if you accept and work towards an idea, you merely conform, without understanding the significance of relationship; you do not understand what your relationship actually is and what it means. Are you at all "related", you and your wife, or your neighbour and yourself?
Though you live together and have children though you wrangle and fight, is there any "relationship" between you and your wife? If you examine yourself, you will see that your whole intention,your whole pursuit, is an isolating process. Each one is isolating himself or herself, in possession, in name, in power, in money; each one builds a wall around oneself and says "I am related".
We look over the enclosing walls occasionally when it is suitable and convenient; but, most of the time, we lurk behind the walls. This process of isolation is considered "relationship"! In daily life, we are isolating ourselves by our activities; we are separating ourselves through function - the bank clerk and the manager, the labourer and the executive, the priest and the bishop, the man in the street and the rich man, the ignorant and the learned, and so on.
We are constantly erecting enclosing walls around ourselves, and yet we try to be "related". When there is this constant erection of walls and isolation, conflict is inevitable. The more one is enclosing, the more the struggle and the violence.
Is this isolation by the erection of the enclosing wall a natural process like the fall of an apple from the tree, or is it the result of influence by society? You are now aware that you are building the wall. Having built and being caught in the process of building the wall, your intelligence says that you should be rid of this wall.
To get rid of this wall, you must first find out why you are building the wall. If you understand the truth of this, you do not have to 'struggle not to build' and you will never build the wall again. Is this isolation a form of self-protection?
Is self-protection natural? Obviously it is. If you do not protect yourself in regard to food, clothing and shelter, there may be no existence at all.
Physically and biologically, there must be self-protection against rain, against sunshine, etc. But, when that self-protection becomes a psychological necessity, then it becomes exploitation and all the rest of it. When your neighbour and yourself are each behind his own wall, how can you understand each other?
Why do you erect these separating walls psychologically? How will you get rid of these walls? First of all, you are aware that you are building walls, psychologically, around yourself.
Then, you enquire if such building is natural, instinctive and therefore inevitable. You do not protect yourself psychologically to be safe outwardly - name, property, bank account, etc.- but in order to be safe inwardly, in order to give you an assurance of self-protection inside. Some protection of you outwardly, in the form of food, clothing and shelter, is necessary; but you increase the protection of yourself outwardly in things in order to be secure inwardly.
Because you are inwardly incapable of protecting yourself and therefore inwardly uncertain, you depend on outward things. You can only protect yourself inwardly with ideas, values which the mind gives with regard to things made by the hand or made by the mind. Also, you can only protect yourself in relation to an outside object.
You have no inward actions or perceptions which are apart from outward things and which would render outward things as of no significance. There is no inward protection by itself. What is the nature of the enclosing wall around you, which gives you psychological protection in relation to your neighbour, your wife and your society?
The wall you build around yourself psychologically consists of the values you give to things made either by the hand or by the mind, i.e. of your ideation. These values are merely the outcome of the pleasure or the pain felt by you through your senses, i.e.
the outcome of sensory values. They have no substance behind them except the significance or value you give them. In protecting yourself outwardly, you say you can use the outward things to protect you inwardly.
You can use property as a means of psychological protection. Property in itself is just a piece of land which can give you food; you give that property a significance which it has not, and with that significance you protect yourself. So, the trouble does not lie in outward things which are all made by the hand or by the mind.
The trouble is because you use those things as a means of self-protection; and therefore, you give to them values which they do not possess and, with those values, you are inwardly protecting yourself. The fact is that those values in themselves are non-existent but are merely created by your mind. Therefore, the outward things made by the hand and the beliefs made by the mind become extraordinarily important and you cling to them both because, with the values you give them, you protect yourself psychologically.
What an extraordinary transformation you have made in yourself! Things made by the mind are illusory because they, beliefs, can project themselves into visions and experiences - you believe or you like to believe in the Master, and you can experience the Master. It is very simple; you want to see a vision and you see a vision, pleasant or unpleasant.
It is all the projection of the mind. So, you have discovered from this process that, through sensory perceptions, you are protecting something which is not sensory, something which you do not know. What are you protecting behind your enclosing wall?
Protecting implies that there is something which can be protected. In other words, what is that something which you are trying to protect by your values with regard to things made by the hand or by the mind? Is there anything behind the wall?
