BENGALURU : If one may ask, what do you mean by that word ‘discontent’? “Before that Sunday morning when I heard you, I was a contented person, and I suppose rather a bore to others; now I see how stupid I was, and I am trying to be intelligent and alert to everything about me. I want to amount to something, get somewhere, and this urge naturally makes for discontent. I used to be asleep if I may put it that way, but now I am waking up.”
Are you waking up, or are you trying to put yourself to sleep again through the desire to become something? You say you were asleep, and that now you are awake; but this awakened state makes you discontented, which displeases you, gives you pain, and to escape from this pain you are attempting to become something, to follow an ideal, and so on. This imitation is putting you back to sleep again, is it not?
“But I don’t want to go back to my old state, and I do want to be awake.”Isn’t it very strange how the mind deceives itself? The mind doesn’t like to be disturbed, it doesn’t like to be shaken out of its old patterns, its comfortable habits of thought and action; being disturbed, it seeks ways and means to establish new boundaries and pastures in which it can live safely. It is this zone of safety that most of us are seeking, and it is the desire to be safe, to be secure, that puts us to sleep.
Circumstances, a word, a gesture, an experience, may awaken us, disturb us, but we want to be put to sleep again. This is happening to most of us all the time, and it is not an awakened state. What we have to understand are the ways in which the mind puts itself to sleep. This is so, is it not?
“But there must be a great many ways in which the mind puts itself to sleep. Is it possible to know and avoid them all?”
Several could be pointed out; but this would not solve the problem, would it? “Why not?”
Merely to learn the ways in which the mind puts itself to sleep is again to find a means, perhaps different, of being undisturbed, secure. The important thing is to keep awake, and not ask how to keep awake; the pursuit of the ‘how’ is the urge to be safe.
“Then what is one to do?”
Stay with discontent without desiring to pacify it. It is the desire to be undisturbed that must be understood. This desire, which takes many forms, is the urge to escape from what is. When this urge drops away - but not through any form of compulsion, either conscious or unconscious - only then does the pain of discontent cease. Comparison of what is with what should be brings pain. The cessation of comparison is not a state of contentment; it is a state of wakefulness without the activities of the self.
“All this is rather new to me. It seems to me that you give to words quite a different
significance but communication is possible only when both of us give the same meaning to the same word at the same time.”Communication is relationship, is it not? “You jump to wider significance than I am now capable of grasping. I must go more deeply into all this, and then perhaps I shall understand.”