The companions, the relationships, the work, the ideas, and the beliefs and the dogmas that we hold have produced a monstrous world, a world of conflict, misery, and perpetual sorrow. We accept it as normal condition, we put up with it day after day; we never inquire into the necessity, the urgency of a revolution that is neither economical nor political but much more fundamental.
No inquiry is ever possible when the mind is tethered to any kind of dogma, tradition or belief. The difficulty is not that we are not capable of inquiring, not that we are incapable of investigating, but we are apparently totally incapable of letting things go, putting things aside and therefore with a fresh mind, with a young, innocent mind, looking at the world and all the appalling things that are taking place in it.
Only when you can destroy completely everything that you have held sacred or right or virtuous that you can find out what is truth.
If one has observed sufficiently the things that are happening – not only mechanically, technically, but also in our relationships between people – when one observes that progress throughout the world is denying freedom, the strength of society in which the individual has completely ceased to be, and how nationalities are dividing themselves more and more, one will see that some kind of deep revolt must come about.
Society controls our minds, shapes our hearts, our actions, whether you live in a communist, Hindu or Christian world. Society with its structure shapes the mind of every human being, consciously or unconsciously. The culture in which we live – the traditions, religions, politics and education –past and present, shapes our thought. And to bring about a complete revolution –a crisis in consciousness – you must question the structure of society.
We are concerned with bringing about a different action, mind, a different entity as a human being; and to go into that profoundly, we must not be slaves to words.
Society is relationship. And that social structure, as it is now, is based on ambition, greed, envy, seeking power, position, prestige, and all the things that man has set up as being extraordinarily significant in life. That is the actual fact – not your gods, not the Gita, not your guru, not your saints and saviours, but the daily life in which you are, which is your ambition, your greed, your envy, your pursuit of power and wealth and position which you want. And, without altering that radically, without breaking down the whole system, you cannot have a religious revolution.
A religious revolution is not concerned with reaction at all. It is concerned with dealing with a fact and destroying that fact; that is, being aware that our relationship, our social structure is based on this extraordinary sense of values – on ambition, greed, envy – and destroying that completely in ourselves, to tally, wholly eradicating it. That is the beginning of a religious revolution – not the pursuit of an idea, which you call God.
You need a new mind because a new world has to be created – not by politicians, but by you and me who are just ordinary average persons, because it is we that have to change completely, it is we that have to being about a mutation in our minds and hearts.
It is only when the mind is completely quiet, free of conflict – it is only then that the mind can go very far into the realms that are beyond time, thought and feeling.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bombay, February 21, 1962
