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This is a dossier on my visit to Fort Jesus in mombasa. Fort Jesus was built by the Portuguese in 1593. Throughout its tumultuous history, the Fort changed hands no less than nine times between the Portuguese and the Omani Arabs, and was used by the arabs as a slave trading centre where slaves were ...
This is a dossier on my visit to Fort Jesus in mombasa.
Fort Jesus was built by the Portuguese in 1593. Throughout its tumultuous history, the Fort changed hands no less than nine times between the Portuguese and the Omani Arabs, and was used by the arabs as a slave trading centre where slaves were imprisoned in a small cave before being exported to various countries. The fort was later used as a prison during the early colonial period until 1958, and is now a museum run by the National Museums of Kenya.
'We have invented God. The thinking created god for itself. That means due to unhappiness, fear and depression we created something called god. God did not create us after his imagination, I wish He had.'
Unknown source
'Out of confusion, you invent something permanent - the Absolute, the Brahman or God.'
Unknown source
'I wonder how many of you realize that we are put together by thought. Your gods are put together by thought.'
Unknown source
'God is invented by man. I am sure that you won’t like this. But you are attached to that concept: God exists.'
Unknown source
'We have now got tribal Gods at every corner because the world has become uncertain, dangerous, and we want to belong to some group, some sect, some local god.'
Unknown source
'There is nothing sacred in the temple, in the mosque, in the churches. They are all the inventions of thought.'
Unknown source
'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.'
Think on These Things
'The men who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima said that God was with them; those who flew from England to destroy Germany said that God was their co-pilot. The dictators, the prime ministers, the generals, the presidents, all talk of God, they have immense faith in God. Are they doing service, making a better life for man? The people who say they believe in God have destroyed half the world and the world is in complete misery.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.205
'You all believe in different ways, but your belief has no reality whatsoever. Reality is what you are, what you do, what you think, and your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.206
'
God is an idea depending on the climate, the enviroment, and the tradition in which you have been brought up.'
On God
'All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.'
Freedom from the Known, p.21
'Most of us want someone to tell us what to do. We look for a direction in conduct, because our instinct is to be safe, not to suffer more. Someone is said to have realized happiness, bliss or what you will and we hope that he will tell us what to do to arrive there. That is what we want: we want that same happiness, that same inward quietness, joy; and in this mad world of confusion we want someone to tell us what to do.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.157
'You are responsible for such external authorities as religion, politics, morality, for such authorities as economic and social standards. Out of your emptiness, out of your incompleteness, you have created these external standards from which you now try to free yourself.
By evolving, by developing, by growing away from them you want to create an inner law for yourself.
As you come to understand external standards, you want to liberate yourself from them and to develop your own inner standard. This inner standard, which you call 'spiritual reality,' you identify with a cosmic law, which means that you create but another division, another duality.
So you first create an external law, and then you seek to outgrow it by developing an inner law... To me, the man who is bound either by an external or an inner law is confined in a prison; he is held by an illusion.'
First Talk at Alpino, 1933
'One of the results of fear is the acceptance of authority in human affairs. Authority is created by our desire to be right, to be secure, to be comfortable, to have no conscious conflicts or disturbances; but nothing which results from fear can help us understand our problems, even though fear may take the form of respect and submission to the so-called wise. The wise wield no authority, and those in authority are not wise. Fear in whatever form prevents the understanding of ourselves and of our relationship to all things.'
Education and the Significance of Life, p.58
'...when mind is caught up in authority,it cannot have true understanding...'
'Is it possible to live in this world without a belief - not change beliefs, but be entirely free from all beliefs, so that one meets life anew each minute?'
The First and Last Freedom, p.57
'When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.
When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.'
Freedom from the Known, p.51-52
'We never give up all our beliefs; we never give up all the formulas, and the things that we have learnt from books, and from teachers. We are never, inwardly, at any moment simple. We are never, at any moment, not asking or not seeking...Only when there is no Hinduism, no Islam, no Buddhism, no Christianity, can there be peace...'
Unkown source
'You can only find out if you deny totally all the present religious beliefs and ideas, because it is only a free mind that can find out what is the quality of the religious mind.'
