Freedom From Ideas Brings About Transformation

Krishnamurti:  Obviously the present crisis throughout the world is exceptional, without precedent. There have been crises of varying types at different periods throughout history, social, national, political. Crises come and go; economic recessions, depressions, come, get modified, and continue in a different form. We know that; we are familiar with that process. Surely the present crisis is different, is it not? It is different first because we are dealing not with money nor with tangible things but with ideas. The crisis is exceptional because it is in the field of ideation. We are quarreling with ideas, we are justifying murder; everywhere in the world we are justifying murder as a means to a righteous end, which in itself is unprecedented.

Jiddu Krishnamurti in California - You may know all the steps of a dance but if you have not creation in your heart, you are only functioning as a machine.Before, evil was recognized to be evil, murder was recognized to be murder, but now murder is a means to achieve a noble result. Murder, whether of one person or of a group of people, is justified, because the murderer, or the group that the murderer represents, justifies it as a means of achieving a result which will be beneficial to man. That is we sacrifice the present for the future - and it does not matter what means we employ as long as our declared purpose is to produce a result which we say will be beneficial to man. Therefore, the implication is that a wrong means will produce a right end and you justify the wrong means through ideation. In the various crises that have taken place before, the issue has been the exploitation of things or of man; it is now the exploitation of ideas, which is much more pernicious, much more dangerous, because the exploitation of ideas is so devastating, so destructive. We have learned now the power of propaganda and that is one of the greatest calamities that can happen: to use ideas as a means to transform man. That is what is happening in the world today. Man is not important - systems, ideas, have become important. Man no longer has any significance. We can destroy millions of men as long as we produce a result and the result is justified by ideas. We have a magnificent structure of ideas to justify evil and surely that is unprecedented. Evil is evil; it cannot bring about good. War is not a means to peace. War may bring about secondary benefits, like more efficient aeroplanes, but it will not bring peace to man. War is intellectually justified as a means of bringing peace; when the intellect has the upper hand in human life, it brings about an unprecedented crisis.

We approach life with a brain which is trained, educated to solve problems; so, we make out of life a problem."

You say the present crisis is without precedent. In what way is it exceptional?
 
If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem. - Jiddu KrishnamurtiHow you live, how you think, what you do, will create the world, or destroy the world. We do not realize this. We do not see this responsibility, and so we say, `Technical knowledge is bringing about the destruction of man; how can that be prevented?'

When one's mind is full of conclusions, assumptions, experiences, filled with the happiness, the travail, the sorrows that have pursued one all through life, there is then no freedom to look at anything new. If, for instance, in listening to what I am saying, you have assumed certain things about me - that you know and I do not, or that I know and you do not - or your mind is shaped, conditioned by what you have read so that you listen with a preconception, a conclusion, a background, then your mind is not simple; and it seems to me that one needs great simplicity to find out if there is something which is not a mere product of the mind. (Fifth Talk by Krishnamurti in Australia 1955)

Krishnamurti: The good is not the `respectable'. The respectable man can never know what is good. Most of us are respectable and therefore we do not know what it is to be good. Moral education can only come, not with the cultivation of respectability, but with the awakening of love. But we do not know what love is. Is love something to be cultivated? Can you learn it in colleges, in schools, from teachers, from technicians, from the following of your gurus? Is devotion love? And if it is, can the man who is respectable, who is devoted, know love? Do you know what I mean by respectability? Respectability is when the mind is cultivating, when the mind is becoming virtuous. The respectable man is the man who is struggling consciously not to be envious, the man who is following tradition, he who says, `What will people say'? Respectability will obviously never know what Truth is, what good is, because the respectable man is only concerned with himself.(Krishnamurti's third talk in Poona 1953)

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in Madanapalle, South India on May 12, 1895.So beauty is, where you are not. It is a tragedy if you don't see this. Truth is, where you are not. Beauty is, love is, where you are not. We are not capable of looking at this extraordinary thing called truth. (Mumbai 4th Public Talk, January 31, 1982)

The hope that tomorrow will solve our problems prevents our seeing the absolute urgency of change. How does one deal with this?

What do you mean by the future, what is future? If one is desperately ill, tomorrow has meaning; one may be healed by tomorrow. So one must ask, what is this sense of future? We know the past; we live in the past, which is the opposite movement; and the past, going through the present, modifying itself, moves to that which we call the future.

First of all, are we aware that we live in the past - the past that is always modifying itself, adjusting itself, expanding and contracting itself, but still the past - past experience, past knowledge, past understanding, past delight, the pleasure which has become the past?

The future is the past, modified. So one's hope of the future is still the past moving to what one considers to be the future. The mind never moves out of the past. The future is always the mind acting, living, thinking in the past.

What is the past? It is one's racial inheritance, one's conditioning as Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Catholic, American and so on. It is the education one has received the hurts the delights, as remembrances. That is the past. That is one's consciousness. Can that consciousness, with all its content of belief, dogma, hope, fear, longing and illusion, come to an end? For example, can one end, this morning, completely, one's dependence on another? Dependence is part of one's consciousness. The moment that ends, something new begins, obviously. But one never ends anything completely and that non-ending is one's hope.

Can one see and end dependence and its consequences, psychologically, inwardly? See what it means to depend and the immediate action taking place of ending it. Now is the content of one's consciousness to be got rid of bit by bit? That is, get rid of anger, then get rid of jealousy, bit by bit. That would too long. Or, can the whole thing be done instantly, immediately? for taking the contents of one's consciousness and ending them one by one, will take many years, all one's life perhaps. Is it possible to see the whole and end it - which is fairly simple, if one does it? But one's mind is so conditioned that we allow time as a factor in change. (Questions and answers at the 11th Question Ojai, California - 8th may 1980)

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in Madanapalle, South India on May 12, 1895.  For more than sixty years he traveled the world giving public talks and private interviews to millions of people of all ages and backgrounds, saying that only through a complete change in the hearts and minds of individuals can there come about a change in society and peace in the world. He died on February 17, 1986 in Ojai, California, at the age of ninety and his talks, dialogues, journals and letters have been preserved in seventy books and in hundreds of audio and video recordings.

In 1971 he went to India then to Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Malibu, CA and New York; Brockwood Park, England; Amsterdam, Holland; Saanen, Switzerland; Brockwood Park, England and Rome, Italy.

Source: www.krishnamurti-information-centre.org / www.jkrishnamurti.org