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It is the outcome of sensate values, the identification through the senses with the object of the senses. Desire with regard to ideas also follows the same process. You like or you do not like a particular idea.
When you like an idea, that idea is pleasing and gratifying to you. The acceptance of an idea or the rejection of an idea is based merely on gratification which is sensate. So, the sensory values dominate and the sensory value is the 'me' dominating the whole - 'I and my property', 'I and my relationship', or 'I and my belief'.
Belief is the outcome of the projection of the mind, whether it is the belief in the ultimate Paramatman or Brahman, or in the Higher Self and the Lower Self. When you think about the Atman, it is still thought. The Brahman is still thought.
As your belief in Reality, God, Atman, etc. is self-projected, it is sensory. Therefore, 'your God' is also sensate; 'your God' is created by you.
The implications are tremendous if you admit this; it will mean, as far as you are concerned, the whole collapse of the so-called religious society. So, you see that desire is the outcome of the sensate value; 'me' is the result of desire; 'me' creates, formulates, and fabricates values etc. ; the wall that 'me' builds is also of sensate values created by the builder and that whatever the thinker, the actor, the builder, does is always sensory and, therefore, transitory.
You now understand how, because your values with regard to property, to relationship and to ideation are all sensory, there is conflict within yourself and chaos in the society around you which is an expression of your inner conflict. You see that your neighbour is like you in many ways and both of you have only sensate values, though you may talk of the Absolute, the Supreme, the Ideal, etc. The result is conflict between you and your neighbour which is society.
That is the building of the walls that separate you and your neighbour, your sensory values and your neighbour's sensory values. So, there is no relationship between you and your neighbour; and therefore there is no relationship between you and society. The society is not responsible for you, It passes laws but you are out of it.
You fit in when it suits you; and when it does not suit you, you are out of it. Similarly, society uses you as a part of itself when it suits it; it absorbs you as a soldier when there is a war, and thrusts you into it, and you accept it. Thus, there is mutual exploitation.
You know now how conflict arises by your building your wall of sensate values. You also know that the builder of the wall is the 'I' which is itself the outcome of desire. As long as the 'I' is satisfied with the wall, there is nothing and the 'I' feels absolutely safe inside the wall.
Most of you are in this state and you crave to remain undisturbed, each behind his own wall. Therefore, in your present state of psychological enclosure behind the wall of your sensate values, your talk of brotherhood has no meaning whatsoever. Your cravings, your desires, inevitably cause you suffering.
When you suffer, you feel disturbed. There is a breach in the wall, there is an enquiry, there is a storm. When you suffer, you try to forget and to avoid that very suffering by building another wall, a wall of belief, or the religious book or the temple, or the Master or some other means of escape.
What happens when the 'thinker' is avoiding pain? The 'thinker' does not want to feel pain or to be disturbed. He hopes to be the permanent and enduring entity behind the wall; and, therefore, he separates himself from the wall, i.e.
from the thought, i.e. from the desire. He then attempts to change his desires and his thoughts; he desires a house, he desires a quality, and ultimately he desires God.
Objects of desire can be changed and the thinker is behind the wall feeling he is always permanent. The 'thinker' and the 'thought' are now two different things because the 'me', i.e. the thinker, is the permanent entity, the other is impermanent; the 'me' is secure, the other is insecure; and the 'me' can play with the secure as much as it likes.
If the thinker identifies himself with the 'thought', then, in changing the thought, he becomes impermanent - which he does not like. Therefore, the 'thought' is considered as separate from the 'I'; when the 'I' is attacked a little more, the 'I' divides itself into the higher and lower; and when the higher is attacked, the 'I' retreats further high, and becomes the Paramatman. There is always in the 'thinker' a sense of permanency, a sense of continuity.
This is what is happening in daily life. When your property is taken away, you retreat to some other permanency, to relationship; and when that goes, you turn to something else, a little higher; and so on, you always remaining, and the objects being higher and higher - which is your relationship to God or 'I am God'. The discussion which we have had so far, has revealed to you the process of your thinking so that, without deception, you can see what you think and how you act in relation to property, in relation to your wife and in relation to society.
