Disintegration and Progress

Professor P. Krishna

(Talk delivered at the KFI Gathering in Chennai on 22 January 2005)

Friends,

This is meant to be a dialogue between us, positing the truth as the unknown and
investigating together to discover it. I mean that seriously, because the opinions of any
individual, however great he might be, are not important. Agreeing or disagreeing with
opinions is not learning. We learnt that from Krishnaji. He told us that even what he said
was not important, but the questions were important. It was important to investigate them
through our own observation of life and of our consciousness. He also pointed out that the
spirit in which we investigate those questions is more important than the questions
themselves, because one is not doing this inquiry in order to come upon an answer.
Answers, ideas and solutions are trivial things. They do not contribute to wisdom; they
contribute to knowledge. For a particular question we can know what the answer is and that
becomes an idea, a piece of knowledge in our head. But that knowledge does not bring
wisdom—wisdom being something different, which is a by-product of what he called self-
knowledge. Self-knowledge is not knowledge about the self, but that understanding which
one has come upon through one’s own perception of the truth, so that it is something real
for oneself and not merely an idea. It is only such knowledge, if you might call it
knowledge at all, that contributes to wisdom, to an actual transformation within us. It is not
a decision to be different but an organic change in the way one relates with people, with
things, with the whole world, and also with oneself.

The dilemma facing our modern society.(if I might summarise it in a few words), is that we
have progressed tremendously in knowledge, in science and technology and in the arts, in
philosophy, in history, geography, the environment and everything else, but we have no
evolved psychologically. Through our knowledge we have come upon a lot of power in our
hands and that has enabled us to outwardly change the way we live in our society. If we
look at the way we were living in 1905 all over the world, and the way we are living today
in 2005, there has been a tremendous change outwardly. They say that society has changed
more in these last one hundred years than it did in thousands of years before that. But not
everything has changed. Krishnaji raised the question: Has there been psychological
evolution at all? That means, have we become wiser in the last 1,000 or 2,000 years? We
have read the Mahabharata and are familiar with the characters desribed there. Are we
wiser today than those characters described in that epic, or are we still like Duryodhana,
Bhima, Shakuni, Arjuna and all the others? Some of us may be a little wiser than others,
but basically don’t we all still live with the same divisions, the same hatred, the same
propensity for war, the same cunning and greed which existed 5000 years ago? We are still
operating in the same manner, which means there has been no psychological evolution at
all. When you couple this fact with the fact that we have arrived at tremendous power
without growing in wisdom, you can see why society has become so much more dangerous;
why there is degeneration all around us.
If during the Mahabharata instead of having bows and arrows they had had nuclear bombs,
I do not know if we would be here today. So, that is the state of modern society: in our
understanding and our wisdom we are still primitive, but we now have all this power that
has come from so-called progress. That is what has made things more dangerous. Inwardly,
perhaps, we may not have become worse than we were before. I am not sure if the measure
of hatred or inner violence in our consciousness is any different from what it was in our
forefathers; but certainly its manifestation outside, which depends on how much power we
have, has changed a million times—and that is what has made the situation very dangerous.
So the fundamental question that one has to ask, even if it seems an impossible question, is:
Why have we not grown in wisdom? This dilemma was expressed very beautifully in a
poem by T.S. Eliot called ‘The Rock’. The last stanza of it summarizes this dilemma and
runs like this:

Where is the life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in our knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
In two thousand years the cycles of heaven
Take us away from God and unto dust.

So is progress an illusion? Is our considering ourselves as extremely intelligent beings in

the 21st century false? Are we really intelligent? If we are then why are we facing all this
degeneration? Krishnaji pointed out that there is no intelligence without love and
compassion. So have we defined intelligence unintelligently? I am just raising a lot of
questions for us to deliberate on, and not answering them, because, as I said before, the
answers are not important but the questions are important. We learned from Krishnamurti
the importance of staying with questions, and exploring those questions in our daily life
through our own observation of our own consciousness and how it responds in various
relationships, without coming to any conclusions or forming strong opinions. In that
exploration there is the possibility for a learning mind approaching the issue with humility,
to come upon a deeper perception which is not merely a conclusion of thought. It is that
deep insight, which brings about transformation in consciousness. The rest of it is only a
change in ideas, and change in ideas does not contribute to the transformation of
consciousness. It does not contribute to self-knowledge or wisdom.

