There is envy, envy being measured comparison, and one is conditioned to accept it. Someone is bright, intelligent, successful, and the other is not. Ever since childhood one has been brought up to measure and compare. So envy is born, but one observes that envy ‘objectively’ as something outside of oneself, whereas the observer himself is that envy. There is no actual division between the observer and the observed.
So the observer realises that he cannot possibly do anything about that envy. He sees very clearly that whatever he does with regard to envy is still envy, because he is both the cause and the effect. Therefore, the ‘what is,’ which is our daily life with all its problems of envy, jealousy, fear, loneliness, and despair, is not different from the observer who says, ‘I am those things.’ The observer is envious, is jealous, is fearful, is lonely and full of despair. So the observer cannot do anything about ‘what is,’ which does not mean he accepts it, lives with it, or is content with it. This conflict comes about through the division between the observer and the observed, but when there is no longer any resistance lo ‘what is,’ then a complete transformation takes place, and that transformation is meditation. So finding out for yourself the whole structure and nature of the observer, which is yourself, and also of the observed, which is again yourself, and realising the totality, the unity of it is meditation, in which there is no conflict whatsoever-and therefore a complete dissolution and the going beyond of ‘what is.’
Then what is the function of thinking or thought, You must have knowledge – scientific knowledge, knowledge that is the accumulated experience of man, the experience of using words, how to play a piano, and so on. You must have complete knowledge, you cannot do without technical knowledge.
And you also see what knowledge has done. You have accumulated knowledge as an experience of the thing that happened yesterday. You want that experience repeated, and it may not happen; therefore, there is pain. So knowledge is necessary in one direction, and knowledge breeds fear and pain in the other.
When you had that experience of sunset yesterday, it was new, fresh, full of joy, something incredible. The light, the texture, the feel of it that has been recorded, that has become knowledge, and therefore, that is already old. The old says, ‘I must have new experience,’ and the new experience is translated in terms of pleasure.
So you see what thought does, that thought must function logically, sanely, effectively, objectively in the technological world, and you also see the danger of thought. The question arises: what is the entity that holds the thought, the thought as pleasure, as pain? What is it that holds this memory as a centre from which it operates? Have you observed that there is in you an observer and the thing observed? The observer is the censor, is the accumulated knowledge as a Christian, a Hindu, a communist, and so on. The observer is the centre, he is the ego, the ‘me.’ That ‘me,’ that ego, invents a superego, or atman, but it is still part of thought. So there is a duality in you as the observer and the observed, the ‘me’ and the ‘you, we, the Hindus, and them, the Muslims, This division is the cause of all conflict.
The observer is the holder of all memory from which all thought arises, so thought is never new. It is never free. It can only think of or invent freedom.
How does one observe without the observer, the observer being the past, the observer being the image? You have built up an image about your wife or husband through time – forty or ten years or one month or one day-that image has been built up, The image-maker is the observer, and we are asking whether you can observe your wife, the tree, or husband, without the image, without the observer. To find that out, you must find out the machinery of image-building. What is it that creates images? If you understand that, you will never create an image and you can observe without the observer.
We are asking whether the image-maker, the machinery of this image-making, can ever come to an end. I will show you how it comes to an end. First of all, you have to inquire what is awareness, what it is to be aware, aware of the trees, of your neighbour, of the shape of the hall, aware of the colour of the various saris, shirts, aware outwardly and aware inwardly, to be aware choicelessly.
You insult me, and at that moment of insult, if there is total awareness, there is no recording, I do not want to hit you back, I do not want to call you a name, I am passively aware of the insult or the flattery, and therefore, there is no image-making. Next time somebody insults you or flatters you, be totally aware.
Then you will see that the old structure of the brain becomes quiet, doesn’t instantly operate. The recording does not record, because you are totally aware. Please see this when you go out next time, look at a tree, just observe it, see the beauty of it, the branches of it, the strength of the trunk, the curve of the branch, the delicate leaves, the shape of it, without the image, the image being the previous knowledge of your having seen that tree. So you look at it without the observer, look at your wife or your husband, as though you are seeing her for the first time-that is, without the image. This seeing is true relationship, not the relationship between image and image. Therefore, a mind that is capable of observing so dearly is capable of observing what truth is.
