Can peace be brought about by the mind? - J. Krishnamurti, from selected teachings

J. Krishnamurti asks and then addresses the question: Can peace be brought about by the mind. - He also answers the question: Will you please teach me how to love. - The words featured in this episode come from talks that Krishnamurti gave, talks that were compiled into book form. Read by Before the Page host Charlie Mehrhoff. 

Living in an Insane World  : Selected Passages - 1989 - J. Krishnamurti

Life Ahead : On Learning and the Search for Meaning - 1963 - J. Krishnamurti

Think on These Things - 1964 - J. Krishnamurti

The Awakening of Intelligence  - 1973 - J. Krishnamurti 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Before we come to the page, before the first word is ever written down, or read, or listened to, there is a longing to connect. My name is Charlie Merhoff, your host here at Before the Page, a podcast featuring poetry, parable, fiction, and non words to echo our longing. Welcome, welcome, friends and listeners. You have reached the thirty-fifth episode of Before the Page. It is always a good time to hear words regarding peace. These come from Jidu Krishnamurti. We have been examining the various factors that bring about deterioration in our lives, in our activities, in our thoughts, and we have seen that conflict is one of the major factors of this deterioration. And is not peace also, as it is generally understood, a destructive factor? Can peace be brought about by the mind? If we have peace through the mind, does not that also lead to corruption, deterioration? If we are not very alert and observant, that word peace becomes like a narrow window through which we look at the world and try to understand it. Through a narrow window we can see only part of the sky and not the whole vastness, the magnificence of it. There is no possibility of having peace by merely pursuing peace, which is inevitably a process of the mind. It may be a little difficult to understand this, but I shall try to make it as simple and clear as I can. If we can understand what it means to be peaceful, then perhaps we shall understand the real significance of love. We think that peace is something to be achieved through the mind, through reason, but is it? Can peace ever come about through any quieting, through any control or domination of thought? We all want peace, and for most of us, peace means to be left alone, not to be disturbed or interfered with. So we build a wall around our own mind, a wall of ideas. It is very important for you to understand this, for as you grow older you will be faced with the problem of war and peace. Is peace something to be pursued, caught, and tamed by the mind? What most of us call peace is a process of stagnation, a slow decay. We think we shall find peace by clinging to a set of ideas, by inwardly building a wall of security, safety, a wall of habits, beliefs. We think that peace is a matter of pursuing a principle, of cultivating a particular tendency, a particular fancy, a particular wish. We want to live without disturbance, so we find some corner of the universe or of our own being into which we crawl and we live in the darkness of self-enclosure. That is what most of us seek in our relationship with the husband, with the wife, with parents, with friends. Unconsciously we want peace at any price, and so we pursue it. But can the mind ever find peace? Is not the mind itself a source of disturbance? The mind can only gather, accumulate, deny, assert, remember, pursue? Peace is absolutely essential because without peace we cannot live creatively. But is peace something to be realized through the struggles, the denials, the sacrifices of the mind? Do you understand what I am talking about? We may be discontented while we are young, but as we grow older, unless we are very wise and watchful, that discontent will be canalized into some form of peaceful resignation to life. The mind is everlastingly seeking a secluded habit, belief, desire, something in which it can live and be at peace with the world. But the mind cannot find peace because it can think only in terms of time, in terms of the past, the present, and the future, what it has been, what it is, and what it will be. It is constantly condemning, judging, weighing, comparing, pursuing its own vanities, its own habits, beliefs, and such a mind can never be peaceful. It can delude itself into a state which it calls peace, but that is not peace. The mind can mesmerize itself by the repetition of words and phrases, by following somebody or by accumulating knowledge, but it is not peaceful, because such a mind is itself the center of disturbance. It is by its very nature the essence of time. So the mind with which we think, with which we calculate, with which we contrive and compare, is incapable of finding peace. Peace is not the outcome of reason, and yet, as you will see if you observe them, the organized religions are caught up in this pursuit of peace through the mind. Real peace is as creative and as pure as war is destructive, and to find that peace one must understand beauty. That is why it is important while we are very young to have beauty about us, the beauty of buildings that have proper proportions, the beauty of cleanliness, of quiet talk among the elders. In understanding what beauty is we shall know love, for the understanding of beauty is the peace of the heart. Peace is of the heart, not of the mind. To know peace you have to find out what beauty is. The way you talk, the words you use, the gestures you make, these things matter very much. For through them you will discover the refinement of your own heart. Beauty cannot be defined, it cannot be explained in words, it can be understood only when the mind is very quiet. So while you are young and sensitive, it is essential that you, as well as those who are responsible for you, should create an atmosphere of beauty. The way you dress, the way you walk, the way you sit, the way you eat, all these things and the things about you are very important. As you grow up, you will meet the ugly things of life, ugly buildings, ugly people with their malice, envy, ambition, cruelty. And if in your heart there is not founded