given by the priests or their gods, by the philosophers, or by the golden drug.

19. The Urgency of Change

The Urgency of Change contains Krishnamurti's answers to questions asked by his audiences.

In the first chapter, K explains what he means by awareness. He starts from the basics: Are we really aware of our anger, sadness, or happiness when they occur, or only when they are over?

We see with our eyes, perceive the things around us with our senses, and feel our own bodies in the same way. This is sensory perception without any psychological involvement. We see a rose, the stars and a door, and they are really there.

Then we think or feel about these things. This is our psychological response to them: either liking or disliking, appreciating or disapproving.

The description is different from the object. These must not be confused, even though we do so all the time. When we see a rose, we react to it with the same mind. We do this even when we judge ourselves, yet we often separate the observer from the object of observation.

The rose is real, but the 'me' is merely an idea created by the mind. This 'me' is made up of the mind accumulated information and experiences. Without thoughts, there is no self.

Awareness of this causes the division between the observer and the object to disappear. There is no longer a self, only an awareness of what is happening.

This is a difficult lesson for someone who experiences life entirely through the self. They will do everything they can to stop himself from realising this.

"When the observer is wholly silent, not made silent, there is surely a different quality of awareness coming into being. This new quality of awareness is attention, and in this attention, there is no frontier made by the 'me'. This attention is the highest form of virtue; therefore, it is love. It is supreme intelligence and there cannot be attention if you are not sensitive to the structure and the nature of these man-mad traps."

God Is a Concept

The second chapter asks whether God exists, and if not, what meaning life has then. Not knowing God, man has invented beliefs and images. Many saints say that without belief, you can never know.

K responds that it is far more important to learn than to know. When the mind is free of belief, it can look. Belief and disbelief are the two sides of the same coin.

To understand whether God really exists, you must put aside the word god. With a tree, the object is before our eyes and there is universal agreement that the word refers to the tree.

"With the word 'god' there is nothing to which it refers, so each person can create his own image of that for which there is no reference. The theologian does it in one way, the intellectual in another, and the believer and the non-believer in their own different ways. Hope generates this belief, and then seeking."

Hope is the outcome of despair. Without hope, there is hell, and it is the fear of hell that gives us hope.

"Then illusion begins. So the word has led us to illusion and not to god at all. God is the illusion which we worship. The non-believer creates the illusion of another god which he worships. So we are asking you whether you can be free of the word with its illusion."

K asks whether humans can be free from words and their illusions. The next question is: what is left if there is no illusion?

The answer is: "Only what is."

"The what is is the most holy," K states.

The questioner wonders how war, hatred, disorder, pain, avarice and plunder can be holy. Then every murderer can say, "Don't touch me, what I'm doing is sacred".

K replies that if you really see that what is is sacred, you will not murder or make wars, you will not hope, you will not exploit others. Nor can you claim immunity from a truth that you have violated.

"When there is no illusion the what is is most sacred, it is god or any other name that can be used. God is when you are not. When you are, it is not. When you are not, love is. When you are, love is not," K concludes.

From a Prison to Another

A man wants to know how he can live in a world surrounded by so much violence, greed, hypocrisy, competition and brutality.

K begins by saying, "Don't let's make a problem of it. When anything becomes a problem, we are caught in the solution of it, and then the problem becomes a cage, a barrier to further exploration and understanding. So don't let us reduce all life to a vast problem."

Instead of starting with a conclusion, we should find out what we mean by living.

To live in this world, we must deny the world: deny the ideal, the war, the fragmentation, the competition, the envy and so on. If we don't want to live in confusion, dishonesty and ugliness of the world, we must deny it because we see what it actually is.

Seeing leads to immediate action, and the world begins to change because we are the world and the world is us, they are not two separate entities. Together, we create the world, and together, we are responsible for it. When we change, the world changes.

The man returned the next day, having realised that ideals and escapes create the contradictions in which we live.

K says that living is now based on the past and memory. From these, we build a picture of the future. Even when the mind seems to function in the present moment, it is still influenced by the past.

When we ask how we are to live in this world, we are merely looking for a change that will replace one prison with another.

There must be a radical change of the mind and heart. We must bring about a totally new order in ourselves. The past holds our minds now in opposites. To give birth to a new order, we must "keep our head above the water".

"Change is not a movement from the known to the known, and all political revolutions are that. This kind of change is not what we are talking about. Change is the denial of change. In the total negation of all movement of thought from what is, is the ending of what is."

Will Is Not Awareness

A man felt that he had understood everything K was talking about on a much deeper level than just the verbal. Yet when he left the talks,

everything seemed to evaporate. No matter what he did, he could not reach the state of mind he had experienced.

He had also tried to be aware of the conflicts and their causes, but this only seemed to strengthen them.

K told him that awareness is not an act of will, choosing what to be aware of. When we deliberately focus on a particular object, that is an act of will; a form of is concentration that involves putting all our energy and thought into the part rather than the whole.

If we want to end anger, we can't do it by focusing on the anger itself. Anger is just an emotion that we have named. We have to see the whole process: how anger arises, how it affects us, and what it leads to. Anger is connected to something and has many consequences; it is not separate from itself.

When we engage with something with our whole being, the self and the anger are one, and there is no conflict between them.

The man said that he was trying to understand what K was saying.

K asked him, "Are you trying to understand me, or are you seeing the truth of what we are talking about, which is independent of me? If you actually see the truth, then you are your own guru and your own disciple, which is to understand yourself."

