BENGALURU: To commit oneself to freedom and to find out what love is - those are the only two things that matter - freedom and that thing called ‘love’. Without total freedom there cannot possibly be love; and a serious man is committed to these two things only, and to nothing else. Freedom implies - does it not? - that the mind frees itself totally from all conditioning.
That is, to uncondition itself - from being a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim, a Christian or a Communist - the mind must be in complete freedom - because this division between man as the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Christian, or the American, the Communist, the Socialist, the Capitalist, and so on, has brought disaster, confusion, misery, wars. So what is necessary first of all is for the mind to free itself from conditioning. You may say it is not possible. If you say it is not possible, then there is no way out. It is like a man living in a prison and saying, “I cannot get out”.
All that he can do is decorate the prison, polish it, make it more comfortable, more convenient, limit himself and his activities within the four walls of his own making. There are many who say it is not possible - the whole Communist world says it is not possible, therefore let us condition the mind in a different way, brainwash it first, then condition it according to the Communist system. And the religious people have done exactly the same thing, from childhood they are brainwashed and conditioned to believe they are Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Catholics.
Religions talk about love and freedom, but they insist on conditioning the mind. So if you say man is not capable of freeing himself from his conditioning, then you have no problem. Then you accept the prison and live in the prison, with the wars, with the confusion, with the conflicts, with the misery, the agony and the loneliness of life, with its violence, brutality and hatred; which is what you actually do. But if you say, ‘it must be possible to uncondition the mind’, then we can go into it; then we are together - not some authority leading you to it, not the speaker taking your hand and leading you step by step, because when there is freedom there is no authority.
Freedom is at the beginning as well as at the end, and if you accept an authority at the beginning, you will always be a slave at the end. So one has to enquire together in freedom; please do understand this. The speaker is not telling you what to do, not setting himself up as an authority - you have had authorities, all you can stomach, with all their absurdities, with all their immaturities - but if you are enquiring (and there is no authority when you enquire) then we can take the journey together, sharing together, not being led. A real scientist is not committed to any government; he has no nationality; he is not seeking an end.
As a pure scientist, he is investigating objectively right to the end, without projecting his personality, his nationality, his ambitions. So enquire into this question of freedom, not intellectually, but actually, with your blood, with your mind and with your heart! It is only in freedom that you can live, and only when there is freedom is there peace. Then in that freedom the mind has immense peace to wander; but a mind that is not free, tethered to a belief, tethered to an ambition, tethered to a family or to some petty little god of its own invention, such a mind can never understand the extraordinary beauty or the love that comes out of this freedom.