Relationship - Pg 66

KRISHNAMURTI: I would like to talk about relationship, about what love is, about human existence in which is involved our daily living, the problems one has, the conflicts, the pleasures and the fears, and that most extraordinary thing one calls death.

I think one has to understand—not as a theory, not as a speculative, entertaining concept, but rather as an actual fact—that we are the world and the world is us. The world is each one of us. To feel that, to be really committed to it and to nothing else, brings about a feeling of great responsibility and an action that must not be fragmentary but whole.

I think we are apt to forget that our society, the culture in which we live, which has conditioned us, is the resultof human endeavour, conflict, human misery and suffering. Each one of us is that culture. The community is each one of us; we are not separate from it. To feel this, not as an intellectual idea or a concept, but to actually feel the reality of this, one has to go into the question of what is relationship because our life, our existence, is based on relationship. Life is a movement in relationship. If we do not understand what is implied in relationship, we inevitably not only isolate ourselves, but create a society in which human beings are divided, not only nationally, religiously, but also in themselves, and therefore they project what they are into the outer world.

I do not know if you have gone into this question deeply for yourself, to find out if one can live with another in total harmony, in complete accord, so that there is no barrier, no division, but a feeling of complete unity. Because relationship means to be related—not in action, not in some project, not in an ideology—but to be totally united in thesense that the division, the fragmentation between individuals, between two human beings, does not exist at all at any level.

Unless one finds this relationship, it seems to me that when we try to bring order in the world, theoretically or technologically, we are bound to create not only deep divisions between man and man, but also we shall be unableto prevent corruption. Corruption begins in the lack ofrelationship; I think that is the root of corruption. Relation-ship as we know it now is the continuation of division between individuals. The root meaning of that word individual is ‘indivisible’. A human being who is in him-self not divided, not fragmented is really an individual.But most of us are not individuals; we think we are, and therefore there is the opposition of the individual to the community. One has to understand not only the meaning of that word individuality in the dictionary sense, but in that deep sense in which there is no fragmentation at all.That means perfect harmony between the mind, the heart and the physical organism. Only then individuality exists.

If we examine our present relationship with each other closely, be it intimate or superficial, deep or passing,we see it is fragmented. Wife or husband, boy or girl, each lives in his own ambition, in personal and egotistic pursuits, in his own cocoon. All these contribute to the factorof bringing about an image in himself, and therefore his relationship with another is through that image; therefore there is no actual relationship. I do not know if you are aware of the structure and nature of this image that one has built around oneself and in oneself. Each person is doing this all the time, and howcan there be a relationship with another, if there is that personal drive, envy, competition, greed, and all the restof those things which are sustained and exaggerated in modern society? How can there be relationship with another if each one of us is pursuing his own personal achievement, his own personal success? I do not know if one is at all aware of this. We are so conditioned that we accept it as the norm, as the pattern of life, that each one must pursue his own particular idiosyncrasy or tendency, and yet try to establish a relationship with another in spite of this. Isn’t that what we are all doing? You may be married, and you go to the office or to the factory; whatever you are doing during the whole of the day, you pursue that. And your wife is in her house,with her own troubles, with her own vanities, with all that happens. Where is the relationship between those two hu-man beings? Is it in bed, in sex? Is a relationship so superficial, so limited, so circumscribed, not in itself corruption? One may ask: how then are you to live, if you do notgo to the office, pursue your own particular ambition, your own desire to achieve and to attain? If one does not do anyof this, what is one to do? I think that is a wrong question altogether, don’t you? Because we are concerned, are we not, in bringing about a radical change in the whole structure of the mind. The crisis is not in the outer world,but in consciousness itself. And until we understand this crisis, not superficially, not according to some philosopher,but actually deeply understand it for ourselves by looking into it and examining it, we shall not be able to bring abouta change. We are concerned with psychological revolution,and this revolution can take place only when there is theright kind of relationship between human beings.

Fear - Pg 457

Questioner: I would like to discuss fear and death and their relationship to intelligence and thought.

Questioner: Could you go into the statement: the world is me and I am the world?

Questioner: Could we discuss, but not theorize, about what happens after death if it is actually possible to die to things known?

KRISHNAMURTI: Fear is a complex problem, and we have to inquire into it, not come with any preconceived ideas, but really penetrate into this whole question of fear. Now first of all, in inquiring into this problem, we are not trying to deal with it as collective fear, nor are we discussing it as group therapy to get rid of fear. We are going to find out what fear means and what its nature and structure are, whether the fear deep down at the very root of our being can be understood, and whether the mind can ever be free from fear. How do you approach this problem? Have you got any kind of fear, physical or psychological? If you have psychological fears—we shall come back to the physical fears a little later—how do you deal with them?

Suppose I am afraid that I shall lose my position, my prestige: I depend on an audience, on you, to bolster me up, I depend on you to give me vitality by talking. I am afraid, as I grow older, I may become senile. I will be faced with nothing, and I am afraid. What is this fear? Or I am afraid that I depend on you—a man or a woman—and that dependency makes me attached to you, so I am afraid to lose you. Or I am afraid because I have done something in the past, which I regret or am ashamed of, and I don’t want you to know; so I am afraid of your knowing it and I feel guilty. Or I feel terribly anxious about death, about living, about what people say, or don’t say, how they look at me. I have a deep sense of foreboding, anxiety, a sense of inferiority. And in this anxiety about death, living a life that has no meaning, I seek assurance from somebody through human relationship. Or out of my anxiety I seek a sense of security in a certain belief, a certain ideology, in God, and so on.

Also I am afraid that I shan’t be able to do everything I want to do in this life. I have not the capacity nor the intelligence, but I am tremendously ambitious to achieve something; so I am frightened of that too. And of course I am afraid of death. I am afraid of being lonely, of not being loved, so I want to establish a relationship with another in which this fear, this anxiety, this sense of loneliness, this separation does not exist. Also I am afraid of the dark, of the elevator—innumerable neurotic fears!

What is this fear? Why are you, why is anybody, afraid? Is it based on not wanting to be hurt? Or is it that one wants complete security, and not being able to find it—this sense of complete safety, of protection, physically, emotionally, psychologically—one becomes terribly anxious about living? So there is this sense of uncertainty. Now, why is there fear?