BENGALURU: The word ‘free’, to be free, has many meanings, but mostly free means to be a friend, to love. And love is not something that thought can evolve, put together, or can be cultivated.
You can cultivate a garden, you can cultivate anything, to plough, to cultivate, to grow. But love is not something that thought can cultivate. So it is very, very important to understand altogether very deeply the nature of thought, thinking.
If we really could understand that fundamentally then we shall be able to resolve most of our problems. Because we have dozens of problems - of relationship, economic problems, social problems, problems of every kind, human beings are burdened with them.
So not only to understand the nature of freedom from something, and to be free, completely free, not from something. And is that possible at all when thought is operating all the time? You understand my question?
So it is important, isn’t it, to understand not only verbally, or through explanations the whole movement of thought, because we live by thought, every action is based on thought, in every area, in every sector, in every field of our life both outwardly and inwardly thought is operating. We have given thought tremendous importance. And until we unravel the whole structure and nature, the movement of thought, merely trying to be free, which is to cultivate freedom, becomes impossible.
So we are concerned together, as two friends, what is freedom, and what is it to be totally free? And can there be this sense of wholeness in which there is freedom, free? So we are going to go into it.
As long as we are programmed - Catholic, Protestant, and the many thousand divisions of Protestantism, or Hinduism and the Islamic world, and the Buddhist world, we are being programmed - and as long as we are being programmed, our whole brain has been programmed for thousands of years, there can be no sense of total freedom. Is this clear? Are we together in this? So is it possible to be free? Or must we everlastingly be condemned to be programmed like a computer?
Our brain functions, not that the speaker is a professional brain specialist, but he has observed many, many, in the course of sixty, seventy years, how people’s brains work, observing them. And also observing one’s own brain in operation. It has become so mechanical, repetitive, its very accumulation of knowledge is limiting it. I wonder if you understand this?
When one has a great deal of knowledge about various disciplines like science, being an expert in surgery, medicine, telecommunication and so on, our brain actually becomes very small, it can expand along a particular line, but that expansion still is limited. I hope you are getting all this.
Now is it possible to be totally free from all this? Otherwise we will never know what it is to be creative, something totally unthought of, totally new. ‘There is nothing new on the earth’, but if we accept that slogan, then we will never find out what it is to be creative.
So thought can never be free, or thought can never bring about a sense of being totally free. Right? I wonder if you understand this. Because thought itself is limited, and therefore whatever it does will still be limited. And thought is driven by desire - isn’t it? Right? So we have to enquire into the nature and the structure of desire. The word ‘desire’ means longing for, in expression, which is wanting something more. The meaning of that word is that, longing for, not having, wanting. Right?