All these three are sought by you in order to safeguard yourself. Because you think you are separate from your thoughts and desires, you are all the time seeking permanency by changing your thoughts and your desires through legislation, through practices, through discipline, through systems and so on. But as has been stated already, whatever you 'the thinker' may do, it is always sensory and therefore impermanent.
You now realise that neither legislation nor belief nor discipline will alter the 'me'. According to environmental influences the 'me' can change the thought, can become a communist when it suits 'me', or a capitalist, or a socialist, or a religious person. Thus, unless the 'me' who is the mischief-maker is tackled and transformed, the 'me' will always create havoc in relationship with property, with family, and with ideas.
The transformation of the 'thinker' will be radical, and not merely superficial, only when the separation of the thinker from the thought ceases. You suggest that the thinker and the thought are now separate and they should be brought together. This suggestion is wrong because it is based on a non-reality.
The 'I' is not actually separate from the thought. It was a clever trick on the part of the 'I' to separate from the thought which is impermanent, assuming its own permanency. This is fictitious.
The moment the 'I' realises that it has played the trick on itself, the trick is gone and the thinker is the thought. To sum up, the 'I' is made up of many memories. The memories are the result of desire; the desire is the result of perception, contact, sensation, identification, which is the 'me'.
So, the 'I' which is the product of desire, cleverly separates himself from the desire and does something about it, because, he can always change desires, and yet he can remain permanent. That is a clever trick that he is playing upon himself with a view to entrenching himself in continuity. This is the cause of the inner conflict in each individual and of the chaos which exists in the world at present; this state of affairs will continue till the trick is gone.
The 'I' does not see the falseness of the trick which he has played upon himself, because when he realises the falseness of the trick, he will come into conflict with everybody. Most of you agree with what we have discussed so far in regard to the falseness of the trick played by the mind on itself; yet you have not seen the real depth of this problem and, therefore, it has not brought about clarification and transformation in you. You accept this in your superficial consciousness but the deeper layers of consciousness are putting up a tremendous inward resistance to this acceptance.
Is this because you are isolated or sleepy? You are not isolated and sleepy but very awake with regard to things that matter - money, passion, enjoyment and so on. You have deliberately become sleepy to things which are disturbing to you, or which you do not want.
This means that you are awake in one part to things you like and asleep in another part to things you do not like. All the present conflict is the result of this partial awakening. Because one part of you is isolated and the other part is active, there is chaos created in yourself and this chaos is projected outside.
This is the major portion of your existence. Nothing distracts you from the pursuit of pleasure; but whenever you apprehend any shock or suffering you promptly try your best deliberately to shut it off from you and to avoid it. That is why you do not look at this problem seriously though you verbally agree.
Who is going to make you look? Can legislation, government, education, the ideal or any other outside agency make you look? Therefore, suffering comes to you as a warning.
But every time you have suffering and sorrow, you look on it as a disturbance and try to avoid it so as to continue in the same old state; this sort of action on the part of the mind has made your life one series of conflicts to avoid "what is". To be aware of how the mind is playing the trick upon itself, is the beginning of understanding. The moment you are aware of it, you invite trouble - and there is joy.
.. These discussions are really meant to be a means of self-knowledge, to discover ourselves are we are talking - not afterwards but as we go along step by step -and to experience directly what is being said, so that we could relate what we are talking to our daily life. We were discussing the idea of separating ourselves in our relationship, how we are building walls of isolation and thinking we are "related" to each other; how the sensate values become predominant when money, property, things are used as a means of isolation; how in relationship between you and another - which relationship creates the society - there is conflict ; that this constant battle between you and me and between you and society is due to our merely looking at each other over the walls of isolation, which we have deliberately built in order to isolate ourselves as much as we can; that this isolation is a form of self-protection, and that these walls are built by the 'me', the thinker who is not really different from the thought, though we have taken it for granted that thought is separate and that the thinker remains aloof and transforms thought.
