Is this vast problem of the world your problem and my problem, or is it independent of us? Is war independent of you? Is the national strife independent of you, the communal strife independent of you? The corruption, the degradation, the moral disintegration, are they independent of each one of us? This disintegration is directly related to us, and therefore the responsibility rests with each one of us. Surely, that is the main problem. To put it differently, is the problem to be left to the few leaders, either of the left or the right, to the party, a discipline, an ideology, to the United Nations, the expert, the specialist? Or is it a problem that directly involves us? This means, are we directly responsible for these problems, or are we not?
Many of you may not have thought about this; therefore it may be quite strange to you. But the question is whether the individual problem is the world problem and whether you can do anything about it.
There is the religious collapse, the moral collapse, the political corruption, the so-called independence that has produced nothing but decay. Is it your problem, or do you leave it all to chance or wait for some miracle to happen so that it will produce a revolution? Or do you leave it to an authority, to a political party?
What is your response? Don’t you have to solve it, don’t you have to attack it, don’t you have to respond vitally to a challenge of this kind? I am not being rhetorical but merely factual. This is no place for rhetoric; that would be absurd. There is a challenge given to us all the time.
Life is a challenge, and do we respond? According to what conditioning do we respond? And when we do respond, is that response capable of meeting the challenge?
So, to meet this world catastrophe, world crisis, and enormous, unprecedented challenge, have we not to discover how we respond individually? Because, after all, a society is a relationship between you and me and another. No society is not founded on relationship. What you and I and another are, the society is. And have we not to understand that relationship between you and me and another to transform society and bring about a revolution—a complete, radical transformation? Because that is what is needed—a revolution, not of the bloody kind, not based on ideas, but a revolution of fundamental value. Not according to any pattern or ideology but a revolution born out of the understanding of the relationship between you and me and another, which is society.
So to bring about a fundamental, radical transformation in society, is it not our responsibility, our individual responsibility, to discover our direct response to this challenge? Do we respond as a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, capitalist, socialist? Is such a response a valid response, a response that will bring about a fundamental change?
If you respond to this world crisis, which is a new challenge, as a Hindu, surely you do not understand the challenge. You are merely responding to the challenge, which is new, according to an old pattern, and therefore your response has no corresponding validity or freshness. If you respond as a Catholic or a Protestant, again you are responding according to patterned thought and so your response has no significance. And has not the Hindu, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the Christian, created this problem? As the new religion is the worship of the state, the old religion was the worship of an idea.
So if you respond to a challenge according to old conditioning, your response will not enable you to understand the new challenge. Therefore, what one has to do to meet the challenge is to strip oneself completely, denude oneself entirely of the background and meet the challenge anew. Surely, a state, a country, a civilization and a people endures, lasts, only survives when it can meet a challenge anew; otherwise it succumbs and is destroyed. And that is exactly what is happening. Technologically we are tremendously advanced, but morally, spiritually, we are very far behind. With this lack of moral stamina, we meet this extraordinary technological progress, and therefore there is always friction and contradiction.
So our problem is that there is this new challenge, and all leaders have failed—spiritual, moral, political. Leaders will always fail because we choose leaders out of our confusion, so any leader will inevitably lead us to more confusion. See the importance of it; don’t brush it aside as a clever statement. See the danger of a leader, not only politically but religiously. Because I am confused, I do not know what to do or how to act, and I come to you. Because I am confused, I choose you. If I am clear, I will not choose you; I do not want a leader. I am a light unto myself, and I can think out my problems for myself. It is when I am confused that I go to another. I may call them a guru, a mahatma, a political leader, and so on, but I go to them because of my confusion. I only see through the darkness of my own confusion.
One who earnestly wishes to investigate the whole catastrophic problem of sorrow must begin with themselves. It is only through the creative understanding of oneself that there can be a creative world, a happy world, a world in which ideas do not exist.