Unkown source
'If we had no pattern of action, based on belief - either in God, or in communism, or in socialism, or in imperialism, or in some kind of religious formula, some dogma in which we are conditioned - we should feel utterly lost, shouldn't we? And is not this acceptance of a belief the covering up of that fear - the fear of being really nothing, of being empty?
To escape from that fear - that fear of emptiness, that fear of loneliness, that fear of stagnation, of not arriving, not succeeding, not achieving, not being something, not becoming something - is surely one of the reasons, is it not?, why we accept beliefs so eagerly and greedily. And through acceptance of belief, do we understand ourselves? On the contrary.
A belief, religious or political, obviously hinders the understanding of ourselves. It acts as a screen through which we are looking at ourselves.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.58
'Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.205
'You all believe in different ways, but your belief has no reality whatsoever. Reality is what you are, what you do, what you think, and your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
Furthermore, belief invariably divides people: there is the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian, the communist, the socialist, the capitalist and so on. Belief, idea, divides; it never brings people together. You may bring a few people together in a group but that group is opposed to another group.
...Therefore your belief in God is really spreading misery in the world; though it may have brought you momentary consolation, in actuality it has brought you more misery and destruction in the form of wars, famines, class-divisions and the ruthless action of separate individuals.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.206-207
'You can change your mind, your opinion, but truth or God is not a conviction: it is an experience not based on any belief or dogma, or on any previous experience. If you have an experience born of belief, your experience is the conditioned response of that belief.'
Commentaries on Living, First Series, p.23
'We feel we cannot act without belief, because it is belief that gives us something to live for, to work for. To most of us, life has no meaning but that which belief gives it; belief has greater significance than life. We think that life must be lived in the pattern of belief; for without a pattern of some kind, how can there be action?'
Commentaries on Living, First Series, p.56
'Does not the urge of the mind to free itself from its conditioning set going another pattern of resistance and conditioning? Having become aware of the pattern or mold in which you have grown up, you want to be free from it; but will not this desire to be free condition the mind again in a different manner? The old pattern insists that you conform to authority, and now you are developing a new one which maintains that you must not conform; so you have two patterns, one in conflict with the other.
As long as there is this inner contradiction, further conditioning takes place.
...There is the urge that makes for conformity, and the urge to be free. However dissimilar these two urges may seem to be, are they not fundamentally similar? And if they are fundamentally similar, then your pursuit of freedom is vain, for you will only move from one pattern to another, endlessly. There is no noble or better conditioning, and it is this desire that has to be understood.'
The Book of Life, May 25th
'The desire to free oneself from conditioning only furthers conditioning. But if, instead of trying to suppress desire, one understands the whole process of desire, in that very understanding there comes freedom from conditioning. Freedom from conditioning is not a direct result. Do you understand? If I set about deliberately to free myself from my conditioning, that desire creates its own conditioning. I may destroy one form of conditioning, but I am caught in another. Whereas, if there is an understanding of desire itself, which includes the desire to be free, then that very understanding destroys all conditioning. Freedom from conditioning is a by product; it is not important. The important thing is to understand what it is that creates conditioning.'
The Book of Life, May 26th
'...is it possible to be aware of our conditioning, just to be aware - in which there is no conflict at all? That very awareness, if allowed, may perhaps burn away the problems.'
The Book of Life, May 24th
'Our problem is how to be free from all conditioning. Either you say it is impossible, that no human mind can ever be free from conditioning, or you begin to experiment, to inquire, to discover. If you assert that it is impossible, obviously you are out of the running. Your assertion may be based on limited or wide experience or on the mere acceptance of a belief but such assertion is the denial of search, of research, of inquiry, of discovery.
To find out if it is possible for the mind to be completely free from all conditioning, you must be free to inquire and to discover.
Now I say it is definitely possible for the mind to be free from all conditioning - not that you should accept my authority. If you accept it on authority, you will never discover, it will be another substitution and that will have no significance. When I say it is possible, I say it because for me it is a fact and I can show it to you verbally, but if you are to find the truth of it yourself, you must experiment with it and follow it swiftly.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.225
'If you watch very carefully, you will see that though the response, the movement of thought, seems so swift, there are gaps, there are intervals between thoughts. Between two thoughts there is a period of silence which is not related to the thought process. If you observe you will see that that period of silence, that interval, is not of time and the discovery of that interval, the full experiencing of that interval, liberates you from conditioning - or rather it does not liberate 'you' but there is liberation from conditioning. So the understanding of the process of thinking is meditation.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.226
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6JWTycK5sw&feature=related
Fort Jesus was built by the Portuguese in 1593. Throughout its tumultuous history, the Fort changed hands no less than nine times between the Portuguese and the Omani Arabs, and was used by the arabs as a slave trading centre where slaves were imprisoned in a small cave before being exported to various countries. The fort was later used as a prison during the early colonial period until 1958, and is now a museum run by the National Museums of Kenya.
