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Ommen, Holland
7th Public Talk 9th August, 1937
Once you develop the will that merely overcomes all habit, conditioning, that very will itself becomes thoughtless and repetitive.
We must understand both the habitual action and the ideal or conceptual action, before we can comprehend action without illusion. For reality lies in actuality.
Awareness is not the development of an introspective will, but it is the spontaneous unification of all the separative forces of desire.
Questioner: Is awareness a matter of slow growth?
Krishnamurti: Where there is intense interest there is full awareness. As one is mentally lazy and emotionally crippled with fear, awareness becomes a matter of slow growth. Then it is not really awareness but a process of carefully building up walls of resistance. As most of us have built up these self-protecting walls, awareness appears to be a slow process, a growth, thus satisfying our slothfulness. Out of this laziness we carve theories of postponement - eventually but not now, enlightenment is a process of slow growth, of life after life, and so on. We proceed to rationalize this slothfulness and satisfactorily arrange our lives according to it.
Questioner: This process seems inevitable. But how is one to awaken quickly?
Krishnamurti: Is it a slow process for individuals to change from violence to peace? I think not. If one really perceives the whole significance of hate, affection spontaneously comes into being; what prevents this immediate and deep perception is our unconscious fear of intellectual and desire commitments and patterns. For such a perception might involve a drastic change in our daily life: the withering away of ambition, the putting away of all nationalistic, class distinctions, attachments, and so on. This fear is prompting us, warning us, and we consciously or unconsciously yield to it and thereby increase our safeguards, which only engenders further fear. So long as we do not comprehend this process we shall ever be thinking in terms of postponement, of growth, of overcoming. Fear cannot be dissolved in the future; only in constant awareness can it cease to be.
Questioner: I think we must come quickly to peace.
Krishnamurti: If you hate because your intellectual and emotional well-being is threatened in many ways and if you merely resort to further violence, though you may successfully, for the moment at least, ward off fear, hate will continue. It is only by constantly being aware, that fear and hate can disappear. Do not think in terms of postponement. Begin to be aware, and if there is interest, that itself will bring about, spontaneously, a state of peace, of affection.
War, the war in you, the hate of your neighbour, of other peoples, cannot be overcome by violence in any form. If you begin to see the utter necessity of deeply thinking-feeling about it now, your prejudices, your conditioning, which are the cause of hate and fear, will be revealed. In this revelation there is an awakening of affection, love.
Questioner: I think that it will take all our life to overcome fear, hate.
Krishnamurti: You are again thinking in terms of postponement. Does each one feel the appallingness of hate and perceive its consequences? If you deeply feel this, then you are not concerned with when hate will cease, for it has already yielded to something in which alone there can be deep human contact and cooperation.
If one is conscious of hate or violence in different forms, can that violence be done away with through the process of time?
Questioner: No, not by the mere passing of time. One would have to have a method to get rid of it.
Krishnamurti: No, the mere passage of time cannot resolve hate; it may be covered over heavily or carefully watched over and guarded. But fear, hate, will still continue. Can a system help you to get rid of hate? It may help you to subjugate it, control it, strengthen your will to combat it, but it will not bring about that affection which alone can give man abiding freedom. If you do not feel deeply that hate is inherently poisonous, no system, no authority, can destroy it for you. Questioner: You may intellectually see that hate is poison, but still you feel hate.
Krishnamurti: Why does this happen? Is it not because intellectually you are overdeveloped and still primitive in your desires? There cannot be harmony between the beautiful and the ugly. The cessation of hate cannot be brought about through any method, but only through constant awareness of the conditionings that have brought about this division between love and hate.
Why does this division exist?
Questioner: Lack of love.
Questioner: Ignorance.
Krishnamurti: Don't you see, by merely repeating that if one really lived rightly this division would not exist, that by not being ignorant it would disappear, that habit is the cause of this division, that if we were not conditioned there would be perfect love - don't you see that you are merely intoning certain phrases that you have learnt? Of what value is this? None. Is each one of you conscious of this division? Please, don't answer. Consider what is taking place in yourself.
We see that we are in conflict, that there is hate and yet at the same time a disgust for it. There is this division. We can see how this division has come into being, through various conditioning causes. The mere consideration of the causes is not going to bring freedom from hate, fear. The problem of starvation is not solved by merely discovering its causes - the bad economic system, over-production, maldistribution, and so on. If you, personally, are hungry, your hunger will not be satisfied merely by your knowing the causes of it. In the same way, merely knowing the causes of hate, fear, with its various conflicts, will not dissolve it. What will put an end to hate is choiceless awareness, the cessation of all intellectual effort to overcome hate.
Questioner: We are not conscious enough of this hate.
Krishnamurti: When we are conscious, we object to the conflict, to the suffering involved in this conflict, and proceed to act, hoping to overcome all conflict. This only further strengthens the intellect. You have to be aware of all this process, silently, spontaneously, and in this awareness there comes a new element which is not the result of any violence, any effort, and which alone can free you from hate and those conditionings that cripple.