Our Relationship with the World (Part II) :Relationship to Society
by Prof. P. Krishna
Rector, Rajghat Education Centre, Krishnamurti Foundation India, Varanasi221001, India
( Second talk delivered on this topic at the Krishnamurti Gathering held in Saanen, Switzerland on31 July, 1995. )
We said last time that if we do not identify ourselves with anything in particular,like either the body or the brain, or the nation, or a particular religion, or aparticular family, then we are not separate entities and in that sense, we are theworld. But when we do separate ourselves through identification, which may beeither by choice or simply through inertia, through habit, something which wehave never questioned, then that affects our whole relationship with everything inthis world. It makes us possessive, it makes us exploit relationships for this meand everything then is directly or indirectly used to further this sense of the me.So the brain starts functioning like a lawyer, defending and protecting that whichit has identified with, and the very thought process gets coloured; it can no longerinvestigate or explore freely, which may be the right function of thought. Insteadit goes in the direction of justifying, defending, feeling superior, saying, "What Iam saying is right, what is mine is better than what is yours", leading to a sense of competition and rivalry. The source of the whole thing, lies in the identificationwith the me and the mine. Having done that, we feel we are separate individuals,but that may not be a fact. It may have become a fact for us, becausepsychologically we let all this happen.If we are one with the world, then it means also that one is responsible for thewhole world--not just for me, my school, my nation, my religion, my family, butfor the whole world. What does it mean to be responsible for the whole world?Does it seem like it makes sense ? Also, if we are the world, then it means that theworld must be terribly affected by the way we are which is the other way around:not only you are the world, but the world is you. Can we examine it in that way ?Is the world really affected by the way we are ? If it isn't, then I am not the world,and the world is not me ! Then I am something separate from the world. Theconnection is not very apparent, so can we investigate it ? Let us take a specificexample. We are all aware of what is happening in what was Yugoslavia, inBosnia. Are we responsible for what is happening there or only those people areresponsible who are directly involved in it ? You could take any other example :what is happening in Ireland, what is happening in Kashmir, what is being done tonature. Are the pollution, the nuclear catastrophes only the work of theindustrialists, the scientists, and we are not responsible for them ? Are thescientist, the politician, the leaders in Bosnia, separate from us and therefore weare not responsible for what is happening there ? It appears that way, doesn't it ?We often blame the people of that particular location for behaving in that way.We either pity them, or we condemn them. But we don't observe them and, fromthat, learn what our responsibility is. Because we don't see the connection, wedon't feel responsible. I think it's important to question that. Because it may be avery convenient thing that our mind has invented, to separate itself out from otherpeople, and feel" I am not responsible for that". It may be an escape. I am notsaying it is but we need to investigate that. A religious mind questions everything.So one is asking: "Are those human beings separate from me ? Or are we reallyessentially the same, a part of this world, and therefore whatever we are affectsthe whole world ?" Krishnamurti has pointed out that society is an abstraction.There is no such thing as society, separate from us. It is our relationship with eachother, which is vitally affected by what we are, which creates that society andwhat happens in that society. Is that true ? Let's look at it. After all, society is acollection of what we call individuals. They may not be individuals, but that'swhat we call them for the time being, because that is how we refer to people.Now, if there is a collection of a million or billion individuals, each one of whomfeels he is a separate individual, a separate entity, each one of whom isself-centred, aggressive, violent, in competition with others, struggling, in conflict,
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can you create out of them, a society which is peaceful, which is nonviolent,which is gentle, orderly, or is that inherently impossible ? What we are trying atpresent in the world is that we are taking the individual for granted. We are eventraining him in education to feel that he is a separate individual, that he should beambitious, he should be aggressive, he should put himself forward, he shouldassert his ego to succeed in life. And having made such individuals then we aresaying : "Why don't we have peace in society, why don't we have love, why dowe have all this violence and how can we contain it "? In order to contain it, wehave the police force, we have the entire judicial system, which punishes theoffender, we have rules and regulations. At the international level, we have theUnited Nations. Whenever there is a situation of war between two countries, theUnited Nations tries to