Crisis in Consciousness (eBook)

Poona, India, 1958

First Talk in Poona

I think it would be well if we could establish a true relationship between the speaker and the audience; otherwise, there may be a great deal of misunderstanding and misjudgment. Obviously the speaker has something to say, and you have come to listen. What he has to say may have very little value, or it may have significance if one is capable of listening with quiet attention.

It is most important to know how to listen. Most of us do not listen; we come either with a tendency to resist or to refute what is being said, or we compare it with what we have previously heard, or learned from books. In this process, obviously, there is no listening because when you are thinking of what somebody else has said on a subject, your mind is merely going back to various memories—merely trying to compare what is being said with what you have already heard or read. So please, if I may suggest, do follow what is being said.

There are so many terrible things taking place in the world, so much misery and confusion, such decadence, corruption, and evil; and I feel that if one is at all earnest, intent on understanding these human problems, one must approach the matter with a certain serious purpose. What I am going to say may be entirely different from what you know or believe—and I think it will be. I am saying this, not from any sense of conceit or over-confidence, but because most of us, when anything unfamiliar is said, are apt to reject it offhand or to ridicule it. This is especially so with the experts, those who are specialists in some department—the scientists, technicians, lecturers, professors, and so on. They are particularly apt to discard a new approach to our many problems because they divide life into departments and think only in terms of their specialized field. Life’s problems are not going to be solved by the specialists. If a man is an economist, he tends to think that all the problems of life will be solved by some economic system which will bring about equality of opportunity for achievement, for gain, and to him every other form of thought, of investigation, of search, seems of secondary importance or not worthwhile.

So, considering all these things, it would be nice, I think, if we could, at least for this hour, listen with a sense of humility, with an attitude of trying to find out what the speaker intends to convey. Afterwards you can question it, discuss it, refute it, or brush it aside. But first, surely, if there is to be any form of communication, there must be a certain understanding, a common ground established between speaker and listener. Listening is very difficult; it is an art. I am sure you have never really listened to anybody because your mind is always occupied, thinking of other things, is it not so? You never actually listen to your wife, to your children, to your neighbor, because your mind is caught up in its own fears and anxieties, in the innumerable preoccupations that arise in the mind and prevent full communication. If you observe yourself you will see how extraordinarily difficult it is to listen to anything, especially to a speaker who is going to say things which you will not like, or which you do not immediately understand, or which seem contradictory. Such things are apt to produce a great deal of confusion, and so you tend to brush them all aside.

So it is necessary to listen with a sense of humility. Humility is entirely different from being humble. Humbleness can be achieved, gathered, cultivated by one who is already full of vanity and arrogance, but humility is not a quality to be acquired; it is a state of being. You are, or you are not, in a state of humility, and we shall discuss all this presently as we go into our many problems in the talks which are to follow. But I am suggesting now that if one wants to learn, to understand what another says, there must be that humility which listens, which does not either accept or reject but inquires. To inquire there must be that state of humility because if you already know, you cease to inquire. If you take a position of agreeing or denying, you put an end to inquiry. Inquiry is only possible when there is a certain freedom of the mind, freedom to go into what is being said, to inquire, to find out. So it is essential that we should listen with a sense of freedom and humility, for only then shall we be able to communicate with each other.

I am not here to instruct you what to do or what not to do, but together we are going to inquire into our many problems. Therefore the thinking should not be one-sided, with you merely receiving. We shall be endeavoring, you and I, to inquire into the whole problem of human existence, into the whole process of living, of death, of meditation, of conflict, of human relationships. All that we are going into. But first it is essential that the mind that wishes to inquire be somewhat pliable and free, not rigid, not prejudiced, not prone to take a stand from which it is unwilling to move.

Surely it behooves us to make this inquiry, seeing that there is so much conflict and misery, such fearful economic stresses and strains, so much starvation and degradation. Obviously a change is necessary, a radical change. A fundamental revolution is necessary because things cannot go on as they are. Of course if we are earning sufficient money, if we are clever enough to get through life without too much conflict and are concerned only with ourselves, then we do not mind if things go on as they are. But if we are at all inquiring, serious, we must surely try to find out, must we not, how to bring about a change. Because religions obviously mean very little; they only offer an escape. You may go to a guru or a priest, repeat mantras or prayers, follow some doctrine or ritual, but they are all avenues of escape. They will not solve your problems—and they have not done so. The problems still exist, and it is no good running away from them. Whether you go to the temple or retire to the Himalayas to become a sannyasi, it is still a running away.

Throughout the world it is the same problem. Religions have failed and education also. Passing a lot of examinations and putting the alphabet after your name has not solved your problems. No system, educational, economic, political, religious, or philosophical, has solved our problems—which is obvious because we are still in conflict. There is appalling poverty, confusion, strife between man and man, group and group, race and race. Neither the communist nor any other social or economic revolution has solved this problem, or ever will. Because man is a total entity, he has to be taken as a totality—not partially, at different layers of his existence. The specialist is only concerned with a particular layer—the politician merely with governing, the economist merely with money values, the religionist with his own creed, and so on. Apparently nobody considers the human problem as a whole and tackles it, not partially, but wholly. The religious person says, “Give up the world if you really want to solve the problem,” but the world is inside oneself. The tears, the innumerable struggles and fears, they are all inside. Or the social reformer says, “Forget yourself and do good,” and you may work to forget yourself; but the problem is still there. All the various specialists offer their own remedies, but no one apparently is concerned with the total transformation of man himself. All they offer are various forms of thinking. If you leave one religion and go to another, you only change your mode of thinking. No one seems to be concerned with the quality of thought, with the quality of the mind that thinks.

The problem is enormous, as you and I know fairly well—we have only to observe as we pass down the street, as we get on the bus, as we talk to a friend or to a politician or to a religious person. We can watch this whole process of degradation going on, every form of decline and corruption, a mounting confusion; and surely we can hope to solve it only when the mind is capable of thinking of the problem in a totally different way. There must be a revolution in the mind itself, not merely a change at some partial level of human existence; and with that revolution in our thinking, with that radical transformation of the mind, we can approach the problem wholly. The problem is constantly changing, is it not? The problem is not static, but we approach it with a mind that is already conditioned, that has already taken a stand and accepted certain sanctions, edicts, values. So while the problem is a living thing, changing, vital, we approach it with a dead mind, and so the conflict increases and the confusion worsens.

So there must be a revolution in thinking, a revolution in the mind itself and not in what the mind thinks about. There is surely a vast difference between the two. We are mostly concerned with what the mind thinks about. The communist is concerned with conditioning the mind to think what it is told, and the so-called religious person is concerned with the same thing. Most of us are concerned with thinking only the thoughts which we already know and have accepted, and these thoughts further condition the mind, obviously. Every thought that you have—as an economist, as a specialist, as a believer in God or a nonbeliever, as a man who pursues virtue or does not—shapes the mind. Your thinking depends upon your conditioning, how you have been brought up, what the pressures of your environment are—religion, society, family, tradition. So if we are at all serious, we shall not be concerned with substituting one thought for another or with sublimating thought to some other level. We must be concerned...