Life is not permanent. Like the leaves that fall from a tree, all things are impermanent. Nothing endures; there is always change and death. Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky, how beautiful it is? Its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness there is a poem, a song. Every leaf has gone and it is waiting for the spring. When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with the music of many leaves, which in due season fall and are blown away. And that is the way of life. But we don’t want anything of that kind: we cling to our children, our traditions, our society, our names and our little virtues, because we want permanency – and that is why we are afraid to die. We are afraid to lose the things we know. But life is not what we would like it to be; life is not permanent at all. Birds die, snow melts away and trees are cut down or destroyed by storms. We want everything that gives us satisfaction to be permanent; we want our position and the authority we have over people to endure. We refuse to accept life as it is in fact. The fact is that life is like the river, endlessly moving on.

Truth must come to you, the mind cannot go to meet it. You think that if you practise overcoming your passions it is going to lead you to reality, and so for you the method is very important; but such a mind, which is always hoping, inviting, expecting, can never under any circumstances reach that which is beyond the mind. There is no path, no yoga, no discipline which will lead you to it. All that the mind can do is to know itself. It must know its own limitations – the motives, the feelings, the passions, the cruelties, the lack of love, and be aware of all its many activities. One must see all that and remain silent, not asking, not begging, not putting out a hand to receive something. If you stretch out your hand, you will remain empty-handed forever. But to know yourself, the unconscious as well as the conscious, is the beginning of wisdom; and knowing yourself in that sense brings freedom – which is not freedom for you to experience reality. The man who is free is not free for something, or from something; he is just free; and then if that state of reality wishes to come, it will come. But for you to go seeking it is like a blind man seeking light; you will never find it. The man who understands himself seeks nothing; his mind is limitless, undesirous, and for such a mind the immeasurable can come into being.

The greater the outward show, the greater the inward poverty; but freedom from this poverty is not the loincloth. The cause of this inward emptiness is the desire to become; and, do what you will, this emptiness can never be filled. You may escape from it in a crude way, or with refinement; but it is as near to you as your shadow. You may not want to look into this emptiness, but nevertheless it is there. The adornments and the renunciations that the self assumes can never cover this inward poverty. By its activities, inner and outer, the self tries to find enrichment, calling it experience or giving it a different name according to its convenience and gratification. The self can never be anonymous; it may take on a new robe, assume a different name, but identity is its very substance. This identifying process prevents the awareness of its own nature. The cumulative process of identification builds up the self, positively or negatively; and its activity is always self-enclosing, however wide the enclosure. Every effort of the self to be or not to be is a movement away from what it is. Apart from its name, attributes, idiosyncrasies, possessions, what is the self? Is there the “I,” the self, when its qualities are taken away? It is this fear of being nothing that drives the self into activity; but it is nothing, it is an emptiness.

What do you mean by happiness? Some say happiness consists in getting what you want. You want a car, and you get it, and you are happy. I want a sari or clothes; I want to go to Europe and if I can, I am happy. I want to be the greatest politician, and if I get it, I am happy; if I cannot get it, I am unhappy. So, what you call happiness is getting what you want, achievement or success, becoming noble, getting anything that you want. As long as you want something and you can get it, you feel perfectly happy; you are not frustrated, but if you cannot get what you want, then unhappiness begins.What is happiness and is happiness something of which you are conscious? The moment you are conscious that you are happy, that you have much, is that happiness? The moment you are conscious that you are happy, it is not happiness, is it? So you cannot go after happiness. The moment you are conscious that you are humble, you are not humble. So happiness is not a thing to be pursued; it comes. But if you seek it, it will evade you.

