18 January

Krishnamurti In India: The Last Decade

First Public Talk – Calcutta 1982

14 Audience: [inaudible]

15 K: Just a minute, sir, please; you will ask questions perhaps at the end of the talk if there is time. But I’m asking – but the speaker is asking if you are following him at all, or at the end of the long day you’re tired and may not be listening at all. So he may be talking to himself. So please be good enough, since you are here, to pay attention to what is being said because it’s your life, not the speaker’s life. It is your daily conflicting, confused existence with all the sorrow, with all the pain and grief. So, please in talking over together, you are aware of your own thinking, your own reactions, your own responses, how they are limited; how they are conditioned; how you depend on past knowledge. And so our life become very narrow, rather sloppy, confused and there is the fear of insecurity. If one is aware at all of one’s own activities – inward activities, your thoughts, your feelings, your reactions, then you will find out for yourself how conditioned you are, how limited you are, and when you recognise that fact, then you realise the consequences of that conditioning, that limitation. Wherever there is limitation as a Hindu or Muslim, there must be conflict. Wherever there is a division between husband and wife, there must be conflict. And human beings, throughout the world, after all this evolution are still in conflict with each other, not only the conflict of war, the preparation for war, the new machines that are killing, may kill millions of people with one blow.

16 So, please, most respectfully, consider all this because we are concerned with your life as a human being. And that life, our daily living, has become extraordinarily complex, extraordinarily dangerous, difficult, uncertain. The future of man is really at stake. This is not a threat; this is not a pessimistic point of view. The crisis is not only physical but the crisis is in consciousness, in our being. So please, in talking over together, become aware of all this. So in becoming aware, you begin to discover: you begin to find out for yourself how your life has become such pain, such anxiety, such uncertainty. If you are so aware, you can then proceed further, deeply, more and more but if you merely listen to the words – and words have very little meaning – words have certain significance, but if one lives in words, as most people do, in symbols, in myths, in romantic nonsense, then we make life more and more difficult, more and more dangerous for each other. So please be good enough to listen, to find out, to question, to doubt, so that your own brain becomes aware of itself.

17 So we are asking why human beings who have developed the most marvellous technology the world has ever known: easy communication, electricity, sanitation and so on; we don’t have to go into all that. But psychologically, inwardly, we remain as we have been more or less for the last forty thousand years. Inwardly, I wonder if one realises that: we have systems, we have ideals, we have all the so-called sacred books which are not sacred at all, they are just words. Why human beings, which is you, have not radically brought about a change, a psychological revolution, and we are going to enquire into that. And whether it is possible to bring about total mutation in the brain cells themselves.