excerpts

One must find out for oneself why one follows, why one accepts this tyranny of authority - the authority of the priest, the authority of the printed word, the Bible, the Indian scriptures, and all the rest of it. Can one reject completely the authority of society? … can one really see that this outward conformity to a pattern is futile, destructive to the mind that wants to find out what is true, what is real?

And if one rejects the outer authority, is it possible also to reject the inner, the authority of experience? Can one put away experience? For most of us, experience is the guidance of knowledge. We say, `I know from experience' or `Experience tells me I must do this', and experience becomes one's inward authority. And perhaps that is far more destructive, far more evil than outward authority. It is the authority of one's conditioning and leads to every form of illusion. The Christian sees visions of Christ, and the Hindu sees visions of his own gods, each because of his own conditioning…

Now, can the mind entirely wipe away the conditioning of centuries? After all, conditioning is of the past. The reactions, the knowledge, the beliefs, the traditions of many thousands of yesterdays have gone to shape the mind. And can it all be wiped away? …

You see, conditioning is the very root of fear; and where there is fear there is no virtue… So the question is: can the mind, which has been influenced by the heavy weight of tradition for centuries upon centuries, put it all aside without any effort? Can you walk out of it all, out of all this background, as freely as you can walk out of this hall? …

The mind is the background. The mind is tradition. The mind is the result of time. And seeing the hopelessness of its own activities, it finally says there is the grace of God which it must wait for, accept, receive - that is another form of influence; and such a mind is not an intelligent mind…

You see, one feels that creation, the thing that we name as God, or truth, or whatever you like to call it, is not for the select few. It is not for those who merely have capacity, a gift, like Michael Angelo, Beethoven, or the modern architects, poets and artists. I feel it is possible for everyone - that extraordinary feeling of immensity, of something that has no barrier, no frontier, which cannot be measured by the mind or put into words. I feel it is possible for everybody.

But it is not a result. It comes into being, I think, when the mind starts with the nearest thing, which is itself - not when it goes after the farthest thing, the unimaginable, the unknown. Self-knowing, the understanding of oneself is to open it up; go into it, see what it is, do not seek something outside.

The mind is a really extraordinary thing. As we know it [in its conditioned form], it is the result of time; and time is authority - the authority of the good and the bad, of what must be done and what must not be done, the tradition, the influences, the conditioning.