On Conflict

"The moment you teach a child the name of a bird, that child will never see that bird again" 

Here is a great look at human conflict and peace from his book "On Conflict". 

A question asked and answered in 1950.

Questioner:     Through such movements as the United Nations and the World Pacifist Conferences, men all over the world are making an individual and collective effort to prevent a third world war. How does your attempt differ from theirs, and do you hope to have any appreciable end results? Can war be prevented?

Krishnamurti:     Let us first dispose of the obvious facts and then go more deeply into the matter. Can we prevent war? What do you think? Men are bent on slaughtering each other; you are bent on slaughtering your neighbor---  not with swords, perhaps, but you are exploiting them, politically, religiously, and economically. There are social, communal, linguistic divisions, and are you not

making a great ado about all this? You do not  want to prevent war because some of you are going to make money. The cunning are going to make money , and the stupid also will want to make more.

For Gods sake, see the ugliness, the ruthlessness of it! When you have a set propose of gain at all costs, the result is inevitable. The third world war arises for the second world war, the second from the first, and the first was the result of previous wars. Until you put an end to the cause, mere tinkering with the symptoms has no significance. One of the causes of war is nationalism, sovereign governments, and all the ugliness that goes with them--- power prestige, position, and authority. But most of us do not want to put an end to war because our lives are incomplete, our whole existence is a battlefield, a ceaseless conflict, not only with one's wife, one's husband, one's neighbor but with ourselves--- the constant struggle to become something. That is our life, of which war and the hydrogen bomb are merely the violent and spectacular projections. As long as we do not understand the whole significance of our existence and bring about a radical transformation, there can be no peace in the world.

Now the second problem  is much more difficult, much more demanding of your attention--- which does not mean that the first one is not important. It is that most of us pay scant attention to the transformation of ourselves because we do not want to be transformed. We are contented and so do not want to be disturbed. We are satisfied to go along as we are, and that that is why we are sending our children to war, why we must have military training. You all want to save your bank accounts, hold on to your property--- all in the name of non-violence, in the name of God and peace, which is a lot of sanctimonious nonsense. What do we mean by peace? You say the United Nations is trying to establish peace by organizing its member nations, which means it is balancing power. Is that the pursuit of peace?

Then there is the gathering of individuals on a certain idea of what they consider to be peace. That is, the individual resists war according to either his moral persuasion or his economic ideas. We place peace either on a rational basis or on a moral basis. We say we must have peace because war is not profitable, which is the economic reason; or we say say we must have peace because it is immoral to kill, it is irreligious, man is godly in his nature and must not be destroyed, and so on. So there are all these explanations of why we should not have war: the religious, moral, humanitarian, or ethical reasons for peace on the one hand and the rational, economic, or social reasons on the other.

Now, is peace a thing of the mind? If you have a reason, a motive for peace will that bring about peace? If I refrain from killing you because I think it is immoral, is that peaceful? If for economic

reasons I so not join the army because I think is is un-profitable, is that peaceful? If I base my peace on a motive, on a reason, can that bring about peace? If I love you because you are beautiful , because you please me bodily, is that love? The is very important. Most of us have so cultivated or minds, we are so intellectual, that we want to find reasons for not killing, the reasons being the appalling destructiveness of the atomic bomb, the moral and economic arguments for peace, and so on; and we think that the more reasons we have for not killing, the more there will be peace. But can you have peace through a reason? Can peace be made into a cause? Is not the very cause part of the conflict? Is non-violence, is peace an ideal to be pursued and attained eventually through a gradual process of evolution? These are all reasons, rationalizations, are they not?

So if we are at all thoughtful, our question really is whether peace is a result, the outcome of a cause, or whether peace is a state of being, not in the future or in the past but now. If peace, if non-violence is an ideal, surely it indicates that actually you are violent; you are not peaceful. You wish to be peaceful, and you give reasons why you should be peaceful; and. being satisfied with the reasons. you remain violent. Actually, a man who wants peace, who sees the necessity of being peaceful, has no ideal about peace, He does  not make an effort to become peaceful but sees the necessity, the truth of being peaceful. It is only the man who does not see the importance, the necessity, the truth of being peaceful, who makes nonviolence an ideal-which is really only a postponement of peace.  That is what you are doing: your are all worshiping the ideal of peace and in the meantime enjoying violence. You laugh: you are easily amused.  It  is another entertainment: and when you leave this meeting, you will go on exactly as before! Do you expect to have peace by facile arguments and casual talk? You will not have peace because you do not want peace: you are not interested in it; you do not see the importance, the necessity of having peace now, not tomorrow.  It is only when you have no reason for being peaceful that you will have peace.

As long as you have a reason to live, you are not living. are you? You live only when there is no reason, no cause-- you just live. Similarly, as long as you have a reason for peace, you will have no peace. A mind that invents a reason for being peaceful is in conflict. And such a mind will produce chaos and conflict in the world. Just think it over, and you will see. How can the mind that invents reasons for peace be peaceful? You can have very clever arguments and counter-arguments, but is not the very structure of the mind based on violence? The mind is the outcome of time, of yesterday, and it is always in conflict with the present; but the man who really wants to be peaceful now has no reason for it . For the peaceful man, there is no motive for peace. Has generosity a Motive? When you are generous with a motive, is that generosity? When a man renounces the world in order to achieve God, in order to find something greater. is that renunciation? If I Give up this in order to find that, have I really given up anything? If I am peaceful for various reasons, have I found peace?

So then, is not peace a thing far beyond the mind and the inventions of the mind? Most of us, most religious people with their organizations, come to peace through reason, through discipline, through conformity, because there is no direct perception of the necessity, the truth of being peaceful. Peacefulness, that state of peace, is not stagnation; on the contrary, it is a most active state. But the mind can only know the activity of its own creation, which is thought; and thought can never be peaceful; thought is sorrow; thought is conflict. As we know only sorrow and misery, we try to find ways and means to go beyond it, and whatever the mind invents only further increases its own misery, its own conflict, its own strife. You will say that very few will understand this, that very few will ever be peaceful in the right sense of the word. Why do you say that? Is it not because it is a convenient escape for you? You say that peace can never be achieved in the way I am talking about; it is impossible. Therefore you must have reasons for peace; you must have organizations for peace; you must have clever propaganda for peace. But all these methods are obviously mere postponement of peace.

Only when you are directly in touch with the problem, when you see that without peace today you cannot have peace tomorrow, when you have no reason for peace but actually see the truth that without peace life is not possible, creation is not possible, that without peace there can be no sense of happiness-- only when you see the truth of that will you have peace. Then you will have peace without any organizations for peace. For that you must be so vulnerable, you must demand peace with all your heart,  you must find the truth of it for yourself, not through organizations, thought propaganda, though clever arguments for peace and against war. Peace is not the denial of war. Peace is a state of being in which all conflicts and all problems have ceased; it is not a theory, not an ideal to be achieved after ten incarnations, ten years, or ten days. As long as the mind has not understood its own activity, it will create more misery; and the understanding of the mind is the beginning of peace.