excerpts

When you respond, not as the collective, but as a real individual who has freed himself from society with its greed, envy, possessiveness, and all the rest of it. Only such an individual will know that extraordinary experience of something which is not measurable by the mind.

It is not a static experience. It is not an experience to be remembered. What is remembered is not true; it has already joined the dead of yesterday. And without that experience of reality, do what you will, you can never have a sane, ordered, balanced, happy world. But you cannot seek that experience, it must come to you; and it will come to you only when you are not concerned about yourself...

In asking a question, what is important is not the answer but the question; because if I know how to look at the question, how to feel my way through it, I shall find, not the answer, but that the problem has ceased to exist.

After all, a problem exists in my daily life only when I have not the capacity to meet it adequately. A good mechanic knows what is wrong with a motor immediately, it is not a problem to him; but to another man, who is not a good mechanic, it is a problem.

Learning how to deal with a psychological problem is, however, entirely different, because the problem varies from moment to moment. It is never the same. You cannot learn a technique of how to deal with the problem, because the problem is constantly changing.

I don't know if you have noticed it. To say, "I will find an answer and apply it to the problem", or, "Having established an end, I will make the problem fit the end", is such a nonsensical way of dealing with a problem. To deal with a problem, one has to have the capacity to look at it. That is all. And you cannot look at a problem if you are interested in the answer. You can look at a problem only if you give your total attention to it; and if you give your total attention to it, the problem is not…

It is really quite extraordinary how the mind can meet each problem afresh every time. The meeting of every challenge afresh is the renewal of life; but a mind that functions mechanically in the groove of tradition, of memory, cannot adequately meet the challenge, and such a mind only creates further problems.

When the mind asks a question looking for an answer, it generally finds an answer [but not the best answer], and the answer is invariably gratifying, comforting; so the mind is caught in its own pettiness…

So, how does it happen that one mind is conditioned and another is not? You can easily say it is karma, or ascribe the whole thing to fancy, imagination; but that is not the answer, surely.

Why does one particular mind that is put under pressure, that goes through all the stresses and strains of life, see so much and come out differently? What makes it happen?

Is it like some rare thing in botany, or in the field of sport? Or is it something which is possible to everybody? If it is a rare thing, it has no value. You can just as well put it in a museum, label and forget it - which is what we generally do, only we make the person into a saint or some silly thing like that.

But if you really want to know, then you will have to find out for yourself whether there is a reality which can be understood immediately and not through the process of time.

There is a reality - please listen, sirs - there is a reality which, coming upon the mind, transforms it. You don't have to do a thing. It operates, it functions, it has a being of its own; but the mind must feel it, must know it and not speculate, not have all kinds of ideas about it.

A mind that is seeking it will never find it; but there is that state, unquestionably. In saying this I am not speculating, nor am I stating it as an experience of yesterday. It is so [a living vitality and thus enduring].

There is that state; and if you have it, you will find everything is possible, because that is creation, that is love, that is compassion. But you cannot come to it through any means, through any book, through any guru or organization.

Do please realize that you cannot come to it through any means. No meditation will lead you to it. When you realize that no sanctions, no pattern of behaviour, no guru, no book, no organization, no authority can lead you to that state, you have already got it.

Then you will find that the mind is merely an instrument of that creation. And it is that creation operating through the mind that will bring about a totally different world ... because that creation is its own reality, its own eternity.