Shiksha Main Kranti #14

First of all, one needs to understand the relationship between ends and means. It has always been assumed that means are one thing and ends another—that ends and means are separate. This is a fundamental mistake. If you begin by separating them, you will never arrive at a right conclusion.

In truth, the means themselves, as they evolve, become the end. The means, developed and matured, become the end. They are not two different things, just as a seed and a tree are not two different things; as birth and death are not two different things. One and the same phenomenon unfolds into the other. The confusion arises because there is a large time gap between the two states. That temporal gap creates the illusion of two.

Hence questions arise like: can we arrive at a right end through wrong means? The question arises only because we have first accepted a division between means and end. No one asks: can we get sweet fruit from a bitter seed? Because we know that seed and fruit are two phases of the same journey, two states of the same reality. The egg and the hen are not two separate things; what is hidden in the egg becomes manifest as the hen. The difference between them is not the difference between two things; it is the difference between the hidden and the revealed. So it is with seed and tree, and so with means and end.

Therefore, wrong means can never lead to a right end, because the means, by traveling, by growing, will themselves become the end. If someone thinks, “Let me use the means of hatred to attain the end of love,” he is in error. By walking with the means of hatred he will arrive only at greater hatred. If someone thinks, “I will use the means of violence to create a world of nonviolence,” he is mistaken; violent means can lead only to greater violence.

But because there is such a long distance between means and end, this confusion persists. It begins to look as if we could reach any end with any means. That is impossible. A particular means leads to a particular end. Therefore the end is not as worth considering as the means are worth considering—because the end belongs to tomorrow, the means to today. What we choose today will manifest tomorrow. The tree and its fruit are not to be pondered as much as the seed is to be pondered, because the seed is to be chosen today; the tree and the fruit will grow out of that very seed. Hence the question of means is supremely important.

Yet through human history most people have considered the end to be important. They insist that one should have a lofty end, a noble purpose, an ultimate goal—and their view is that once we choose a noble end, everything else will fall into place. This emphasis itself is wrong. The end is not so important. The means are important, because they are what we must choose and act upon today. What we do today is what we will become tomorrow. The value of an end is only this: it can help us choose meaningful means.

If a person wants to fill his life with love, the end has only this much value—that now he will choose such means as begin with love. In fact, only means that begin with love can lead to love; otherwise they will not.

The first step is already the last step, because the second step comes out of the first, the third out of the second; the last step will be but a link in the chain of the first step.

So I call the means more valuable than the end, because the means we choose today will become tomorrow’s end. But man has been making the opposite mistake; history is full of it. Those who want to bring religion to the world have often used irreligious means to do so. A teacher wishes to educate a child but uses punishment and fear. A father or mother wants to make the child good, but because what they do to make him good is itself bad, the child in the end becomes bad. If this is understood rightly, there is no longer much need to worry about the end; the essential thing is to make a decision about the means at the moment of choosing them.

So first, understand: I take ends and means to be one and the same. Hence the question “Can we reach a right end through wrong means?” does not even arise for me.

Now the second thing: those who have split life into two compartments—subjective and objective, inner and outer—have also caused damage. In reality, life is whole, integrated. There are not two broken halves called inner and outer. The way my breath goes out—before I can even notice that it has gone out, it has begun to come in. And the moment I become aware that the breath has gone in, I find it is already going out. The breath that goes in is the same breath that was out; what is inside now will be outside a moment later. Inner and outer are as intimately joined as the breath that moves in and out.

It depends on our way of seeing. Inner and outer are two poles of the same life. There are not two lives, one inner and one outer; life is one. It has two ends, a span that reaches within and without. They are joined, together. In the end there are no hard boundaries called inner and outer, no compartments called subjective and objective. Those who split life in this way have done great harm. The result of this splitting was that some declared the real life to be outside—materialists, hedonists, today’s scientists. Their stance is that only the outer is life; the inner is nothing. Others—religious people, yogis, philosophers, mystics—insisted that only the inner is life; the outer is nothing. Both have harmed life, because life is both.

Those who insisted on the inner said: abandon the outer, cling to the inner. But in abandoning the outer they reached a point where there was nothing left to hold onto within, because what they called “within” is inextricably connected with the without. In this way, dropping the outer, dropping and dropping, nothing remains but death and inertness. Such people proved suicidal. In their renouncing and renouncing they found that everything had gone—nothing remained. How could anything remain? There are not two separate things, one to be kept and one to be discarded. A coin has two sides; if I say I will keep one side and throw away the other, when I throw away the second side the entire coin is gone—nothing remains in my hand.

Those who conceived the inner in opposition to the outer, in dropping the outer lost everything; nothing of the inner remained. A certain emptiness was left behind—an emptiness that is the absence of life.

On the other hand, there are those who said only the outer is life; they denied the inner. The more they rejected the inner, the more they found that nothing was left outside either—only meaninglessness remained. Because life is one whole, sever the inner and the outer also disintegrates. Life remains only as a total; if it goes, it goes as a total.

Therefore an integrated view is needed in which the objective and the subjective, the outer and the inner, are not two but one.

These two strands in old thinking have caused great harm. They destroyed life from both sides. In one case, emptiness remained; in the other, meaninglessness remained. If we open the books of Eastern countries that emphasized the inner, we find one refrain: life is futile, life is suffering, life is insubstantial—and the sole longing is to be free of life. Everything outer was discarded, and along with it life itself slipped away. If we enter the contemporary Western mind, we see: life is meaningless; nothing has any meaning; all is absurd. Doing this is fine, doing that is fine; there is benefit in neither. Wealth is futile, power is futile, all means are futile. The West, having experimented with the outer and abandoning the inner, has ended in meaninglessness.

In my view, life is a flow, a liquidity—a wave that keeps touching both shores, the inner and the outer. Only one who can hold both together can attain the supreme end of life. Those who split inner and outer have also split ends and means into inner-means and outer-means: to attain outer life use outer means; to attain inner life use inner means. They even said outer means will not work within, and inner means will not work without.

So if a man wants to realize the soul, what use are food, clothes, a house—these are outer things. Those who emphasized the inner denied whatever is outer—whether clothes, house, relationships, friendship, love, society. Their criterion was: whatever is not inner, let it go; we have nothing to do with it. In the end, their hands were empty; nothing remained within either.

There is no such thing as an inner that exists separately, isolated from the outer. All these people insisted on abandoning outer things. Naturally, the society sank into poverty, misery, indigence. To say that clothing and housing are merely outer is wrong. If life is one, then what is outer in life and what is inner are also one.

For example, I say even clothing is not merely outer, because your clothes are an extension of you, a kind of spread of your body. It may surprise you to know: a man who lives naked will need forty percent more food, because the naked body dissipates that much more energy into the atmosphere; he will need forty percent more food. One who wears proper clothing will manage on less food.

And another interesting fact: one who is fully clothed will need more sex and less food. In the West, where clothing has become highly developed, sex has increased and the need for food has decreased. The reason is: so much energy is conserved that one seeks release through sex. So clothing is not just an outer thing; it will determine food, it will determine sex; food and sex will shape the mind, and the mind goes on moving inward. Nothing is purely outer.

The house, too, is not merely outer. The truth is, one with a little sensitivity can go into anyone’s house and know as much about the person as if one had gone into his interior. Enter a man’s house and you immediately know something of him, because the house is his larger body. If he lives amidst filth, you know he has no inner resistance to filth. If he lives with ugliness, you know he has no protest against ugliness; there is no sense of beauty within. Beauty is within, house is without—yet the two are not so separate. If you go to someone’s home and see flowers planted, a freshness, a fragrance, cleanliness, a couple of paintings on the wall—they all report to you about the man. Whatever is there is there because he placed it there. None of our acts are divorced from us; every act reveals and opens us.

Let me tell you an incident. Vivekananda was about to go to America. Ramakrishna had passed away, so he went to Sharda Ma for her blessings. She was in the kitchen cooking. Vivekananda said, “I am going to America. Please bless me.” Sharda asked, “For what purpose?” Vivekananda said, “To carry a message of love.” Sharda said, “Good. Hand me that knife lying there.” Vivekananda casually picked it up and handed it to her. He could not imagine any connection between asking for blessings and handing a knife. But he held the blade in his own hand and extended the handle toward Sharda. She laughed, took the knife, and said, “You have my blessings; go—no one will be harmed by you.” Then it struck Vivekananda and he asked, “Was there some significance in how I picked up the knife?” Sharda said, “Certainly. You are present in whatever you do. I was watching whether you would present the blade toward me or hold the blade yourself. One who has love in his heart will hold the blade himself so that the other is not hurt.”

