BENGALURU: I hope you don’t feel as nervous as I do. Shall we go on with what we were talking about yesterday morning, if we may? We were saying that thought brings about fragmentation. Thought has its right place but it is misused, becomes mischievous when there is not the freedom from thought. And that freedom has to be learnt; it is not an idea, a speculative theory – theory being insight – nor is it an ideal. And to learn about it there must be curiosity – like a child that learns mathematics, not knowing anything about it, he begins to learn. But learning mathematics or a language needs time, whereas insight into the freedom from thought needs no time at all. That is what we were more or less saying yesterday.
And if we may go on with what we were saying: one observes, doesn’t one, in one’s own life, a series of fragmentations, a life that is broken up, contradictory - the business life, the family life, the religious life, the scientific life, the artistic life and so on and on and on. This constant fragmentation has its own activity, its own action and the more one enquires into it, goes into this question of fragmentation, and one tries to integrate these many fragments together, the integrator is still thought who is responsible for the fragmentation. Right? We have broken up life into the family life, the individual life, the religious life, the national life, the politics and so on, and this division exists and when one becomes aware of it, conscious of it, sees the full significance of these fragmentations, one hopes through the cunning, clever process of thought to bring all these fragments together.
But the entity that tries to bring about these fragments together is still a superior perception of thought, is still thought. Can one perceive these various fragments and not try to bring them together, integrate them, but look at them from a total point of view, from a totality, from a perception in which there is no fragmentation? There is the religious life, with all its beliefs, rituals, superstitions, and we play with it, which is totally different from our daily life, with all its conflicts, loneliness, boredom, pleasures, fears, anxieties, and there is the life of earning a livelihood, all totally separate, and therefore contradictory.