A Part Is Never the Whole

K used different words when talking about perception, such as seeing, observation, understanding and awareness. One questioner was confused and wanted to know if it was possible to perceive anything completely, especially oneself.

K began by saying that we always look at things partially. We are inattentive and prejudiced. We never see anything completely. It is difficult to look at a flower without any image.

It's fairly easy to look at something that doesn't deeply touch us. But looking at ourselves is different. It's hard to do so without judging and condemning ourselves. We may not be pleased with what we see, and seeing our true nature can be either depressing or frightening.

Partial perception has become the accepted norm. Each one of us is a battlefield of conflicting opinions and judgements.

"The whole of life is in each moment. Each moment is a challenge. To meet this challenge inadequately is a crisis in living. We don't

want to see that these are crises, and we shut our eyes to escape from them. So we become blinder, and the crises augment."

We must see and understand the problem while it is happening, not before or after. Perception is instantaneous. It doesn't include the words 'then' or 'when'. We either understand instantly or not at all.

The aim is not to be attentive all the time, but to be aware of inattention. You cannot practise being beautiful, or loving. When hate ceases, the other is. When you focus your whole attention on hate, you do not gather knowledge about it.

"Never practise; you can only practise mistakes. Learning is always new."

Too Much Sorrow

The man said he had suffered a great deal all his life. He had divorced his wife, and lost his son in an accident. He had enough money, but too much sorrow.

K asked him what he had learned from his suffering and sorrow.

He said it had taught him to never to be attached to people, and a certain bitterness and not allowing him to express his feelings.

K said that suffering had then not taught him wisdom, but rather made him more cunning and more insensitive.

"There is the personal sorrow and the sorrow of the world. There is the sorrow of ignorance and the sorrow of time. This ignorance is the lack of knowing oneself and the sorrow of time is the deception that time can cure, heal and change. Most people are caught in that deception and either worship sorrow or explain it away. In either case one never asks if sorrow can come to an end."

Self-pity is one of the elements of sorrow. Another element is being attached to someone. Sorrow is already there when attachment begins, but it is only noticed when the relationship ends.

Knowing oneself is the ending of sorrow. You cannot know yourself through analysis. It is only possible in relationship, from moment to moment. You must be aware of everything that is actually happening right now without thinking about the past or the future.

Where there is sorrow, there is no love. Love and sorrow cannot live together. It is in knowing oneself completely that sorrow ends.

Dreams Are Clues

Professionals tell us that dreaming is as vital as daytime thinking and activity. Someone asked K why the language of dreams is one of symbols.

He replied that language itself is a symbol. We are used to symbols; we see a tree or our neighbours through an image and treat them accordingly. It is most difficult for a human being to look at anything directly.

The meaning of a dream is not always clear to us. When someone hits us, we don't need symbols. Interpreting dreams is not so apparent.

The 'I' is the dreamer who wants to see significance in the dream that it has invented or projected. Both are unreal. The dreamer perpetuates his own limitations; therefore, the dream is always an expression of the incomplete, never of the whole.

"Consciousness is the whole of man and does not belong to a particular man. When there is awareness of the total movement of life during the waking hours, what need is there for dreams at all? This total awareness, this attention, puts an end to fragmentation and to division. When there is no conflict whatsoever the mind has no need for dreams."

Avoiding Happiness

What is happiness? Is it an end in itself, or does it come as a secondary thing from living intelligently? Can we seek happiness, and if so, where can we find it?

We pursue pleasure. Mistakenly, pleasure is called happiness. Pleasure is gratification, satisfaction, indulgence, entertainment, stimulation. We confuse happiness with pleasure and pursue both.

Are we trying to be happy because we are unhappy and dissatisfied? Does happiness have an opposite?

"If you were happy, you wouldn't seek it. So what is important is not happiness, but weather unhappiness can end. If we pursue happiness, it becomes an escape from unhappiness and therefore it will always remain, covered and hidden but always festering inside."

We need intelligence to be happy. We must see how thought creates opposites. Seeing is not thinking. If you think about something, you will never understand it. You are avoiding the issue.

A New and Brave Human

A social worker witnessed extraordinary injustice in his work. He had been a communist, but gave it up when it ended in tyranny. America seems to offer a certain kind of freedom, but China does not. There is no hope for human dignity or freedom of man there. He did not know how to begin to tackle this issue.

K replied that the idea of reform must be put aside: "Let's wipe it out of our blood." We must forget the idea of wanting to reform the world. Then we can see what is happening right throughout the world.

Political parties have limited programmes, and religions have their own recipes, yet there is still no peace in the world. Therefore, political action and religious formulas are not the answer. They are based on belief, idealism, dogmatism, and conformity. These involve authority, acceptance, obedience, and the utter denial of freedom.

We must be concerned with radical change, with total revolution between human beings. This must be our only concern. It must be immediate and not based on action of will and assertiveness.

Life is suspended while we wait for change. It is like trying to clean the water in a tank that is constantly being refilled with dirty water. So, time is out.

"All the social maladies are the projection of the conflict in the heart of each human being. Conflict is our main concern. The only possible change is a radical transformation of yourself in all your relationships, not in some vague future, but now."

A man who is passionate about the world and the necessity for change must be free from political activity, religious conformity, and tradition – which means being free from the weight of time, the burden of the past, and the action of will. This is both social and political revolution.