Stop imagining, start observing...

Why is it that most magazines devote the front page to a picture of a pretty girl, although she may not be connected with the contents? And why is she always smiling, looking happy or sexy?

The answer may seem obvious to your "autopilot mind" but that does not mean it is really understood. The device would not work if everyone saw through it. The fact is that the manufacturers and advertising men who deal in these things aim to create a desire for their products by planting the alluring impression in your mind that they are bringing you happiness. This works because real happiness is not known. If it was, even to suggest that a magazine could cause it would be ridiculous. It might make you laugh to be tickled with a feather, but that doesn’t mean the feather causes happiness. And laughter is not the indicator of happiness, as we all know.

People imagine happiness is associated with possessions, whether money, houses, cars, television sets, pretty girls or handsome men. They never cease imagining this even though in their own experience the happiness of possession inevitably wilts and droops. So the false is tolerated and believed because the fact is not faced and is therefore powerless to bring the new.

Our object here is to discover what is false. By observation we have discovered that imagination is false when it separates the part from the whole and builds on only one aspect of a fact — an impression. So if you separate yourself from this imagining you separate yourself from the false.

When you identify with imagining you identify with the false and you are unconsciously thinking with your autopilot mind. When you are identified with a state you are that state. When your thinking is unreal, so are you. When you are angry, you are anger.

You can never stop anger by decision. Anger is the same monster every time. Its energy is emotion and emotion is the result of conflict. Conflict comes from compulsive imagining and that is the result of trying to change ‘what is’ without facing the fact.

Anger, like all the other corrupting identities in you, has to be observed and understood and then it disintegrates and never returns. You cannot be anger and the observer at the same time, but you can appear to be angry and still be the observer. It takes tremendous power to remain the observer under provocation. But anger, being false, cannot exist in the spotlight of intelligent observation.