You are the World by Krishnamurti

Author:Krishnamurti
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Krishnamurti Foundations
Published: 2014-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

TALKS AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY

1

It is becoming more and more difficult to live peacefully in this world without withdrawing into a monastery or some self-enclosing ideology. The world is in such disorder, and there have been so many theories and speculative suggestions on how to live and what to do. Philosophers have been at it for so long, spinning out their ideas of what man is and what he should do. As one travels throughout the world—not being a philosopher or a human being crowded in with many ideologies and having no belief whatsoever about anything—one asks oneself whether it is at all possible for human beings to change.

When one asks that question (and I’m sure those of us who are somewhat thoughtful and serious do ask it), one hears it said that we should first change the world—that is, change the social structure with its economy—and that it must be a global change, a global revolution, not a change affecting only a part of the world. Then, it is said, there will be no need for the individual human being to set about changing at all: he will change naturally. Circumstances will then bring about right occupation, leisure, right relationship, consideration, love, understanding and so on. So there are those who, reasoning thus, advocate changing the environment—and it must be global—so that man, who is the creature of his environment, will also change, naturally.

We have this division, then, between the inner and the outer, the outer being the environment, the society. Bring about a deep revolution in the latter, they say, and this will result in changing the individual: the you and the me. This division has been maintained for thousands of years, the separation between what is called spirit, and that which is of the world, matter—the religious and the so-called worldly. And this division, in itself, is most destructive, because it breeds separateness and a series of conflicts: how the inner can adjust itself to the outer and the outer shape the inner. This has always been the problem. The whole Communist world denies the inner; they say, ‘do not bother about it, it will look after itself when everything is perfectly and bureaucratically organized’.

One observes also that man, with all his anxieties, violence, despair, fear, acquisitiveness, his incessant competitiveness, has produced a certain structure which we call society, with its morality and its violence. So, as a human being, one is responsible for whatever is happening in the world: the wars, the confusion, the conflict that is going on both within and without. Each one of us is responsible, but I doubt whether most of us feel that at all. Intellectually, verbally, perhaps, we may accept it; but do we feel actually responsible for the war that is going on in Vietnam or in the Middle East, for the starvation in the East, and all the misery, division and conflict? I doubt it. If we did, our whole educational system would be different. As we do not feel it, we obviously do not love our children.

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