You are building and erection of valuations; what is behind that wall of valuations? To enquire if there is anything behind the wall, what is the instrument with which you are enquiring? The instrument is the outcome of the things made by the hand or by the mind, which is the wall.
To find out what is behind the wall, you have to climb over the wall or go through the wall. What are you protecting with extraordinary care everyday, struggling, cheating ruthlessly, brutally, violently, deceitfully and cunningly? When you say you are protecting yourself, you are merely protecting the wall which you have built up.
So your consideration is how to strengthen the wall and not to protect something. To find out what is behind the wall, the wall must cease. You do not know what is behind the wall and therefore you are not protecting the thing behind the wall, but only the wall which you know, which is your valuation.
The positive value is the wall; you do not like that and you would like to be something else. When you are talking about protecting you do not know what you are protecting. But, you do know that the wall exists.
So, perhaps you are protecting the wall, because the value is the wall, either positive value or negative value. So, you are keeping a wall, positively or negatively, as a means of protecting; and on enquiring what you are protecting, you do not know. You see the wall only and not the something behind it.
Perhaps if you know what is inside the enclosure, it may not be necessary to protect at all; or perhaps there is nothing to protect. Without knowing what is behind the wall, it is absurd your protecting or building a wall. you only know the wall.
You do not know anything about protection. Therefore, the word 'protection' has gone out of your thought, and all that remains is the wall, not the idea to protect something. You are not using the word 'protection' any more because 'to protect' means 'to protect something'; and as you do not know that something you are not going to protect.
All that you are now left with is the wall and not 'protection'. But the wall is made of the valuation by the valuer. So, the wall is the valuer and the valuation.
You are protecting something which you do not know. If you know what you are protecting, that may not need any protection,. So it is a foolish action that you are doing.
Therefore, you will neither protect nor destroy; and you are only left with the wall and not with the idea of protection. The wall was created out of things made by the mind; therefore, the mind is the wall. The wall is made out of the mind's tricks and valuations.
As the mind is the creator of the values, the values are the mind. What is 'me'? 'Me" is the product of desire in relation to the object of desire.
A challenge and the response to the challenge constitute an experience. When the response is conditioned, the experience leaves a residue which is memory. 'Me' is 'memories', the accumulated residue of experiences, with which evaluation is made, the sum total of the qualities.
So, the 'me' which is protecting the wall, is the wall, i.e. the qualifier evaluating things is the wall. Therefore, the wall is the 'me', the thinker, the thought, the valuation.
The 'me', the accumulated residue of experience, is pleasurable in part and painful. The thinker wants to avoid the painful; he finds the thoughts can be changed. So, hoping to be permanent and unchanging, he separates himself from the thoughts and talks of "I change my thoughts", thus playing a trick on himself, because the separation is not real but only fictitious.
When attacked, the thinker tries to seek identification with "higher self", and when that is attacked, he identifies himself with Atman, with Paramatman, then with Para Brahman. Thus, the thinker is always trying to do something about thought. Unfortunately, all your structure of thinking, your philosophy, is based on this fallacy that the thinker is different from the thought.
Therefore, you have all kinds of systems for reformation of thought, etc., which are doing such havoc in the world now. So, there is the wall, which is the 'me', the thinker, the thought, the valuation. The 'me' which is the quality, which is the wall, is enquiring to find out what is behind.
That is, the 'me' which is the valuation, is enquiring the valueless which the 'me' does not know. That is, the 'me' which is the judge, is judging something which it does not know; therefore, it can never judge. It can only judge according to the values which it has; but something which it does not know, it cannot judge.
So, the 'me' is only protecting itself, though it talks of protecting itself, is still an idea which has no substance. It is going round in circles and it is concerned in maintaining the wall and not in relating with another. Therefore as long as the wall exists, there is no relationship.
As long as the wall exists, you have no relationship with your wife or with the society. As long as the wall exists, you cannot find what is behind. So, your problem is how to dissolve the wall.
In trying to understand that problem, you understand this extraordinary process how the thinker and the thought have separated themselves thus creating all the mess in the world. You realise that you cannot do anything about the wall because you are the wall and because whatever you do only helps in still building the wall. Therefore you cannot do anything, which means the wall ceases to be.
As long as you are acting, doing something negatively or positively, you are adding to the wall because you are the wall. Therefore you cannot do anything about the wall. When you cannot do anything, actually you sit quiet; therefore, the wall is not.
There is no "overcoming" the wall, no "demolishing" the wall. Thus, when you are aware, through understanding the truth about the wall, the wall ceases to be and there is no barrier. Then, there is love.
You love all, irrespective of whether they have their own enclosures or not. So, please start with yourself, recognise you are building a wall around you and yet trying to have relationship with others; understand and be aware of what is taking place in this process; then the wall around you will cease to be and you will build no more walls; then only can you love others and have real relationship with them. .. We have been discussing the practical ways of dealing with some of the topics which we had considered already.
We tried to analyse what we mean by practical steps. Is it a matter of practice, or a matter of understanding? If you understand something, there is no need for practice.
If you understand and study the nature and the implications of nationalism, not bringing your prejudice and your defence mechanism against it, that very understanding would dissolve the poison of nationalism. We also discussed the practical steps with regard to our relationship with property - not only land but name, title, degrees, alphabetical letters before and after one's name - and how property becomes of enormous significance, when inwardly, psychologically, there is poverty of being. Then we discussed relationship with persons - between you and me, you and your wife or husband - whether you are 'related' or whether merely 'relationship' is a term without much significance.
We started with the examination of "relationship" as it is now and not of what is should be. We found that relationship is conflict though that conflict is neither necessary nor inevitable. We also found that this conflict in relationship was due to each one striving for isolation; though you may live with your wife, with your neighbour and with the society, you are really building psychological walls of isolation between yourself and society, between yourself and your family.
Though you say you are "related" to your wife and your children what is actually taking place in "relationship" is that you are seeking self-protection by building up walls of resistance, and so is your wife and others. You occasionally look over the walls and call it relationship; but, the isolating walls keep you separate. Is the building of the wall an inevitable law like gravitation?
You build the wall to protect yourself, On enquiry, you found that though, physically and biologically, some property - food, clothes and shelter - is essential for your existence, it is not necessary to protect yourself psychologically. Yet you are protecting yourself inwardly by the values which you have given to the things made by the hand (property) or by the mind (beliefs), thus using for your psychological protection only values based on sensory perception. Because of this, things assume an importance or significance which they do not inherently possess, and you, therefore, cling tenaciously to property and belief, even to the extent of dying for them, if necessary.
The walls which you protect yourself with are built up of the value which you yourself have given to things. Are you aware that you are creating this wall of detachment around you? You have a certain attitude and I may or may not have that attitude; the very attitude of the teacher and the disciple builds a wall.
Similarly, a man of property, a man of possession, or a man of greed, creates a barrier between himself and his servant, between himself and the man who has no title; the man who has title, talks about brotherhood and about avoiding distinctions and so on; yet, he creates a barrier between himself and others. The building of these psychological walls is the very impediment to relationship and is one of the fundamental disintegrating factors in society. One of these isolating walls around you is caste.
Your father or his forbears created caste to separate themselves from the rest; probably, biologically, they thought they were superior and did not want to mix up with the rest. We can understand this tendency, because each one of us wants to feel superior. You put degrees after your name to show that you are different from another.
You have the desire to be separate, to be superior to others, to be something in words and in name; that is why you are attached to your titles, your property, your name, etc. If all these are taken away from you, you are absolutely nothing. Similarly, your national prejudice is another such wall.
As you are inwardly poor, shallow and empty, you seek gratification through things by giving them your own extraordinary values and you therefore cling to them with great tenacity; you therefore build the wall around you and within the enclosure you admit none, not even your son, your neighbour, or the society. In understanding this, you understand that the search for sensory gratification is the cause of creating the enclosing wall. Desire is the builder of the wall - desire for title, for bank account, for property, for family, for beliefs.
The 'I' is the product of the desire in relation to an object. How does desire come into being? Perception, contact, sensation and desire.
There is a car, then perception of it, then contact with it, then a sensation caused by it, and then the desire which says "How lovely it is! I would like to have it", comes. Desire or craving comes through seeing, touching and feeling.