BENGALURU: Most of us think along a particular line: if we are specialised we think along those grooves; if you are committed to a particular religion, an ideological structure, again your thinking is conditioned by that. So we begin to lose the capacity to reason. Reason implies a certain quality of scepticism, doubt, not accepting anything, either from the psychologists, professors, or from the sacred books – there are no sacred books, there are only printed books, like other books, but we give them importance because they happen to be old, people have said they have been uttered by saints or by some teacher, and so we give to a printed word tremendous importance, which is to be driven by a language. And so where language drives us we cannot reason properly, sanely.
Or we cannot possibly reason logically if you are committed to a particular belief, or to a particular ideology because then, if you are committed or identified, you go round and round that circle, round that particular ideology or belief. You don’t think wholly, completely, deeply. So reason we thought is something intellectual and anything intellectual we throw out - that is the latest fashion! Whereas we need this capacity to reason, which I said implies doubt, scepticism, the freedom from every form of authority, including that of the speaker, specially so, because the speaker is rather intense about these matters therefore you may be influenced by that. So don’t. Think clearly for yourselves, and to think clearly you must have no motive, or a goal, a direction. If you have a motive that controls your thinking, if you have a goal, a purpose, a direction that controls your thinking.
All our activities are based on thought -–whether you build a marvellous building, the technological extraordinary advancement, and thinking in your relationship with each other, every action is based on thought. And we said thought is always, under all circumstances, limited. We went into that very carefully, why it is limited. Because thought is the outcome of knowledge, which is the past. So thought is time-binding. So thought is time binding, time being the past and thought is the outcome, response of knowledge, memory stored up in the brain. This is obvious. If you think for yourself, observe for yourself, it becomes very clear. Measurement implies comparison. Most of us compare ourselves with somebody else, always something much greater, not with the poor people, but higher, more intellectual and so on. So thought is limited under all circumstances, therefore thought is never free, thought is a movement in measurement.