Crisis in Consciousness

Produktdetails

Verlag

Krishnamurti Foundation America

Erschienen

2018

Sprache

English

Seiten

636

Infos

636 Seiten

ISBN

978-1-912875-03-0

Kurztext / Annotation

Krishnamurti posits that if the politicians and scientists wanted to end starvation in the world it could be done-food, clothing, and shelter for everyone. 'It could be done, but they are not going to do it as long as their thinking is based on nationalism, on motives of their own personal profit. And even if this far-reaching outward change were brought about, it seems to me that the problem is much deeper. The problem is not merely starvation, war, the brutality of man to man; it is the crisis in our own consciousness. Fundamentally the problem lies within.' In this volume, Krishnamurti takes great care to elucidate this necessity of a revolution within our consciousness-where the problem lies-before we expect any kind of revolutionary change outside of ourselves.

Textauszug

Poona, India, 1958

First Talk in Poona

I think it would be well if we could establish a true relationship between the speaker and the audience; otherwise, there may be a great deal of misunderstanding and misjudgment. Obviously the speaker has something to say, and you have come to listen. What he has to say may have very little value, or it may have significance if one is capable of listening with quiet attention.

It is most important to know how to listen. Most of us do not listen; we come either with a tendency to resist or to refute what is being said, or we compare it with what we have previously heard, or learned from books. In this process, obviously, there is no listening because when you are thinking of what somebody else has said on a subject, your mind is merely going back to various memories-merely trying to compare what is being said with what you have already heard or read. So please, if I may suggest, do follow what is being said.

There are so many terrible things taking place in the world, so much misery and confusion, such decadence, corruption, and evil; and I feel that if one is at all earnest, intent on understanding these human problems, one must approach the matter with a certain serious purpose. What I am going to say may be entirely different from what you know or believe-and I think it will be. I am saying this, not from any sense of conceit or over-confidence, but because most of us, when anything unfamiliar is said, are apt to reject it offhand or to ridicule it. This is especially so with the experts, those who are specialists in some department-the scientists, technicians, lecturers, professors, and so on. They are particularly apt to discard a new approach to our many problems because they divide life into departments and think only in terms of their specialized field. Life's problems are not going to be solved by the specialists. If a man is an economist, he tends to think that all the problems of life will be solved by some economic system which will bring about equality of opportunity for achievement, for gain, and to him every other form of thought, of investigation, of search, seems of secondary importance or not worthwhile.

So, considering all these things, it would be nice, I think, if we could, at least for this hour, listen with a sense of humility, with an attitude of trying to find out what the speaker intends to convey. Afterwards you can question it, discuss it, refute it, or brush it aside. But first, surely, if there is to be any form of communication, there must be a certain understanding, a common ground established between speaker and listener. Listening is very difficult; it is an art. I am sure you have never really listened to anybody because your mind is always occupied, thinking of other things, is it not so? You never actually listen to your wife, to your children, to your neighbor, because your mind is caught up in its own fears and anxieties, in the innumerable preoccupations that arise in the mind and prevent full communication. If you observe yourself you will see how extraordinarily difficult it is to listen to anything, especially to a speaker who is going to say things which you will not like, or which you do not immediately understand, or which seem contradictory. Such things are apt to produce a great deal of confusion, and so you tend to brush them all aside.

So it is necessary to listen with a sense of humility. Humility is entirely different from being humble. Humbleness can be achieved, gathered, cultivated by one who is already full of vanity and arrogance, but humility is not a quality to be acquired; it is a state of being. You are, or you are not, in a state of humility, and we shall discuss all this presently as we go into our many problems in the talks which are to follow. But I am suggesting now that if one wants to learn, to understand what another says, there mu

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