CHENNAI : As long as you have a reason to live, you are not living, are you? You live only when there is no reason, no cause — you just live. Similarly, as long as you have a reason for peace, you will have no peace. A mind that invents a reason for being peaceful is in conflict, and such a mind will produce chaos and conflict in the world.
The mind is the outcome of time, of yesterday, and it is always in conflict with the present, but the man who really wants to be peaceful has no reason for it. For the peaceful man, there is no motive for peace. Has generosity a motive? When you are generous with a motive, is that generosity? When a man renounces the world in order to achieve God, in order to find something greater, is that renunciation? If I give up this in order to find that, have I really given up anything? If I am peaceful for various reasons, have I found peace?
Most of us, most religious people with their organisations, come to peace through reason, through discipline, through conformity because there is no direct perception of the necessity, the truth of being peaceful.
Peacefulness, that state of peace, is not stagnation; on the contrary, it is a most active state. But the mind can only know the activity of its own creation, which is thought, and thought can never be peaceful; thought is sorrow, thought is conflict. As we know only sorrow and misery, we try to find ways and means to go beyond it, and whatever the mind invents only further increases its own misery, its own conflict, its own strife. You will say that very few will understand this, that very few will ever be peaceful in the right sense of the word. Why do you say that? Is it not because it is a convenient escape for you?
You say that peace can never be achieved in the way I am talking about; it is impossible; therefore, you must have reasons for peace, you must have organizations for peace, you must have clever propaganda for peace. But all those methods are obviously mere postponement of peace. Only when you are directly in touch with the problem, when you see that without peace today you cannot have peace tomorrow, when you have no reason for peace but actually see the truth that without peace life is not possible, creation is not possible, that without peace there can be no sense of happiness — only when you see the truth of that will you have peace.
Then you will have peace without any organisations for peace. For that you must be so vulnerable, you must demand peace with all your heart, you must find the truth of it for yourself, not through organizations, through propaganda, through clever arguments for peace and against war.
Peace is not the denial of war. Peace is a state of being in which all conflicts and all problems have ceased; it is not a theory, not an ideal to be achieved after ten incarnations, ten years, or ten days. As long as the mind has not understood its own activity, it will create more misery and the understanding of the mind is the beginning of peace.