Any progress within consciousness is self-improvement, and self-improvement is progress in sorrow, not the cessation of sorrow. If the mind is concerned with being free of all sorrow, then what is the mind to do? We suffer, don’t we? We suffer, not only from physical illness, disease, but also from loneliness, from the poverty of our being; we suffer because we are not loved. When we love somebody, and there is no love in return, there is sorrow. In every direction, to think is to be full of sorrow. Therefore, it seems better not to think, so we accept a belief and stagnate in that belief, which we call religion. Now, if the mind sees that there is no ending of sorrow through self-improvement, through progress, what is the mind to do? Can the mind go beyond this consciousness, beyond these various urges and contradictory desires? And is going beyond a matter of time? If it is a matter of time, you are back again in the other thing, which is progress. Within the framework of consciousness, any movement in any direction is self-improvement and therefore the continuance of sorrow. Sorrow may be controlled, disciplined, subjugated, rationalised, super-refined, but the potential quality of sorrow is still there; and to be free from sorrow, there must be freedom from this potentiality, from this seed of the ‘I’, the self, from the whole process of becoming.
From What Are You Doing With Your Life?
Mental Wellbeing Channel reshared this.