Mind : ( 24/10/2012. )

Generally, an example of a tortoise is given to tell us how we have to conduct ourselves under pressing conditions of life. The tortoise thrusts its head outside and moves forward in any direction it likes, but whenever there is a sensation of danger or even a slight movement of anything outside, it has a background of its own. It withdraws itself into its shell, and it seems to be safe there. The shell cannot be pierced or attacked. Whenever there is fear of any kind, the child runs back to its mother and sits on her lap. It is safe there because the ultimate protecting factor is taken as the refuge, which is the solution for all anxieties, for all fear, and for all unhappiness. Have we in our life any such background of thought? If we are tormented because we cannot understand the processes of life outside, what are we supposed to do? Where are we to withdraw ourselves? We have not found such a centre of our life. We have lost our centre; we have been thrown out of the m...

Then what is our fate? We know what has happened to us. As I said, we try to make the best out of the circumstances. There is an old proverb: If you go to a land where people eat snakes, you try to eat the centre of the snake. It means to say, you become better, even there. Don’t eat the tail of it. This is what we call somehow or other dragging through life, and it cannot be called living life. Inwardly we are in turmoil. Outwardly we seem to be trying to adjust ourselves to this turmoil, so we are perpetually in a mood of adjustment to conditions or circumstances that are not under our control. Thus, from birth to death it is a life of suffering and subjection to an unpredictable future. But a yearning of the soul, a longing that is trying to speak in a language other than linguistic, tells us that we have a sort of future which cannot and need not be a total violation of freedom, or a negation of the fulfilment of the longing. This hope is an insignia that has been implan...

We cannot say what tomorrow’s political condition will be. We cannot say what the attitude of our friend in regard to us will be tomorrow. We cannot say what would be the state of our health tomorrow. These are all smaller things than death, almost virtually equal to a destruction of our personal independence and freedom. Inasmuch as we are subconsciously in a state of insecurity, we are entirely unhappy in our personality. It is a disturbance that has taken place from within ourselves on account of an unconscious feeling of insecurity, unpredictability, and an unconscious yielding to whatever might happen. A word that is uttered, a behaviour that is confronted, a remark that is made, a little change in the weather – a small thing, a little occurrence or event can completely put us out of gear. Such is the independence that we enjoy in our life. But the world is the world. The world cannot be anything other than what the world is. King Canute tried to stop the ocean waves. H...

If we cannot be free, we regard our bondage itself as a kind of freedom. Submission is freedom. We go on submitting ourselves to any kind of thing that takes place, anything that is told and anything that happens, and that submission itself gives us a kind of vicarious satisfaction. This stupidity in which the human mind is involved, and out of which it tries to extract a little happiness, is what traditionally goes by the name of samsara, or earthly entanglement. We are somehow able to get on in life, though we are miserable. Notwithstanding the fact that we have not a ray of hope of achieving ultimate freedom in our life, we try to find some profit in this subjection to circumstance. All this is because we have no background in our lives. We are drifting like a straw in a violent wind. A dry leaf that is tossed hither and thither by the gale of wind outside has nothing to say about itself. Wherever we are tossed, we move in that direction. Because we are in this condition, we...

Whatever is dependent is a source of misery. Whatever be the extent of understanding of this situation of ours, it is not enough to solve the problem in which we have been involved.  Our dependence is manifold. So complicated is this dependence that we have not found any time to bestow a thought upon it. People who have been born as slaves regard that slavish life itself as a kind of freedom.  They have never enjoyed freedom in their life, never had good health, never heard a good word from people. That has become a normalcy for their life. Some sort of situation of this character seems to be supervening in our personal lives – one and all, without distinction – so that we have mistaken this life of bondage for a life of freedom.  Inasmuch as we have been born into bondage, we have never seen freedom, and do not know what it is. We mistake bondage itself for a sort of freedom and so we try to make the best of it, try to grab a jot of satisfaction or pl...