A Wholly Different Way of Living PDF
Preview A Wholly Different Way of Living
A Wholly Different Way of Living Copyright © 1991 Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd. A Wholly Different Way of Living J. K RISHNAMURTI In dialogue with Professor Allan W Anderson CONTENTS I. Knowledge and the Transformation of Man II. Knowledge and Conflict in Human Relationships III. What Is Communication with Others? IV. What Is a Responsible Human Being? V. Order Comes from the Understanding of Our Disorder VI. The Nature and Total Eradication of Fear VII. Understanding, Not Controlling, Desire VIII. Does Pleasure Bring Happiness? IX. Sorrow, Passion and Beauty X. The Art of Listening XI. Being Hurt and Hurting Others XII. Love, Sex and Pleasure XIII. A Different Way of Living XIV. Death, Life and Love Are Indivisible – the Nature of Immortality XV. Religion, Authority and Education – Part 1 XVI. Religion, Authority and Education – Part 2 XVII. Meditation, a Quality of Attention that Pervades All of One’s Life XVIII. Meditation and the Sacred Mind DIALOGUE I Knowledge and the Transformation of Man DR ANDERSON: Mr Krishnamurti, I was very taken with a recent statement of yours in which you said that each human being is responsible for bringing about his own transformation, which is not dependent on knowledge or time. And if it’s agreeable to you, I thought it would be a splendid thing if we explored together the general area of transformation itself, and after that perhaps the other related areas would begin to fall into place and we could discuss the relationship between them. KRISHNAMURTI: Don’t you think, sir, considering what’s happening in the world, in India, in Europe and in America, the general degeneration, in literature, in art, and especially in the deep cultural sense, in religion, that there is a traditional approach, a mere acceptance of authority, of belief, which is not really the religious spirit? Seeing all this, the confusion, the great misery, the sense of infinite sorrow, any observant and serious person would say that this society can be changed only when the individual human being really transforms himself radically, that is, regenerates himself fundamentally. And the responsibility for that depends on the human being, not on the mass or on the priests or on a church, a temple, but on a human being who is aware of this enormous confusion, politically, religiously and economically; in every direction there is such misery, such unhappiness. And when you see that, it is a very serious thing to ask oneself whether a human being like oneself or another can really deeply undergo a radical transformation. And when that question is put, and when one sees one’s responsibility in relation to the whole, then perhaps we can discuss what relationship knowledge and time have to the transformation of man. A: I quite follow. We need to lay some groundwork. K: Yes. Because most people are not seriously concerned with the events, with the chaos, with the mess in the world at present. They are concerned only with the problems of energy, of pollution and so on—such superficial things. They are not really deeply concerned with the human mind—the mind that is destroying the world. A: Yes, I quite follow. What you have said places radical responsibility on the individual as such. K: Yes. A: There are no five-year plans that we can expect to help us out! K: You see, the word ‘individual’ is really not a correct one because the term, as you know, sir, means undivided, indivisible, in himself. But human beings are totally fragmented, therefore they are not individuals. They may have a bank account, a name, a house, but they are not really individuals in the sense of being total, complete, harmonious, whole, unfragmented, which is really what it means to be an individual. A: Well, would you say then to move or make passage or, perhaps, a better word would simply be to change, since we are not talking about time, from this fragmented state to one of wholeness could be regarded as a change in the level of the being of the person. Could we say that? K: Yes, but you see the word ‘whole’ implies not only sanity, health but also holy. All that’s implied in that one word ‘whole’. And human beings are never whole. They are fragmented, contradictory, they are torn apart by various desires. So when we talk of an individual, the individual is really a human being who is totally, completely whole, sane, healthy and therefore holy. And to bring about such a human being is our responsibility educationally, politically, religiously, in every way. And therefore it is the responsibility of the educator, of everybody, not just myself; it is your responsibility as well as mine, as well as his. A: It’s everyone’s responsibility. K: Absolutely—because we have created this awful mess in the world. A: But the individual is the one who must make the start. K: It’s the business of the human being, each human being—it does not matter whether he is a politician or a businessman or just an ordinary person like me in the street—to realize the enormous suffering, misery, confusion there is in the world. And it’s our responsibility to change all that. A: It is the responsibility of each human person. K: Yes, whether he is in India or England or America or wherever he is. A: If the change is going to start at all, it’s going to be with each one of us. K: Yes, sir, with each human being. Therefore the question arises from that, does a human being realize with all seriousness his responsibility not only to himself but to the whole of mankind? A: It wouldn’t appear so from the way things go on. K: Obviously not; each one is concerned with his own petty little selfish desires. So responsibility implies tremendous attention, care, diligence—not negligence as is the case now. A: Yes, I do follow that. The word ‘we’ used in relation to each brings about the suggestion of a relationship which we could perhaps pursue here a moment. There seems to be an indivisible relation between each of us and what we call the whole, which the individual doesn’t sense. K: Sir, as you know, I have been all over the world, except behind the Iron Curtain and to China, the Bamboo Curtain. I have talked to and seen thousands and thousands of people. I have been doing this for fifty years and more. Human beings wherever they live are more or less the same. They have their problems of sorrow, problems of fear, problems of livelihood, problems of personal relationship, problems of survival, overpopulation and the enormous problem of death—it is a problem common to all of us. There is no Eastern problem or Western problem. The West has its particular civilization and the East has its own. But all human beings are caught in this trap. A: Yes, I follow that. K: They don’t seem to be able to get out of it. They have been going on and on in it now for millennia. A: Therefore the question is, how does one bring this about? The word ‘individual’, as you have just described it, seems to me to have a relationship to the word ‘transform’ in itself. It seems that many people have the notion that to transform a thing means to change it utterly without any relationship whatsoever to what it is as such. That would seem to ignore that we are talking about form that undergoes a change, while form still