What is the knowledge of self?It can't be bought at the price of effort or practice.Knowledge of self comes from observing yourself in your relationship with your peers, your teachers, and everyone around you; it comes when you observe the other person's manners, your actions, your way of dressing, your speech, your contempt or flattery, and your reaction; it happens when you observe everything going on inside and around you and see as clearly as you see your face in the mirror. When you look at yourself in the ice, you see yourself as you are, don't you? You may wish to have a different head, have a different shape, with a little more hair, a less ugly face, but the facts are there, clearly reflected in the mirror, and you can't sweep them off and say, "I am handsome!"If you can look in the relationship mirror exactly like you would in an ordinary mirror, then knowledge of self is endless. It's like stepping into a vast ocean without shore. But we most want to reach an end, we want to be able to say, "I came to know myself and I'm happy." But it's far from happening this way. If you can look without condemning what you see, without comparing yourself to others, without wishing to be more beautiful or virtuous, if you can simply look at what you are and keep going, you’ll discover that you can go infinitely far. So the journey is endless and there is all the mystery, all the beauty of the thing.

Fear does terrible things. It makes you lie, it makes you kill, it makes you violent, it makes you curl up in yourself. All of us know what fear is. Is one of the causes of fear wanting to become something psychologically? That is, I am this and I must be that. ‘That’ is a projection through comparison. I compare myself with you and I want to be like you. Or I don’t want to be like you but would like to be like somebody else – to become. Comparing is to become. Can we end comparison? Of course, you have to compare two cars. If you have the money, you buy the better one. When you are comparing one house with another, it is necessary to get the best materials, the better of the houses. But we are talking about psychological comparison, seeing the consequences of comparison, which is to become. This is one of the causes of fear. And seeing the truth of it, end comparison instantly.

It is necessary to have a great deal of scepticism. It is necessary to never say, ‘Yes,’ but to say, ‘No,’ and inquire. Most of us are yes-sayers because we have been trained from childhood: the father, the mother, the priest, the government, everything around us is so conditioned and influences us so that we just accept. And therefore we don’t question. When we do question, we ask silly questions. To ask a very serious question, the right question is very important, because when you ask the right question, you will get the right answer.

What is age? Is it the number of years you have lived? That is part of age; you were born in such and such a year, and now you are fifteen, forty or sixty years old. Your body grows old—and so does your mind when it is burdened with all the experiences, miseries and weariness of life; and such a mind can never discover what is truth. The mind can discover only when it is young, fresh, innocent; but innocence is not a matter of age. It is not only the child that is innocent—he may not be— but the mind that is capable of experiencing without accumulating the residue of experience. The mind must experience, that is inevitable. It must respond to everything—to the river, to the diseased animal, to the dead body being carried away to be burnt, to the poor villagers carrying their burdens along the road, to the tortures and miseries of life— otherwise it is already dead; but it must be capable of responding without being held by the experience. It is tradition, the accumulation of experience, the ashes of memory, that make the mind old. The mind that dies every day to the memories of yesterday, to all the joys and sorrows of the past—such a mind is fresh, innocent, it has no age; and without that innocence, whether you are ten or sixty, you will not find God.

Do you see how the mind deceives itself? Can you bring the unknown, that which cannot be experienced, into the conditioned, into the realm of the known? Obviously not. So don't try it. Don't try to find God, truth, for it has no meaning. All you can do is to observe the operation of your own mind, which is the area of conflict, misery, suffering, ambition, fulfilment, frustration. That you can understand, and its narrow borders can be broken down. But you are not interested in that. You want to capture God and put him in the cage of what you know, the cage you call the temple, the book, the guru, the system, and with that you are satisfied. By doing that you think you are becoming very religious. You are not. You are just hypocrites, robbing, cheating, lying within the cage.

Most people are unhappy; and they are unhappy because there is no love in their hearts. Love will arise in your heart when you have no barrier between yourself and another, when you meet and observe people without judging them, when you just see the sailboat on the river and enjoy the beauty of it. Don't let your prejudices cloud your observation of things as they are; just observe, and you will discover that out of this simple observation, out of this awareness of trees, of birds, of people walking, working, smiling, something happens to you inside. Without this extraordinary thing happening to you, without the arising of love in your heart, life has very little meaning; and that is why it is so important that the educator should be educated to help you understand the significance of all these things.