This is astonishing, because ordinarily if you ask someone to hand you a knife, he will hold the handle and turn the blade toward you; it seems natural—neither he nor you would think about it. But even in such a small act we receive a report about the person. Even in the lifting of a knife, the whole person is present.

Remember: in our smallest acts we are wholly present—wholly. Not the tiniest part is left behind. In the blink of an eye or a slight gesture of the hand we are totally there. Every little act contains our whole personality. So what is outer and what is inner? Lifting the knife is outer; how one lifts it is inner. Where will you draw the line between the two?

That is why I say: there is nothing you can call purely outer, and nothing purely inner. They are joined. Life is a bridge that vibrates every moment between the inner and the outer.

Those who denied the outer denied outer things as well—clothing, housing, relationships, friendships. They said, let the person be alone; let only that remain which is inner. A race began: eliminate this, cut that—this too is outer, that too is outer. In the end one finds everything has been cut away; life is lost; nothing remains. I do not call this moksha; I call it death. And because this state is brought about by one’s own hand, I call it self-destruction—suicide.

Then there is the other race, in which the outer is everything. There is no concern for the inner. All the concern is: what kind of house, what kind of clothes, what to eat, what not to eat, how much wealth, how much power. This race denies the inner being. When one person from this race meets another, he asks, “What is your bank balance?” Because what you have in your locker or bank determines who you are. He never asks, “What is your being?” He asks, “What is your having?”

Who you are is not the question; what you have is. If you have an expensive car, you must be a valuable man—because there is nothing within. The car proves your worth; costly clothes prove your worth. But it is not necessary that inside costly clothes there is a costly man, or that a costly post is occupied by a costly man. Not at all.

In fact, if we deny the inner man entirely and lay all emphasis on these outer things, the possibility is that you will not find a valuable man in those places at all—because a truly valuable man cannot lay so much emphasis on such things. A valuable man emphasizes being, not having. What I have is not so important to him; what I am is. He will not be anxious, “Only if I become president will I be someone.” Being president is secondary. He may become president or not; it cannot be his race. If, in the natural flow of his life, it happens, fine; if not, he won’t worry. Perhaps only such a man can be truly valuable.

One for whom the post is valuable cannot himself be valuable. If the man is valuable, the post will be worth only a couple of pennies. And a truly valuable man cannot go mad to occupy a post; that madness is born of inferiority. Where there is no sense of inner inferiority, a man can step down from any post as if nothing has happened.

When there is only emphasis on the outer and the inner man is denied, things remain but life is destroyed; the consumer is destroyed. The stockpile of consumables grows and grows, but the one who could enjoy them has quietly departed. Things accumulate in heaps, and the man for whom they were gathered—where is he? For whom was all this collected? Remember, as I said, things are so interconnected that if there is so much emphasis on the outer—and because things are not merely outer—the final result will appear within. Small outer events produce inner consequences.

I have heard: in an African village UNESCO installed water taps. Until then the village had only one well. A few days later the elders came and said, “We are sorry, but please remove these pipes; the entire life of our village has been thrown into disorder.” The officials were astonished. “What nonsense are you speaking?” The elders said, “The well was our life. We met there. All the women gathered there in the morning; in the evening the village sat there to chat. The well is now deserted. With water at every doorstep no one comes. Our community feeling has vanished. We used to live together as one; now we are all separate. We do not want these pipes.”

Even a thing as external as a water pipe will affect the social structure and a man’s mind. We do not notice. Because nothing is merely outside. I am not saying those villagers were altogether right. I am saying: this is a consequence. In the long run they may find benefit, because as long as there is only one well, individuals cannot be born in that village—only community. When there is a tap in every house, individuals will begin to be born.

It is interesting that in the old world there were scarcely any individuals; the society alone existed. The arrangements were such that you had to live in the group. There was a time when if a man misbehaved his access to the well was cut off; he would die. He could not live because he was banned from drawing water. The village would decree he cannot drink from the well—then he died. Today he does not need to ask the village; he has his personal arrangement, his own tap.

My point is: any outer arrangement will touch and change the inner arrangement, because inner and outer are not two separate things. We have no idea how many tiny outer things create inner changes.

