BENGALURU: So, violence plays an extraordinary part in our life, we never ask whether the mind can be completely and utterly free from violence. We have accepted it as part of life, as we have accepted war as a way of life. And we have our favourite wars - you may not like this particular war, but you don’t mind having other kinds of wars. And there will be always wars – and there have been for 5,000 years, wars, because man has accepted violence as the way of life.
And we never question whether the mind can be really and truly, deeply free of violence. And the permissive society in which we live, the culture in which this is gradually coming out of this society, to do what one likes or choose what one likes, is still an indication of violence. Where there is choice there is no freedom. Choice implies confusion, not clarity. When you see something very clearly there is no choice, there is only action. It is only a confused mind that chooses. And choice is an indication of the lack of freedom and therefore in choice there is resistance, conflict.
And so our life as it is now is based on violence. Our life is conditioned by the verb ‘to be’. Please, this is important to understand, how our life is guided and conditioned by the verb ‘to be’: one has been, one is, and one will be. The idea in that verb is to arrive, to succeed, to achieve, to become, gradually attain peace, gradually get rid of the things that hinder us. So the verb ‘to be’ is the conditioning of the mind in time. Do please follow this.
Because enlightenment is not a matter of time at all. Understanding is not a matter of gradual sensitivity; either one understands it immediately or not at all. As long as the mind is conditioned by that verb, and as most minds are, all our modern structure is based on that. I will be good, I will gradually achieve a certain state of mind and so on. So one has to be aware of this dangerous word. And find out whether the mind can be free of the word, because the word is never the thing, the description is never the described. And yet we are satisfied with the description, with the explanations.
So, as I said, we are going to go into this question of not only what is meditation - and I believe that is a new word that you have learned in this country, brought from the East, and one doesn’t know the full meaning of that word. But before we go into that, which is a very complex and most important thing, meditation is the most beautiful thing in life, if you know what meditation is. But before one can meditate one must understand what is living, what is love and what is death. If you don’t understand that your meditation is merely an escape, is a form of self-hypnosis.
So you must lay the foundation, not gradually. There must be order before the mind can fully comprehend the significance of what meditation is, there must be complete order. Which means, the end of all conflict, all disturbance, all disorder within oneself, otherwise your sitting down in a corner by yourself for ten minutes a day and thinking you’re going to meditate or achieve enlightenment, is nonsense, if you don’t mind my saying so.