So, this morning I would like to explore this question in that spirit, without the desire to
find answers, merely to explore in order to understand all its implications and to understand
what is. What is is not only what is visible at the surface, but when one probes deeply one
discovers that there is a lot more that one does not see in the superficial viewing, analysis
and argument. So with that awareness that we really do not know the truth and a state of
learning which is not attached to any opinions let us explore for the love of understanding
what is. That is the essence of the religious mind — religion being the quest for truth, and
truth being the unknown. So this morning I would like to do that in the form of a dialogue
with oneself and ask fundamental questions.

One such question is, why does anything that man touches, that he discovers, that he
invents become so complicated and complex? We invented money—it seems a simple
enough invention. Before that, people used to take their goods to the marketplace and had
to exchange goods which others had brought there, and it must have occurred that it is
much more sensible to give a slip of paper and say: I have given this much to you and you
can take whenever you want an equivalent amount from me. That paper became the rupee
note when the government stamped it and so on. So a very simple, intelligent device
invented for the convenience of barter, so essential. But that invention of ours today has
become this vast economic system with interest rates, foreign exchange rates, stock market
speculation, investment, and nobody can predict what is going to happen. And what is
worse, that damned thing which we invented now dictates our life. Seriously, sir, seriously.
It dictates what your children will see, what they will read, what education they will receive
in the university. They are no longer free to do what they are interested in doing because
the money is being dangled in front of them and they are being directed [led] in that
direction. So we have become slaves to our own invention.

Take sexuality, we did not invent it, we got it as a gift from Nature. Animals have it too,
plants have it. It has come to us in evolution. But no animal has made it such a complex
thing as we have. That has become this whole world of pornography, the pursuit of
pleasure. And now even if you want to buy a car or a toaster, they use sex to promote it.

Einstein found the equation e = mc². A tremendous truth about Nature that mass is simply
another form of energy. But immediately man said, can I use this to make a bomb? That
comes from the hatred in our consciousness. You want to make war, then you want to use
that new discovery for war. And something like 60% of the entire scientific budget comes
from the budget of the Defence Department, which means that the entire scientific effort is
not merely being directed to discover the truth about Nature, though they might say so, but
because their intention is to use that to kill. They call it ‘defence’. A humorist once said:
‘Never believe something, until the Government denies it.’ So when they call it ‘defence’
we know what they mean.

So why does anything that we do become corrupt, become complicated? This is related to
the question we were asking the other as to what is the relationship between evil and good.
If you look at that, you will see that the source of all this disorder outside is the same as the
source of all this disorder within us, in our consciousness. And the root of it is the ego
process in each human being. You can contain its manifestation, and that is what we are
trying to do through organizations like the United Nation, the police force, and so forth. We
are trying to contain the manifestation of the ego process which creates all this division
between me and you, my country and your country, my religion and your religion, and so
on. It brings in this whole business of ‘mine’ and ‘the other’, ‘not mine’. And from there
arises all the disorder. And if we do not tackle it there, which is what Krishnamurti pointed
out, the rest of it follows as a logical consequence. You would only be treating the
symptoms outwardly and containing the symptoms. It is like if one is getting boils all over
the body, and one is busy treating each boil and healing it without ever asking the question:
why am I getting all these boils all over the body? There is a cause. Unless you eliminate
that cause, the illness will continue and you are dealing only with the symptoms outside.
And the state of the world is like that. We are continuously having wars, and there are
deep-rooted reasons for those wars. Those reasons are not eliminated by the United Nations
or by all the diplomacy and so on. They are maintained. So it is only an outer treatment of
the symptoms, and life becomes busy doing this, but it will never solve the problems. Just
as if you are healing only the boils at each point on your body without ever finding out the
deeper cause that is creating them, the body will remain sick.

