Rishi Valley Students 1984

Can We Stop Thinking About Ourselves?

Q: Why do we have prejudices?

One must have a free mind, a free brain to understand something.

The brain needs tremendous security. Is thought secure? Will thinking make you secure? And is knowledge secure? Do you find security through comparison?

The brain which lives without security will be confused whatever it does. How can you be clear when you are confused and seeking security in things that don't give it? Can the brain clear itself of its confusion?

The brain has this capacity to go in one direction to an extraordinary extent, technologically. And being self-centred, selfish, that capacity has been reduced to a very small affair. Thinking about oneself is a very small affair. Because it is small the brain gets confused.

The Brain is Always Recording

Q: Are you sensitive?

If I prejudge you, I can't see you directly.

Do all the colours in this valley and the sunlit rock on that hill early in the morning all this beauty around you, does it mean something to you? Do you watch very carefully?

If you watch very carefully it never becomes routine. Are you thinking while you are watching? Do you watch with your eyes only? Or altogether? When you watch you begin to learn.

I am watching those trees and I am also watching myself. If you do that you become tremendously alive, your brain becomes extraordinary, sensitive. Are you sensitive to people, to other people's suffering? What is your relationship to what is happening in the world? What is the use of education?

It Doesn't Matter If You Die For It

Q: What is the cause of corruption?

Human beings have capacity, some kind of hidden talent. Talent is to paint, to play the violin or the flute, or to be a very good human being. So find out your own talent, not imposed by education, by your parents, by society, but find out something that you have for yourself.

Discover your own talent and stick to it, whether you become poor, rich, or successful. But your brain is conditioned by society, so your own talent is destroyed by this pressure.

What is the cause of corruption? If you are interested in yourself, in what you want, in what you must be, if you are greedy, envious, harsh, brutal, then there is corruption.

The real cause of corruption is inside you. Unless you find that out and change that you will be a corrupt human being.