The only place someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas.
Maybe if you're ready to listen and you're ready to be challenged.
But there's one thing,
The most important of all that you could do,
Where no one can help you.
What's this most important thing of all?
It's called self-observation.
No one can help you there.
No one can give you a method.
No one can show you a technique,
Because the moment you pick up a technique,
You're programmed again.
Self-observation,
Watching yourself,
Which is not the same as self-absorption.
Self-absorption is self-preoccupation.
You're concerned about yourself.
You're worried about yourself.
I'm talking about self-observation.
What's that?
Self-observation,
It means to watch everything as far as possible in you and around you,
As if it were happening to someone else.
To watch everything in you and around you as if it were happening to someone else.
What does that last sentence mean?
It means that you do not personalize what is happening to you.
It means you look at it as if you have no connection with it whatsoever.
The reason you suffer from your depressions and your anxieties is that you identify with them.
You're saying,
I am depressed,
And that is false.
You are not depressed.
If you want to be accurate,
You might say,
I is experiencing a depression right now.
But you could hardly define yourself with the verb to be and say,
I am depressed.
You are not your depression.
But by a strange kind of trick of the mind,
By a strange kind of illusion,
You have deluded yourself into thinking,
Though you're not aware of it,
That you are your depression,
That you are your anxiety,
That you are your joy and the thrills that you have.
I am delighted.
You certainly are not delighted.
Delight is in you right now.
But hang around.
It'll change.
Won't last.
Never lasts.
Keeps changing.
It's always changing.
Clouds come and clouds go.
Some of them are black.
Some of them are white.
Some of them are large.
Others are small.
And if we want to follow the analogy,
This isn't philosophy now.
This is just an analogy.
You are the sky.
You're observing them all.
You're a passive,
Detached observer.
My,
That's shocking.
Particularly in the Western culture.
You're not interfering.
Don't interfere.
Don't fix anything.
Watch.
Observe.
The trouble with people is they're busy fixing things they don't even understand.
We're always fixing things,
Aren't we?
Never strikes us that things don't need to be fixed.
They really don't.
This is the great illumination.
They need to be understood.
If you understood them,
They'd change.
They really would,
If you understood them.
