Where is the border between conscience and unconsciousness? The reason the world is beyond repair is because it is populated by a race of beings that now believe that they are conscious. They are not conscious; you are not conscious. The proof that you are not conscious is that you hurt one another, that's the proof of it. And that you hurt yourself, that's the proof of it. Every time you talk to yourself, every time you punish yourself, every time you wish someone ill, every time you turn against someone for any reason.
I know you're working towards having conscience, but you don't understand the immediacy of it. Because if you did, you wouldn't spend your day thinking that you were conscious -- pursuing the choices that are made by an unconscious nature, to do what? And I'm asking you to see this -- to do what? In order to further establish borders. Who I am, what I have, what I've got, what I need to do to keep it in place. Anything that helps me is on my side of my border, and anything on the other side of the border is decidedly my enemy. And if you doubt that's true, then you just look at how you receive any event, any news, any action by another person towards you that seems to take away what you have amassed on the other side of the border.
So, the border is between conscience and unconsciousness. Why conscience? Because you have, as a human being, the right to live with a conscience. And you see, there are no borders in conscience. No border exists in conscience. A human being with conscience means that he or she is awake to the border-making elements inside of themselves. And they cannot take the side of anything that chooses against themselves. Now I'll say it to you differently: a person with conscience can't hurt themselves, it's impossible. Love can't hurt itself.
Have you ever had a moment of conscience in the middle of an unconscious act? Call it what you will -- that still little voice. In an instant you realize, "My god, look what I... (and it's proper), look what I am in this moment, look what has come into me, look at what is defining me by being against you." That's what a border is. A border is when I exist independent and against something that seems to be against me. And how do I know it's against me? Because I can perceive, I feel it, here's my enemy.
So the question is now, not where is the border, but what is the authentic nature of the dispute in any act of hostility? What causes disputes between human beings? How many of you have disputes with others? Have you ever wondered how long will the disputing go on? How long will... and I don't know if you understand this, but what you call bickering, and all that business, what do you think the difference is between bickering and a full-blown war? What do you think the difference is? I'll tell you what you think it is. You think you're in control of the bickering. If you were in control of the bickering, there wouldn't be bickering. If you were in control of the gossiping, there wouldn't be gossiping.
So anything that sits inside of you and tells you, "Well, this is a small escalation that I'm using just to make my point and get what I want," is part of the unconsciousness that produces the border that is breaking your life into the parts that will never come together unless something dramatic happens in your life. What's the real nature of the dispute? We've understood the border, if we've understood at all, that there could not be a border between two human beings if they both had conscience. Can you understand that? It would be impossible, because neither one could hurt themselves or the other. Where the border is, is between conscience and unconsciousness. What is the nature of the dispute, what produces this dispute that prohibits the individual from recognizing where the border is?
The real root of the violence is identification. What is identification? It means that who I am is the same as what I want. Who I am is the same as what I believe. And the contradictions are so extraordinary. For instance, I believe in a loving Jesus, I believe in a peaceful Muhammad. But if you don't want the loving Jesus or the Muhammad or the Buddha or the Moses or the Abraham or whoever it may be -- if you don't want what I want -- which is the love that these beautiful divine beings represent -- but if you don't want the same love I want, I will destroy you. I will see that a border exists between us and I will conquer you eventually, even if it takes a thousand years. I will bring you over to see the intelligence (please listen to the word), I will bring you over to see the light of my life, so you may share in the same beneficence that I do.
Now all of this would be meaningless, what I'm saying to you, if there weren't in it an implied action -- if there weren't an implied understanding at the root of all of it. You must begin to understand what it means to cross the border between conscience and unconsciousness. You don't want to cross the border; you don't want to be present to yourself in the moment where the border dispute appears. Do you understand this? When the thought comes about what she did, or what he didn't do, or why they said those things, or why is my life like this -- every last thought or feeling comes to you as something that you resist. Do you understand? The enemy is the product of something resisting something that you're identified with. No enemy exists outside of resisting something that you are identified with. You cannot separate enemies from identification.
When it takes place, when the misery swells up in the heart over your little life that hasn't been what you wanted it to be, or the terrible burden you have to shoulder that no one else understands, or that heinous act that that man or woman did to you, or the horrible future that awaits you because of certain such and such -- every last time a moment like that appears, whether it's on the freeway (between you and another person in a car), at the supermarket, it makes no difference. You have to be willing, in that moment, to "pay the debt of your fathers." Your father, my father, no father, no mother on this planet, virtually, has been willing to pay the debt.
And it's our debt. It doesn't belong to an individual, it doesn't belong to a country, doesn't belong right, left, up, down, hot, cold. It does not belong to any group, it belongs to humanity. It belongs to you and I, accordingly, to the degree that we're willing to pay it in the moment that we're asked to pay it. Will I cross that border? Will I move from this unconscious, knee-jerk, hateful, violent, stressed -- you name it -- anxious... will I, in the moment I feel that border appear? And you can't feel resistance without a border having appeared. Is that clear to you? The instant that resistance appears to life, it exists simultaneously with the border upon which you are on this side -- and the life that you don't want, the person that's problematic -- is on the other side.
In that moment, the choice must be to cross the border from being an unconscious human being into one who accepts what it means to have conscience in that moment. To no longer look at something to lash out at or blame, because your country is occupied. Your own mind occupies itself, doesn't it? You sit there and hate what your own mind is doing to you. Do you know why you sit and hate your own mind when it punishes you? Because that's what unconscious human beings do. Because they believe that the fierceness they feel towards what is frustrating their hope to be free, is somehow connected with a time when they'll eventually reach freedom. No such time exists.
Am I willing... listen now, I'll phrase it for you differently. Am I willing to die to my hatred, instead of finding life in a future where you won't be the cause of it anymore? Am I willing to die to my selfishness because I see the absolute futility of clinging to something I can't keep, no matter what I do? Am I willing to die to the part of myself that has any enemy at all because I realize that as long as I have an enemy, I am my own worst suffering, my own pain? Nothing produces pain in me other than the mind that creates and revisits a border between itself and the antagonist that's part of its own unconscious mechanism.
Because If I'm willing to do that, then in every moment in which it appears, you understand that "Now is the time that I must do what my fathers have never done." And I'm not speaking of individual fathers or mothers, although we can speak of them that way. I'm speaking of why has this nature... what has taken this nature so terribly, terribly long to recognize that, if it keeps proceeding down the path that it provides for itself, there can never be peace anywhere -- let alone within itself. Am I willing to pay that price? That's where you cross the border. That's where you remember yourself, and you choose in those moments -- you choose. And let me explain something to you: it is a choice, and if you don't make it, it was made for you. And the choice that was made for you, it was the continuity of conflict.
Will I bring all of this into the light of myself, instead of blaming the darkness on something outside of myself? Will I choose in favor of aligning myself with conscience? So that eventually -- and it is true and it will happen -- such an individual becomes, within herself, the actual reciprocity of harmony itself. Just like violence and hatred and conflict and borders are a self-fulfilling prophecy, so is an individual who is willing to pay the price of "conscienceless" in the moment. Because, they can no longer harm themselves. You may not know this yet, but the only thing you suffer from is what you do to yourself. That's an absolute fact. You suffer from nothing other than what you allow to be done to yourself in the unconscious workings of your own mind. What great hope there is in such an idea, if you can even begin to fathom it.
