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now, you are just a mechanical thing. You go on repeating yourself, like a gramophone record which is stuck somewhere and goes on repeating the same line again and again and again. Just watch your life: have you not become a gramophone record, stuck? -- and the needle goes on moving in the same groove -- and goes on repeating the same thing every day: the same anger the same sex, the same jealousy, the same hatred, the same possessiveness, the same greed. Have you ever done anything new?
I was reading a limerick yesterday. I liked it.
There was a young man
who said,'Damn,
I have just realized that I am,
a being that moves
in predictable grooves.
Not even a bus, I'm a tram!'
Just watch yourself and you will find yourself not even a bus, but a tram: fixed grooves, well-trodden paths, repetitively. And you become more and more efficient in them. You completely forget how to live. It is as if you are being lived by a mechanical life; you are not living it because you are not conscious about it.
It once happened to a man who was travelling by rail: he noticed that another man who was his sole companion in the compartment was behaving in an unusual way. For some time he seemed to be chuckling to himself very happily, and then a serious look would come over his face and he would make a gesture of impatience before resuming his chuckles again. After a while, the first man could not stand it any longer and said,'Excuse my asking, sir, but what is it that amuses you so much?'
'Funny stories, of course,' he promptly replied,'I am telling myself funny stories.'
'How very interesting,' murmured the first man soothingly, and then added,'but every now and then you look very serious. Why is that?'
'That is when it is a story I have heard before.'
This is how things go on. If you yourself are telling the story, how can you tell the new story? All stories are heard before; you can just repeat. Your life cannot be a life of newness, of freshness, of morning. Your life is bound to be stale, stuffed with just repetitions; at the most an efficient mechanism, but no consciousness.
So whenever
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