There is a mention in the life of Confucius: he was passing a village and stopped at a garden at noon. He was amazed. An old gardener had yoked his young son like two oxen to a device drawing water—where horses or oxen were usually yoked. Confucius thought perhaps the old man did not know that times had changed, that now oxen and horses could be used, or that with a counterweighted lever one could draw water without such labor.

Confucius went to the old man and said, “My friend, do you not know that nowadays oxen and horses are yoked, and we can draw water with a counterweight as well? Perhaps you have not heard.” The old man said, “I know all that, but speak softly—my young son might hear.” Confucius asked, “What is there to fear if he hears?” The old man said, “There is much to fear. I am old, but if my young son gets the idea of yoking animals, he will become old already—lazy, indolent. Do not put such notions in his head. And I also believe that those who use mechanical devices gradually become mechanical themselves; their hearts turn hard. And those who resort to such cleverness—because there is much cunningness in it—those people become dishonest. We are fine as we are; we labor all day, but we remain all right.”

What the old man says may or may not be agreeable; I myself do not agree with him. But he does point to an essential truth: what happens outside is connected with what happens inside.

It is said necessity is the mother of invention. I do not say that. I say laziness is the mother of invention. The urge behind inventions is: how can man labor less? How can I reach your house without walking—hence the cart, the car, the jet. How can something happen without me doing anything? Man does not want to labor. I do not condemn this. I say it is all right—because it is not exactly laziness. Man wants to be free of the nonessential, and the more he is freed from the futile, the more he can move in a meaningful direction. Whatever is best in this world—music, literature, philosophy, religion, meditation—has come from those who had leisure, who were at rest. No ditch-digger or stone-breaker has produced great music, nor could he. No Buddhas or Christs have been born out of such toil, nor could they be. It is the leisure class, or a person who comes to inner leisure, who, freed from futile labor, allows consciousness to touch new dimensions.

This is exactly what I am saying: for human energies to move into higher dimensions, it is essential that one be freed from the lower. So I do not say that the old man’s answer to Confucius was right. I do not agree with the old man—though I have heard that Confucius agreed with him. Gandhi would have agreed with him; I would not. In my view, perhaps the old man saved his son from laziness, but then what? The boy would still die harnessed to the plough like an ox. And if the old man thinks that if the boy uses a tool he will become a machine, has he noticed that by yoking him like a bull he is turning him into a bull? That does not occur to him. Besides, using a machine is not possible for an animal; it is possible only for man. So rather than becoming a bull, making use of technology is meaningful, it has value.

I also feel that the old father had very little trust in his son. He assumes that only by keeping the boy engaged in lowly tasks can he keep him “right.” If the boy is freed from that, he will not move toward anything higher. Perhaps Gandhi also lacked trust in man—it seems they did not trust man. If you trust man, you should recognize that the more freedom and freedom-from-drudgery we give him, the more he will grow. He has limited energy; we should not waste it, we should conserve it.

What I was saying—and in that context I said it—is that whatever we do outside finally enters within, and whatever we do within affects the outside. In truth there is no boundary between inner and outer: they are two sides of the same stream of life. Therefore all these divisions—inner/outer, subjective/objective, spiritual/material—are wrong. Because of these divisions a long tradition of confusion was born. Some denied all outward means because they said, “We seek an inner end.” But there is no “inner end” and “outer end.” There are ends and there are means.

Those who said, “There is no inner,” dismissed inner means as irrelevant. “What will we do with love? What use is compassion? What is the meaning of soul, God, prayer? Our concern is the outer ends—wealth, success, happiness.” Then they ask, “What will prayer do for creating wealth? What will compassion do?” So: learn mathematics, build machines, become ambitious. But only a man without compassion can be ambitious. If you are compassionate, how will you be ambitious? Ambition demands you drag others down, climb on their heads, make a staircase of their necks, use others as means—what place is there for compassion?

Thus those who made outer ends supreme killed the inner; those who made inner supreme killed the outer. Man has been ill-treated from both sides. Hence I say: the end is the means, and we must think in an integrated way. There is no means—inner or outer—and no end—inner or outer—that is not interdependent. They are all linked.