and established a perception of beauty, you will easily be swept away by the enormous current of the world. Then you will get caught in the endless struggle to find peace through the mind. The mind projects an idea of what peace is and tries to pursue it, thereby getting caught in the net of words, in the net of fancies and illusions. Peace can come only when there is love. If you have peace merely through security, financial or otherwise, or through certain dogmas, rituals, verbal repetitions, there is no creativeness, there is no urgency to bring about a fundamental revolution in the world. Such peace only leads to contentment and resignation. But when in you there is the understanding of love and beauty, then you will find the peace that is not a mere projection of the mind. It is this peace that is creative, that removes confusion and brings order within oneself. But this peace does not come through any effort to find it. It comes when you are constantly watching, when you are sensitive to both the ugly and the beautiful, to the good and the bad, to all the fluctuations of life. Peace is not something petty created by the mind. It is enormously great, infinitely extensive, and it can be understood only when the heart is full. And that was from the seventeenth chapter of Life Ahead. Moving on. Someone approached Krishnamurti and they said, I am full of hate. Will you please teach me how to love? And this is Krishnamurti's response. No one can teach you how to love. If people could be taught how to love, the world problem would be very simple, would it not? If we could learn how to love from a book as we learn mathematics, this would be a marvelous world. There would be no hate, no exploitation, no wars, no division of rich and poor, and we would all be really friendly with each other. But love is not so easily come by. It is easy to hate, and hate brings people together after a fashion. It creates all kinds of fantasies, it brings about various types of cooperation as in war. But love is much more difficult. You cannot learn how to love, but what you can do is to observe hate and put it gently aside. Don't battle against hate, don't say how terrible it is to hate people, but see hate for what it is and let it drop away. Brush it aside, it is not important. What is important is not to let hate take root in your mind. Do you understand? Your mind is like rich soil, and if given sufficient time any problem that comes along takes root like a weed, and then you have the trouble of pulling it out. But if you do not give the problem sufficient time to take root, then it has no place to grow and it will wither away. If you encourage hate, give it time to take root, to grow, to mature. It becomes an enormous problem. But if each time hate arises, you let it go by, then you will find that your mind becomes very sensitive without being sentimental. Therefore, it will know love. The mind can pursue sensations, desires, but it cannot love. Love must come to the mind. And when once love is there, it has no division as sensuous and divine. It is love. That is the extraordinary thing about love. It is the only quality that brings a total comprehension of the whole of existence. And those words can be found in Think on These Things, the eighth chapter. And also found in Living in an Insane World. But continuing on that question, will you please teach me how to love a little bit more from Krishna Murti, from the awakening of intelligence, part five, chapter three. So again, if you have done it now, as the speaker is talking about it, looking at that sky with your whole being, that very act of looking has its own discipline and therefore its own virtue, its own order. Then the mind reaches the highest point of absolute order, and therefore, because it is absolutely orderly, it itself becomes the sacred. I do not know if you understand this. You know, when you love the tree, the bird, the light on the water, when you love your neighbor, your wife, your husband, without jealousy, that love that has never been touched by hate. When there is that love, that love itself is sacred. You have no other thing that can be more so. So there is that sacred thing, not in the things that man has put together, but which comes into being when man cuts himself off entirely from the past, which is memory. This does not mean that man becomes absent minded, he must have memory in a certain direction, but that memory will be found to be part of this whole state in which there is no relation with the past. And that cestaction of the past can only be when you see things as they are and come directly in contact with them, as with that marvelous sunset. Then out of this order, discipline, virtue, there comes into being love. Love is tremendously passionate and therefore it acts immediately. It has no time interval between the seeing and the doing. And when you have that love, you can put away all your sacred books, all your gods. And you have to put away your sacred books, your gods, your everyday ambitions to come upon that love. That is the only sacred thing there is. And to come upon it, goodness must flower. Goodness, you understand, sirs? Goodness can only flower in freedom, not in tradition. The world needs change. You need tremendous revolution in yourself. The world needs this tremendous revolution, not economic communist, bloody revolution that man has tried throughout history that can only lead him to more misery. But we do need fundamental psychological revolution, and this revolution is order, and order is peace, and this order with its virtue and peace can only come about when you come directly into contact with this order in your daily life. Then out of that blossoms goodness, and then there will be no seeking anymore for that which is sacred. We are going to end this episode of Before the Page, which featured the words of Krishna Murti on peace and love with a short poem composed by the reader. Before the debris of the bomb blasts, the birds scatter in flight. Until the next episode, please be well. And again, if you wish to reach out to BeforeThePage, that's easy enough. Go to before the page at gmail.com. Spell just how it sounds before the page at gmail.com. Peace.