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.
Knowledge is an addiction, as drink; knowledge does not bring understanding. Knowledge can be taught, but not wisdom; there must be freedom from knowledge for the coming of wisdom.
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.
Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to some imaginal bliss. The meditative mind is seeing, watching, listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion, attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day.
Life is both pleasure and pain, is it not? But why should we cling to pleasure and avoid pain? Why not merely live with both? If you cling to pleasure what happens? You get attached, do you not?
A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind.
There you have the two extremes: the man that is concerned mainly with the hidden life, and the man who seriously concerns himself with the expression of that life. What I want to do is to bring about harmony between the two extremes, for therein lies the Truth. The harmony of life is the understanding of Truth.
I say that when you have perceived or attained the goal, compromises, renunciations, do not exist. If you have seen the goal, compromise ceases to exist. It is then a question of a different attitude.
Buddha called himself 'The Enlightened One' and Jesus called himself 'The Son of God'. To me the term 'World-Teacher' is of as little importance as 'The Son of God' or 'The Enlightened One'.
Education in the true sense is helping the individual to be mature and free, to flower greatly in love and goodness. That is what we should be interested in, and not in shaping the child according to some idealistic pattern.
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 we want to change existing conditions, we must first transform ourselves, which means that we must become aware of our own actions, thoughts and feelings in everyday life.
When inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learned without experiencing it.