What we do arises from what we are within; and what we are within shapes what we do. They depend on each other and are useful together. In truth they are two aspects of one thing and cannot be separated. Therefore I would say: do not create this gap between inner and outer—nor between ends and means. An integrated attitude accepts no such gaps. Do not divide science and religion either—it is the same kind of division. Religion simply accounts for the world of inner knowing; science for the world of outer knowing. There is nothing essentially separate. In my vision, as man grows in understanding, what will remain is knowing—wisdom. If that knowing relates to the outer, we will call it science; if to the inner, we will call it intuition. There will be outer-knowing and inner-knowing—provisional distinctions.

Call it religion or science, it does not matter—what will remain is knowing, and that knowing will embrace the whole of life: from the smallest outer thing to the vastest inner, from the tiniest thought within to the greatest sky without—seeing them together as one.

Our understanding is so small that we cannot encompass this vastness. The brain’s grasp is limited; to help it we break things into fragments, and gradually the fragments become important and we think they are separate. As if there is a small hole into this room and a man peeps through it and sees only a tiny portion—he takes that to be the whole room. Another peeps through a different hole and sees a different portion—he too takes that to be the whole. This is what has happened in the world: people took whatever they saw through their little peepholes to be totality.

Fragments were seen and declared to be the whole—and this has cost us dearly. Then another remedy was proposed: take all the fragments and add them up to get the whole. Like Gandhi says: the Koran is right, the Bible is right, the Gita is right; Krishna saw rightly, Mohammed saw rightly, Christ saw rightly—now add them all and you’ll get the whole. My view is: those fragments are indeed partial; they have value, but twenty-five fragments put together do not create the whole. The whole is not produced by adding parts. The whole is seen directly, and when it is seen, all parts are seen within it. That is a different matter. But adding fragments only creates more mess.

It is like saying: here is a man with hands, feet, a head—let’s bring a head cut from one person, a foot from another, a hand from a third, a nose from someone, an eye from someone—join them all and make a whole man. You will only create a corpse, not a living whole. These are parts, yes, but the whole is not made by joining parts; they are organic parts only within the living whole.

So I say: the eclectics who say “add everything—this too, that too”—do not come closer to truth. They will not even reach as close as those who looked through a single hole, because the eclectic has not looked through any hole at all—he is mixing the reports of twenty-five peepholes and drawing a copy of the room. It is like I come to Jabalpur, you come to Jabalpur, a third friend comes to Jabalpur; each of us sees something different. We then combine our reports and say, “Now we have the complete Jabalpur.” It will be nothing. Each one’s view had authenticity—at least he had seen something. But the mixture will not even retain that truth. Whoever clings to that mixture will be in deep difficulty—he will not be able to make sense of it.

All truths come from the whole, but by adding truths you cannot reconstruct the whole. A flower blooms with petals, leaves, thorns, the living plant. Tear off the leaves and petals, then try to reattach them—you cannot restore the flower that was. What you create will have no relation to the living flower. So I am not saying “join science and religion.” I am saying they were never separate. The very talk of joining presupposes separation. Like Gandhi kept saying, “Allah and Ishwar are your names.” This assumes there are two names and now we must make them one. If it is seen, there is no need to declare it; there is nothing to join because they were never apart. When we say “Hindu–Muslim are brothers,” we have already assumed the fight has begun—otherwise the slogan would be unnecessary. Once enmity is firm, the “brother–brother” slogan starts. As long as there was no quarrel, nobody spoke of brotherhood.

All this stands on an untruth. So I say: do not try to join inner and outer—they are not separate. These two things are not two at all. They only appear diametrically different because of a false division. Know that division as false. There is one reality spread throughout.

I mean, there should be an education—this is how I understand you, Acharya-ji—that a new education should be created so people understand these divisions, and confusion between subjectivity and objectivity can be wiped out. Have I learned correctly?
Yes, exactly. We need a culture that from childhood does not create divisions but leads toward non-division. In truth the child has no divisions to begin with. We teach them. So much so that the child does not even differentiate between dream and waking reality. He dreams of a toy at night and in the morning cries, “Where is it?” He does not know that what was seen in the dream is a dream and what is seen outside is different. For him it is all one. He does not know who is Hindu, who is Muslim. He lives in a world of non-division—but it is an unknowing non-division.

