Life is a challenge. Whatever you do, you have to face the challenge of life, and you have to respond. Your response is the challenge; it is not separate from the challenge. This process of challenge and response is what we call an experience. From this experience, there is a residure which is memory. Memory is the result of experience. And thought is the response of memory. Thought is the active action of memory which arises as an automatic reaction when we meet challenge.
We seem to be caught in this overall process: challenge, reaction, experience, memory, and thought. We seem to only know this endless chain of causes and effects. As long as the response to a challenge is not whole, complete, final, there will always be a residue stored as memory. And this memory will then be active in our life. We don’t see that thought is limited, that thought cannot be whole, because thought is the process of memory which is already a partial residue from experience. And as we don’t see that thought is limited, we continue to respond to life with the only tool we know: the thought process. There is always an interval, between the challenge and the response. This interval, which implies time to respond, is thought, it is the process of memory which works by association to a previous challenge for finding out the response. So our response to a challenge is an old response, an already known answer that is automatically applied.
Our response is always old, from the past. But life is always new. Why don’t we approach a challenge not knowing how to respond? Is it because, we are disturbed if we don’t know how to answer? Is it because we are afraid of not knowing the answer, not being able to respond and being afraid we have made other experiences or our own experience into an authority? Is it because our education is based only on learning the right method to approach a problem? We don’t see that the thought process of finding the answer is in itself fear because it introduces time, a separation, an interval between the challenge and the response. This interval is the method learned which is now responding automatically to the challenge. Why don’t we see that there is no method to respond to the challenge of life, the challenge of relationship which is in essence the challenge of life? Can we approach life with this quality of the brain which doesn’t know, which doesn’t apply a method, which is not moving? Not moving in the only way to the face the fact and facing the fact we are able to see it and from that observation, the right response, the right action may come.
Can’t we respond to the challenge of relationship, which is life, from the unknown and not from the known?
