excerpt

Why are we human beings violent? Do you understand, sir, the word itself? Why are you violent? Not somebody else is violent, the Muslim, the Hindu; but you as a human being - why are you violent, violence being anger, hate, fear, accepting authority, asserting oneself constantly, hating, why? Because mostly each one of us wants security. When your security is threatened, when your country, when your ideas, when your concept of what God is, what truth is, what should be, or what should not be, when that conceptual attitude is threatened - which makes you feel so completely insecure - then you become aggressive, violent.

This means that, as long as you are satisfied, as long as you are left undisturbed in your little backyard, as long as nothing threatens you, you live peacefully. But the moment there is any kind of threat, any kind of uncertainty - uncertainty about your relationship with your wife - you become violent; when there is uncertainty about your position, when you are not capable of fulfilling yourself, being somebody, having a position, prestige, when all those are threatened, you become violent.

So what you really want is not the ending of violence; what you really want is to be completely secure, both inwardly and outwardly. You want to be secure inwardly with your ideas, secure in your relationships, secure in your concepts. But unfortunately you can never be secure. That is one of the first things you realize: that life is not for the secure - which does not mean that you must be insecure or that you must seek insecurity. That is, each one of us, as a human being, wants to be secure within the pattern which we have created for ourselves as being secure, and that pattern will invariably contradict the pattern of another, and so there is a battle between us. And if you observe, not idealistically but factually, life is never secure. Your wife may run away, or my wife may die; there is disease; there is death; nothing is secure.

Do think about it, do reflect about it honestly, and you will find it for yourself - which means, to understand it is to be afraid. And we are frightened human beings, dreadfully frightened, frightened about insecurity, frightened about our relationship, frightened about our job, frightened about death, frightened about our love, our affections, our attitudes. So out of this fear comes violence. And we have lived that way for thousands of years and we seem to be incapable of breaking through that darkness of fear. So that is why we are violent. As a human being, can you understand for yourself - observing life, the everyday incidents - that there is no such thing as security, that life is a movement, an endless movement? And a man who can move with it and go beyond this movement - he will find that peace, that joy, that eternity.

But that means one has to be rid of fear. And fear is one of the most difficult things to be free from. Therefore one has to investigate the whole structure, the psychology of fear. You know to understand something like fear you have to observe it in yourself not to deny it or run away from it or suppress it, but just to observe it…

To understand something, sirs, you must look. To understand this whole phenomenon of violence in the world you must understand the psychological structure of man who has immense fears. That means you have to look at your own fears which no God, no system, nothing will dissolve, except yourself. So you must become astonishingly serious. And seriousness leads to efficiency, clarity. It is only the serious, earnest man that lives, and the rest become merely either cannon fodder or useless human beings. And it is very difficult to be serious - not grow beards or put on a loin cloth, or a sanyasi's robes, or become a monk, or join an Ashram; such a person is not a serious man at all. A serious man is one who sees the facts of the world as they are, who is not caught in concepts, in formulas, or in ideals, but who sees things as they are in the world and faces them and resolves them. Such a man is a serious man. And it is only such serious men that can bring about a different society.

And we need a different society, because society, as it is, is always in a state of disorder; because there are classes, the rich and the poor, the man who knows and the man who does not know, the leader and the follower, the guru and the disciple. Think of all that and see how totally disorderly all that is. And out of that disordered society you try to build an ordered society, or try to reform it. It is not possible. A new order can come into being only when we understand ourselves and bring about a total change within the human mind.