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"Do you mean to say that our leaders and teachers have been
wrong in advocating and maintaining the ideal?"
What do you think?
"If I understand correctly what you say..."
Please, it is not a matter of understanding what another may say,
but of finding out what is true. Truth is not opinion; truth is not
dependent on any leader or teacher. The weighing of opinions only
prevents the perception of truth. Either the ideal is a homemade
fiction which contains its own opposite, or it is not. There are no
two ways about it. This does not depend on any teacher, you must
perceive the truth of it for yourself. "If the ideal is fictitious, it
revolutionizes all my thinking. Do you mean to say that our pursuit
of the ideal is utterly futile?,"
It is a vain struggle, a gratifying self-deception is it not?
"This is very disturbing, but I am forced to admit that it is. We
have taken so many things for granted that we have never allowed
ourselves to observe closely what is in our hand. We have deceived
ourselves, and what you point out upsets completely the structure
of my thought and action. It will revolutionize education, our
whole way of living and working. I think I see the implications of a
mind that is free from the ideal, from the what should be. To such a
mind, action has a significance quite different from that which we
give it now. Compensatory action is not action at all, but only a
reaction - and we boast of action!...But without the ideal, how is
one to deal with the actual, or with the what has been?"
The understanding of the actual is possible only when the ideal,
the what should be, is erased from the mind; that is only when the
false is seen as the false. The what should be is also the what
should not be. As long as the mind approaches the actual with
either positive or negative compensation, there can be no
understanding of the actual. To understand the actual you must be
indirect communion with it; your relationship with it cannot be
through the screen of the ideal, or through the screen of the past, of
tradition, of experience. To be free from the wrong approach is the
only problem. This means, really, the understanding of
conditioning, which is the mind. The problem is the mind itself,
and not the problems it breeds; the resolution of the problems bred
by the mind is merely the reconciliation of effects, and that only
leads to further confusion and illusion.
"How is one to understand the mind?"
The way of the mind is the way of life - not the ideal life, but
the actual life of sorrow and pleasure, of deception and clarity, of
conceit and the pose of humility. To understand the mind is to be
aware of desire and fear.
"Please, this is getting a bit too much for me. How am I to
understand my mind?" To know the mind, must you not be aware
of its activities? The mind is only experience, not just the
immediate but also the accumulated. The mind is the past in
response to the present, which makes for the future. The total
process of the mind has to be understood.
"Where am I to begin?"
From the only beginning: relationship. Relationship is life; to be
is to be related. Only in the mirror of relationship is the mind to be
understood, and you have to begin to see yourself in that mirror.
"Do you mean in my relationship with my wife with my
neighbour, and so on? Is that not a very limited process?"