A saint re-enters the same world—but with knowing non-division. The child’s is ignorant, so we must fragment it. Some distinctions are necessary for living: what is poison and what is nectar; where is the door and where the wall; what brings harm and what brings benefit. These distinctions must be taught. But behind all these distinctions a sense of non-division should develop. He should know: sometimes poison can be nectar, and sometimes nectar can be poison. There are times when a dose of poison saves a life; there are times when excess nectar kills. Distinctions are provisional; they arise because of human limits. And within distinctions runs a current of unity—things are connected within—this should develop in him.

Our way of life should impact the child so that life appears whole. It should not appear as inside/outside, subjective/objective, but as one life. The same person who eats is the one who prays—and prayer is connected to eating in some deep way; they cannot be separate. The inner thread should become visible. Indeed this is natural to the child—he is the same while eating or praying. He only gets confused when he sees his father: one man at meals, another in the shop, a third while praying, different again at home, and yet another before the servant. This is beyond his understanding.

If a child is told, “Respect your father because he is elderly,” he will also want to respect the elderly servant. If old age deserves respect, then an old servant also deserves respect. Grown-ups cannot accept this; they say, “No, not like that—respect your own father; he is a servant!” Thus we create a division—not just between father and servant, but inside the child we create two faces: one face for the servant, another for the father; one posture in the temple, another in the shop. We teach him layers. As these layers accumulate, the divisions harden.

Education—beginning with the parents and continuing through school and university—should be arranged so that the sense of connection remains alive. Even between opposites there is something within that links them—let that be visible. One thing must become clear: I am whole. My outer and inner cannot be two things. What I am outside, I am inside; what I am inside, I am outside. Then an integrated individuality arises. The very meaning of individual is indivisible—one who is not fragmentable.

Our social system creates personality, not individuality. It gives a person many masks, but no single person at the center. He wears many personas pasted around him—becomes whatever is needed. Inside, there is no one who remains the same in all situations—outside, inside, temple, shop.

I think, sir, we have a very old culture. We have been teaching our generations for millions of years, keeping the view of ends in life. Now how will it be possible that we start from the means? Will you please throw some light on that?
This is exactly what we have always done: we put the end first. And we have thus put man into many troubles. First, the end is in the future and we are in the present. We are always in the present; the end is always in the future. They never meet. This creates a tension that will never be resolved, a mad anxiety that will never be cured—because the end will always be tomorrow and I am always today. When tomorrow comes, it becomes today, and the end recedes to another tomorrow. So a person lives as he is—and the idea of the end keeps torturing him.

If a man is violent, he remains violent—and nonviolence is his goal. He says, “Someday I will become nonviolent; if not in this life, then in the next.” He remains violent because life is lived today; nonviolence is always tomorrow. The goal offers a convenient trick: postpone what is essential. “I cannot be nonviolent today—I am violent. Slowly, slowly I will practice, pray, do yoga, take sannyas. If not this life, then another.” Since it is not a small thing, it can be postponed.

Secondly, the goal creates repression. “I am violent but must become nonviolent—what to do? Suppress violence, wear the garb of nonviolence.” But because I am violent, even in becoming nonviolent I will use violence. If I think my wife obstructs my nonviolence, I will abandon her; the wife may starve, the children may beg on the streets—while I become “nonviolent.” And this violence in the service of nonviolence is not even questioned!

There was a respected Jain monk. Twenty years after he had left home, a telegram reached him in Kashi: his wife had died. He said, “Good—one more nuisance finished!” It is written in his life-story as a mark of great austerity that he expressed no sorrow! Someone brought me that biography; I said, “It bewilders me—when you left her twenty years ago, where was the nuisance left? And if her death ended your nuisance, you must have been wishing for it for twenty years. This man is violent—he could have killed her. He left her half-dead already, and now, at her death, he says, ‘Nuisance finished.’ This is extreme violence—no compassion, no pain, no sensitivity, even in this moment.” Yet he had been practicing nonviolence for twenty years!

A violent man, in trying to become nonviolent, can only use violence—against others or against himself. Often violence against oneself goes unnoticed. If I lock someone in a room and starve him, the whole village will call me cruel. But if I lock myself in and do not eat for twenty days, the village will call me a great ascetic. Yet I am doing the same—only the doer and the sufferer are the same person, so the deception is easy.

