BENGALURU: We are together having a conversation, you as a separate human being, if you are separate at all, with the speaker. We are walking down a lane, wooded, plenty of shadows and birds singing and we sit down together and talk about the whole problem of existence, which is very complex. And as we are friends for a long time we have many days to talk over these things.
And we are neither convincing each other about any subject. We are not trying to persuade each other, we are not trying to overcome the other through arguments or sticking dogmatically to one’s own opinion, prejudices, but rather together – and I hope you are doing the same with me – together we are going to look at the world as it is and the world that is within us.
Many volumes have been written about the world outside of us: the environment, society, politics, economics, and so on but very few – as far as I know, and one may be mistaken – very few have gone to the very length of discovering what we actually are, why human beings are behaving as they are doing - killing each other, constantly in trouble with each other, following some authority or other – some book, some person, some ideal – and having no right relationship with their friends, with their wives, with their husbands and with their children.
Why human beings have become after so many millennia so vulgar, so brutal, utterly lacking care, consideration, attention to others, and denying the whole process of what is considered love, if we at all have that quality. And outwardly there are wars, which man has lived with wars for thousands and thousands of years. We are trying to stop nuclear war but we have never stopped wars. There has been no demonstration right in the world to stop wars, but they demonstrate against a particular war.
And these wars have been going on; people being exploited, oppressed – and the oppressor becoming the oppressor. This is the cycle of human existence with sorrow, loneliness, a great sense of depression, the mounting anxiety, the utter lack of insecurity, and there is no relationship with society or with one’s own intimate persons – a relationship in which there is no row, conflict, quarrels, oppression and so on.
This is the world we live in – which I am sure we all know; or we are unaware of it, or we don’t want to know. Most of us are unaware of what is actually happening. And the scientists, the biologists, the philosophers have their own separate existence apart from the rest of us. And throughout these millennia our brains are conditioned; conditioned by knowledge.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti