excerpts

When the mind says "I know", all that it knows is what has happened yesterday, or at some other time in the past. With that knowledge it approaches the present; but the present is changing from moment to moment. So the mind can never say I know; and this is very important, psychologically, to understand.

The man who says "I know", does not know. You can never say "I have found truth", because truth is moving, living, dynamic, it is never still, never static, never the same; and that is the beauty, the splendour of truth.

To understand this thing called the `me', the self, you must come to it without saying "I know", without accepting any authority. All authority is dead, and it does not bring about this creative search. Authority can guide you, shape you, tell you what to do and what not to do, but all that is still within the field of knowing; and burdened with the known you cannot follow that which is living, vital, moving.

So the mind that sees the truth of this and wishes to inquire into itself will never say "I know; therefore, being in a state of constant movement, it is able to observe that which is also never the same. This is the beginning of self-knowledge.

The self as we know it is a limited thing, but it is also living, moving, and a mind that is conditioned, bound by tradition … cannot possibly understand the self… I am not using the word `self' in any significant spiritual sense; I mean by that word the self which functions daily, which thinks, feels, invents, hopes, wants, and is caught in conflict; the self which is biased, which speculates, judges, seeks.

To understand yourself there must be an awareness, a watchfulness, a state of observation in which there is not a trace of condemnation or justification; and to be in that state of observation without judging is an extraordinarily arduous task, because the weight of tradition is against you; your mind has been trained for centuries to judge, to condemn, to justify, to evaluate, to accept or deny.

Don't say "How am I to get rid of this conditioning?", but [just] see the truth that if you want to understand yourself, which is obviously of the highest importance, you must observe the operation of your own mind without any condemnation or comparison.

What is thinking? Surely, what we call thinking is a reaction of memory, of one's conditioning. If I ask you a question with which you are familiar, your response is immediate, because the mechanism of memory operates instantly…

The mind that says "I am going to inquire into myself" is already conditioned; it is conditioned as a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, this or that. It is only in understanding this conditioning that the conditioning can be broken down.

Now, how is the conditioned mind to resolve its conditioning? Do you understand the question? You are conditioned as a Hindu, let us say, and you are totally unaware of that conditioning because you live in a society where practically everybody is Hindu and you have accepted it; so you never question it at all. But now someone is telling you that your mind is conditioned, and you have begun to see that it is true; so you say "How am I to be free from this conditioning?"

Sirs, freedom from a particular conditioning is still a conditioned state, is it not? Please follow this. To be free from something is a reaction, therefore it is not freedom at all. I will show you what I mean. Merely to free myself from nationalism is a reaction, because I want to be something else.

My conditioning gives me pain, sorrow, and I say I must be free from it in order to be happy, that is, in order to be something else. In other words, I free myself from something in order to be in a more gratifying state, which is obviously a reaction; therefore it is not freedom. Freedom is not born of reaction, it is a state of mind in which there is no desire to be or not to be something.

If you see the truth of that, then the next question is, what does it mean to be free of conditioning? It means, surely, not freedom from something, or freedom to be something, but seeing the fact as it is. Let us say I am conditioned as a Hindu. I do not want to be free from my conditioning; I want to see it. And the moment I see it as it is, there is freedom, not as a reaction. I do not know if I am making myself clear on this point. I don't want to take examples, because examples can be refuted by other examples. But what is important is to think of it negatively, because negative thinking is direct thinking.

You see, there is positive thinking and negative thinking. Positive thinking is deciding what to do, how to break down one's conditioning by practising a system, a method, a discipline. In practising a method or a discipline in order to be free of conditioning, one has merely introduced a further conditioning, a new habit. That is positive thinking. Whereas negative thinking is to look at the fact of one's conditioning, and see the truth that no system or discipline can bring freedom from conditioning.

Sirs, many of you practise non-violence, you worship the ideal of non-violence, you everlastingly preach non-violence. That is the positive approach, which you know very well. But the truth is that you are violent; and the negative approach is simply to perceive that truth. To perceive the truth that you are violent is enough in itself. You don't have to do anything. The moment you act upon violence, you have introduced the fictitious ideal of non-violence.

I don't know if you see this. Let us say I am greedy. That is a fact, and I know it. I don't want to change greed into non-greed, to me that has no meaning, because I see that becoming non-greedy still has the qualities of greed. All becoming is obviously a form of greed. The mind is aware of the fact that it is greedy, and it also perceives that any move on its part to change greed is still within the field of greed. This very perception of what is is the resolution of it.

So the inquiry into the self must begin with a negative approach, because you don't know what the self is. You may think you know the self as a greedy man, as this or that; but the self is being influenced, it is undergoing constant change, and to understand it you must approach it, not positively, but negatively, obliquely.

Most minds are conditioned, and the breaking down of that conditioning does not come about through any resolution or determination, through any practice of discipline. It comes about only when there is a negative approach to one's conditioning. The mere perception of what is is enough in itself. Follow this and you will see why.

When you understand the negative approach, which is to see the truth of it, its uselessness, its fictitious nature, then your mind, which is greedy, is no longer caught in the fictitious process of trying to become non-greedy. Therefore it is free to look at what is, which is greed; and because the mind is free to look at greed, it is capable of dissolving greed.

Try this the next time you are angry or violent. Don't condemn it, don't say it is right or wrong, but look at it. Just to look at the feeling, without naming it, without condemning or justifying it, is an extraordinary thing. The very word `anger' is condemnatory, and when you look at the feeling without naming it, the verbal association with that feeling, through the word `anger', ceases.

Go along with this, sirs; don't accept or reject what is being said, but just follow it whether you understand it or not.

To understand the whole process of the self, there must be a negative approach; because the conscious mind can never go consciously into the deep unconscious. You may be a great technician outwardly, on the conscious level, but inwardly, in the deep layers of the unconscious, there is the everlasting pull of the racial, instinctual, traditional responses; there all your ambitions, your frustrations, your hidden motives and fears are rampant, and you have to understand all that. To understand it, you must approach it negatively. The positive approach is always within the field of the known. But the negative approach frees the mind from the known, and therefore the mind can look at the problem anew, afresh, in a state of innocency.

Then you will discover that the self is not only the seeker, but also the process of seeking as well as that which is sought. The seeker is seeking peace of mind, and he practises a method by which to find what he seeks. The seeker, the seeking, and the sought are all one and the same thing.

When the seeker seeks what he wants, which is peace of mind, it is still within the field of the known. His seeking is a reaction from the conflicts of life, so the peace he is everlastingly pursuing is a projection of the known.

Whereas, if the mind, seeing for itself the fictitiousness of that pursuit, is not concerned with peace at all, but with understanding its own conflicts, and therefore approaches them negatively, then there is the beginning of self-knowledge.

The understanding of oneself is a constant, timeless process. There is no end to self-knowledge. The moment you see the truth that the understanding of oneself is limitless, your mind is already freed from the known and therefore able to penetrate into the unknown.

A mind that is tethered to the known can never move into the unknown. All your Gods, your Bibles, your Gitas, your Marxist books will not lead you very far. To go far you must begin near, which is to see that a mind hedged about, bound by the known, cannot proceed into the unknown.

The unknown is the total negation of the known, it is not a reaction from the known. So there must be an end to the game of the seeker and the sought. In other words, there must be an end to all seeking. Then only is there something new.

All profound discoveries are made in this state, not when the mind is pursuing a projection of the known. It is when the mind ceases completely to move in the field of the known, when it does not project the known into the unknown - it is only then that there is the coming into being of an extraordinary state of creative newness which has nothing to do with the known. That is truth, that is reality, that is God, or whatever name you care to give it. But the name is not the thing.

So one must begin near, which is to empty the mind of all the things it has known - inwardly, psychologically, not factually. You cannot forget where you, live, that would be amnesia. But you have to wipe away, in the psychological sense, all that you have known as a man of experience, as a man of knowledge, as a man who has read, read, read, and who is controlled by what is known - all that must come to an end.

What is known has always a centre, and therefore always a circumference, a recognizable frontier. The frontier ceases only when the centre ceases. Then the mind is unlimited, not measurable by man.