Identification with the rag called the national flag is an emotional and sentimental factor and for that factor you are willing to kill another - and that is called, the love of your country, love of the neighbor . . .? One can see that where sentiment and emotion come in, love is not.
One does not concern oneself with the expressions, but rather with life. You are looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope when you look at the expressions of life.
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
The Hindu, the Oriental, says that the physical is but the shadow of the Eternal, of the Truth; and he says 'In order to understand the Truth, I must let the shadow go, and not concern myself with it, but with the understanding of the Eternal.' So he does not concern himself with the physical. He is more concerned with the quality of mind and heart. Hence there is disease, there is disorder, and there is chaos and neglect and the gradual running down of the physical.
Now, when you are aware, you see the whole process of your thinking and action, but it can happen only when there is no condemnation. That is. When I condemn something, I do not understand it.
You are this, which does not satisfy, so you want to be that. If there were an understanding of this, would that come into being? Because you do not understand this, you create that, hoping through that to understand or to escape from this.
When I said that I am the Buddha, the Christ, the Lord Maitreya, and more, it was not a question of superiority or inferiority. I added that phrase 'and more' very carefully, because I knew that people had a very limited understanding of the Buddha and the Christ, and hence if I said: 'I am the Christ, the Buddha', they would limit that Reality to their own conceptions of the Buddha or the Christ, and Life has no limit.
The unknown is not measurable by the known. Time cannot measure the timeless, the eternal, that immensity which has no beginning and no end... when we try to measure something which is not measurable, we only get caught in words.
To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.
And it is impossible to treat human beings as human beings if you label them, if you term them, if you give them a name as Hindus, Russians, or what you will. It is so much easier to label people, for then you can pass by and kick them, drop a bomb on India or Japan.
Find out for yourself what are the possesions and ideals that you do not desire. By knowing what you do not want, by elimination, you will unburden the mind, and only then will it understand the essential which is ever there.
Freedom is entirely different from revolt. There is no such thing as doing right or wrong when there is freedom. You are free and from that centre you act.
From these prejudices there arises conflict, transient joys and suffering. But we are unconscious of this, unconscious that we are slaves to certain forms of tradition, to social and political environment, to false values.
There is no such thing as living alone, for all living is relationship; but to live without direct relationship demands high intelligence, a swifter and greater awareness for self-discovery.
There is an efficiency inspired by love which goes far beyond and is much greater than the efficiency of ambition; and without love, which brings an integrated understanding of life, efficiency breeds ruthlessness.