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If the individual can hold all of the meanings together in his own mind, he has the attitude of the dialogue.
Your assumptions may be revealed and challenged, and you may find the opinions of others to be outrageous. Also, people may be frightened and anxious if there is no leader and no topic and nothing “to do.” So you have to get through all of that.
there is a great deal of violence in the opinions that we are defending. They are not merely opinions, they are not merely assumptions; they are assumptions with which we are identified – which we are therefore defending, because it is as if we are defending ourselves. The natural self-defense impulse, which we got in the jungle, has been transferred from the jungle animals to these opinions.
There are situations where people have differing assumptions and opinions, where one faction is interested and the other isn’t. Still, somehow, we have got to have a dialogue. Even if one faction won’t participate, we who are willing can participate in a dialogue between our thought and their thought. We can at least dialogue among ourselves as far as we can, or you may by yourself. That is the attitude of dialogue.
If we really could do something creative, it might still affect other people on a tacit level. It would really communicate at the tacit level, both with words and beyond words. But if we keep on repeating the same old story, then it won’t happen.
our very movement has the quality of the solution; it is part of it. However small it is,
thought is abstraction, which inherently implies limitation. The whole is too much. There is no way by which thought can get hold of the whole, because thought only abstracts; it limits and defines.
The present is not contained in thought; thus, an analysis cannot actually cover the moment of analysis.
So we can see that there is no “road” to truth. What we are trying to say is that in this dialogue we share all the roads and we finally see that none of them matters. We see the meaning of all the roads, and therefore we come to the “no road.” Underneath, all the roads are the same because of the very fact that they are “roads” – they are rigid.
If you see other people’s thought, it becomes your own thought, and you treat it as your own thought. And when an emotional charge comes up, you share all the emotional charges, too, if they affect you; you hold them together with all the thoughts.
The senses will tell you what is happening, and then the consciousness must build a form, or create some sense of what it means, which holds it together. Therefore, meaning is part of it.
Really, underneath they were similar, because they both had rigid positions. Loosening that position, then, was the key change.
On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you are trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself, that is also not being serious.
the important point is not the answer – just as in a dialogue, the important point is not the particular opinions – but rather the softening up, the opening up of the mind, and looking at all the opinions.
if somebody doesn’t listen to your basic assumptions you feel it as an act of violence,
Love will go away if we can’t communicate and share meaning.
it could make a new change in the individual and a change in the relation to the cosmic. Such an energy has been called “communion.” It is a kind of participation.
the idea of partaking of the whole and taking part in it; not merely the whole group, but the whole.
parts are parts of a whole, but the fragments are just arbitrarily broken off from each other.
The real crisis is not in these events which are confronting us, like wars and crime and drugs and economic chaos and pollution; it’s really in the thought which is making it – all the time. Each person can do something about that thought, because he’s in it.
We may imagine that the source of the problem is that somebody “over there” is thinking these wrong thoughts – or that a lot of people are. But the source of the problem is much deeper. It is that something is going wrong in the whole process of thought, which is collective, which belongs to all of us.
the content of thought and the deep structure are not really separate, because the way we think about thought has an effect on its structure.
we may say that perception presents something, and that thought re-presents it in abstraction.
The way you experience something, therefore, depends on how you represent it – or mis-represent it.
What’s wrong with it is not that it takes place, but rather that we are not aware of it.
If someone says, “People of this category are bad,” and you accept that, then the representation of thought enters the presentation of perception. Once you’ve accepted that, it goes into implicit, tacit thought.
we fail to notice that this is happening. If we say it’s a “pure” fact, which is just “there,” we will give it tremendous value, and say, “How can you deny the fact?
most of our representations arise collectively, and that gives them greater power.
As the group communicates, these representations may get shaken, and change; the presentation changes, and therefore the whole relationship changes.
If we could learn to see thought actually producing presentations from representations, we would no longer be fooled by it – it would be like seeing the trick of a magician.
real change is the change of collective representations.
What is called for in such a case is not some procedure that “solves his problem.” Rather, it is to pause and to give attention to the fact that his thinking and feeling is dominated, through and through, by a set of self-contradictory demands or “needs” so that as long as such thinking and feeling prevail, there is no way to put things right. It takes a great deal of energy and seriousness to “stay with” an awareness of this fact, rather than to “escape” by allowing the mind to dart into some other subject, or otherwise lose awareness of the actual state of affairs. Such attention, going
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as long as a paradox is treated as a problem, it can never be dissolved. On the contrary, the “problem” can do nothing but grow and proliferate in everincreasing confusion. For it is an essential feature of thought that once the mind accepts a problem, then it is appropriate for the brain to keep on working until it finds a solution.
What is needed is that people be ready to give serious and sustained attention to a paradoxical pattern that has come to dominate their thinking and feeling.
the very process of thought with which we consider our personal and social “problems” is conditioned and controlled by the content which it seems to be considering
what is needed is to go on with life in its wholeness and entirety, but with sustained, serious, careful attention to the fact that the mind, through centuries of conditioning, tends, for the most part, to be caught in paradoxes, and to mistake the resulting difficulties for problems.
the assumptions are functioning as a kind of observer.
the observed is profoundly affected by the observer, and the observer by the observed – they really are one cycle, one process.
at a certain stage the distinction between the observer and the observed cannot be maintained,
the observer is the observed.
if you don’t put the assumptions together with the emotions – then the who...
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You say, “I am going to look at myself inwardly,” but the assumptions are not looked at – the assumptions are looking.
This is the picture which emerged gradually; thought tells you the way things are, and then “you” choose how to act from that information.
The very “wrong” things which he should be looking at are in the one who is looking, because that is the safest place to hide them. Hide them in the looker, and the looker will never find them.