So what is the deeper cause? And unless we deal with it there, we are not really dealing
with the thing intelligently. So we must ask ourselves: What is this ego process? From
where does it originate? Is it inevitable? Is it our own creation or has Nature created it? Is it
possible to be free, to end this process within oneself? These are all fundamental questions.
They may have been asked for 2,000 years or more, but they are existential, live questions.
So one must go into it afresh, without saying to oneself whether it is possible or not
possible, because when you say, ‘it is impossible’, it takes away the energy from exploring,
because the mind says: ‘Oh, it is impossible, leave it alone; I want to do only that which is
possible’, which then makes it impossible all the more. So is it impossible because it is
innately impossible, or is it impossible because we have not paid heed or attention to this
problem? You cannot answer that question until you have really and sincerely attempted to
do it. That is why one must do this exploration without seeking a result out of it, which
means for the love of it, just for understanding oneself.

So I ask myself: What is this ego process? Is it there in Nature? After all, we are all part of
Nature. And you can see that the trees have no ego. The animals have very little [cut in the
tape]. They are like little children—and we were all little children; we were not born with
the ego. So where does it come from? There may be great disasters in Nature. That tsunami
wave that came and destroyed much. It may be inconvenient for us, but it does not come in
order to kills us. There is no intentionality in Nature, and it is that intentionality which is
the ego. Nature has this cosmic order which follows certain laws that the scientists are
trying to determine. And that order creates all the phenomena—sometimes it is convenient
for us, like the rainfall and so on, and sometimes it is inconvenient for us. But it is neither
intentionally trying to create convenience or inconvenience. So there is no ego in Nature
anywhere. So why is it there in us? Are we born with it? When I look at that, when I look at
children, I see that they fight, but the next day they have forgotten; they do not stick on
with their hurt. They are quickly friends again. Whereas if two adults fight, it is so difficult
for them to forget and forgive and to die to that hurt. So obviously we are not born with the
ego. We have built it up as we grow up.

And you can see in yourself, when you think of your own state as a child and your state
now. It is so difficult for a grown up human being to make friends with another human
being. The mind is calculating, cunning. It says: Should I make friends with him or not?
Will it be beneficial or not? It goes on all the time in subtle ways. In childhood you did not
do that. You were friends with the neighbour’s child or with the servant’s child. There was
an innocence, and that innocence goes away. It is taken away by the ego process. So what is
this ego process? Can we go deeper into it?

In the course of evolution, when the human being came out of the egg—what he had
through genetic mutation and so on, which distinguishes him as a human being—was
enhanced memory, enhanced capacity to think—and language is included in that capacity,
the ability to learn language; every child learns language—and the enhanced capacity for
imagination. These were the gifts which were given to us by Nature. But Nature does not
dictate which way we should use these gifts. So we have to ask ourselves, have we used
these additional capacities which we have over the animals, who are were our biological
ancestors—to be more kind, to be more gentle, to be more protective of the earth, of the
environment, and even of our own species? The answer was given yesterday by Mark Lee
when he told us that in the last ten years human beings have killed 30 million people of
their own kind, their own species, in wars. That is how horrendous this ego process is in
each one of us. And that is at the root of the cause why we fight within the family, between
brothers, between husband and wife, why we dominate and so on. It is not different from
the cause of the war in Kashmir or in Ireland or in Iraq. It is the same cause, the same
domination—that which goes on within us, each individual, projects itself in a big way, and
then we object to it and call it war and so on. But then that is only a question of
manifestation on a larger scale, but the root of it, the causation, is the same.

So we must examine that causation. If I want to learn about myself I must examine that.
How does it begin? If you ask that and you watch a child growing and slowly becoming
egotistic, this process becoming stronger, you will see that when these capacities for
imagination and thinking and enhanced memory are combined with the instinct of pursuing
pleasure and avoiding pain, which is also there in the animal, it now extends to us and
becomes the pursuit of psychological pleasure and pain. It is not just physical pleasure and
pain as in the case of animals, but it is now also psychological pleasure and pain. And when
you combine that with these abilities, the mind is all the time calculating whether it can get
more security in the future, whether it can get more pleasure in the future. So the desire to
accumulate for the future and the desire to protect oneself in the future from any kind of
harm seems perfectly natural, in the sense that when you have that instinct and you have
these capacities, it is going to form the ego—it is like chemistry. If you start with calcium,
carbon and oxygen atoms, you are going to end up with calcium carbonate. It is like that.

