Finding the root of contradiction

All that we know of love is a contradiction, a contradiction with jealousy, hate, antagonism, and the thing we call love.
Finding the root of contradiction

BENGALURU: All that we know of love is a contradiction, a contradiction with jealousy, hate, antagonism, and the thing we call love. If one would know or understand this thing called love. Not verbally, not the sensual pleasure called love, not the love that goes with hate, envy, ambition. An ambitious man can never know what love is, obviously. Like an ambitious man who is competitive, talking about peace has no meaning.

There’s only peace when the mind is not competitive, non-comparing, and therefore there is no contradiction with himself. So if - or rather, to bring about a different society, a different structure of social existence, one must inevitably understand this, the nature and the significance of contradiction within oneself. Because most of us are trying to fulfil - in painting, in writing, in doing this or that, in the family - that again is an indication of contradiction. Then you will say, ‘Mustn’t man express himself? Isn’t it his nature to express?’ But surely we are putting the cart before the horse, aren’t we? Why this extraordinary insistence on expression? You may or may not express, but if you insist that you must express, objectively - in a painting, in a writing, in a poem, in a book, in an expression, a gesture - if you insist on that then that very insistence is an indication of contradiction.

So, the root of contradiction, as we were pointing out, is this division between the thinker and the thought. And the two cannot be integrated. But if one observes what the structure of the thinker, you will see the thinker is not, when thought is not. It is the thought that breeds the thinker, the experiencer, the entity that creates time, and the entity who is the source of fear.

Because most of us have many forms of fear. Please watch your own fear as we are talking about it, deeply inside, your own secret fears. And obviously there is the obvious, there is the ultimate fear of death. And being afraid we try to escape from death through belief, through the ideas of resurrection and reincarnation and so on and on and on. Either you rationalise death or you have a belief.

Both rationalisation of death and a belief are both an avoidance of death, an escape, and therefore that creates contradiction. We say death is something opposite to living. So to understand death, we must understand life.

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