Therefore the question is not that nonviolence is the supreme religion; the question is: what am I right now? See it, know it. If I am violent, recognize it—let that recognition deepen. Let it be seen, from morning to night, that violence pervades me. Violence is not only stabbing someone in the chest—that is the notion of the dull-witted. One can look at someone in a way more violent than a knife. Or not look at all, and still be violent. You pass by me on the road, and I pass you without even seeing you—as if you are an insect, as if you do not exist. Big leaders walk like this—people as insects, and they pass through them.

Do you feel, sir, that new education and institutions of education we have can serve this purpose?
First grasp this: the valuable thing is that my awareness of being violent becomes complete. The issue is not the goal of nonviolence. What am I—now, today, this moment? If it becomes clear that violence is present in me twenty-four hours a day, and understand: you do not become violent at times and nonviolent at others. There is a continuity to your being. You are what you are—sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes visible, sometimes hidden—but you remain the same. A violent man is violent even in the temple while praying—open his heart and you will find violence. He is violent even while giving charity—if you could look within, you would find that even in giving he enjoys his superiority; his ego savors it.

So I say: do not set nonviolence as a goal. That strategy is old and has failed; it has harmed. The need is to know what I am—today, now. If my seeing becomes utterly clear, I will not have to “do” anything to become nonviolent. As the understanding sharpens and I see that violence stands in every moment, the very seeing makes violence impossible. My gestures—sitting, standing, eating, drinking, walking, speaking, meeting—will begin to change. I will not change them by aiming at nonviolence; I will recognize violence, and change will begin. Understanding brings transformation. As violence departs, what remains is nonviolence. Nonviolence is not a goal to be attained tomorrow; if violence drops today, nonviolence is here, now.

How does violence drop? Not through violent means. Fasting to torture the body is violent; running away to the forest leaving wife and children is violent; standing on your head, lying on thorns—these are violent means; they will never bring nonviolence. The first and foremost means is understanding. There is no more nonviolent means in the world. When understanding grows, violence becomes impossible. The moment it is seen as violence, it is gone. The very moment of seeing is the moment of its departure. Nothing else is required.

And about your second question—can today’s education do this? No. Today’s education cannot, because it is built around goals. We teach children ends: “Do not steal.” Non-stealing is a goal in the future. Today the child will steal; today the teacher steals, the father steals, the mother steals, the village steals, the world steals; and all preach non-stealing. The child vows to stop—tomorrow. The moment he vows to stop, he has accepted stealing as present and continuing. He will keep postponing, like everyone else. The temple will write “Nonviolence is the supreme religion,” and violence will go on.

We need a new education that does not say, “Do not lie,” but says: when you lie, be awake—recognize it. Do not be afraid; do not run. Just know that you lied. Let your sensitivity grow so that you do not lie without even knowing it. That is what happens now—people lie unconsciously. Someone asks, “All well? Did you see so-and-so?” “Yes, I saw him yesterday,” he says—though the man is not even in town. There is no purpose served; it is mechanical. He has no awareness of why he speaks this way.

I had a professor: whenever I mentioned a book, he would immediately say, “Yes, excellent—I’ve read it.” Slowly I doubted it, because whenever I asked anything about the book he could say nothing. There was no book he had not read—according to him. One day I went and mentioned an utterly fictitious Russian philosopher, “Bornakov.” He said, “Yes, yes—very fine, I read him twenty years ago.” I said, “He never existed—not twenty years ago, not twenty million years ago. He has not written a single line. I asked only because I felt you simply assent; it is unbearable to you to admit there is a book you have not read.” Ego creates the habit. It is not even deliberate lying; it has become blood-deep. Lies just flow out.

So the issue is not to teach “Do not lie,” but to awaken awareness at the very moment of lying. As the whole absurdity of lying becomes visible—the foolishness, the harm to oneself and others, the web of lies begetting lies—no one will be willing to lie. The liar harms others, yes, but he harms himself far more. He loses the capacity to know truth, becomes humanly weak. A liar cannot believe anyone speaks truth; he cannot trust; he cannot be a friend; he cannot take anything simply. His very possibility of being human withers. If all this is seen, lying will drop.

And we never teach why people lie. The fundamental cause is fear. Remove fear if you want truth. But the teacher stands with a stick and says, “Do not lie—or I’ll break your head!” He does not know what he is doing. His stick will force lying. The boy who was playing stickball will say, “I went to the hospital to get medicine for my father”—because of the stick. If you want truth, banish fear from education. Make people fearless—ready to bear any hardship joyfully, but unwilling to bear the hardship of lying.

