Table Of ContentA 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.