intervene and prevent that war from happening. So wehave set up mechanisms for preventing war. Will that remove the causes of war ?If it does not remove the causes of war, we're going to perpetually have thisproblem of war and perpetually need a United Nations to contain it. It is the samewith the judicial system. We first produce violent, aggressive individuals, who arethe result of that society--born in that society, growing up in imitation of thatsociety, educated in that society, who turn into rapists, or dacoits or criminals;then, to protect society from them, we catch hold of them, we have an entirepolice force to control them. Will that control change that individual ? Willputting him in prison change him, make him peaceful, or will he become morebitter, more violent, so that we need even more control ? I am just pointing outwhat we are actually doing. It becomes a perennial problem that on the one handwe are producing human beings like this, and on the other trying to control them.In Russia, the communists thought that by controlling through the State, in a verytight way, they can change the human being. For seventy years this experimentwas done, with tremendous repression and cruelty-- trying to create equalityamong human beings outwardly enforcing that equality, and hoping it would gointo the interior. Trying to move from the periphery towards the centre, not theother way, not operating at the source of the problem, but with the symptoms. Ithas not worked, it did not work. You needed repression and more repression, withthe result that when they suddenly removed all that repression there istremendous chaos-- which is what the actuality is. So how does the actualitychange ? It may be just a matter of chance that what is happening in Bosnia is nothappening here. Just as much a matter of chance as it is where the next storm willcome in the atmosphere, or where there will be the next earthquake. The causesmay be deep down somewhere, though the manifestation takes place in oneparticular place. The human beings in Yugoslavia are no different from you andme and what could happen there can happen here tomorrow, the potential for itexists, unless we inwardly transform and are totally free of violence. Are we ? Oris it that right now, around us, circumstances are such that we can afford to benon-violent ? If we were in Bosnia, the circumstances would be such that wecould not afford to be non violent, so we would choose to be violent. So, isnon-violence a matter of choice ? That is a question that has often been asked :whether Gandhi was really non violent, or whether he chose non-violencebecause violence would not have succeeded against the British ? If the enemy ispowerful, strong, much more capable of violence than you are, then it is stupid totry to overthrow him with violence, he will win. So you cannot fight him and if you can not fight him, try non-violence ! Then it just becomes another weapon tofight with. Then it is not really non-violence, when it is a matter of choice. Or didGandhi have nothing to do with violence because there was no violence in him ?So he refused to kill, refused to hurt anybody, irrespective of what theconsequences may be-- one may be decimated, destroyed, it does not matter. Thatis a totally different state from the one of choosing to adopt a non-violentmovement as the better choice in a given situation.Krishnamurti was lecturing in India when Gandhi was murdered, in January 1948.And he was asked by someone in the audience : Sir, who was responsible for themurder of Gandhi ?" His answer was that each one of us was responsible--eachone who identifies with a particular religion, who forms a group, who belongs to acaste, who hates his fellow man either because of his ideas or because of thecolour of his skin, who is divided. Of course there were only a few individualswho plotted and pulled the trigger of the gun and according to the law, only thosemen were responsible and were hanged. But we have all contributed in producingthat man. It is like having a whole sea of violence to which each one of us iscontributing his share. In that sea storms are bound to arise. Those storms areyour little wars--sometimes in Iraq, sometimes in Kashmir, sometimes elsewhere.But they arise in that sea, and each one of us contributes to that sea of violence.Because we are the world, if we are violent, the world is violent. If the way I look upon my wife, my child, the tree in the garden, nature, the river, is exploitative inits outlook - which means basically separating oneself out and saying. "How can Imake use of these things for my profit ?" - if each one of us is that way, then
