7/30/2019 Krishnamurti-this Matter of Culture Chapter 26 Part3

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THIS MATTER OF CULTURE CHAPTER 26part2

After all, what is contentment, and what is discontent? Discontent is the striving after the `more', and contentment is the cessation of that struggle; but you cannot come to contentment without understanding the whole process of the `more', and why the mind demands it.

If you fail in an examination, for example, you have to take it again, do you not? Examinations in any case are most unfortunate, because they don't indicate anything significant, they don't reveal the true worth of your intelligence.Passing an examination is largely a trick of memory, or it may be a matter of chance; but you strive to pass your examinations, and if you don't succeed you keep at it. With most of us it is the same process in everyday life. We are struggling after something, and we have newer paused to inquire if the thing we are after is worth struggling for. We have never asked ourselves if it's worth the effort, so we haven't yet discovered that it's not and withstood the opinion of ourparents, of society, of all the Masters and gurus. It is only when we have understood the whole significance of the `more' that we cease to think in terms of failure and success.

You see, we are so afraid to fail, to make mistakes, not only in examinations but in life. To make a mistake is considered terrible because we will be criticized for it, somebody will scold us. But, after all, why should you not make amistake? Are not all the people in the world making mistakes? And would the world cease to be in this horrible mess if you were never to make a mistake? If you

are afraid of making mistakes you will never learn. The older people are makingmistakes all the time, but they don't want you to make mistakes, and thereby they smother your initiative. Why? Because they are afraid that by observing and questioning everything, by experimenting and making mistakes you may find out something for yourself and break away from the authority of your parents, of society, of tradition. That is why the ideal of success is held up for you to follow;and success, you will notice, is always in terms of respectability. Even the saint in his so-called spiritual achievements must become respectable, otherwise hehas no recognition, no following.

So we are always thinking in terms of success, in terms of the `more' and the `more' is evaluated by the respectable society. In other words, society has very carefully established a certain pattern according to which it pronounces youa success or a failure. But if you love to do something with all your being you

are then not concerned with success and failure. No intelligent person is. Butunfortunately there are very few intelligent people, and nobody tells you aboutall this. The whole concern of an intelligent person is to see the facts and understand the problem - which is not to think in terms of succeeding or failing. It is only when we don't really love what we are doing that we think in those terms.

Questioner: Why are we fundamentally selfish? We may try our best to be unselfish in our behaviour, but when our own interests are involved we become self-absorbed and indifferent to the interests of others.

Krishnamurti: I think it is very important not to call oneself either selfish or unselfish, because words have an extraordinary influence on the mind. Calla man selfish, and he is doomed; call him a professor, and something happens inyour approach to him; call him a Mahatma, and immediately there is a halo aroun

d him. Watch your own responses and you will see that words like `lawyer', `business man', `governor', `servant', `love', `God', have a strange effect on your nerves as well as on your mind. The word which denotes a particular function evokes the feeling of status; so the first thing is to be free of this unconscious habit of associating certain feelings with certain words, is it not? Your mind has been conditioned to think that the term `selfish' represents something very wrong, unspiritual, and the moment you apply that term to anything your mind condemns it. So when you ask this question, "Why are we fundamentally selfish?", it has already a condemnatory significance.

It is very important to be aware that certain words cause in you a nervous,

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emotional, or intellectual response of approval or condemnation. When you callyourself a jealous person, for example, immediately you have blocked further inquiry, you have stopped penetrating into the whole problem of jealousy. Similarly, there are many people who say they are working for brotherhood, yet everythingthey do is against brotherhood; but they don't see this fact because the word `brotherhood' means something to them and they are already persuaded by it; theydon't inquire any further and so they never find out what are the facts irrespective of the neurological or emotional response which that word evokes.

So this is the first thing: to experiment and find out if you can look at facts without the condemnatory or laudatory implications associated with certainwords. If you can look at the facts without feelings of condemnation or approval, you will find that in the very process of looking there is a dissolution of all the barriers which the mind has erected between itself and the facts.

Just observe how you approach a person whom people call a great man. The words `great man' have influenced you; the newspapers, the books, the followers all say he is a great man, and your mind has accepted it. Or else you take the opposite view and say, "How stupid, he is not a great man". Whereas, if you can dissociate your mind from all influence and simply look at the facts, then you willfind that your approach is entirely different. In the same way, the word "villager', with its associations of poverty, dirt, squalor, or whatever it is, influences your thinking. But when the mind is free of influence, when it neither condemns nor approves but merely looks, observes, then it is not self-absorbed and there is no longer the problem of selfishness trying to be unselfish. Questioner:Why is it that, from birth to death, the individual always wants to be loved, a

nd that if he doesn't get this love he is not as composed and full of confidenceas his fellow beings?