"You Are the World" Krishnamurti

"You Are the World" Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti was one of the most profound spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. He was groomed to be the second coming of Christ by the Theosophical Society. He spent over seventy years giving talks and holding discussions on the meaning of life. Many of his talks are recorded in the dozens of books that he left us.

C.W. Leadbeater one of the leaders of the Theosophical Society proclaimed that the Hindu boy Krishnamurti was the vehicle for the second coming of Christ. Krishnamurti was raised and educated by the society that moved him to England in the early 1900’s. He attended English private schools. Leadbeater formed the Order of the Star in 1911, and proclaimed that Krishnamurti would be the head of it.

In 1929 Krishnamuti dissolved the Order of the Star maintaining, that Truth is a pathless land that cannot be approached by any religion or sect. He felt that all organized religion is false, in that it is based on the past and creates division and conflict. From 1929 until his death in 1989 he conducted talks and discussions that go very deeply into the real meaning of life.

According to Krishnamurti, the religious teachers of the world, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed conveyed the Truth in their teachings. However, when organized religions were formed to institutionalize their teaching the truth was lost in misinterpretation and in the worship of the bearers of the Truth.

Krishnamurti taught that each one of us must find Truth for ourselves. He believed that we have to reject all authority. Authority is always from the past. It keeps us chained in ideas and beliefs that have no relationship to what is in the present. We must question all authority. What do our teachers know? Where did they get their information? Why should we follow the thoughts of those who claim to know?

His rejection of authority, of course, is on a psychological level. He did mean that we should not have respect for the laws that govern our material existence. We have to obey traffic signals. We have to pay our taxes. We have to respect the laws that govern property rights. However on the psychological level there are no books, no teachers, and no political figures that can know the Truth. Truth is not found in words. On the psychological level Truth must be experienced. In order to find the Truth we must start as if we knew absolutely nothing.

Krishnamurti felt that nationalism is one of the major causes of war and economic disparity. We make artificial divisions through which we look at ourselves as Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and Germans. Because of these artificial divisions, we go to war with one another. During the Second World War Germany and Japan were our enemies. Today they are friends and trading partners.

There are evil men in the world who had to be stopped, Hitler, Mussolini, and many others. But waging war is not the way to end evil and corruption. We have been waging wars for thousands of years and we are further from a peaceful world at the present time then we ever were.

What can we do to stop the evil, corruption, and greed in the world? Krishnamurti says that we must look at the evil, corruption, and greed in ourselves. He says that you are the world. We cannot change the world. We can only change ourselves. If we change, if each of us would eliminate the greed and corruption in ourselves, the world would change also.

Krishnamurti maintains that change will not come over time. There is no psychological evolution. We must change immediately. To change we must look at ourselves, and see the conditioning that has created the ego that we take as our self. He maintains that if we see a snake in the middle of the road, we react to it immediately, knowing the danger that it presents. By the same token, if we really saw the danger of our present existence, we would act immediately to cease to live in the way that we do. He states that the world house is on fire. If we saw the danger that this presents we would immediately change our way of reacting to the world.

Thought is always in the past Krishnamurti teaches. In asking what is thought, he maintains that thought begins with sensation. We see a tree, and we create a word to name it. From that moment on we never see a tree again. Instead, we see the image of the tree that has been formed through thought. We meet a friend, but we do not see the friend as he is in the here and now, we see the image of the friend that is formed by thought and held in our mind as memory. We have sensation, thought, and images all stored in the mind as memory.

Through thought, education, and culture, each man is separated from his neighbor. Through nationalism each man is separated from those in other nations. Through religion we are each separated from those who believe in a different god. We separate our selves though economic and class distinctions.

Krishnamurti teaches that all humanity is one. All men have the same sorrows, pain, suffering, and desires. We are all human beings. If we would recognize the oneness of mankind we would all work of the good of the whole instead of competing and grabbing all we can do for our separate selves. And, even logically this makes senses. If there are hungry people in Afghanistan, some of them will turn to terrorism. If there are terrorists in the Arab world they will have a direct effect on we here in the United States. If all men are not free and well feed, all men are in danger.

We need to take time to look at the flowers, to see the splendor in the blade of grass. We should stop and watch the sun set. We need to spend more time in communion with nature. The rush and hustle to make a living separates us from the very earth that we come from. We need to return to the simple life of the more natural man says Krishnamurti.

Krishnamurti teaches that to get in touch with the Otherness, the source of all living things we have to empty ourselves of all thought and feeling. We must go beyond time-space in other to reach that Immensity. In the silent emptiness we will find the source of our being.

In a dialogue with Dr. David Bohm Krishnmauti discusses the difference between reality and actuality. Reality is what we see with our senses. We see the sun revolve around the earth. We see the solid mass of a tabletop. That is reality. In actuality, the sun stands still and the earth revolves around it. In actuality the tabletop is made up of billons of atoms that are mostly empty space.

All thought comes from the senses. We see the field of grass and we use words to describe what we see. We store these words in memory. When we want to describe the reality of a field of grass, we go to our memory to retrieve the words. Two men looking at the same field of grass will describe it differently according to the words, the images that are stored in their mind. The actual field of grass will be that which exist out side of our memory. You can only experience the actual if you look with an empty mind.

Many of Krishnamurti’s concepts are very hard to understand. He maintains that the observer is the observed. We are not separate from the phenomena that we observe. When you walk down a busy street, you are all the people and commotion that you experience. And, I can grasp this when I see that on a psychological level I have in my consciousness all that takes place as I walk down the busy street.

Krishnamurti say that if you are angry, you are the anger you are not separate from it. The emotion feeling is you. You are lost in it, and cannot free yourself from the anger until you recognize that it has engulfed you.

He says that you are the world. Here again he is speaking on a psychological level. In a state of meditation, I have felt the actuality of this statement. In the emptiness one can sense the presence of a vast immensity that includes all of humanity. As J. G. Bennett has said it is like the oxygen that we breathe in and the oxygen is in our bodies and still exists outside our bodies in the whole world without separation.

If you accept the fact that you are the world, you will find that your relationship to the world is most different. You will be less likely to do harm to a friend or an enemy when you realize that you are not separate. You will be more likely to work for a more equal distribution of wealth and education when you see that the well being of the world enhances the well being of yourself.

My short article on Krishnamurti does not nearly touch the wisdom of his teachings. Lucky for us, he has left several dozens books some that are reproductions of his talks and dialogues others that are his actual writing. In order to appreciate Krishnamurti’s teaching you should look at some of his books.

. 


.