The demand to be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity. Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path? We are not loved because we don’t know how to love.
Self-knowledge is not a thing to be bought in books, nor is it the outcome of a long painful practice and discipline, but it is awareness, from moment to moment, of every thought and feeling as it arises in relationship.
Relationship is not on an abstract, ideological level but an actuality, the relationship with property, with people, and with ideas. Relationship implies existence and, as nothing can live in isolation, to be is to be related. Our conflict is in relationship, at all the levels of our existence, and the understanding of this relationship, completely and extensively, is the only real problem that each one has.
This problem cannot be postponed nor be evaded. The avoidance of it only creates further conflict and misery; the escape from it only brings about thoughtlessness, which is exploited by the crafty and the ambitious.
Now, there is a different way of working, which is to inquire into ourselves and to know exactly what is going on within the field of the mind, not in order to gain some reward, but for the very simple reason that there can obviously be no end to misery in the world as long as the mind does not understand itself.
And, after all, the world in which we live is not the enormous world of political activities, of scientific research, and so on; it is the little world of the family, the world of relationship between two people at home or in the office, between husband and wife, parents and children, teacher and pupil, lawyer and client, policeman and citizen.
That is the little world we all live in, but we want to escape from that world of relationship and go out into an extraordinary world which we have imagined and which does not really exist at all. If we do not understand the world of relationship and bring about a fundamental transformation there, we cannot possibly create a new culture, a different civilization, a peaceful world. So it must start with ourselves.
The world demands an immense, a radical change, but it must begin with you and me; and we cannot bring about a real change in ourselves if we do not know the totality of our world of thoughts, of feelings, of actions, if we are not aware of ourselves from moment to moment.
And you will see, if you are so aware, that the mind begins to free itself from all influences of the past. After all, the mind is now the result of the past, and all thinking is a projection of the past, it is simply a response of the past to challenge, so merely to think of creating a new world will never bring a new world into being.