BENGALURU: Can you and I, then, bring about in ourselves without any outside influence, without any persuasion, without any fear of punishment- can we bring about in the very essence of our being a total revolution, a psychological mutation, so that we are no longer brutal, violent, competitive, anxious, fearful, greedy, envious and all the rest of the manifestations of our nature which we have built up the rotten society in which we live our daily lives?
As an individual, it is your responsibility to bring about a tremendous change in the world. It is your responsibility, because you are part of this society, because you are part of this tremendous sorrow of man, this constant effort, struggle, pain, and anxiety. You are responsible. Unless you realize that immense responsibility and come directly in contact with that responsibility and listen to the whole structure, the machinery of that responsibility, do what you will, go to every temple, to every guru, to every Master, to every religious book in the world, your action has no meaning whatsoever.
It seems to me very important, then, to understand the total process of individuality, because it is only when the individual changes radically that there can be a fundamental revolution in society. It is always the individual, never the group or the collective, that brings about a radical change in the world, and this again is historically so.
Now, can the individual, that is, you and I, change radically? This transformation of the individual but not according to a pattern- is what we are concerned with, and to me it is the highest form of education. It is this transformation of the individual that constitutes religion, not the mere acceptance of a dogma, a belief, which is not religion at all. The mind that is conditioned to a particular pattern which it calls religion, whether Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or what you will, is not a religious mind, however much it may practice all the so-called religious ideals.
In all our relationships with people, with nature, with ideas, with things, we seem to create more and more problems. In trying to solve one problem, whether economic, political, social, collective, or individual, we introduce many other problems. We seem somehow to breed more and more conflict and need more and more reform. Obviously, all reform needs further reform, and therefore it is really retrogression. As long as revolution, whether of the left or the right, is merely the continuity of what has been in terms of what shall be, it also is retrogression. There can be fundamental revolution, a constant inward transformation, only when we, as individuals, understand our relationship to the collective.
The revolution must begin with each one of us, and not with external, environmental influences. After all, we are the collective; both the conscious and the unconscious in us is the residue of all the political, social, cultural influences of man. Therefore, to bring about a fundamental outward revolution, there must be a radical transformation.So, the first thing is to realize that the world’ s problem is the individual’s problem; it is your problem and my problem, and the world’s process is not separate from the individual process.