The benediction of meditation
BENGALURU: What is living? Not what should be living, not what is the purpose of living, not what is the significance of living, not what is the principle upon which life should be based, not what is the goal of living, but actually what is living as it is now, as it is in our daily life, what it actually is in our private secret daily life. Because that is the only fact, and all other things are unreal, illusory, theoretical. So what is this life, our life, the life of a private human being, the life of a human being in relationship with society, the relationship with society which he has made, which he has built, this society, and that society holds him prisoner. So he is the society, he is the world, and the world is not different from him. Which again is fairly obvious.
So we are dealing not with abstractions, not with ideals, which are idiotic anyhow, but with actually ‘what is’, which is our living. What is our living? If you observe, from the moment we are born till we die it is a constant battle, constant struggle, with great pleasures, great fears, despair, loneliness, the utter lack of love, the loneliness, the boredom, the repetition, the routine.
That’s our life. Spending forty years in an office, or in a factory, being a housewife, the drudgery, the dullness, the boredom of all that, the sexual pleasure, the jealousy, the envy, the failure of success and the worship of success. That’s our daily tortured life. That is, if you are at all serious and observe what actually is, but if you are merely... if you seek entertainment in different forms, whether it is in a church or on the football field, then such entertainment has its own pains, has its own problems.
And a superficial mind does escape through the church and through the football field, and we are not dealing with such superficial minds. That’s because they are really not interested. Life is serious, and in that seriousness there is great laughter. And it is only the serious mind that is living, that can solve the immense problem of existence.
So our life as it is lived daily is a travail, and no one can deny it. And we don’t know what to do about it. We want to find a way of living differently - at least we say so, at least some of us say we must, and make an attempt. Before making an attempt, before trying to change, we must understand actually ‘what is’, not ‘what should be’, but actually take ‘what is’ in our hands and look at it.
And you cannot look at it, come closely, intimately contact with it if you have an ideal, or if you say this must be changed to that, or if you are concerned in changing it. But if you are capable of looking at it as it is, then you will find there comes quite a different quality of change, and that is what we are going into now.