So every human being has the capacity for the ego process in his consciousness. But are we
completely trapped in this, or can we free ourselves by learning about it? After all, the
biologist explains how violence has come into us from our biological past, and their
explanation is not wrong. But if you accept that explanation, then this violence is
inevitable. But that is not true. A human being can add to that violence and become a
Hitler, or he can become a Gandhi or a Krishnamurti. So one can see that there is a certain
amount of freedom which is given to man, which is not given to animals. You cannot make
a tiger into a vegetarian, you would have to force him, but a human being, though he was
born in a non-vegetarian environment, may become a vegetarian, may come upon
compassion, so we have this capacity for change. And that is why this whole question about
what is moral, what is right, and what is immoral and what is wrong arises only for man. If
I was completely determined by my past, I am not responsible for what I do. How can you
blame me? But that is not completely so. That is why we must exercise these capacities to
learn for ourselves. And we can free ourselves of this through our own understanding of
ourselves.

And that is what I understand Krishnamurti is asking us to do. He is saying: ‘You have
cultivated enquiry regarding the outer world, as science enquiring into Nature; you have
cultivated enquiry into social problems in order to solve them; but you have not cultivated
inquiry in order to understand yourself. You are so ignorant of yourself.’ In his book,
Education and the Significance of Life he says: ‘The ignorant man is not the unlearned
(meaning the uneducated), but the one who does not know himself. And the learned man is
stupid when he relies on his knowledge to give him understanding.’ Similar things were
pointed out by the Budha, by Socrates, and by several others. We worship these people; we
have a very high opinion of [regard for] these people; but have we listened to them? Are we
doing what they asked us to do? Why not? Is it because we are not really convinced of the
truth of this? Why are we still egotistic, even after knowing all the arguments?

Logically it can be shown how destructive the ego is. I can do it with you in five minutes.
Maybe I should. I am a scientist; I like to make equations. You take anything, any virtue,
any quality—add the ego to it and see what it becomes. Take love—add the ego to it and it
becomes attachment, possessiveness, jealousy, dependence. Take humility—add the ego to
it and it becomes inferiority, being small, servile. Take power, which is the ability to do
things—add the ego to it and it becomes domination, exploitation. You take anything. Take
sexuality—add the ego to it and it becomes lust, pornography. So the problem is not
sexuality or love; there is no problem with what is; there is the problem with this ego. It is
the source of all problems, both in our personal life and out there, in society, because ‘we
are the world’, if we have understood that. That is what it means—whatever happens in
society is a reflection or projection of what is happening inside of us.

So we must ask ourselves, is it possible to free ourselves of this ego process? Now if it is
something that Nature has created in us, like my kidneys or my heart, my lungs—you
cannot get rid of it, you must only cope with it, manage it. But if it is something which we
create out of our own thinking or out of our own manner in which we are approaching life,
then I can learn not to approach life that way—if I see the danger of it. In the video
yesterday Krishnaji asked that question. He said, ‘Sir, do you perceive the danger of this—
the danger—as you perceive the danger of fire? Do you perceive it that way, or
intellectually, argument, and say, yes, I agree, logically correct? That does not work.’ But if
it is danger, then action follows. It is not your action. Then Nature’s intelligence acts.
Nature has put an intelligence into the organism to protect itself. But when you make it into
a virtue, saying ‘I must not be egotistic’, but you do not see the danger of it, it continues,
and creates this conflict between what we are and what we think we should be. And we
have read that being explained by Krishnaji.

So why are we not aware of its danger, though we can logically create these equations, as
we have just done, and conclude: Yes, the ego is bad for man. It will not go away just
because you have concluded this. It does not lie within volition. You can decide which
house to buy, which job to take, which car to drive or not drive. These are within our
decision, but you cannot decide not to worry, to be happy, to love, even to make friends, to
perceive beauty. So the greatest things in life are those you cannot decide to have, but they
can come to you. They are a by-product of understanding oneself and life, of coming upon
sensitivity. In other words, they are a by-product of right living. And to find out about right
living I have to find out if this ego process can end, and why it goes on. And it does not end
because I want it to end. It can end if I perceive the danger of it. Can we?

