10. The World Is for All

To liberate the human mind is an ambitious mission. Many thinkers have wanted this to happen and, in different ways, have expressed how to actualise it.

To Krishnamurti, freedom means to eliminate the vicious circle of our psychological conditioning, which manifests itself in a thousand different ways: fear and hate, desire and sorrow.

Mental freedom cannot come from will, living simply, or believing in an idea. There should be no motive behind it, yet exploring our motives might give us a glimpse of what is keeping us in the prison of our thoughts. However, it is not important to know what we are attached to, but to see that we are attached.

Krishnamurti wanted us to be free from all our mental cages, not just the most unpleasant ones. He spent over 60 years trying to get us to be free. Yet two days before his death, he felt that no one had succeeded.

Was there something wrong with his message? Did he admit his failure when he said this? Some say yes, but it is better not to make hasty conclusions about his statement. He was old, very ill, and under heavy medication when he uttered this.

There is a lot to do with human nature, and maybe we never manage to change. Maybe we will never manage to change our human nature. We are still capable of doing cruel things to each other, and although we hope for peace and happiness, wars and conflicts are still raging all over the world. We are not free.

Perhaps Krishnamurti underestimated the force of conditioning and could not get his message through so that all our mental chaos would be cleaned. But he surely managed to influence thousands of people and offered us a thrilling possibility to see life in a new light.

To Krishnamurti, the root cause of the world's miserable state was crystal clear, and he pointed it out in his dialogues with David Bohm, in his public talks, and in his books more clearly than anyone has ever done. He saw something that we have not seen.

Nobody, not even Krishnamurti, can help us realise the facts about ourselves if we don't want to see. And if we don't passionately want to see, we will never see it.

I am afraid that the trouble with us is that we don't want to see. Perhaps there is only one exit out of this man-made confusion and suffering. Krishnamurti saw it, said it, but it is not his fault that change has not happened!

For over thirty years I have tried to understand what is wrong with us, why we are like this. I don't think we are unintelligent or lazy. It seems that we are drastically misled. The heavy weight of culture and tradition blocks our insight. Perhaps we don't see, because we think we see.

There is an answer to this question that has bothered us for centuries. The modern worldview is based on individuality and selfishness. It encourages us to seek our own happiness and fulfilment, and the price of it is very high.

Our big mistake may be the assumption that we are individuals. We do share the same world; the cosmos does not belong to anyone. We are the world and the world is us.

If we continue to see the world and act through our inward filters, we will never be free. But if we realise that the limits of our thinking are not actual, then we enter a state full of insight and intelligence. In that state, life ceases to be a problem, and a human being lives in direct communion with what Krishnamurti aptly calls 'what is'.

If You Cannot Answer, Change the Question

What is left of a person stripped of the essence of his identity, thoughts, and images? Krishnamurti nails it: truth and love.

A world dominated by thinking is self-centred and fragmented, and will slowly or quickly destroy the world. This thinking-dominated world lacks genuine care for other people and a sense of responsibility. It is cold, crooked and calculating, an unsafe and frightening place for a human being.

In their meetings, these two brilliant minds of our species penetrated through consciousness into an area where there are no images, words or explanations.

We live in the embrace of that magnificence but do not see or feel it except in short flashes, in ecstatic moments of our lives.

Inspired by these two excellent guides, we searched in this book for an answer to the question: Can a human brain be changed so that it does not live in concepts, beliefs and make-beliefs, but in facts and actuality?

To answer this question, we must understand how our brain and mind work. Our brain is imposing wrong answers on us because we keep asking the wrong questions. If we ask the right question, we will be free.

Krishnamurti and Bohm say that when the brain is silent, something truly extraordinary happens. The old brain lives in a stuffy prison where the light of life enters only in fleeting moments, as a hint of something that we long for. That brain is programmed to seek solutions from an area where there are only ineffective substitutes.

When one deeply understands that there is no escape from reality, because it pervades everything, the neurotic movement of thought stops and the structure and function of the brain change. When images are gone, only the actual is left.

Why is this so difficult to understand? Why don't we discard the illusions that make our lives a misery?

Why do we accept brutalities, conflicts, intellectual and spiritual self-deception, the idiocy of isms?

Why do we want to go faster, although our way of life is leading us to global catastrophe? Why don't we take the map and change direction now?

Is it that we don't see or that we don't care?

We use a wrong instrument and keep hammering the wrong nails. We try to change the world, but the world is not the problem. It is our brain we have to change; stop trying and let silence take over.

We still think our brain has the answer, but it does not. On the contrary, the brain is the essence of the problem, because it sustains it.

We have totally misunderstood the role of thinking. We keep playing the wrong notes and hope to get the melody right.

As Krishnamurti points out, thought can never realise what is true. Thought has a place in daily life, in learning and expression, but when it enters the psychological area it breeds disorder, self-deception and conflict.

Clarity Is Necessary

Krishnamurti and Bohm show a solution that may be the only way out of this destructive confusion we create together. Nobody knows whether we will manage to face this challenge and find a way to solve our common, colossal problems before it is too late.

The key concepts in their dialogues are intelligence, insight, the ground, order, truth, mind, reality, and actuality. They give these terms new meanings. The point is not to explain but to understand or see.

The conditioning of our consciousness makes it impossible to see things as they are. We think we see, but in fact we don't. The fatal division between me and you is the deep source of conflicts and separation between people. It has severely damaged the brain.

Healing starts when thought stops.

In an interview by Evelyne Blau, Bohm describes how his states of mind changed in his dialogues with K.

"I had no feeling, but clarity. I said to him, I have no feeling and he said, 'Yes, that's right', which surprised me, because I had previously thought that anything intense must have a lot of feeling. When I went out, I had a sense of some presence in the sky, felt something universal."

Bohm says that the sense of space was present in their discussions, and that the change in his state of consciousness also occurred in Switzerland, but "it went away by the time he got back home".

Krishnamurti advised Bohm, in his scientific work, to begin with the unknown. This applies to life in general, too. The insights we get when starting from not-knowing are very important for dissolving rigid compartments of thought and finding fresh views.

The energy beyond matter is something we can't get a grip on. It can be called the truth, and truth acts on the material basis of thought and consciousness, changing it into orderly form. So thought ceases to create disorder, leaving the mind empty for something deeper.

We may feel that we lack sufficient energy to break through our conditioning. Bohm regards this as an excuse, revealing a misunderstanding of the nature of the required energy. The very process of ego wastes energy. To avoid the waste, we must see what is essential and universal. The universal belongs to everybody and covers everything.

"If you see yourself as a particular being, you protect that being, and your energies will be dissipated."

The observations we make of reality are mainly reflections of our own mind. They are very shallow, and many of them are delusions. When you see things as they are, thought loses its power, and an enormous amount of energy is released.

"The minute you see that the whole content of your consciousness is only a show, the brain quiets and is in another state. It is no longer trapped, and it sees everything differently. This perception transforms everything, and there is no turning back."

So it all comes back to where it all started. When the observer really is the observed, there is no me and you, and there is now becoming something else.