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Ojai, Sunday, 24 April, 1983
It is a spring morning and the earth is so alive, and up in this valley all the mountains are green and the tallest of them so extraordinarily vital, immovable and majestic. It is a morning that as you go along the path and look around at the beauty and the ground squirrels, every tender leaf of the spring is shining in the sun. Those leaves have been waiting for this the whole winter and have just come out, tender, vulnerable. And without being romantic, imaginative, there is a feeling of great love and compassion, for there is so much beauty, incorruptible. There have been a thousand spring mornings but never such a morning as this, so still, so quiet, breathless - perhaps it is with adoration. And the squirrels are out and so are the lizards.
It is a spring morning and the air is festive; there are festivals all over the world because it is spring. The festivals are expressed in so many different ways but that which is can never be expressed in words. Everywhere, with the song and the dance, there is a deep feeling of spring.
Why is it that we seem to be losing the highly vulnerable quality of sensitivity - sensitivity to all the things about us, not only to our own problems and turmoils? To be actually sensitive, not about something but just to be sensitive, to be vulnerable, like that new leaf, which was born a few days ago to face storms, rain, darkness and light. When we are vulnerable we seem to get hurt; being hurt we withdraw into ourselves, build a wall around ourselves, become hard, cruel. But when we are vulnerable without any ugly, brutal reactions, vulnerable to all the movements of one's own being, vulnerable to the world, so sensitive that there is no regret, no wounds, no self-imposed discipline, then there is the quality of measureless existence.
We lose all this vulnerability in the world of noise and brutality, vulgarity and the bustle of everyday life. To have one's senses sharpened, not any one particular sense but to have all the senses fully awake, which does not necessarily mean to indulge - to be sensitive to all the movements of thought, the feelings, the pains, the loneliness, the anxiety - with those senses fully awakened, there is a different kind of sensation that goes beyond all the sensory or sensual responses. Have you ever looked at the sea, or at those vast mountains, the Himalayas, which stretch from horizon to horizon - have you ever watched a flower, with all your senses? When there is such observation there is no centre from which you are observing, there is no `me'. The `me', the limited observation of one or two senses, breeds the egotistic movement. After all, we live by the senses, by sensation, and it is only when thought creates the image out of the sensations that all the complexities of desire arise.
On this morning, you look down into the valley, seeing the extraordinary spread of green and the distant town, feeling the pure air, watching all the crawling things of the earth, watching without the interference of the images thought has built. Now the breeze is blowing from the valley up the canyon and you turn as the path turns. Going down, there is a bob cat right in front of you, about ten feet away. You can hear it purring, rubbing itself against a rock, the hair sticking out of its ears, its short tail and extraordinary, graceful movement. It is a spring morning for it too. We walked together down the path and it was hardly making any noise except for its purring, highly enjoying itself, delighted to be out in the spring sunshine; it was so clean that its hair was sparkling. And as you watch it, the whole wild nature is in that animal. You tread on a dead branch which makes a noise, and it is off, not even looking behind it; that noise indicated man, the most dangerous of all animals. It is gone in a second among bushes and rocks and all the joy has gone out of it. It knows how cruel man is and it doesn't want to wait; it wants to be away, as far away as possible.
It is a spring morning and it is peaceful. Aware that a man was behind it, a few feet away, that cat must have instinctively responded to the image of what man is - the man who has killed so many things, destroyed so many cities, destroyed culture after culture, ever pursuing his desires, always seeking some kind of security and pleasure.
Desire, which has been the driving force in man, has created a great many pleasant and useful things; desire also, in man's relationships, has created a great many problems and turmoils and misery - the desire for pleasure. The monks and the sannyasis of the world have tried to go beyond it, have forced themselves to worship an ideal, an image, a symbol. But desire is always there like a flame, burning. And to find out, to probe into the nature of desire, the complexity of desire, its activities, its demands, its fulfilments - ever more and more desire for power, position, prestige, status, the desire for the unnameable, that which is beyond all our daily life - has made man do all kinds of ugly and brutal things. Desire is the outcome of sensation - the outcome with all the images that thought has built. And this desire not only breeds discontent but a sense of hopelessness. Never suppress it, never discipline it but probe into the nature of it - what is the origin, the purpose, the intricacies of it? To delve deep into it is not another desire, for it has no motive; it is like understanding the beauty of a flower, to sit down beside it and look at it. And as you look it begins to reveal itself as it actually is - the extraordinarily delicate colour, the perfume, the petals, the stem and the earth out of which it has grown. So look at this desire and its nature without thought which is always shaping sensations, pleasure and pain, reward and punishment. Then one understands, not verbally, nor intellectually, the whole causation of desire, the root of desire. The very perception of it, the subtle perception of it, that in itself is intelligence. And that intelligence will always act sanely and rationally in dealing with desire.
So without too much talk this morning, without too much thinking, to be entirely enveloped by this spring morning, to live with it, to walk in it, is a joy that is beyond all measure. It cannot be repeated. It will be there until there is a knock on the door.