Sum up in one sentence the writer‘s advice to people who want to stop violence,according to the passage.
Violence
Now, if you want to stop violence, if you want to stop wars, how much
vitality, how much of yourself, do you give to it? Isn’t it important to
you that your children are killed, that your sons go into the army where they
are bullied and butchered? Don’t you care? My God, if that doesn’t
interest you, what does? Guarding your money? Having a good time? Taking drugs?
Don’t you see that this violence in yourself is destroying your children?
Or do you see it only as some abstraction?
All right then, if you are
interested, attend with all your heart and mind to find out. Don’t just
sit back and say, ‘Well, tell us all about it’. I point out to you
that you cannot look at anger nor at violence with eyes that condemn or justify
and that if this violence is not a burning problem to you, you cannot put those
two things away. So first you have to learn; you have to learn how to look at
anger, how to look at your husband, your wife, your children; you have to
listen to the politician, you have to learn why you are not objective, why you
condemn or justify. You have to learn that you condemn and justify because it
is part of the social structure you live in, your conditioning as a German or
an Indian or a Negro or an American or whatever you happen to have been born,
with all the dulling of the mind that this conditioning results in. To learn,
to discover, something fundamental you must have the capacity to go deeply. If
you have a blunt instrument, a dull instrument, you cannot go deeply. So what
we are doing is sharpening the instrument which is the mind - the mind which
has been made dull by all this justifying and condemning. You can penetrate
deeply only if your mind is as sharp as a needle and as strong as a
diamond.
It is no good just sitting back and asking, ‘How am I to get
such a mind’? You have to want it as you want your next meal, and to have
it you must see that what makes your mind dull and stupid is this sense of
invulnerability which has built walls round itself and which is part of this
condemnation and justification. If the mind can be rid of that, then you can
look, study, penetrate, and perhaps come to a state that is totally aware of
the whole problem.
To investigate the fact of your own anger you must pass
non-judgemental on it, for the moment you conceive of its opposite you condemn
it and therefore you cannot see it as it is. When you say you dislike or hate
someone that is a fact, although it sounds terrible. If you look at it, go into
it completely, it ceases, but if you say, ‘I must not hate; I must have
love in my heart’, then you are living in a hypocritical world with double
standards. To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is,
the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification - then you
understand it so totally that you are finished with it. When you see clearly
the problem is solved.
But can you see the face of violence clearly - the
face of violence not only outside you but inside you, which means that you are
totally free from violence because you have not admitted ideology through which
to get rid of it? This requires very deep meditation, not just a verbal
agreement or disagreement.
You have now read a series of statements but have
you really understood? Your conditioned mind, your way of life, the whole
structure of the society in which you live, prevent you from looking at a fact
and being entirely free from it immediately. You say, ‘I will think about
it; I will consider whether it is possible to be free from violence or not. I
will try to be free.’ That is one of the most dreadful statements you can
make, ‘I will try’. There is no trying, no doing your best. Either
you do it or you don‘t do it. You are admitting time while the house is
burning. The house is burning as a result of the violence throughout the world
and in yourself and you say, ‘Let me think about it. Which ideology is
best to put out the fire?’ When the house is on fire, do you argue about
the colour of the hair of the man who brings the water?
(From Freedom from the Known by J. Krishnamurti)
Then press this button to check your answer: