BENGALURU: You can sit in the right posture with your back straight, breathing correctly, do pranayama and all the rest of it for the next ten thousand years, and you will be nowhere near perceiving what truth is, because you have not understood yourself at all, the way you think, the way you live. You have not ended your sorrow, and you want to find enlightenment. You can do all kinds of twists and turns with your body and this seems to fascinate people, because they feel it is going to give some power, some prestige. Now, all these powers are like candles in the sun; they are like candle light when the brilliant sun is shining.
Being caught in the process of becoming, of acquisition, and realizing its strife and pain, the desire to get out of it gives birth to the conflict of duality. Gain always engenders fear, and fear gives birth to the conflict of opposites - the overcoming of what is and transforming it into that which is desired. Does not an opposite contain the germ of its own opposite? Is virtue the opposite of vice? If it is, then it ceases to be virtue. If virtue is the opposite of vice, then virtue is the outcome of vice. Beauty is not the denial of the ugly. Virtue has no opposite. Greed can never become nongreed, any more than ignorance can become enlightenment. If enlightenment is the opposite of ignorance, then it is no longer enlightenment. Greed is still greed when it tries to become nongreed, for the becoming itself is greed. The conflict of the opposites is not the conflict of dissimilars, but of changing and opposing desires. Conflict exists only when what is is not understood. If we can understand what is, then there is no conflict of its opposite. What is can be understood only through choiceless awareness in which there is neither condemnation, justification, nor identification.
Negation is the most positive action, not positive assertion. This is a very important thing to understand. Most of us so easily accept positive dogma, a positive creed, because we want to be secure, to belong, to be attached, to depend. The positive attitude divides and brings about duality. The conflict then begins between this attitude and others. But the negation of all values, of all morality, of all beliefs, having no frontiers, cannot be in opposition to anything. A positive statement in its very definition separates, and separation is resistance. To this we are accustomed, this is our conditioning. To deny all this is not immoral; on the contrary to deny all division and resistance is the highest morality. To negate everything that man has invented, to negate all his values, ethics and gods, is to be in a state of mind in which there is no duality, therefore no resistance or conflict between opposites. In this state there are no opposites, and this state is not the opposite of something else.
To deny all this is to deny oneself, and oneself is the conditioned entity who continually pursues a conditioned good. To most of us negation appears as a vacuum because we know activity only in the prison of our conditioning, fear and misery. Negation is the state of enlightenment which functions in all the activities of a man who is free of the past. It is the past, with its tradition and its authority, that has to be negated. Negation is freedom, and it is the free man who lives, loves, and knows what it means to die.