abides. K: Yes, sir, I understand. A: Otherwise the change would involve a loss, a total loss. K: So are we asking this question, sir: what place has knowledge in the regeneration of man, in the transformation of man, in a fundamental, radical movement in man? What place has knowledge and therefore time? Is that what you are asking? A: Yes, I am. Because either we accept that a change which is a genuine change means the annihilation of what preceded it, or we are talking about a total transformation of something that abides. K: Yes. So let us look at that word for a minute. Revolution in the ordinary sense of that word does not mean a gradual evolution, does it? A: I agree. K: Now, revolution is either bloody, overthrowing the government, or there is a revolution in the psyche. Outer or inner. A: Yes, outer or inner. K: The outer is the inner. The inner is the outer. There is no difference between the outer and the inner; they are totally related to each other. A: Then this goes back to what you mentioned earlier. There is no division, even though intellectually you make a distinction, between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’. K: That’s right. So, when we talk about change, we mean not a mere bloody physical revolution, but rather a revolution in the makeup of the mind of the human being, the way he thinks, the way he behaves, the way he conducts himself, the way he operates, functions, the whole of that. Now, in that psychological revolution—not evolution in the sense of gradualness—what place has knowledge in that? In the regeneration of man, which is the inward revolution which will affect the outer. A: And which is not a gradual progress. K: Gradual progress is endless. A: Exactly. So we are talking of an instant qualitative change. K: Again when you use the word ‘instant’, it seems as though it is to happen suddenly. That’s why I am rather hesitant about using the word ‘instant’. We will go into it in a minute. First of all, sir, let’s be clear what you and I are talking about, if we may. We see objectively the appalling mess the world is in, right? The misery, the confusion, the deep sorrow of man. A: Yes. K: I can’t tell you what I feel when I go round the world. The pettiness, the shallowness, the emptiness of all this, of the so-called Western civilization, if I may use that word—and which Eastern civilization too is being dragged into. And all the time we are just scratching on the surface and we think that mere change on the surface—change in the structure—is going to do something enormous to all human beings. On the contrary it has done nothing. It polishes things a little bit here and there but deeply and fundamentally it does not change man. So, when we are discussing change we must I think be fairly clear that we mean change in the psyche, in the very being of human beings. That is, in the very structure and nature of his thought. A: A change at the root. K: At the root. And therefore when there is that change he will naturally bring about a change in society. It isn’t society first, or the individual first, it is human change which will transform society. They are not two separate things. A: Now I must be very careful that I understand this exactly. K: After all human beings have created this society. By their greed, by their anger, by their violence, by their brutality, by their pettiness, they have created this society. A: Precisely. K: And they think by changing the structure they are going to change the human being. This has been the Communist problem, this has been the eternal problem: that if we change the environment we change man. They have tried that in ten different ways and they haven’t succeeded in changing man. On the contrary man conquers the environment as such. So, let us be clear that the outer is the inner—the inner is the outer—that there is not the division, society and the individual, the collective and the separate human being, but that the human being is the whole, he is society, he is the separate human individual, he is the factor which brings about this chaos. A: Yes, I am following this very closely. K: Therefore he is the world and the world is him. A: Yes. Therefore if he changes everything changes. If he doesn’t change nothing changes. K: I think this is very important because we don’t realize, I think, this basic factor that we are the world and the world is us, that the world is not something separate from me nor the me separate from the world. Whatever culture you are born in, you are the result of that culture. And that culture has produced this world. The materialistic world of the West, if one can call it that, which is spreading over the whole globe—everything is being swept aside in the wake of Western culture, and this culture has produced this human being, and the human being has created this culture. A: Exactly. K: He has created the paintings, the marvellous cathedrals, the marvellous technological things, going to the moon and so on, human beings have produced all that. But it is human beings who have also created the rotten society in which we live. The immoral society in which we live has been created by human beings. A: Yes, there is no doubt about that. K: And therefore the world is you, you are the world, there is no other. If you accept that, if you see that, not intellectually, but feel it in your heart, in your mind, in your blood, then the question is: is it possible for a human being to transform himself inwardly and therefore outwardly? A: I am very concerned to see this as clearly as I can in terms of two texts that come to mind. I am thinking of that wonderful text in the third chapter of St John’s gospel, which says (and I will try to translate this as the Greek has it), ‘The one who is doing the truth is coming to the light’. It isn’t that he does the truth and then later comes to the light. And it isn’t that we could say from the pulpit, I will tell you what the truth is, if you do it then you will see the light. Because we are back again to what you mentioned earlier, the non-temporal relationship between the action which itself is the transformation... K: Quite. A: ...and the marvellous vista of understanding, which is not an ‘if then’ thing, but is truly concurrent. And the other one that I thought of, and I was hoping you might agree with, is saying the same thing, if I understand it well in terms of what you have said—and again I will try to translate it as literally as I can: ‘God is love and the one abiding in love is abiding in God and God is abiding in him.’ K: Quite, quite. A: I put the ‘-ing’ on all those words because of the character of the language itself. And this ‘inging’ gives the feeling that there is an activity here that is not bound temporally. K: It isn’t a static state. It isn’t something you accept intellectually and leave like that. Then it is death, there is nothing in it. A: Yes. K: That’s why, you see, we have divided the physical world as the East and the West. We have divided ourselves into different religions, and we have divided the world into nationalities, capitalists and socialists, communists, and the others and so on. We have divided ourselves into fragments, opposing each other; and where there is a division there is conflict. A: Precisely.
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