After all, that is the great illusion of mankind, is it not? It thinks that acting out of self-
interest is in its self-interest, and does not question that. Is it? After all, that is what we have
been doing for thousands of years—each one acting out of self-interest. And that is what
has brought the world to the present state. So is it really in our interest? We are hurtling
towards a catastrophe. The next world war, if it comes, will eliminate all of us. We have
brought this danger upon ourselves. So obviously, it is not in our self-interest. And yet, it
appears to be in our self-interest, because if I can do something and make a little profit it
appears that I will benefit from it. So is it the outcome of a narrow vision? When I see only
up to here, I feel it is beneficial. If I saw very far, both in time and in space, then I would
see it is disastrous! So how does one expand one’s vision, and why is the vision so
confined?

[Let us] go back to the child. He grows up being attached to his parents, his family. He
grows up in a society, in a religion, and acquires all that. He starts feeling safe within that.
He calls it ‘My house, my religion, my family’, and feels secure within that. And that is the
trap of this conditioning which we have to see through. That is a natural process. But if that
traps your thinking, and my thinking thereafter is all the time to secure the profit, the
benefit of the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’, then that is the ego process. Can we see this trap and the
danger of being in this trap, that my thought process is no longer free to enquire? It is all
the time seeking to justify the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’. It is arguing like a lawyer. Each one of
us has a personal lawyer sitting up here who is all the time arguing in favour of oneself,
‘me’ and what I call ‘mine’. This means it [the thought process] is no longer an instrument
for inquiring into what is true. So long as I am seeking profits, or seeking satisfaction for
the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’, I am not seeking the truth. And therefore it is very easy to say ‘I
am a seeker of truth’, but are we? Or are we seeking satisfaction in one form or another, in
which case we are not really seeking the truth?

So can the passion for learning be so strong that it can overcome this instinct of seeking
pleasure and avoiding pain, not just physical but psychological pain, hurt. Truth may hurt
me. It does; it comes as a revelation, as a disillusion, which means one is going on with
some illusion which one found comforting and pleasant, and then it shocks you. So unless
we are willing to face psychological pain, and perhaps also physical pain, we cannot really
say we are in quest of truth. So you can say it is difficult and chicken out, which is what
most of us do. And we say, ‘It is meant for the Buddha, I’m not the Buddha, I’m an
ordinary man’, and then we continue. But then see logically that if we continue like that we
have no right to complain about the quarrels, about the wars, about our children getting
killed in that war, in the riot, because all that is a consequence which follows out of that
kind of living. But we do complain. So it is illogical, irrational. To see the truth of this, is to
see that the mind is caught in illusion, and that all disorder, all division, arises out of that
illusion.

So this quest for self-knowledge is the quest for the ending of illusion, without which there
is no ending of disorder within, and therefore out there in society. But we have not
inculcated that quest. That is what Krishnaji was doing. For 60 years he went around the
world pointing out our state, saying: ‘For God’s sake, enquire; see the importance of not
continuing in illusion.’

The only way to end illusion is to enquire into what is true, because illusion means we are
taking something to be true when it is not true, or we are giving tremendous importance to
something when it is not really that important in life. Both are illusions. So to discover for
oneself what is the right place of everything in our life, is to discover order. And we really
do not know that. So it is really something one has to discover, which is unknown. The
truth is the unknown. That is why Krishnaji called it ‘the art of living’. And art is
something that cannot be directed, that cannot be prescribed. You cannot write guidelines
of how to make a beautiful picture. It has the right proportion, and that right proportion
creates beauty. But we have a way of finding out when it is in the wrong place—it will
create disorder; it will create conflict within me. And I can use that as a source to learn for
myself where is that conflict coming from. We normally look for the external cause of that
conflict, but that is not important, though it may be necessary. The important thing is to
find out the inner cause of that conflict and use it as a ground for learning about oneself.
Then it becomes an instrument of self-knowledge. Without this learning about ourselves, he
pointed out to us, there is no basis or foundation for our meditation, for our practices and so
on.

