Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness.
Let the mind be empty, and not filled with the things of the mind. Then there is only meditation, and not a meditor who is meditating . . . The mind must be clear, without movement, and in the light of that clarity the timeless will be revealed.
If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour - whether that neighbour is near or very far away - forget about meditation.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. We have lost it, or we have never had it; and, because we do not know how to judge anything, we have been led here and pushed there, beaten up, driven, politically, religiously and socially. We don't know, but it is difficult to say we don't know.
What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.
Am I caught in a self-centred, narrow little cell which refuses to look beyond? Do I see it when you come along and tell me that my brain is the brain of all mankind?
No book can teach you about yourself, no psychologist, none of the professors or philosophers. What they can teach you is what they think you are or what they think you should be.
All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
Awareness is that state of mind which takes in everything-the crows flying across the sky, the flowers on the trees, the people sitting in front, the colors they are wearing - being extensively aware, which needs watching, observing, taking in the shape of the leaf, the shape of the trunk, the shape of the head of another, what he is doing.
Aloneness is obviously not isolation, and it is not uniqueness. To be unique is merely to be exceptional in some way, whereas to be completely alone demands extraordinary sensitivity, intelligence, understanding.