'We have invented God. The thinking created god for itself. That means due to unhappiness, fear and depression we created something called god. God did not create us after his imagination, I wish He had.'
Unknown source
'Out of confusion, you invent something permanent - the Absolute, the Brahman or God.'
Unknown source
'I wonder how many of you realize that we are put together by thought. Your gods are put together by thought.'
Unknown source
'God is invented by man. I am sure that you won’t like this. But you are attached to that concept: God exists.'
Unknown source
'We have now got tribal Gods at every corner because the world has become uncertain, dangerous, and we want to belong to some group, some sect, some local god.'
Unknown source
'There is nothing sacred in the temple, in the mosque, in the churches. They are all the inventions of thought.'
Unknown source
'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.'
Think on These Things
'The men who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima said that God was with them; those who flew from England to destroy Germany said that God was their co-pilot. The dictators, the prime ministers, the generals, the presidents, all talk of God, they have immense faith in God. Are they doing service, making a better life for man? The people who say they believe in God have destroyed half the world and the world is in complete misery.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.205
'You all believe in different ways, but your belief has no reality whatsoever. Reality is what you are, what you do, what you think, and your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.206
'
God is an idea depending on the climate, the enviroment, and the tradition in which you have been brought up.'
On God
'All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.'
Freedom from the Known, p.21
'Most of us want someone to tell us what to do. We look for a direction in conduct, because our instinct is to be safe, not to suffer more. Someone is said to have realized happiness, bliss or what you will and we hope that he will tell us what to do to arrive there. That is what we want: we want that same happiness, that same inward quietness, joy; and in this mad world of confusion we want someone to tell us what to do.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.157
'You are responsible for such external authorities as religion, politics, morality, for such authorities as economic and social standards. Out of your emptiness, out of your incompleteness, you have created these external standards from which you now try to free yourself.
By evolving, by developing, by growing away from them you want to create an inner law for yourself.
As you come to understand external standards, you want to liberate yourself from them and to develop your own inner standard. This inner standard, which you call 'spiritual reality,' you identify with a cosmic law, which means that you create but another division, another duality.
So you first create an external law, and then you seek to outgrow it by developing an inner law... To me, the man who is bound either by an external or an inner law is confined in a prison; he is held by an illusion.'
First Talk at Alpino, 1933
'One of the results of fear is the acceptance of authority in human affairs. Authority is created by our desire to be right, to be secure, to be comfortable, to have no conscious conflicts or disturbances; but nothing which results from fear can help us understand our problems, even though fear may take the form of respect and submission to the so-called wise. The wise wield no authority, and those in authority are not wise. Fear in whatever form prevents the understanding of ourselves and of our relationship to all things.'
Education and the Significance of Life, p.58
'...when mind is caught up in authority,it cannot have true understanding...'
'Is it possible to live in this world without a belief - not change beliefs, but be entirely free from all beliefs, so that one meets life anew each minute?'
The First and Last Freedom, p.57
'When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.
When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.'
Freedom from the Known, p.51-52
'We never give up all our beliefs; we never give up all the formulas, and the things that we have learnt from books, and from teachers. We are never, inwardly, at any moment simple. We are never, at any moment, not asking or not seeking...Only when there is no Hinduism, no Islam, no Buddhism, no Christianity, can there be peace...'
Unkown source
'You can only find out if you deny totally all the present religious beliefs and ideas, because it is only a free mind that can find out what is the quality of the religious mind.'
Unkown source
'If we had no pattern of action, based on belief - either in God, or in communism, or in socialism, or in imperialism, or in some kind of religious formula, some dogma in which we are conditioned - we should feel utterly lost, shouldn't we? And is not this acceptance of a belief the covering up of that fear - the fear of being really nothing, of being empty?
