On Conflict by Krishnamurti

Author:Krishnamurti [Krishnamurti]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

Ojai, 13 April 1975

THE PROBLEM IS: what is action that is not always based on memory? Because action based on memory must inevitably lead to degeneracy. That is our problem. Because the human mind is degenerating, and one of the factors of that degeneration is conflict, fear, and the everlasting pursuit of pleasure, all based on the movement of thought that is a material process. Is there an action that is not degenerate? Is there an action that is perception and action? Actually perceiving and acting without the interval of time.

Let me put it another way. Life is relationship. Without relationship there is no life, living. Yet in one’s relationship there is a great deal of accumulated memory; between two people there are hurts, nagging, pleasures, annoyances, domination, and so on. You know what happens in relationship. All that is stored up in memory as an image. You have an image about her, and she has an image about you. And these two images say, ‘We are related. We love each other’. See what is happening: love is reduced to the images that you have about each other. Those images are memories, and so you call love a remembrance of things past. That is a fact; that happens in daily life. Now, can you live without these images? Only then is there love. In that relationship in which there is no image, there is an action from moment to moment that is always fresh.

You are related to somebody intimately, your wife, your girl, your boy, or whoever it is. Living together for a day or for fifteen or thirty years, you have created, put together an image about her or him. That is a fact. You can see it in your own life. That accumulation of various incidents, insults, annoyances, impatience, anger, pleasure, domination has become a memory, an image, and that image is always responding. That memory is always responding in the relationship. Now, can you live without building an image at all? Then only is there relationship. Now, can you do it, never create an image, whatever happens? Don’t say yes or no; you are going to find out. If you say, ‘No, it’s not possible’, then there is no problem; you go on in your own way. But if you want to find out, which means how to live differently, you must ask this question, whether you can live without a single image. Do you want to find out? I will point it out to you, and we will go together. I am not your guru, thank God, or your teacher or explainer—nothing.

You have to find out what is attention and what is inattention. I am related to you, intimately, family, and I have an image about you. Why has that image come into being at all? Does the image come into being when there is attention? So I must find out what attention is.

What is attention? Is attention concentration? What is concentration? When you concentrate, you exclude; you are putting your whole being on a certain point when you concentrate.

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