If one listens…without effort, with clarity, then I think that very listening is the vehicle of action. You do not have to do anything about it – the very act of listening is action. It is like seeing something, it is like looking at a flower. We never actually look at a flower, because we look with our minds, with our thoughts, with our ideas, opinions, with our botanical knowledge of that flower. So it is thought that looks – not so much the eye, as thought. Our thoughts, ideas, opinions, judgments, botanical knowledge—these interfere with our looking. It is only when you can look at something completely that you are in direct contact with that thing; and to look completely demands a great deal of energy not words, words, words, they don’t create energy. What brings energy is this observing, listening, learning, in which there is not the observer; there is only the fact, and not the experiencer looking at the fact.
Learning is an act—an act of the active present. It is the verb to learn, it is a movement. But that which has been learnt has already become a static thing. So in the same way, if we could listen… to everything in life—to all the intimations of one’s own demands, urges, the hints of one’s own desires, secret longings, to listen to another, whether it is your husband, or a child, or a wife, or a neighbour, so that the mind becomes sharp, clear, dealing only with facts and not with emotional opinions and prejudices – then perhaps we can come to understand the very complex problems that life hides.
Paris, 1965, Talk#1,
Collected Works Vol XV, p. 155
You know, a boy at school, in class, wants to look out of the window. A bird is flying by, there is a lovely flower on the tree, or someone goes by. His attention is taken away from the book, and the teacher tells him to look at the book, to concentrate on the book. That is how most of our life is. We want to look, but society, economy, religious doctrines force us to conform; and therefore we lose all spontaneity, all freshness. So, the discipline of learning is something entirely different from the discipline of acquiring knowledge. You need to have a certain discipline when you are acquiring technological knowledge or any other knowledge. You have to pay attention, give your mind to something particular, to specialize in a subject; and that entails a certain discipline of conformity, of suppression, and all the things that are happening in the world through discipline. Now, the discipline which we are talking about, has nothing whatsoever to do with the discipline of conformity to a pattern…We are learning, and that learning is never conformity to a pattern—how can it be? Whether the pattern has been laid down by the Buddha, by Christ, by Sankara, or by your own pet guru, learning has nothing whatever to do with it. Because in that conformity all learning ceases, and therefore there is never originality. And we are discovering through learning, with originality. I do not know whether you see the beauty of what we are talking about. Watching, looking, seeing, listening are all parts of learning. If you do not know how to listen, you cannot learn. If you do not know how to see a flower, you cannot learn about the beauty of that flower. And to listen, to see, to learn implies in itself a discipline which is not conformity.
New Delhi, 1964, Talk#3,
Collected Works Vol XIV, p. 240