We live in fragments. You are one thing at the office,
another at home; you
talk about democracy and in your heart you are autocratic;
you talk about loving
your neighbours, yet kill him with competition; there is one
part of you working,
looking, independently of the other. Are you aware of this
fragmentary existence
in yourself? And is it possible for a brain that has broken
up its own functioning,
its own thinking, into fragments - is it possible for such a
brain to be aware of the
whole field? Is it possible to look at the whole of
consciousness completely,
totally, which means to be a total human being?
If, in order to try
to understand the whole structure of the `me', the self, with all
its extraordinary complexity, you go step by step,
uncovering layer by layer,
examining every thought, feeling and motive, you will get
caught up in the
analytical process which may take you weeks, months, years -
and when you
admit time into the process of understanding yourself, you
must allow for every
form of distortion because the self is a complex entity,
moving, living, struggling,
wanting, denying, with pressures and stresses and influences
of all sorts
continually at work on it. So you will discover for yourself
that this is not the way;
you will understand that the only way to look at yourself is
totally, immediately,
without time; and you can see the totality of yourself only
when the mind is not
fragmented. What you see in totality is the truth.
Now can you do that?
Most of us cannot because most of us have never
approached the problem so seriously, because we have never
really looked at
ourselves. Never. We blame others, we explain things away or
we are frightened
to look. But when you look totally you will give your whole
attention, your whole
being, everything of yourself, your eyes, your ears, your
nerves; you will attend
with complete self-abandonment, and then there is no room
for fear, no room for
contradiction, and therefore no conflict.
Attention is not the
same thing as concentration. Concentration is exclusion;
attention, which is total awareness, excludes nothing. It
seems to me that most of
us are not aware, not only of what we are talking about
but of our environment,
the colours around us, the people, the shape of the trees,
the clouds, the
movement of water. Perhaps it is because we are so concerned
with ourselves,
with our own petty little problems, our own ideas, our own
pleasures, pursuits and
ambitions that we are not objectively aware. And yet we talk
a great deal about
awareness.
Once in my native town trichur, I was travelling in a car. There was a chauffeur driving and I was sitting beside him. There were three gentlemen behind discussing awareness very intently and asking me questions about awareness, and unfortunately at that moment the driver was looking somewhere else and he ran over a goat, and the three gentlemen were still discussing awareness - totally unaware that they had run over a goat. When the lack of attention was pointed out to those gentlemen who were trying to be aware it was a great surprise to them and with most of us it is the same. We are not aware of outward things or of inward things. If you want to understand the beauty of a bird, a fly, or a leaf, or a person with all his complexities, you have to give your whole attention which is awareness. And you can give your whole attention only when you care, which means that you really love to understand - then you give your whole heart and mind to find out.
Once in my native town trichur, I was travelling in a car. There was a chauffeur driving and I was sitting beside him. There were three gentlemen behind discussing awareness very intently and asking me questions about awareness, and unfortunately at that moment the driver was looking somewhere else and he ran over a goat, and the three gentlemen were still discussing awareness - totally unaware that they had run over a goat. When the lack of attention was pointed out to those gentlemen who were trying to be aware it was a great surprise to them and with most of us it is the same. We are not aware of outward things or of inward things. If you want to understand the beauty of a bird, a fly, or a leaf, or a person with all his complexities, you have to give your whole attention which is awareness. And you can give your whole attention only when you care, which means that you really love to understand - then you give your whole heart and mind to find out.
Such awareness is
like living with a snake in the room; you watch its every
movement, you are very, very sensitive to the slightest
sound it makes. Such a
state of attention is total energy; in such awareness the
totality of yourself is
revealed in an instant.
When you have looked
at yourself so deeply you can go much deeper. When
we use the word `deeper' we are not being comparative. We
think in comparisons
- deep and shallow, happy and unhappy. We are always
measuring, comparing.
Now is there such a state as the shallow and the deep in
oneself? When I say,
`My mind is shallow, petty, narrow, limited', how do I know
all these things?
Because I have compared my mind with your mind which is
brighter, has more
capacity, is more intelligent and alert. Do I know my
pettiness without
comparison? When I am hungry, I do not compare that hunger
with yesterday's
hunger. Yesterday's hunger is an idea, a memory.
If I am all the time
measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you,
then I am denying what I am myself. Therefore I am creating
an illusion. When I
have understood that comparison in any form leads only to
greater illusion and
greater misery, just as when I analyse myself, add to my
knowledge of myself bit
by bit, or identify myself with something outside myself,
whether it be the State, a
saviour or an ideology - when I understand that all such
processes lead only to
greater conformity and therefore greater conflict - when I
see all this I put it
completely away. Then my mind is no longer seeking. It is
very important to
understand this. Then my mind is no longer groping,
searching, questioning. This
does not mean that my mind is satisfied with things as they
are, but such a mind
has no illusion. Such a mind can then move in a totally
different dimension. The
dimension in which we usually live, the life of every day
which is pain, pleasure
and fear, has conditioned the mind, limited the nature of
the mind, and when that
pain, pleasure and fear have gone (which does not mean that
you no longer have
joy: joy is something entirely different from pleasure) -
then the mind functions in
a different dimension in which there is no conflict, no
sense of `otherness'.
Verbally we can go
only so far: what lies beyond cannot be put into words
because the word is not the thing. Up to now we can
describe, explain, but no
words or explanations can open the door. What will open the
door is daily
awareness and attention - awareness of how we speak, what we
say, how we
walk, what we think. It is like cleaning a room and keeping
it in order. Keeping the
room in order is important in one sense but totally
unimportant in another. There
must be order in the room but order will not open the door
or the window. What
will open the door is not your volition or desire. You
cannot possibly invite the
other. All that you can do is to keep the room in order,
which is to be virtuous for
itself, not for what it will bring. To be sane, rational,
orderly. Then perhaps, if you
are lucky, the window will open and the breeze will come in.
Or it may not. It
depends on the state of your mind. And that state of mind
can be understood only
by yourself, by watching it and never trying to shape it,
never taking sides, never
opposing, never agreeing, never justifying, never
condemning, never judging -
which means watching it without any choice. And out of this
choiceless
awareness perhaps the door will open and you will know what
that dimension is
in which there is no conflict and no time.