excerpts

As you are listening to me now, for example, you already have certain ideas, prejudices, conclusions, which means that you are reacting according to the background in which you have been brought up;

you are not listening to what is being said, but to these conclusions and interpretations, so actually there is no communication between us.

To communicate fully and significantly, you and I must obviously be free from any kind of conclusion, opinion, or dogmatic belief.

The mind must be free to listen, and that is one of our greatest difficulties, is it not? If I want to understand something, my mind must put aside all its prejudices, conclusions, dogmas and beliefs which is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.

Yet that is obviously the first essential in all search: to set the mind free from the conclusions or assumptions it has acquired. There is no search if I start with a conclusion, with any form of judgment or evaluation, because my thinking is then merely a movement from one conclusion to another, which is no thinking at all. Is that not so?

Can the mind be wholly free of the qualities which it calls greed, envy, violence? If it can, then the moment it is free, one's relationship to society has undergone a fundamental change, because one is no longer dependent psychologically on the evaluations imposed by society.

That is, sirs, to be totally free of envy or jealously is to be free from the whole complex problem of the 'more', more knowledge, more power, more capacity.

The process of imitation, the desire for fame, for success, implies comparison: I am small and you are great, you know and I do not. The mind is caught in this extraordinary process of acquisition, this comparative pursuit of success, in which is involved ambition, with all the frustrations and fears that go with it.