Can you observe without effort? Now, can you observe with effort? (audience - no...) Don't yell sir, find out, can you observe anything with effort? If I want to see you, must I make an effort to see you? Can't I see you because I am interested in seeing you? We have made everything into an effort. To get up is an effort, to go to bed is an effort, everything has become an effort. Why? Why is it we can't do anything simply, easily, happily, why? Why has all of life, the way we live, become a constant struggle, conflict and effort? First, let us look at it very simply. You make effort because you are comparing. You are comparing yourself with another, yourself with an idea, yourself as you think you should be. You are comparing. In education when you are a little boy the teacher compares you with the other boy who is still more clever. The mother compares herself with another woman, so, where there is measurement, comparison, there must be effort. Can you live without comparing? Never to compare, that means never to have an ideal, never to have a hero, by which you measure yourself with another. When you see a man riding in a big car, you look at it and you compare. You compare yourself with a man who is clever, bright, and you say, `I am dull'. Therefore, recognising through comparison you are dull, you make an effort to be bright. Please see this, the truth of it, that when you compare yourself with another or identify yourself with another, which is a form of comparison, there must be conflict. Can you live without comparison at all, which means seeing what is, and never comparing what is with what should be? You have understood? Never to compare, which means when you don't compare, you have to observe yourself and therefore through observation you become a light to yourself. Light doesn't compare itself with anything, it is light. When you are tremendously joyous, there is no comparison; but when you are comparing, when there is comparison you say, I had pleasure yesterday and I want more of it. To wipe out in our vocabulary in our thinking, the `better', the `more'. The better is the enemy of the good. If there is conformity there must be effort, if you are conforming to the social pattern, to what people say, conforming to an ideal, conforming to the past image of yourself or the future image of yourself, there is constant comparison, constant conformity. You train the child to conform. That is what the Stalins, Hitlers and all the tyrannical rulers of the world have done; conform. All the religious people have conformed and that's why there are saints. Can the mind not compare, not conform? That you can only find out by being aware, every day, seeing how you are comparing, how you are conforming, deeply, not at a superficial level, putting on these trousers or some other trousers, but deeply, inwardly conforming, comparing.

Then you can live a life without conflict, when there is no comparison and there is no conformity, because then life is intelligence and that intelligence is not yours or mine, but intelligence, which is wisdom.