Look at the sky, look at that tree, look at the beauty of the light, look at the clouds with their curves, with their delicacy. If you look at them without any image, you have understood your own life. But you are looking at yourself, at your life, as an observer and your life as something to be observed, there is a division between the observer and the observed. This division is the essence of all conflict, the essence of all the struggle, pain, fear, despair. Where there is a division between human beings, division of nationalities, division of religion, social division, wherever there is a division, there must be conflict. There is Pakistan on one side and India on the other battling with each other. You are a Brahmin and another is a non-Brahmin, and there is hate, division. Now that externalised division with all its conflict is the same as the inward division, as the observer and the observed.
A mind that is in conflict cannot possibly ever understand what truth is. A mind in conflict is a tortured mind, a twisted mind. How can it be free to observe the beauty of the earth or a child or a beautiful woman or man or the beauty of extreme sensitivity and all that is involved in it?
Now we are going to find out for ourselves-not from the speaker – whether it is possible to end this division between the observer and the observed. Are you following all this? Please, this is important if you are really to move any further. You are going to go into the question of what love is, what death is, what the beauty of truth is, what meditation is, and a mind that is completely and totally still. And to understand all this, one must begin with the ending of conflict, and this conflict exists wherever there is the observer and the observed.
The next question is, what is this observer, the observer who has separated himself from the observed? We see that when we are angry, at the moment of anger, there is no observer. At the moment of experiencing anything, there is no observer. When you look at a sunset, that sunset is something immense; when you look at it, there is no observer saying, ‘I am seeing the sunset.’ A second later comes the observer. Supposing you are angry, at the moment of anger there is no observer, no experiencer, there is only a state of anger. A second later comes the observer who says, ‘I should not have been angry; or ‘I was justified in getting angry.’ This is the beginning of division.
How does this happen? Why, at the moment of experience, is there a total absence of the observer, and how does it happen that a second later the observer comes into being? When you look at this flower, at the moment you observe it closely, there is no observer, there is only a looking. Then you begin to name the flower. Then you say, ‘I wish I had it in my garden or in my house.’ Then you have already begun to build an image about that flower. The image and the image-maker are the observer, and the observer is the past, the ‘me’’ as the observer is the past, the ‘me’ is the knowledge which I have accumulated, the knowledge of pain, sorrow, agony, suffering, despair, loneliness, jealousy. The observer looks at that flower with the eyes of the past. You do not know how to look without the observer, and therefore, you bring about conflict.
Now our question is, can you look not only at the flower but at your life, at your agony, at your despair, at your sorrow, without naming it, without saying to yourself, ‘I must go beyond it, I must suppress it’? Can you look at it without the observer? Take your particular form or particular tendency, or take what most people are – envious. You know what envy is. You are very familiar with that. Envy is comparison, the measurement of thought, a comparing of what you are with what you should be or what you would like to become. When you are envious of your neighbour – he has got a bigger car, a better house, and all the rest of it-you certainly feel envy, that is, you compare yourself with him and envy him more. Now can you look at that feeling without saying it is right or wrong, without naming it? Can you look at it without an image, Then you go beyond it. Instead of struggling with envy and trying to suppress it, observe your anger, your envy, without naming it.
The naming is the movement of the past memory while it justifies or condemns. If you can look at it without naming, then you will see that you go beyond it. The moment you know the possibility of going beyond ‘what is,’ you are full of energy. The man who does not know how to go beyond ‘what is,’ because he does not know how to deal with it, is afraid, he wants to escape. Such a person loses energy. If you have a problem and you can solve it, then you have energy. A man who has a thousand problems and does not know what to do with them loses his energy. So in the same way, look at your life, in which there is what you call love.