We also discussed why we do not see the depth of such a serious problem as the thinker and the thought are one, whether it is because we are asleep, or because we don't want to go deeply into the matter, as, if we do it will mean a revolution in thinking and therefore in action. If the thinker and the thought are one, the thinker has to alter himself fundamentally, and not merely the frame of his picture which is thinking. So, the thinker plays an insidious and clever trick on himself and separates himself from the thought and then does something about thought.
To discuss this, you must find out what desire is and how desire or craving arises. Desire comes through perception, contact, sensation and identification. So there is the 'me', the person who chooses.
The 'me', the thinker, is born our of desire, and he does not exist previous to desire. In your everyday experience, the thinker is separate from the thought, i.e. the thought is outside you as it were, and you can do something about it, you can modify it and recondition it.
Is the thinker really separate from the thought? How does the 'thinker' come into being? You are the result of your father and mother.
How did you begin to think and feel as a child? You wanted milk, there was a sensation of hunger; then the contact with the bottle or the breast, and the struggle to feed, to grow, and then the toy, the impingement of society on the mind, and gradually, the 'I' comes out. Therefore, it is perception, sensation, contact and the desire from which is 'my mother,' 'my toy,' which grows to 'my bank account', 'my house', and so on.
So the thinker, the 'me' comes through perception, contact, sensation and desire from which arises consciousness; the thinker then separates himself, for his own further security, as the high and the low, the high becoming the Paramatman and the low becoming this existence. When this existence is threatened, the thinker can always retire into the more permanent. You are the sum total of all the human existence.
As you are a Hindu, you are the result of all Hindus; you are the result of your father, not only biologically, but in thought, in your beliefs, and so on. The 'I' comes into being through desire; then the 'I' feels established and creates the desire which is outward, the desire and 'I' thus becoming two separate entities, which means that the thinker and the thought are separate. Craving continuity, the thinker separates himself from the thought, and thinks that thought is changeable, modifiable, can be destroyed and replaced.
If the thinker is the thought, then the thinker also can be changed, which means he has to admit his impermanency - which he does not like. All our actions in society are based on the idea that the 'I' is the permanent and the thought is the impermanent. We know very well the impermanency of matter.
Property can be taken away from you when Communism comes, or when you lose it by speculation. Because thought is seeking permanency, it says "I will go to a higher level of consciousness or a deep level which is my belief, which is my God", and goes higher and higher to be more and more permanent. When this trick is understood, it is gone, and the thinker and the thought are one.
Then, there will be a revolution in our daily life. You admit that the thinker and the thought are one and yet there is no change in your way of living. Why?
Either you are asleep which means you don't want to be disturbed, or there is an inward resistance. Now, how can we dissolve the resistance? Not by overcoming it, not by disciplining it away, but by understanding it.
The moment you understand it, it drops away. What do you mean by resistance? You accept the idea on the superficial layer of your consciousness and the rest of your consciousness is resisting it.
You are resisting any change. That is, you are resisting the acceptance of 'what is'; 'what is' is that the thinker and the thought are one. You superficially say "Yes", but the rest of your consciousness is resisting it, because the unconscious sees the tremendous implications in the acceptance of 'what is'.
You are afraid to lose yourself - yourself meaning your property, your status now, your belief and your son. So you are resisting in order not to lose what you are protecting, in order to guard it. This means you are resisting the destruction of ideas, relationship and things made by the hand or by the mind; you are resisting the dissolution of the identification with things, with name, with property, and so on.
The house, the property, is the value which the mind gives; otherwise the house has no meaning; and things made by the mind are also the values given by the mind. You are afraid that, by not identifying with the valuations of the mind, there will be an end; and so, you are resisting their end or destruction. You are defending the valuations which you have created, lest they should be destroyed; the valuations are created through desires, which is the mind.