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society will be the way we see it in operation. Somewhere, the manifestation maybe more violent than elsewhere but the potential is every where. In that sense,you could say that the third world war is already on. The United Nations and thepoliticians call it a war only when the violence manifests beyond a certain extent,beyond a certain level, but the third world war is already going on in the minds of men, in the hatred between nations, in the use of violence to solve problems. It isalready going on because the psychological warfare is already going on. Andevery war has sown the seeds for the next war. We have seen all this happen, wehave read it in history, in our education, but we somehow feel separate from it.We feel Hitler was responsible for that war; but were we not responsible for thecreation of Hitler ? Are we, perhaps, through our process of education, throughour bringing up, creating little Hitlers ? We object only to the big Hitler, becausehe does things that are destructive and inconvenient for us, but the little Hitlersare also inconvenient ! A father who is a little Hitler in his family is veryinconvenient for his children, for that family but that is legal. So we haveaccepted a certain amount of violence as the norm, and we object only when thatviolence manifests in a bigger way. Then, we regard it as illegal, immoral, we callit war.Wars have not ended for a million years. We have continually had wars, and weare still having wars-- big wars and small wars. No animal, not even the tiger,whom we consider most ferocious, has ever created that kind of destructionwhich we human beings have created-- that is a fact. I am not saying it just tomake us feel small. It is a fact for which we are responsible. No other animal, noother species has created that much destruction on Earth, as we have created.Again that is a fact. You can look at history, see what mankind has done. Is thisgoing to change through a new political system, through another government,through the United Nations or some other organization ? How will it change ? If we are the world, and we don't change, the world doesn't change ! You canorganize things in a communist manner and you will have the violence of communism. Or you can organize things in a capitalistic manner, and you willhave the violence of capitalism. Show me a place where three is no violence?How can there be if there is violence in each one of us ? So none of those systemsis going to solve the problem. They are only meant to contain it, to put apoliceman there to make me orderly, because I am not orderly in myself. That iswhy I need the system, I need a policeman to create order. We believe that anexternal agency will bring order into society, which is me ! That may be anillusion. It has not worked for thousands of years or at least as far as the recordedhistory we know. No amount of repression has done away with it. No amount of control, organizing, this form of politics, that form of politics, has solved it. Andstill, we are not learning the basic lesson that each one of us is responsible. I amnot contributing to the war in Bosnia, only if I have ended violence within me;otherwise I am contributing to it. Just as in science you would say that if you takecalcium and carbon and oxygen atoms, you will get calcium carbonate, and theycan tell you what the properties of that material will be, it is equally true that if you take individuals of the kind that we are producing, self-centered, violent,ambitious, concerned mainly with their own success, talking a little bit of lovewithout understanding what it means, then there is no way you can have a societythat is peaceful, non-violent and orderly. That is as clear a fact as the scientificfact about a collection of atoms.So if that is true, then what is our responsibility ? Is it our responsibility to becomea politician, so that we are in a position of power, and therefore can affect andinfluence things from there ? That is often put forward as an argument. Oftenpeople say good people must enter politics, so that they can rise and come topower, and then goodness will be in power. By the time you rise to the top, youwill cease to be good ! Which means we have to understand our relationship withpower. I think it was Shakespeare who said, "Power corrupts, and absolute powercorrupts absolutely". But I question it.I think that happens because we don't understand our relationship to power.Power cannot corrupt, if you are incorruptible. Power corrupts, because we arecorruptible. And what we see in the world by way of goodness is often just bornof innocence. Children are innocent, they are good, but unless that goodness isrooted in understanding it is very fragile. Because a good human being, with verylittle self-knowledge, is completely corruptible, easily corruptible. Take a villagerfrom India who is very good because he is very simple, you take him to the cityand he gets corrupted in three months ! So goodness is very, very fragile, unless itis rooted in understanding. Therefore it seems to me that our first responsibility isto understand ourselves, to free ourselves from this division which is within us,which separates us from the rest of the world and affects all our relationships.Because so long as each one of us is that way, our governments are going to bethat way, our industries are going to be that way, and all this is going to happen.
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Our Relationship With the World (Part II) -Relationship to Society
by Prof. P. Krishna.
Rector, Rajghat Education Centre, Krishnamurti Foundation India, Varanasi 221001, India
( Second talk delivered on this topic at the Krishnamurti Gathering held in Saanen, Switzerland on 31 July, 1995. )
Rector, Rajghat Education Centre, Krishnamurti Foundation India, Varanasi 221001, India
( Second talk delivered on this topic at the Krishnamurti Gathering held in Saanen, Switzerland on 31 July, 1995. )
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