BENGALURU: No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself but you are related, you cannot escape from that absolute fact, you cannot exist in isolation. Your mind may think it exists in isolation, or bring about through action a state of isolation, but even in that isolation you are related.
And when one looks at that relationship, because life is relationship, living is relationship, we cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally, but unconsciously, deeply, under the wall we are related. I do not think we have paid a great deal of attention to this question of relationship. Your books don’t talk about relationship, they talk about god, practice, methods, how to breathe, don’t do this, do that, and the everlasting back and forth. Relationship implies responsibility, as freedom does.
And to be related is to live, that’s life, that’s existence. And if in that relationship there is disorder our whole society, culture goes to pieces, which is what is happening now. So what is order, what is freedom and what is relationship? This is the first thing we are going to enquire into. And from there go into this whole question of what love is and if the mind can ever be free from this tyranny of death.
Don’t wait or neglect the previous things, that is love, relationship, freedom and order, because you may be only interested in death, and you say, ‘Really I am not interested in all the other things, but as I am terribly interested in death and what happens afterlife and so on, I will neglect the rest and I will pay attention when you come to that part’ - if you do that then you will never understand what we are talking about. You must take the whole thing together: order, freedom, disorder, relationship, love and death, they are together, they are not separate things.
So what is disorder? Because when the mind understands what is disorder, really deeply inwardly what brings about disorder, then out of that insight, out of that awareness, out of that observation comes naturally order. Not the blueprint of what order should be, because that is what we have been brought up with, a pattern has been laid down by religions, by cultures, what order should be, or what order is.
And the mind has tried to conform to that order, whether it is cultural order, social order, legalistic order or religious order, it has tried to conform to the pattern established by the social activity, by certain leaders, teachers and so on. To me that is not order because in that there is implied conformity. So where there is conformity there is disorder. Where there is the acceptance of authority there is disorder. Where there is comparative existence, that is measuring yourself against somebody, comparing yourself with somebody does produce disorder.