Living

We consider living to be a positive action. Doing, thinking, the everlasting bustle, conflict, fear, sorrow, guilt, ambition, competition, lusting after pleasure with all its pain, the desire to be successful-all this is what we call LIVING. That is our life with an occasional joy, with its moments of compassion without any motive, and generosity without any strings attached to it. There are rare moments of ecstasy, of a bliss that has no past nor future. But going to office, anger, hatred, contempt, enmity, are what we call everyday living, and we consider it extraordinarily positive.

The negation of positive in the only true positive. To negate this so-called living, which is ugly, lonely, fearful, brutal and violent, without knowledge of the other, is the most positive action. Are we communicating with each other? You know, to deny conventional morality completely is to be highly moral, because what we call social morality, the morality of respectability, is utterly immoral; we are competitive, greedy, envious, seeking our own way- you know how to behave. We call this social morality; religious people talk about different kinds of morality, but their life, their whole attitude, the hierarchical structure of religious organisation and belief, is immoral. To deny that is not to react, because when you react, this is another form of dissenting through one’s own resistance. But when you deny because you understand it, there is the highest form of reality.

In the same way, to negate social morality, to negate the way we are living- our petty lives, our shallow thinking and existence, the satisfaction at a superficial level with our accumulated things- to deny all that, not as a reaction but seeing the utter stupidity and the destructive nature of this way of living- to negate all that is to live. To see the false as the false- this seeing is the true.