excerpts

Can the mind free itself from the accumulation of experience? When it is free, is there such a thing as an experiencer?

What is it that experiences? Surely, it is the accumulation of previous experiences and memories. The mind responds to any challenge through its previously accumulated knowledge.

To know ourselves we must inquire much more profoundly, we must understand the whole process of our consciousness, the totality of it - not merely the superficial consciousness of daily activities, but the deep unconscious, which contains the whole residue of racial conditioning, the racial memories, the hidden motives, urges, compulsions, fixations.

To have this self-knowledge, the mind must be aware of itself from moment to moment; it must see all its own movements, its urges, its motives, the operations of memory, and how, through tradition, it is caught in mediocrity.

If the mind can be aware of all that within itself, then you will find there is a possibility of being free from all conditioning and discovering something totally new.

Then the mind itself is made new - and perhaps that is the real, the immeasurable.

Most of us are psychologically dependent, not only on people, but on property, on beliefs, on dogmas. Are we at all conscious of that fact? If we know that we do depend on something for our psychological happiness, for our inward stability, security, then we can ask ourselves why.

Why do we psychologically depend on something? Obviously, because in ourselves we are insufficient, poor, empty, in ourselves we are extraordinarily lonely; and it is this loneliness, this emptiness, this extreme inward poverty and self-enclosure that makes us depend on a person, on knowledge, on property, on opinion, and on so many other things which seem necessary to us.

Can the mind be fully aware of the fact that it is lonely, insufficient, empty? It is very difficult to be aware, to be fully cognizant of that fact, because we are always trying to escape from it; and we do temporarily escape from it through listening to the radio, and other forms of amusement, through going to church, performing rituals, acquiring knowledge, and through dependence on people and on ideas.

To know your own emptiness, you must look at it; but you cannot look at it if your mind is all the time seeking a distraction from the fact that it is empty. And that distraction takes the form of attachment to a person, to the idea of God, to a particular dogma or belief, and so on.

So, can the mind stop running away, escaping, and not merely ask how to stop running away? Because the very inquiry into how the mind is to stop escaping, becomes another escape.

It is in the very process of running away from what is that fear arises.

So, when the mind understands the futility, the utter uselessness of trying to fill its own emptiness through dependence, through knowledge, through belief, then it is capable of looking at it without fear. And can the mind continue to look at that emptiness without any evaluation?

When the mind is fully aware that it escapes, runs away from itself; when it realizes the futility of running away, and sees that the very process of running away creates fear - when it realizes the truth of that, then it can face what is.

Now, what do we mean when we say that we are facing what is? Are we facing it, looking at it, if we are always giving a value to it, interesting it, if we have opinions about it? Surely, opinions, values, interpretations, merely prevent the mind from looking at the fact. If you want to understand the fact, it is no good having an opinion about it.

So, can we look, without any evaluation, at the fact of our psychological emptiness, our loneliness, which breeds so many other problems?

I think that is where the difficulty lies - in our incapacity to look at ourselves without judgment, without condemnation, without comparison; because we have all been trained to compare, to judge, to evaluate, to give an opinion.

But to find that out for oneself, and not merely repeat it verbally, one must understand the process of escape. In the very understanding of escape there is the stopping of escape, and the mind is able to look at itself. In looking at itself there must be no evaluation, no judgment.

What do we mean by ordinary awareness? I see you; and in watching you, looking at you, I form opinions. You have hurt me, you have deceived me, you have been cruel to me, or you have said nice things and flattered me; and consciously or unconsciously all this remains in my mind.

When I watch this process, when I observe it, that is just the beginning of awareness, is it not? I can also be aware of my motives, of my habits of thought. The mind can be aware of its limitations, of its own conditioning; and there is the inquiry as to whether the mind can ever be free from its own conditioning. Surely this is all part of awareness.

To say that the mind can or cannot be free from its conditioning, is still part of its conditioning; but to observe that conditioning without saying either, is a furthering of awareness awareness of the whole process of thinking.

So through awareness I begin to see myself as I actually am, the totality of myself. Being watchful from moment to moment of all its thoughts, its feelings, its reactions, unconscious as well as conscious, the mind is constantly discovering the significance of its own activities - which is self-knowledge.

Whereas, if my understanding is merely accumulative, then that accumulation becomes a conditioning which prevents further understanding. So, can the mind observe itself without accumulation?

All this is still only part of awareness, is it not? A tree is not merely the leaf, or the flower, or the fruit; it is also the branch, the trunk - it is everything that goes to make up the whole tree. Likewise, awareness is of the total process of the mind, not just of one particular segment of that process.

But the mind cannot understand the total process of itself if it condemns or justifies any part, or identifies itself with the pleasurable and rejects the painful.

So long as the mind is merely accumulating experience, knowledge - which is what it is doing all the time - , it is incapable of going further. That is why, to discover something new, there must be a dying to every experience; and for this there must be awareness from moment to moment.

Being fully conscious of one's whole process of thinking, and being able to go beyond that process, is awareness. You may say it is very difficult to be so constantly aware. Of course it is very difficult - it is almost impossible. You cannot keep a mechanism working at full speed all the time, it would break up; it must slow down, have rest.

Similarly, we cannot maintain total awareness all the time. To be aware from moment to moment is enough. If one is totally aware for a minute or two, and then relaxes, and in that relaxation spontaneously observes the operations of one's own mind, one will discover much more in that spontaneity than in the effort to watch continuously.

You can observe yourself effortlessly, easily, when you are walking, talking, reading - at every moment. Only then will you find out that the mind is capable of freeing itself from all the things it has known and experienced; and it is in freedom alone that it can discover what is true.

To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself. It demands only that you observe it - observe yourself in the mirror of relationship. But you cannot observe if you are merely concerned with absorbing and accumulating.

Only when the mind is not self-concerned is there a possibility of bliss.