The uniqueness of the individual cannot express itself because of the stranglehold of the experiences of others.
To be an individual and to be yourself you do not have to do a thing. Culture demands that you should be something other than what you are. What a tremendous amount of energy we waste trying to become that! But if that energy is released, living becomes very simple. Then what is it that you cannot do?
Trying to keep the sensation of happiness, or any other sensation that is pleasurable, going longer than its natural duration, is destroying the sensitivity of the living organism.
Mind Deception
The mind is interested only in sensuality. In fact, it is born out of sensuality. It maintains its continuity in the field of sensuality. But the body is not interested in any of these except to respond to stimuli.
There are actually no problems; rather, what we are saddled with are only solutions.
The only ‘I’ that I can find there is the first person singular pronoun. I have to use that to differentiate from the second person singular pronoun.
The perfect man is born out of the value system that we have created. The value system is patterned after the behavior of the great teachers of mankind who have done more harm than good. But every human being is unique.
Stimuli of Responses
There is no such thing as the totality of experiences. Memory is in frames. In order to explain what I mean when I say that it is all in frames and that the whole human body is functioning from moment to moment, there is one basic thing, that is, how the senses are operating. What is there is only a response to a stimulus!
The response is not translated by anything that is there, except that it registers the stimuli in the same way as information is registered when transferring images from one floppy disc to another. There is no linking up of all these responses. Each one is an independent frame. A lot of imagination is involved in our trying to understand what is actually happening there.
This body is singularly incapable of creating images. Translating the sensory perceptions into images is the cultural input there. When my eyes are not looking at you, there is no way that this organism can create the image of what you look like. The problem is the creation of images which is born out of our imagination and mostly out of what is put in there by our culture.
The Brain & Perception
What the brain does is to translate these sensory perceptions into the framework of memory. Memory is not a constant factor. What happens is that when the light falls on the object and activates your optic nerve, it throws an image on the retina.
This is what we have learned from the study of our biology, and that is what the physiologists have taught us in our schools. But actually, if you want to experience the fact, that is, the image of what you are looking at, it is something which cannot be experienced by you.
Why I give this example is to free us from many of the ideas we have of what memory is. When once the optic nerves are activated, they in their turn activate the neurons in the brain, bring the memory into operation, and tell us that the object is this or that. So the next frame is quite different from the previous frame.
The Camera
Let me give the example of a movie camera. The movie camera captures whatever is happening in frames. You take, for example, the movement of my hand from here to there — it has ten different frames to show that the hand has moved from here to
there. And in order to see the movement on the screen, you have to use an artificial thing called the projector. And only then do you see the movement of hand artificially created through the help of the projector. The sound is something like what they do in the movie industry.
The sound is nineteen and a half frames behind the corresponding picture frame, There is a gap between the picture you take and the sound — nineteen and a half frames. In exactly the same way, thought is very slow. By the time it comes and captures this “whatever is there” within its framework, your eyes have moved somewhere else, and that other thing is completely wiped out.
Nobody is there…
The brain is operating in exactly the same way. The whole thing is registered as dots and the pictures are taken in frames. There is an illusion that there is somebody who is looking at things. Actually there is nobody who is looking at the things.
It may sound very strange to you when I say that there is nobody who is talking. You are the one that is making me talk; there is nobody here who is talking. There is nobody. It may sound very strange to you but that is the way it is. It is so mechanical, yet we are not ready to accept the mechanical functioning of this living organism.
Do we have a sense of identity, personal identity, of yourself?
There is no center there; there is no psyche there; there is no ‘I’ there. The only ‘I’ that I can find there is the first person singular pronoun. I have to use that first-person singular pronoun to differentiate it from the second person singular pronoun. That is all. But there is nothing there which you can say is ‘me’.
That is the reason why I cannot tell myself that I am a free man, that I am an enlightened man. Also, I have no way of knowing that you are not an enlightened man, that you are not a free man.
There is no need for me to free you or enlighten you because to do that I must have an image of myself and in relation to that I can have an image of you. So the images we have there are related to what we would like to be, what we ought to be, what we should be, and what we must be.
The uniqueness of every individual cannot express itself because of the stranglehold of the experiences of others. After all, you don’t exist, and I don’t exist. You and I have been created by the totality of those experiences, and we have to use them in order to function sanely and intelligently in this world.
Love & Gratitude