To escape from that fear - that fear of emptiness, that fear of loneliness, that fear of stagnation, of not arriving, not succeeding, not achieving, not being something, not becoming something - is surely one of the reasons, is it not?, why we accept beliefs so eagerly and greedily. And through acceptance of belief, do we understand ourselves? On the contrary.
A belief, religious or political, obviously hinders the understanding of ourselves. It acts as a screen through which we are looking at ourselves.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.58
'Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.205
'You all believe in different ways, but your belief has no reality whatsoever. Reality is what you are, what you do, what you think, and your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
Furthermore, belief invariably divides people: there is the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian, the communist, the socialist, the capitalist and so on. Belief, idea, divides; it never brings people together. You may bring a few people together in a group but that group is opposed to another group.
...Therefore your belief in God is really spreading misery in the world; though it may have brought you momentary consolation, in actuality it has brought you more misery and destruction in the form of wars, famines, class-divisions and the ruthless action of separate individuals.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.206-207
'You can change your mind, your opinion, but truth or God is not a conviction: it is an experience not based on any belief or dogma, or on any previous experience. If you have an experience born of belief, your experience is the conditioned response of that belief.'
Commentaries on Living, First Series, p.23
'We feel we cannot act without belief, because it is belief that gives us something to live for, to work for. To most of us, life has no meaning but that which belief gives it; belief has greater significance than life. We think that life must be lived in the pattern of belief; for without a pattern of some kind, how can there be action?'
Commentaries on Living, First Series, p.56
'Does not the urge of the mind to free itself from its conditioning set going another pattern of resistance and conditioning? Having become aware of the pattern or mold in which you have grown up, you want to be free from it; but will not this desire to be free condition the mind again in a different manner? The old pattern insists that you conform to authority, and now you are developing a new one which maintains that you must not conform; so you have two patterns, one in conflict with the other.
As long as there is this inner contradiction, further conditioning takes place.
...There is the urge that makes for conformity, and the urge to be free. However dissimilar these two urges may seem to be, are they not fundamentally similar? And if they are fundamentally similar, then your pursuit of freedom is vain, for you will only move from one pattern to another, endlessly. There is no noble or better conditioning, and it is this desire that has to be understood.'
The Book of Life, May 25th
'The desire to free oneself from conditioning only furthers conditioning. But if, instead of trying to suppress desire, one understands the whole process of desire, in that very understanding there comes freedom from conditioning. Freedom from conditioning is not a direct result. Do you understand? If I set about deliberately to free myself from my conditioning, that desire creates its own conditioning. I may destroy one form of conditioning, but I am caught in another. Whereas, if there is an understanding of desire itself, which includes the desire to be free, then that very understanding destroys all conditioning. Freedom from conditioning is a by product; it is not important. The important thing is to understand what it is that creates conditioning.'
The Book of Life, May 26th
'...is it possible to be aware of our conditioning, just to be aware - in which there is no conflict at all? That very awareness, if allowed, may perhaps burn away the problems.'
The Book of Life, May 24th
'Our problem is how to be free from all conditioning. Either you say it is impossible, that no human mind can ever be free from conditioning, or you begin to experiment, to inquire, to discover. If you assert that it is impossible, obviously you are out of the running. Your assertion may be based on limited or wide experience or on the mere acceptance of a belief but such assertion is the denial of search, of research, of inquiry, of discovery.
To find out if it is possible for the mind to be completely free from all conditioning, you must be free to inquire and to discover.
Now I say it is definitely possible for the mind to be free from all conditioning - not that you should accept my authority. If you accept it on authority, you will never discover, it will be another substitution and that will have no significance. When I say it is possible, I say it because for me it is a fact and I can show it to you verbally, but if you are to find the truth of it yourself, you must experiment with it and follow it swiftly.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.225
'If you watch very carefully, you will see that though the response, the movement of thought, seems so swift, there are gaps, there are intervals between thoughts. Between two thoughts there is a period of silence which is not related to the thought process. If you observe you will see that that period of silence, that interval, is not of time and the discovery of that interval, the full experiencing of that interval, liberates you from conditioning - or rather it does not liberate 'you' but there is liberation from conditioning. So the understanding of the process of thinking is meditation.'
The First and Last Freedom, p.226
http://www.youtube.com/wat
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