I read a novel with a striking character. On a beach two men were sunning themselves on the sand; suddenly one rose and stabbed the other in the back. They were strangers. In court he said, “All my life I felt I have done nothing—my life has been empty. My name has never appeared in the papers. Suddenly I saw his back shining in the sun, and I felt like stabbing him—at least my name will be in the papers, there will be talk. Something thrilling—at last I have done something. That’s all.” Nobody believes it; the court threatens him with the gallows; he says, “Do what you must; this is the whole truth.” So they search for other motives. A witness says: “The day his mother died in the morning, that night I saw him at the theatre.” The court says, “He is dangerous—watching a dance the night his mother died!” He says, “I had already bought the ticket. And in any case, whenever I go to the theatre in the future, it will always be after my mother’s death—she is dead now. If people never went to the theatre after their mothers died, theatres would close—everyone’s mother dies.” Another witness says, “I told him, ‘You must be very sad that your mother died.’ He said, ‘Yes, very sad—I couldn’t sleep all night; I had to sit by her body.’” The judge says, “At least lie, fool! Do not say such true things—no one will believe them; this world stands on lies.” Tears come to the judge’s eyes: “First I felt sad my mother died; later I felt sad I had lost a night’s sleep—what can I do? That is how it was.”

We preach “Speak the truth,” and teach everything that produces lies: we teach fear. If we want truth, we must create fearlessness and accept truths directly, however hard. Truths are harsh—though the world keeps saying “Speak the truth,” it is still not ready for it. An acquaintance visits your home; you are inconvenienced, but you say, “What a blessing that you came.” He knows it is not; you know it is not; and when you visit him, he says the same. A false world is built, while truth is a goal on the wall.

A better world will be one where we train children to be ready for truth. A wife should know it is not necessary that only she be attractive to her husband. Even after marriage, another woman may appear beautiful to him. It will be a wondrous and loving phenomenon if the husband can say, “That woman looks very lovely to me,” and the wife can hear it, understand, have compassion. Then there is love. Tomorrow the wife may say the same.

An incident occurred in Bombay. A woman came to me about four years ago, distressed: “My husband loves me beyond measure; but I have never been able to love him. My love still belongs to someone I knew before marriage. We have no contact; he lives in Africa; once in four or six years he comes for a day or two. My husband’s love has become a burden. If only he loved me less! I cannot love him; that other man’s image remains. What should I do? I would not even leave my husband if that man were offered to me now—this is not the question. I feel great compassion for my husband—but not love.” She wept. I said, “Tell your husband—tell him everything. You will be unburdened.” She said, “What will he think? We’ve been married twenty years.” I said, “He loves you; he will understand.” With difficulty she agreed.

Later she told me, amazed: “I could never have imagined what happened. After I told him, his love for me became even more wondrous—deeper than ever. We were never so close. And when that man came, my husband brought him home to stay. He stayed seven days in our house. During those seven days my husband tried in every way to let us be together, talk, be close. And in those seven days that man faded from my heart. The picture dissolved. What I had imagined existed only in imagination—he was ordinary. And what I had never seen in my husband—I saw it then: the depth of his love.” Truth worked a miracle that a veil of lies could never have allowed. The barrier fell; the past departed; something greater became visible.

Our entire structure stands on lies while the signboard reads “Truth is the highest religion.” Likewise, the structure is built on violence while the goal is nonviolence; built on dishonesty while preaching honesty. It has come to this: the bigger the dishonesty, the larger the signboard of honesty. Even honesty is used in the service of dishonesty—because the goal has been placed in the future.

I want an education where daily life is the goal—there is no future. What I am living today is all. Let me know it, understand it, recognize it. And let the atmosphere in educational institutions support this—an air where truth is honored, however harsh, however merciless, however naked. Only truth is honored. Let truth gain prestige. From the first day, the practices that grow understanding and recognition of how and why we cling to untruth should be central. Geography, mathematics, chemistry, physics are not as important as meditative awareness—a wakeful mind that helps each person understand the mind he has today. And the wonder is: the deeper the understanding, the more transformation happens.

Understanding is the means—and there is no greater means than understanding.