CHENNAI: One has to become aware of what it is that one is dependent upon. One has to find out why one depends on anything at all, psychologically — I don’t mean technologically, or depending on the milkman — but psychologically, why do we depend, what is involved in dependence? This question is essential in investigating the dissipation, deterioration and distortion of energy — the energy we need so vitally to understand the many problems.
What is it on which we so depend — is it a person, a book, a church, a priest, an ideology, a drink or a drug? What are the various supports which each one of us has, subtly or very obviously? Why do we depend and does discovering the cause of a dependence free the mind from that dependence? Do you understand the question? We are taking the journey together — you are not waiting for me to tell you the causes of your dependency, but rather, in enquiring together, we will both discover them — that discovery will be yours, and being yours it will be able to give you vitality.
One discovers for oneself that one depends upon something, upon, say, an audience which will stimulate one, therefore one needs that audience. One may derive energy from addressing people and one depends upon that audience for that energy, upon whether it agrees or disagrees. The more it disagrees the more there is a battle and the more vitality one has, but if the audience agrees then one does not derive that energy. One depends — why? And one asks oneself if in discovering the cause of one’s dependence one will free oneself of that dependence.
Go into it slowly with me please. One discovers that one needs an audience because it is a very stimulating thing to address people — why does one need that stimulus? Because in oneself one is shallow, in oneself one has nothing, no source of energy which is always full, rich, vital, which is moving, living. Does the discovery of the cause free one from being dependent or is the discovery of the cause merely intellectual, merely the discovery of a formula? If it is an intellectual investigation and the intellect has found the cause of the mind’s dependence, through rationalization, through analysis, then does that free the mind from being dependent? Obviously it doesn’t.
The mere intellectual discovery of the cause does not free the mind from its dependence on some thing which will give it stimulation, no more than a merely intellectual acceptance of an idea, or an emotional acquiescence in an ideology will. The mind is freed from dependence in seeing the totality of this whole structure of stimulation and dependence and in seeing that the mere intellectual discovery of the cause of dependence does not really free the mind from dependence. Seeing the whole structure and nature of stimulation and dependence, and how that dependence makes the mind stupid, dull, inactive, the seeing of the totality of it, alone, frees the mind. Does one see the whole picture or does one see only a part of the picture, a detail? This is a very important question to ask oneself, because one sees things in fragments and thinks in fragments — all one’s thinking is in fragments. So one must take efforts to enquire into what it means to see totally.
One asks if one’s mind can see the whole, even though it has always functioned fragmentarily, as a nationalist, as an individualist, as the collective, as the Catholic, as German, Russian, French, or as an individual caught in a technological society, functioning in a specialised activity, and so on — everything broken up into fragments with good opposed to evil, hate and love, anxiety and freedom. One’s mind is always thinking in duality, in comparison, in competition and such a mind functioning in fragments will not be able to see the whole. If one is a Hindu, if one looks at the world from one’s little window as only the Hindu, believing in certain dogmas, rituals, traditions, brought up in a certain culture and so on, obviously one does not see the whole of mankind.