THE MECHANISTIC VIEW of life is that, as man is merely the product of environment and of various reactions, perceptible only to the senses, the environment and reactions should be controlled by a rationalized system that will allow the individual to function only within its frame. Please comprehend the full significance of this mechanistic view of life. It conceives no supreme, transcendental entity, nothing that has a continuity; this view of life admits no survival of any kind after death; life is but a brief span leading to annihilation. As man is nothing but the result of environmental reactions, concerned with the pursuit of his own egotistic security, he has helped to create a system of exploitation, cruelty, and war. So his activities must be shaped and guided by changing and controlling the environment.
Then there are those who accept the view that man is essentially divine, that his destiny is controlled and guided by some supreme intelligence. These assert that they are seeking God, perfection, liberation, happiness, a state of being in which all subjective conflict has ceased. Their belief in a supreme entity who is guiding man’s destiny is based on faith. They will say this transcendental entity or supreme intelligence has created the world and that the ‘I’, the ego, the individual, is something permanent in itself and has an eternal quality.
Sometimes you think life is mechanical, and at other times when there is sorrow and confusion, you revert to faith, looking to a supreme being for guidance and help. You vacillate between the opposites, whereas only through comprehension of the illusion of the opposites can you free yourself from their limitations and encumbrances. You often imagine that you are free from them, but you can be radically free only when you fully comprehend the process of the building up of these limitations and of bringing them to an end. You cannot possibly have the comprehension of the real, of what is, as long as this beginningless process of ignorance is perpetuated. When this process, sustaining itself through its own volitional activities of craving, ceases, there is that which may be called reality, truth, bliss.