In other words, we are confused human beings, and out of that confusion we are choosing
between what is pleasant and what is unpleasant. The choice of a confused mind only adds
to the confusion. So this pursuit of truth and coming upon clarity is more important that the
choices that we are all the time making. That is the cure, and we are capable of it. In a
sense, the truth is eternal, it is something that is always there. It has always been there. The
truth that Patanjali or Socrates talked about is no different than the truth that Krishnamurti
is talking about, or what the truth is, because the truth is the fact. That has not changed. We
have a consciousness and the eyes to see and the senses to perceive that truth. What is
blocking it? The world? I may blame television and propaganda for blocking it, I may
blame my parents for conditioning my mind, but if they had not conditioned it, something
else would have. But the fact is there is nothing between me and truth except myself.

So I am seeking to perceive the truth and I am myself in the way. See the truth of that. How
do you get yourself out of the way? We have to die, to the ‘me’, to this ego process. But we
cannot die, it is not a voluntary process. But by exploring it, by watching it in our own life,
which means not condemning it, because when we condemn something we do not watch.
We have to have the patience to watch and see how it arises, what it is doing to our life in
all our relationships. And perhaps in that watching it may dawn on the consciousness that I
am myself creating this thing, and that I am myself responsible for creating all this misery
in my life. And when we see the danger of that process maybe it will end. But we do not
have the patience to watch long enough. We are satisfied. If we solve the immediate
problem, we are satisfied. If I may give a metaphor, there is the problem of hatred, of
jealousy, of attachment, desire and frustration—numerous problems—like a tree with many
branches, and at the root of it is this ego process.

Now when one of these problems manifests in our life and we start enquiring to solve it,
and when it is solved, we stop. Do not stop. Continue with it though the pain has
disappeared. Continue with it. Each one of them has the opportunity [potential] that if you
trace it far enough you will come to the root, and you have the possibility of uprooting the
whole tree. It does not have much significance to cut just one branch, because when the
root is there, another branch will grow. The metaphor is fairly apt. And Krishnaji says:
Keep watching. Start with whatever is occupying your mind, but do not accept simple
answers. Do not escape. Do not get satisfied with solving the immediate problem. Ask why
did it arise, go deep into it, and it gives you an opportunity to learn about yourself deeply. It
is possible, but we have not really devoted ourselves. We do it on the side, as a hobby, a
little bit. But we have not made that a passion. It is not a question of only analysis and
thinking about it, because, as he has explained to us, thought is from memory and all the
conditioning is stored in memory. And therefore thought is the instrument of conditioning.
It is not a free instrument; it is a coloured instrument. But it has the value of
communication. It has the value of creating the question, but it cannot answer that question.
You must not take the question answer from thought, otherwise it is another intellectual
conclusion. So is there another instrument in us which is not corrupted by our conditioning?
The answer is yes. We are capable of awareness. Without that you could never have the
freedom to come out of conditioning, which influences and traps the thought process. That
is why he talked about ‘choiceless awareness’. Watch choicelessly, watch, do not argue,
take the argument only as a question. But the answer comes from watching, not from
concluding. It is not a logical conclusion. That does not work here. It works in science, but
it does not work in this religious quest.

So that is the work—to come upon this enquiring mind. There is a quotation there in the
bookshop where he says: ‘Sir, you must plough the field’, which is what we have done,
‘You must plough the field with thought, analysis, questioning. Then leave it fallow.’ The
leaving it fallow is important, because in that silence, it regenerates. Thought is not the
instrument of regeneration, but, as I said, it has the value of creating the question. Even
Krishnamurti’s books will not give you regeneration. But they can give you the question.
But we must explore that question in our own life, in our own consciousness, to receive
from it the wisdom that it can give, if we put in that work and approach it in that way. And
each one of us has to do that. It is not enough if Buddha does it and then he gives you
guidelines and you will live that way. All that has been tried—it has failed. At the end of all
that we are the way we are. That is why Krishnamurti wanted this inculcated in education,
because it is necessary for every human being. It is not just that there is a religious man
who will do this and then he will tell us how to live. It is not possible. Each one of us must
grow in wisdom. Which means this enquiry, this learning mind—which is investigating
what is true and what is false—we must anchor it in the child, in the student. It is more
important to create this enquiry in the mind than the scientific enquiry. The scientists, they
teach science and make it extremely important to inculcate enquiry. But we have not cared
to inculcate this inquiry, to create an inquiring mind. And that is why he was interested in a
different education, which will lay equal emphasis on knowledge and on self-knowledge.