You’re surrounded by air and water and so on, and if you were not surrounded in that way it wouldn’t last very long. Also, you’re surrounded by people who feed you and keep you alive, and also give communications, which keep your mind going. Any person, totally isolated, would never even be human, right?
And what you really want out of desire is some sort of state of perfection of consciousness. You want everything to be happy, and good, and right, and orderly, and harmonious, and everything just right, you see? That’s the ultimate aim of desire. Now, the object of desire is not really desired at all; it’s merely a means to the end—which is the state of consciousness, right? So we go through one object after another seeking this state, and it doesn’t work.
Desire creates self-deception. That is, the quickest way to satisfy desire momentarily is to engage in wishful thinking—that is, to arrange your ideas according to what you desire, you see? So I think that this self-deception I’ve observed is one of the major components of human thought. That is, most thought is self-deception. In fact, the dominant thought is almost always self-deception, however rational you may be in applying your techniques. The end is always determined by self-deceptive thought.
The source of this global force is exactly the same as the source of what happens in the individual—that is, the collective programs. That, if they aren’t changed, nothing can be done. You see, people have tried by every means imaginable—by religion, by science, by politics—to change this, and nothing has happened, right? It has gone on much the same over thousands of years. Now, somehow that is not going to change fundamentally unless you get at the root of it. Society is basically identical with the individual at this deep root. The society is nothing but the totality of individuals who are caught in it; who are, in turn, reinforcing each other.
I think that if we could get a considerable number of people who are doing this, who are able to do this, they would be able to really think together. See, ordinarily, people can’t think together. Each one has his own opinion which is based on his own conditioning. And people really pay very little attention to each other when they try to think together, right? If, say, ten or twenty or thirty people could really think together with one mind, I think they would liberate a tremendous energy which would affect the others.
In the beginning, each civilization begins with a few people of very high energy who get things started. It sort of rises up to the top and then falls because the energy gets lost. And where I would say the energy gets lost is that the civilization accumulates traditions which are accumulated in the brain cells, and gradually the brain cells fill up with programs, and people can’t do anything new, right? So the civilization dies.