12 Security
When you start enquiring into yourself that is the end of security, which means you are already re-orientated.
Security and enquiry are not compatible states, the one must end for the other to begin.
The enquiry itself is the first visible sign of conversion.
When you see the self you see this as well, that your life has been empty and barren.
There is nothing so empty and hollow as the self, which is why it seeks security so fervently.
To have lived without love is its own condemnation.
Self-understanding is self-mortification.
To mortify yourself independently of understanding yourself is still the movement or desire, is it not?
Understanding penetrates deeper and deeper, but as far as it has reached, to that degree you are free.
What is the self but the burden of the past bearing down on the present?
There is a heaviness about people that is proportional to their self-centredness.
Similarly there is a lightness about anyone who has brought the tyranny of self to an end.
Three more questions for investigation:
What do you actually experience?
Why do you experience things in this way?
Could you experience them differently?
Those enslaved to the body and its passions;
those enslaved to the mind and its logic;
and those who have seen the conditionality of both the mind and the body, and are no longer subject to either.
All memory is a present fiction.
Have you noticed yet how you rewrite history in the light of your present understanding?
A fiction can never be an adequate guide to the understanding of the present.
You cannot rely upon what is partial and conditioned.
Belief conditions experience, and experience conditions belief.
Either you get the experience you expect, or you interpret the experience in terms of the known, but neither leads to the truth.
People believe whatever they like.
Do you know why you like what you like?
What is it that belief gives you that you don’t have already?
The mind that is rooted in the past is restricted in the present.
A view point gives perspective, it is true, but a perspective is always limited.
The self believes itself to be autonomous only when its roots are unknown, unseen.
What you believe is the outcome of two demands: that of security, and that of logic.
The internal coherence of what you believe hides the external chaos that is the result of it.
You may believe in something bigger than the self but it is no less limited, and what is limited finds its itself in conflict with its competitors.
The breakthrough to self-understanding happens when you see that the mind is irretrievably conditioned.
Seeing the fact of the conditioned mind in itself means you have a different relationship with its contents.
Once you understand that all minds are conditioned then your relationships change also.