Life, our daily living, has become extraordinarily complex, extraordinarily dangerous, difficult, uncertain. The future of man is really at stake. This is not a threat. This is not a pessimistic point of view. The crisis is not only physical, but the crisis is in consciousness, in our being.
If one lives in words (as most people do; in symbols, in myths, in romantic nonsense), then we make life more and more difficult, more and more dangerous, for each other.
Please be good enough to listen, to find out, to question, to doubt—so that your own brain becomes aware of itself.
We have systems, we have ideals, we have all the so-called sacred books (which are not sacred at all, they’re just words). Why human beings—which is you—have not radically brought about a change, a psychological revolution?
Your consciousness is not yours. Your consciousness is the consciousness of all humanity. Because what you think—your beliefs, your sensations, your reactions, your pain, your sorrow, your insecurity, your gods, and so on—is shared by all humanity. Go to America, go to England, Europe, or Russia, China: human beings suffer. They are frightened of death. They have beliefs, they have ideals. They speak a particular language. But their thinking, their feeling, their reactions, their responses, generally is shared by all human beings. This is a fact—not merely the invention or speculation of the speaker. This is a fact. But you suffer, your neighbor suffers. That neighbor may be thousands of miles away; he suffers. He is insecure, as you are. He may have a lot of money, but inwardly there is insecurity. So is a rich man in America, or the man in power: all go through this pain, anxiety, loneliness, despair.
Your consciousness is not yours any more than your thinking. It is not individual thinking. Thinking is common, is general—from the poorest man, the most uneducated, unsophisticated man in a little, tiny village to the most sophisticated brain, the great scientists. They all think. They may think differently. Their thinking may be more complex. But thinking is general, shared by all human beings. Therefore, it is not your individual thinking. This is rather difficult to see and recognize the truth of it, because we are so conditioned as individuals. All your religious books, whether Christian or Muslim or another religious books, they all sustain and nourish this idea, concept, of an individual. You have to question that! You have to find out the truth of the matter!
Human consciousness is similar; is shared by all human beings. Therefore, there is no individual; outside, peripheral. He may be more educated, he may be taller, he may be shorter; outside the skin, as it were, he may be different, but inwardly he shares the common ground of all humanity. This is a fact if you examine it very closely. But if you are frightened, if you are caught in the conditioning of being an individual, you will never understand the immensity and the extraordinary fact that you are the entire humanity. From that there is love, compassion, intelligence. But if you are merely conditioned to the idea that you are an individual, then you have endless complications. Because it is based on illusion, not on fact.
You are the result of your environment, you are the result of the language you speak, you are the result of the food you eat, the clothes, the climate, the tradition handed down from generation to generation—you are all that. You are the product of the society—which you have created.
You are the world and the world is you. Your consciousness is not yours. It is the ground which all human beings share, all human beings think. So you are actually not an individual. That is one of the realities; truth that one must understand.
“Individual” means isolation: to separate himself from another, like nations isolate themselves—as Indians and all the rest of it. And they think in isolation there is security. There is no security in isolation! But the governments of the world, representing humanity of each country, they are maintaining this isolation, and therefore they are perpetuating war. So if you recognize the truth, the fact, that you are not an individual—you may be short, you may be tall—but inwardly there is no division. We all share the same problems. When you recognize that truth—and I hope you do—then the problem is: can you, as a human being representing all humanity, bring about a fundamental psychological revolution?
If I do change, if there is a change in a particular person, how will it affect the whole consciousness of mankind?
If you change fundamentally, you affect the whole consciousness of man. Napoleon affected the whole consciousness of Europe. Stalin affected the whole consciousness of Russia and human beings all over the world. The Christian savior, he has affected the consciousness of the world. And the Hindus with their peculiar gods have affected the consciousness of the world. So when you, as a human being, radically transform psychologically—that is, be free of fear, have right relationship with each other, the ending of sorrow, and so on, which is a radical transformation (which we shall go into presently)—then you affect the whole consciousness of man. So it is not an individual affair. It is not a selfish affair. It is not individual salvation. It is the salvation of all human beings, of which you are.
I’m sure you all have an image about the speaker. I’m quite sure of it. Why? You don’t know the speaker. You can never know the speaker—as you don’t know your husband, your wife. But you have created an image about him: that he is religious, non-religious, he is stupid, he is very clever, he is beautiful, he is this, he is that. And with that image you look at the person. The image is not the person. The image is the reputation. And reputations are easily created. The reputation may be good or bad. But the human brain, the thought, creates the image. The image is the conclusion. And we live by images and the imagination. The making of pictures has no place in love. We don’t love each other. We may hold hands, we may sleep together, we may do this and ten different things, but we have no love for each other. If you had that quality, that perfume of love, there would be no wars. There will be no Hindu and Muslim, Jew and Arab. But you listen to all this and you will still remain with your images. You’ll still wrangle with each other, quarrel with each other, dissent. You understand? Our life has become so extraordinarily meaningless.
We are put together by thought. Your gods are put together by thought. All the rituals, all the dogmas, the philosophy, are all put together by thought. And thought is not sacred. Thought is always limited.
Thought has created the image about you as the audience, about you as the wife and the husband, about you as the Indian, and you as the American, and so on. It is these images which are unreal, which are separating humanity. You should never call yourself an Indian. And I never call myself a Russian or American. But we are human beings. Then we should have no wars. We should have global government, global relationship. But you are not interested in all that.
The inward psyche conquers the outer environment.