So, you are resisting the destruction of valuations which have come into being through thought, the thought being the result of the desire - i.e. the desire creates the thinker, the thinker evaluates and then offers resistance to the destruction of those things which he has built up. So the thinker is resisting 'what is' and the impingement of new desires.
The values are created by the mind whether of things or of ideas. So, it is afraid to lose the valuation which it has created and to which it is attached. You bring a new idea and the mind does not want to have it because it is disturbing the things which it has already built.
The thinker is resisting, not with things but with ideas which are transitory in themselves. So, your resistance is transitory. You are resisting the dissolution of valuations which are thoughts and thought is transitory.
Things have no significance except what the mind gives; in their very nature they are transitory; and yet the mind clings to them and to the significance it gives them. In other words, the thinker creates evaluations and then, in examining them, finds that these evaluations are transitory, and that he is resisting the destruction of the transitory because he is seeking permanency in them. In other words, you recognise that they are all impermanent and yet you are seeking permanency in them because, by your valuation, you have given them permanency.
When you recognise the absurdity of giving permanency to things which have no permanency, it drops away - just as when you know that all the banks are bad, you don't go to any bank. All things made by the hand or by the mind are in their very nature transitory because the mind alone gives values to them, transitory for the simple reason that thought is transitory and thought is the thinker. Now, you, the thinker, are asking,"Is there permanency?"
because it is what you want. You are the result of desire which is impermanent. The impermanent is asking to find out the truth of permanency.
The mind which has been seeking permanency has vested permanency in things made by the hand or by the mind, and it finds that they are impermanent; and yet it says it must have permanency. Can the impermanent find the permanent? If I am blind can I see the light?
If I am ignorant can I know enlightenment? There can only be enlightenment when ignorance ceases. The transitory cannot find the permanent; it must cease for the permanent to be.
The person who is seeking permanency is obviously impermanent; you cannot say he is permanent. He is the outcome of transitory desire and therefore, in himself, he is transitory - which he does not acknowledge. Property is impermanent.
Relationship is impermanent. Belief is impermanent. Therefore, seeing everything around as impermanent and as transitory, the mind says that there must be something permanent, though there is no inherent permanency.
Your permanency is born out of impermanency and is therefore the opposite of impermanency; therefore it has the seed of its opposite which is transitory. When you treat impermanency as impermanent then there is nothing; but when you are seeking permanency as an opposite to transitory, the permanency itself is transitory. So you are resisting the acknowledgment of the fact that whatever you do, think and feel is impermanent, though you know very well that they are impermanent.
This is another trick of the mind. So, you recognise the trick that the mind is seeking permanency in opposition to the transitory - namely that whatever you do is impermanent; and yet you are seeking permanency. Being transitory yourself, you can never find permanency, because you will evaluate "permanency" and all your valuations are transitory.
the impermanent can never find the permanent. When you realise this, you do not seek permanency through things, through relationship and through ideas. Therefore, there is no valuation and you accept them at their level.
Therefore you have no conflict with them. There is a great relief if the mind is not giving values of permanency to things which have no permanency. If you say property, family and things are necessary but not as a means for permanency, then there is no conflict.
It does not matter who owns the house; you use it merely as a means of protection, not as a means of self-expansion through the search for permanency. Therefore the mind, the 'thinker' as the 'evaluator', is non-existent. When the thinker ceases to create value, perhaps something else will come into being.
But, as long as the thinker exists there must be the evaluation. His values are impermanent. Therefore, if the thinker is seeking permanency, he must cease, because he is the mischief-maker and is reducing to chaos the relationship with society and with property.
So your problem then is how the thinker can come to an end, how the thinking process can end. Someone says that there will be no progress at all if the thinker ceases to exist. The word "progress" was first introduced by the industrialists in the eighteenth century in England because they wanted to make the people buy more.
Progress means time. Through time, do you understand anything? You can only understand now, not tomorrow.
Therefore, understanding is independent of time. So, how is the thinker to come to an end? If he does, life becomes extraordinarily marvellous and there is no conflict with things.
As the thinker is the result of desire, this means that desires must come to an end. Can desire come to an end? What do you mean by desire?
Perception, contact, sensation and desire. "I must have " food, "I must have" clothes, "I must have" shelter. Those are imperative 'musts'; though there are certain desires involved in them, they are necessary.
But the desire or the craving for things, for family, for name, for beliefs must cease. If it ceases, what will happen to my relationship? Desire is the very expression of attachment.
When I use my wife as a means of psychological necessity, then there is attachment; when she helps me to cover up my loneliness, then I am attached. Then, she is mine. Similarly, belief becomes necessary when I am attached to it, whether it is belief in religion, or belief in an economic system.
So desire can come to an end only when there is no attachment. And can I live in the world without attachment? Obviously I can.
The moment I am attached it is an indication of desire - desire which is impermanent and which creates the thinker who evaluates. It is only when it ends, that you can find out if there is permanency or not. Without that, any talk of belief is puerile.
I have shown you how to stop thinking. If thinking ceases, then there would be a great quickening, and a revolution would take place inside you. .. To love one another is one of the most difficult things, because there is in it always the shadow of pleasure and pain.
In it there is always the sensual memory with its incessant gnawing either of yesterday's picture or of tomorrow's delight. There is always a sense of frustration, a sense of unpleasant existence; there is never a moment of complete love, of complete communion with another. Have you ever felt this sense of an extraordinary physical resistance as well as psychological impediment in loving another, when there is really no openness between two people?
Surely, there can be only love when there is this sense of complete communion with another. There is no way to love. You cannot buy it, nor can you barter it away for something else; love must be really felt and lived, and it comes into being when this pleasure and pain, when this sense of frustration, when this sense of demanding fulfilment in another, when this sense of the "me" and "my pleasures" ceases; and that is one of the most difficult and arduous things.
We can be sentimental over love; but that is not love. In loving one, you will love the whole of humanity. The idea of loving everybody has very little meaning if you don't know how to love one, your child, your husband, your wife, your neighbour.
After all, the one is the whole. The idea of cosmic love and loving mankind is really a rationalisation of the lack of love in one's heart for another. It is an easy escape of the reformer, of the humanist, of the moralist and of the righteous.
Our trouble is that we really do not know how to love one another. We know when we love somebody with all our being. It is surely a shattering experience because it implies a letting down of all barriers.
It is worthwhile discussing the problem of duality, in which is implied pleasure and pain, resistance and non-resistance, merit and demerit, the desire for fulfilment, the desire to have an example or an ideal, the desire to imitate, the problem of resistance, meditation etc. Is there the opposite? Are we aware of the opposites and when?
When you crave for something, there is always resistance. In gaining it, you must resist other encroachments and other influences. You must build around you a wall in order to gain what you want.
Others also may want the same and so, you must resist them. So, in craving for something, there must be resistance. You desire power.
In setting out to achieve power, you desire to acquire position, prestige and all the implications of power. In this craving for achievement, there is inherently the state of 'not-achieving' and fear of 'not achieving'; this means resistance. Thus, every craving for something creates its own opposite, its own resistance.
Let us take attachment and detachment. Being attached, you find pain and strife in attachment; and in order to overcome that pain and strife, you say 'I must be detached.' It is really the pain that comes out of attachment that you want to get rid of; only, you call it detachment.
But you never question why you are attached. If you understood what attachment is, then you would not proceed to detachment. Attachment may be the outcome of frustration.
You are attached to your house, name, wife. Inwardly, you are frustrated, you are not fulfilling, you are not complete. Therefore, the house, the family and the name become all important, to which you become attached; and when they cause you pain, you wish to 'develop detachment'.
But still, the inward frustration, emptiness, poverty, continues. We treat detachment and attachment as opposites, because we do not really understand the process of detachment. You have to understand what is implied in being held to something.
