10 Understanding Conflict
As soon as you say ‘I’ you create confusion.
The primary delusion is to think that the self is more important than love.
Where there is self then love is not; and where there is love then self is not.
If action never breaks free of self it never acquires meaning.
Understanding arises dependent upon interest – so the question is, are you really interested in yourself?
It seems most people lost interest in themselves years ago, and function mechanically, habitually.
If you have no real interest in yourself, you will have no real interest in any other either.
Why are people so little interested in themselves? Is it because to investigate the self is so very dangerous?
It is sometimes asked, can the mind be free? But you must see that the mind itself is the prison.
If the door could be unlocked from the inside, would it be a prison?
If it is security you want then know that nothing is so secure as a prison.
You do not control the self, it controls you.
Full of thought you become opaque; empty of thought you become transparent.
The dullness of the mind springs from the belief that it already knows, and therefore need not look again.
The mind which seeks security wants to know a thing only enough in order to control it.
The more you look after yourself, the more you have to look after yourself; but the more you let go of self the less there is to look after.
Anything you do in life can be made into a means of self-expansion, but the bigger the self, the bigger the problem, obviously.
If you have a self then you are going to have to spend your whole life looking after it.
Only a deluded mind finds the world illusory.
The world simply is what it is, how could it be an illusion?
The mind is deluded when it takes the world and itself – for something it is not.
The self is an illusion put together by thought.
Only when you understand that the illusion is self-created can you be free of it.
When you stop creating the self, then where will it find a footing?
As long as you have an image you are trying to project there will be duality and conflict.
If you are creating an image, it is because you want to seem what you are not, isn’t it?
To build up, project, and maintain an image, which is simply a falsehood – what a waste of energy!
The truth doesn’t have to be created, it is evident once the false comes to an end.
Understanding that you don’t understand is the beginning of wisdom.
To understand the mind you must be silent, but will you be silent unless you first understand?
Thought is always seeking its own advantage.
Thought shelters you from the reality of who you are, by creating the illusion of who you think you are.
The mind is a chameleon, changing its colour according to need.
Conformity is a strategy for survival.
The mind is as unstable as the circumstances of its surroundings.
The function of the self is buying and selling.
What is the centre of calculation cannot be the centre of compassion also.
Have you not seen this continual calculation going on? – and if you have, are you not disgusted?
Three questions you should ask yourself upon seeing the arising of conflict: