This essay by the late Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti was written in 1948, as people everywhere began digging out from the horror, madness, and destruction of World War II, and Hindus and Muslims battled each other in India. Nearly fifty years later, as the world continues to explode in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, Krishnamurti’s writing is hauntingly relevant.
— Cassandra Sitterly
Wherever we may live, each of us is aware that there is an ever-mounting confusion in the world. This loss of orientation, this degeneration of values, is not restricted to any particular class or nation. Wherever we live, at whatever level of society, we are aware of conflict and misery that seem to have no end.
Many solutions have been offered for this confusion, solutions economic and political, social and religious. And yet, no system can bring about peace. Systems, with their ideologies and their patterns for action, are merely concerned with outward changes and adjustments. They are unable to bring about a radical transformation because they strive toward a result, a goal that is the outcome of superficial knowledge, calculation, and frustration. Their knowledge is not integrated. The experts who offer well-planned formulas are obsessed with preconceived achievements and are incapable of understanding the psychological complexities of the human mind and heart.
These systems, concerned solely with results and not with the means, can offer only patterns of action and variations of ideas. As long as peace is conceived in terms of opposing ideologies, there cannot be peace. As long as peace is a matter of which side wins, the victor is invariably faced with disaster, because in order to conquer, he has to let loose the powers that enslave him. The way of peace is to understand the fallacy of the idea that peace is the result of strife, the outcome of a physical or mental conflict between military or ideological antagonists. Peace is not the result of a struggle; peace is that which remains when all conflict is dissolved in the flame of understanding. Peace is not the opposite of conflict nor the synthesis of opposites.
Philosophical and economic systems are turned out in large numbers by the specialists, and these various systems compete with each other for power. After all, experts and specialists can offer only their opinions; they cannot offer the true solution, for the true solution is completely outside all systems. A system may be technically sound and yet inapplicable except by compulsion, and there cannot be peace through compulsion. There can be no peace without the removal of the causes of chaos. And the roots of sorrow must be seen before they wither away. Yet we rely on specialists, because none of us wants to think out the problems of peace for himself. But surely peace is not in the realm of ideas. You can see for yourself that peace is not the product of a thought process. Our thinking is conditioned and therefore limited. Limited thinking is invariably erroneous and always a source of conflict. To rely on systems, however technically perfect, is to avoid the responsibility of being directly concerned with peace.
The war, this evergrowing tragedy, is after all, merely the spectacular and bloody expression of our daily life. War is not an accidental result of an irresponsible society. This misery, this violence, this appalling chaos in the world is the result of our daily actions in relationship to things, to people, and to ideas. As long as this relationship is not fully and deeply understood, there can be no peace in the world. Peace and happiness do not come into being by themselves, or by chance. To be happy and peaceful, one has to pay the price. This price may appear enormous, but in reality it is not so very great: only the clear intention to have peace in ourselves and live in peace with our neighbors. This intention is essential. Peace is a way of life, not the result of strategy by an individual or a group. It is a way of life in which violence is not suppressed by the ideal of nonviolence, but in which the causes and effects of violence are deeply understood, and violence is therefore transcended.
To understand violence, there must be clear awareness of violence in its various expressions. Nationalism, class antagonism, acquisitiveness, the lust for power, and the innumerable beliefs from which our minds suffer all bring about violence. Acquisitiveness, the basis of our present civilization, has divided man against man. In our desire to possess, to dominate peoples’ thoughts, feelings, and work, we have divided ourselves into classes, class governments, class struggles, class wars, and also into Hindus and Muslims, Americans and Russians, workers and peasants. The power over things made by the hand is the least disastrous; it is the mental, the psychological slavery of man to man that is so brutalizing and disintegrating. The real causes of war are hidden in our unwillingness to keep inwardly, psychologically, free. As long as we are not ready to abandon our beliefs, dogmas, ideologies, and the various compulsions which are merely chains provided by society, the problem of violence will continue. These chains will bring about inevitable chaos and misery to all the schemes for social or political, economic or religious transformation.
And yet we can live extremely simply and wisely, and therefore peacefully, if our minds and hearts are not burdened by possessiveness, whether of things made by the hand or by the mind. What we need in the way of food, clothing, and shelter will come to us easily and sanely when our lives are free of violence. This freedom from violence is love. Each of us must be concerned with the creation of a new society, free from the forces which are destroying and disintegrating the world in which we live. You, the individual, must realize that by your own transformation, by freely paying the price for peace, by your gladly abandoning nationalism and class security, ideologies and organized religions, you can bring peace to the world. Your own transformation is of the utmost importance, because you, yourself, are the cause of the confusion in the world; your way of life will immediately transform the world about you, or continue further the chaos and sorrow.
What you are is of the highest importance. It is your everyday conduct that is decisive in bringing about peace to the world; it is not mass movements impelled by physical and psychological compulsions. Unless you stop yielding to pressure — physical or mental, religious or political — you will continue to be the creator and the victim of this appalling misery. Therefore, you, the individual, are the world problem. You are the only problem because all the other problems are created by your unwillingness to tackle yourself first and to understand yourself deeply and fully.
The problems of the world are your own problems merely magnified and multiplied. They are not in any way strange to you — they are the same problems of food and shelter, affection and freedom, peace and happiness. You are a part and an expression of the world and the world is reflected in you fully and completely. You cannot separate yourself from the world because the world affects you and you affect the world, whether you like it or not. All attempts to estrange yourself from the world will inevitably lead to decay, to the withering of the mind and the heart. You have made the world and you have to transform it. It is by your conduct, by your way of living, by fundamentally regenerating yourself, that you can create a new world free from want and strife, from exploitation and war. This fundamental regeneration, this complete transformation, will come if you are aware of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Be aware of how you behave in your daily life, how you are conditioned by the past and your surroundings, how you act from memory, from greed, from imitativeness and submissiveness. Do not condemn your life. Be compassionate to yourself, but do not justify yourself. Without condemnation and justification, see yourself as you are. Watch yourself thinking, feeling, and acting until you begin to understand yourself. This flame of understanding brings about disentanglement which makes for true simplicity. It is this simplicity of mind and heart that will bring about the transformation of the individual and will immediately transform the world in which you live.
You will become aware of violence in your daily life. If you condemn it, you will create the opposite, the ideal of nonviolence, which only perpetuates violence by involving you in an endless conflict with violence. To remain in a state of conflict is in itself violence. To cultivate an ideal of nonviolence while all the time living in violence is hypocrisy and a great form of violence. An ideal is always something that is not; it is an imaginary fiction, this opposite. The actual is the only thing that exists. Being fictitious, the ideal is noneffective and therefore sustains violence in some form or another. But in the full and pliable awareness of violence with its various implications, there is freedom from it and not merely substitution by another form of violence.
Love alone can transform the world. No system, either of the left or the right, however cunningly or convincingly devised, can bring peace and happiness to the world. Love is not an ideal; it comes into being when there is respect and mercy, which all of us can and do feel. We must show this respect and mercy to all. It is the way of our being and it comes with the richness of understanding. Where there is greed and envy, where there is belief and dogma, there cannot be love. Where there is nationalism or attachment to sensate values, there cannot be love. And yet, love alone resolves all our human difficulties. Without love, life is crude, cruel, and empty. But to see the truth of love, we must be free of the imprisoning processes that destroy the individual and disintegrate the world. Peace and happiness come when the mind and heart are not burdened by these constantly isolating ways of life.
Love and truth are not found in any book, church, or temple. They come into being with self-knowledge. Self-knowing is arduous but not difficult; it becomes difficult only when we are trying to achieve a result. But just to be aware from moment to moment of one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions without condemnation and justification brings a freedom, a liberation in which alone can there be the bliss of truth. It is this truth that will bring peace to the world. It is this truth that will make each one of us a blessing in our relationship, a source of happiness.
This war which seems so catastrophically imminent cannot be prevented by any spasmodic effort of diplomacy or by the game of conferences. Pacts and treaties will not stop the war. What can put an end to those recurring wars is goodwill. Ideologies in their very nature cause conflict, antagonism, and confusion, and so goodwill is destroyed.
Ideologies become all-important when the individual and his inward happiness are denied. Then you and I become merely pawns in the game of power seekers, and where there is hunger after power, whether it be individual or collective, there must be bloodshed and sorrow.
The way of peace is simple. It is the way of truth and love. It starts with the individual. Where the individual accepts responsibility for war and violence, there peace finds a foothold. To go far, one must begin near; the first actions are within. The sources of peace are not outside of us, and the heart of man is in his own keeping. To have peace, we must be peaceful. To put an end to violence, each of us must voluntarily free himself from the causes of violence. Diligently, one must address the task of self-transformation. Our minds and hearts must be simple, creatively empty, and watchful. Only then can love come into being. Love alone can bring peace to the world, and only then will the world know the bliss of the real.
April 3, 1948
Bombay, India
Our thanks to Mark Lee at the Krishnamurti Foundation of America for permission to reprint.
— Cassandra Sitterly