In the very desire to achieve anything, there is the seed of its own opposite. In the process of 'becoming', achieving, gaining, there is always the 'conflict of the opposites', because the very desire to 'become something' creates its own opposite. In 'becoming' there is always the dual; in 'being' there is no duality.
When you are angry, there is no duality at the moment of anger, i.e. you are in the state of 'being angry'. But that 'being angry' creates a disturbance and you don't want to be angry; so you want to 'become peaceful'; this 'becoming' implies the dual.
There is no duality in that particular moment when the feeling arises; duality is only found after that feeling has been termed; there is the time-factor involved in it. If there is no 'becoming', there is no duality with all its conflict, the time-factor, the whole sense of frustration and all the rest of it. For example, you are angry; you find anger painful, you think there will be pleasure in 'non-anger'; thus you have immediately created duality; you refuse to understand the full significance of anger, but you pursue its opposite; you want to transform 'anger' into 'non-anger'.
Thus, 'becoming' implies a refusal to acknowledge 'what is' and a desire to transform 'what is' into other than 'what is'. The pursuit of an ideal also implies the 'conflict of opposites'. The ideal is something which you are not.
You are this and you want to 'become' that which is your ideal. To understand the implications of what you actually are now, your mind must be free and concentrated; but if your mind is thinking in terms of the ideal, then it is distracted by the ideal. What are the implications of 'becoming the ideal'?
The ideal is the example to be followed, and 'becoming' the ideal means imitation. Supposing you are arrogant, your ideal is humility. The ideal is created by your not understanding 'arrogance' which is the 'what is'.
Humility is the example which you are going to become. The example means imitation. So, in becoming, in achieving the ideal, there is coping which means only imitation and no thinking.
when you have an ideal there cannot be thinking; there is merely the achievement of 'becoming that ideal'. In your daily life, you are full of ideals; which means you are not thinking but merely imitating. In 'becoming', there is imitation, copying and therefore the cessation of thinking, feeling, living; and therefore, the idealists are the most thoughtless, brutal and ruthless people; and to them systems are more important than man.
Hitler was said to be a great idealist. In yourself, you can see the truth of this when you pursue an ideal. You have the ideal of Brahmacharya; then you just leave you wife and go.
When you have an ideal of a perfect state, the proletariat or the right, you see how ruthless you are bound to be in achieving that ideal. The ideal, for example, is the authority, whether it is imposed by another or by yourself inwardly, therefore, there is cessation of thinking and there is fear. All your social structure, all you education, and all your relationship are based on imitation.
Your judgement and your thought is based on avoiding 'what is'. Look at what is happening in society. corruption, degradation and so on.
Why do you not tackle all this directly, instead of saying that through an ideal you must become marvellous? It is the thoughtless man who is asleep and who is imitative, that wants an ideal, because he has to whip himself up to become something. But the man who is learning, watching and feeling things, does not require an ideal; he is active where he is.
So, in 'becoming' there is the denial of 'what is', the denial of what you are, i.e. your 'being arrogant'. And in 'becoming humble', which is the ideal, you must find out how to become that.
"How" is the imitative process. You go to a Guru for help, in which there is implied authority and fear. So, 'becoming' implies imitation and therefore no creativeness at all.
Look at the society, look at us, how thoughtless as are! We are marvellous in passing examinations and nothing else. A man who is 'becoming' can never find Reality because he is not understanding 'what is', but wants to transform 'what is'.
Why should any man 'become the ideal' when he is what he is? By understanding 'what is', perhaps a new thing will come into being. So, an ideal is really an impediment; the example is a horror to a creative man.
When you want to write a poem and when you are imitating Keats, you cease to be a poet. But when you are really creative and you really want to write a poem, you don't care two pins about Keats as the ideal. That is why you need revolution of a fundamental, deep and psychological nature to free you from imitation, from the ideal; because it is only when you are free, you can be creative.