BENGALURU: There are rare moments when you function as though you were completely abandoned, completely in harmony with yourself, with the world, with everything about you, so that there is no struggle, no effort, no striving after something.
When you see the clarity of an evening or of the morning very clearly, when you are completely one with nature, when every tree says something to you, and every flower is a delight – you must have had these moments, when the mind is not disturbed – and is it possible to live like that? Is it possible to function efficiently, technologically, almost like a computer, without a battle within oneself? Because I feel we human beings are tortured entities, driven by innumerable, contradictory desires, driven by our demand to fulfil, to achieve, to succeed, to compete - we are always comparing what is, with what should be. And this comparison is one of the factors of conflict.
We are thinking out together our problems, we are taking a journey together into ourselves, into our lives, into our conflicts, into our miseries, into our unutterable loneliness and despair. You are not merely listening to a few words, but listening so that you really hear your own mind working operating, functioning, so that you see yourself very clearly; not ‘what is good’ or ‘what is bad’, but actually see what is.
If one could listen in such a manner, not only to what the speaker is saying but also to the birds, to what your neighbour says, to your boss in the office, to yourselves when you are soliloquizing talking to yourself – listen so that you find out, so that you learn! And I hope you will listen that way because we are not making any propaganda, we are not telling you what to do.It is a terrible thing to rely on another about the way of life, to be told what to do, how to behave, what righteousness is or is not – this seems to me a state of immaturity and no one can make you mature; all that one can do is to listen and learn. But learning is a very difficult art. Most of us know how to accumulate knowledge and from that knowledge act.