BENGALURU: Freedom cannot be given; freedom is something that comes into being when you do not seek it; it comes into being only when you know you are a prisoner, when you know for yourself completely the state of being conditioned, when you know you are held by society, by culture, by tradition, held by whatever you have been told. Freedom is order - it is never disorder - and one must have freedom, completely, both outwardly and inwardly; without freedom there is no clarity; without freedom you can’t love; without freedom you can’t find truth; without freedom you can’t go beyond the limitation of the mind. You must demand it with all your being. When you so demand it, you will find out for yourself what order is - and order is not the following of a pattern, a design; it is not the outcome of habit.
If you can move from freedom, then you will discover the most extraordinary things of the mind. And then you will find that the mind itself is the total reality: it is not that there is a reality to which the mind goes, but the mind itself, that extraordinary thing, when there is no contradiction within itself - when there is no anxiety, no fear, no desire to be successful - then that mind itself is that which is eternal, unnameable. But to speculate about the eternal without understanding the whole process of the mind is just childish play; it is an immature game which scholars, whom you worship, play. So, it would be good if you and I could really go into this, as two human beings interested in solving the problems we have, which are also the problems of the world. The personal problem is not different from the world problem. But you cannot tackle it if you have not understood the mind.
So, please, do watch your mind, go into it not merely when you have nothing to do, but from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed, from the moment you wake up until you go back to sleep. Then you will begin to find out what an extraordinary richness there is - a richness not in knowledge, but in the nature of the mind itself. It is in the mind, also, that there is ignorance. The dispelling of ignorance is all-important, not the acquisition of knowledge, because the dispelling of ignorance is negative while knowledge is positive. And, a man who is capable of thinking negatively has the highest capacity for thinking. The mind which can dispel ignorance and not accumulate knowledge such a mind is an innocent mind, and only the innocent mind can discover that which is beyond measure.
Is there not something which is beyond thought, beyond time, something that is not created by the mind?’
Either you have been told about that state, have read about it, or there is the experiencing of it. The experiencing of it can never be an experience, a result; it cannot be thought about and, if it is, it is a remembrance and not experiencing. You can repeat what you have read or heard, but the word is not the thing; and the word, the very repetition, prevents the state of experiencing. That state of experiencing cannot be as long as there is thinking: thought, the result, the effect, can never know the state of experiencing.