 47. Ego-I |
Is not the function of the mind, as we know it and as we function daily, a process of isolation? Aren't you seeking individual salvation? You are going to be somebody in the future; or in this very life you are going to be a great man, a greater writer. Our whole tendency is to be separated. Can the mind do anything else but that? Is it possible for the mind not to think separatively, in a self-enclosed manner, fragmentarily? That is impossible. So we worship the mind; the mind is extraordinary important. Don't you know, the moment you are a little bit cunning, a little bit alert, and have a little accumulated information and knowledge, how important you become in society? You know how you worship those who are intellectually superior, the lawyers, the professors, the orators, the great writers, the explainers and the expounders! You have cultivated the intellect and the mind.
The function of the mind is to be separated; otherwise your mind is not there. Having cultivated this process for centuries we find we cannot cooperate; we can only be urged, compelled, driven by authority, feat, either economically or religious. If that is the actual state, not only consciously but also at the deeper levels, in our motives our intentions, our pursuits, how can there be cooperation? How can there be intelligent coming together to do something? As that is almost impossible, religions and organized societal parties force the individual to certain forms of discipline. Discipline then becomes imperative if we want to come together, to do things together.
Until we understand how to transcend this separative thinking, this process of giving emphasis to the "me" and the "mine," whether in the collective form or in individual form, we shall not have peace; we shall have constant conflict and wars. Our problem is how to bring an end to the separative process of thought. Can thought ever destroy the ego self thought being the process of verbalization and of reaction? Thought is nothing else but reaction; thought is not creative. Can such thought put an end to itself? That is what we are trying to find out. When I think along these lines: "I must discipline," "I must think more properly," "I must be this or that," thought is compelling itself, urging itself, disciplining itself to be something or not to be something. Is that not a process of isolation? It is therefore not that integrated intelligence which functions as a whole, from which alone there can be cooperation.
How are you to come to the end of thought? Or rather how is thought, which is isolated, fragmentary and partial, to come to an end? How do you set about it? Will your so-called discipline destroy it? Obviously, you have not succeeded all these long years, otherwise you would not be here.
Please examine the disciplining process, which is solely a thought process, in which there is subjection, repression, control, domination – all affecting the unconscious, which asserts itself later as you grow older. Having tried for such a long time to no purpose, you must have found that discipline is obviously not the process to destroy the self. The ego self cannot be destroyed through discipline, because discipline is a process of strengthening the ego self. Yet all your religions support it; all your meditations, your assertions are based on this. Will knowledge destroy the egoic self? Will belief destroy it? In other words, will anything that we are at present doing, any of the activities in which we are at present engaged in order to get at the root of the egoic self, will any of that succeed? Is not all this a fundamental waste in a thought process which is a process of isolation, of reaction? What do you do when you realize fundamentally or deeply that thought cannot end itself? What happens? Watch yourself. When you are fully aware of this fact, what happens? You understand that any reaction is conditioned and that, through conditioning, there can be no freedom either at the beginning or at the end – and freedom is always at the beginning and not at the end.
