Persisting towards a better tomorrow

And most of us, lacking this extraordinary quality of love, slip into ‘righteous’ habits — and habit can never be righteous.
Persisting towards a better tomorrow

CHENNAI: What is important is not the piling up of words or arguments or explanations but rather to bring about in each one of us a deep revolution, a deep psychological mutation, so that there is a different kind of society, a different relationship between man and man which is not based on immorality, as it is now. A revolution in its most profound, total sense of that word must take place not through any system, or any action of the will, or a combination of habit and foresight. One of our greatest difficulties is — is it not? — that we are caught in habits. And habit, however refined, however subtle, deeply established, engrained, is not love. Love can never be a thing of habit. 

And most of us, lacking this extraordinary quality of love, slip into ‘righteous’ habits — and habit can never be righteous. Habit is not good or bad; there is only habit, a repetition, a conformity to the past, which is the tradition, which is the outcome of a great deal of inherited and acquired knowledge and instinct. And if one pursues or lives in habit inevitably there must be the increase of fear. Psychologically, inwardly, we refuse to follow the movement of life because our roots are deep in habit, tradition, in what has been told to us, in obedience and acceptance. And it seems to me it is very important to understand this, and to break away from it. Because I don’t see how man can live without love. Without it we are destroying each other. 

Most of us have grooves of habit, conscious or unconscious, habits that we think are right and wrong; the good and the bad habits, the behaviour habits and the habits which are not respectable, which are considered by society immoral. But the immorality of society is in itself immoral. You can see that’s fairly simple, because society is based on aggression, on acquisitiveness, and on the sense of one dominating the other, and so on — the whole cultural system. And we have accepted such morality and it has become a habit. To change that habit, to see how extraordinarily immoral it is — though that immorality has become highly respectable — to see it, and to act not with a mind that is caught in habits. To act in a wholly different way is only possible when we understand the nature of fear. 

So if we could go into this question of fear, not intellectually, not verbally, but being aware of one’s psychological fears, examine them. That is, give fear space so that it can flower, and in the very flowering of it, watch it. You know, fear is a very strange phenomena. If we could understand the psychological fears, then biological, physiological fears can be easily remedied. But unfortunately we start with physical fears and neglect the psychological fears. Because when we avoid it we are merely turning our backs on it. But it’s always there. And when you can look at it without any avoidance, then there is a different quality to that fear. I hope you are doing it, I hope you are taking your own particular pet fear, however cherished, however carefully one has avoided it, and look at it without any form of escape, without judgement, condemnation, justification. 

You know, the extraordinary nature of fear, and when one lives in fear one lives in darkness. It’s a dreadful thing. One is aware of it, one doesn’t know what to do with it, so one turns to analysts, psycho-analysts, you know, all that business. So by looking and giving freedom to fear there is an ending of fear. Fear is not an insoluble problem. And when there is an understanding of fear, there is an understanding of all the related problems to that fear. And it’s only when there is no fear there is freedom. And you know, love is not habit, love cannot be cultivated; habits can be cultivated and for most of us love is something so far away we haven’t even known the quality of it, and to come upon it there must be freedom. And when the mind is completely still within its own freedom, then there is the ‘impossible’, which is love.— Jiddu Krishnamurti

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