Allan W Anderson Talks

What is Communication with Others?

What does it mean to be serious?

In the word communication is implied the art of listening.

The art of listening demands a quality of attention in which there is a real sense of having an insight as we go along each second.

Communication implies that we must be at the same level at the same time, with the same intensity walking together on the same road thinking together in the same tongue observing together, sharing together otherwise there is no communication.

Responsibility means total commitment.

The world is in a mess and it's my responsibility living in this world as a human being who has created this mess to be serious about its resolution.

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What is a Responsible Human Being?

What is responsibility in human relationship?

What is your responsibility for human growth, human culture, human goodness?

What is your responsibility to the earth?

When you feel responsible for a child there is a flowering of real affection and care and you don't train him or condition him to kill another for the sake of your country.

Human beings are now conditioned to be irresponsible. What are the serious people going to do with the irresponsible people?

If you show me how irresponsible I am, what responsibility means you care for me.

When there is total responsibility in which freedom and care go together the mind has no image in relationship at all.

Order Comes from the Understanding of Our Disorder

What is order in freedom?

Unless we understand the nature and structure of disorder we can never find out what is order.

How has the whole phenomenon of disorder come about? And what is order then?

Is order something imposed, a discipline which is conformity, suppression, imitation?

Is order acceptance, obedience?

Unless we understand the movement of thought we cannot understand disorder.

A mind that is caught in measurement can never find truth.

Is it possible to look without measurement?

Is it possible to live a life the whole of life living, acting, laughing, crying without a shadow of comparison?

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The Nature and Total Eradication of Fear

Can the mind be free of fear?

Physical fears and psychological fears are interrelated. There are conscious as well as unconscious fears.

Fears that the mind itself has produced, has cultivated.

The racial fears, the fears that society has taught me the fears that the family, the neighbour, has imposed all those crawling, ugly, brutal things that are hidden how can they all come up naturally and be exposed so that the mind sees them completely?

What is the answer to this fact of fear which has been carried on from generation to generation?

Is there a way of dealing with fear not with the branches of it, but with the root of it?

Behind the words, the descriptions, the explanations, what is fear?

Understanding, Not Controlling Desire

What is pleasure? What is desire?

We are not condemning pleasure, but observing it.

To really go into the question of pleasure one has to look into desire. Through propaganda desire is inflamed.

What is desire? How does it come about that this very strong desire is born, is cultivated?

How does it take place in each one of us?

Must desire be controlled at all?

Desire seems to be a very active and demanding instinct that is going on in us all the time.

Why has pleasure, whether of sex, possession, power knowledge, or enlightenment become so extraordinarily important in life?

Pleasure is an extraordinary thing.

To see a beautiful thing and to enjoy it what is wrong with that?

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Does Pleasure Bring Happiness?

What relationship has pleasure to enjoyment, joy, and is pleasure happiness?

Is there any relationship between pleasure and enjoyment?

What is pleasure and what is it that keeps it going? What is the pursuit, the constant direction of it?

A single tree standing on the hill. You see that it is really beautiful the flowers, the deer, the meadows the water and the single tree, and its shadow. You see that and it is almost breathtaking.

Does thought then come along and say how extraordinary it was, what a delight it was?

Isn't there then desire for repetition?

So thought gives nourishment, sustains it and gives a direction to pleasure.

Why should thought come into it at all?

Sorrow, Passion and Beauty

What is beauty?

We are becoming more and more artificial superficial and verbal.

Has man lost touch with nature?

Has he lost the delicacy, the sensitivity of the mind, heart and body?

How can we know what beauty is?

What is beauty? Must it be expressed?

Does it need the word, the stone, the colour, the paint? Or is it something that cannot be put into words into a building, into a statue?

Without passion you can't have beauty.

Passion comes when there is suffering.

Remaining with that suffering, not escaping from it brings passion.

Passion means the complete abandonment of the "me", the self, the ego and therefore the austerity of great beauty.

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The Art of Listening

What is seeing, what is listening, what is.

Do we see actually or through a screen darkly through a screen of prejudice a screen of our experiences, wishes, pleasures, fears between us and the object of perception?

Do we ever see the thing at all?

Does the act of listening bring about complete freedom from all statements? Is the mind completely attentive?

Then the mind is extraordinarily free to act.

Then the seeing is doing.

I learn in order to gain reward or avoid punishment.

I learn a particular job or craft to earn a livelihood.

Is learning a process of accumulation?

Is there any other kind of learning that is not accumulating and acting from that?

Have we learned anything from sorrow?

What is there to learn?

Being Hurt and Hurting Others

What is a religious life?

The word "religion" means gathering together all energy at all levels so that it will bring about great attention.

Can the mind be so totally attentive that the unnameable comes into being?

What is the quality, structure, nature of a mind and therefore of a heart and brain that can perceive something beyond the measurement of thought something that is not only sacred and holy in itself but that is capable of seeing something immense?

In discussing religion we ought to enquire into the nature of hurt because a mind that is not hurt is an innocent mind.

Can our hurts be healed so that not a mark is left and can future hurts be prevented, without any resistance?

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Love, Sex and Pleasure

What is love?

Is love pleasure or the expression of desire?

Is love the fulfilment of sexual appetite?

Is love the pursuit of a desired end?

Is love a thing that can be cultivated?

Love has been identified with sex which means, basically, with pleasure.

Why have we made sex such an enormous fantastic, romantic, sentimental affair?

What is the relationship of joy, enjoyment and pleasure to love?

To come upon this thing called love you must understand the place of pleasure.

A mind that has been trained, sustained in this rotten social conditioning must first free itself before it can talk about love.

Religion, Authority and Education - Part 1

What is religion?

In the West and the East in the world of Islam, Buddhism or Christianity the same principle goes on worshipping an image which has been created.

It is the human being that has created the image.

Can the mind observe this phenomenon and see its own demand for security, permanency and deny all that?

Why does the mind divide life accepting authority in one way and denying it in another?

We accept the tyranny of a petty little guru with fanciful ideas and reject a political tyranny or a dictatorship.

What is the importance of authority?

What is behind this acceptance of authority?

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Religion, Authority and Education - Part 2

How am I to enquire into religion?

What is religion? What is God, what is immortality, what is beauty?

Can the mind put aside totally all the structure of thought with regard to religion?

Can the mind be free of the authority of another however divine or not divine?

Can the mind put away everything that man has taught or invented, imagined about religion, God?

Can wisdom be sought through a book, a teacher from another, through sacrifice, torture, renunciation?

Can the mind be free of all the things that are born of fear, desire, and pleasure?

Your thoughts, speech and behaviour are the very essence of religion. If they are not, religion can't exist.