Jiddhu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

THE ONLY REVOLUTION - EUROPE PART 9

The day began rather cloudy and dull, and the naked trees were silent in the wood. Through the wood you could see crocuses, daffodils and bright yellow forsythia. You looked at it all from a distance and it was a patch of yellow against a green lawn. As you came close to it you were blinded by the brightness of that yellow - which was God. It was not that you identified yourself with the colour, or that you became the expanse that filled the universe with yellow - but that there was no you to look at it. Only it existed, and nothing else - not the voices around you, not the blackbird singing its melody of the morning, not the voices of the passers-by, not the noisy car that scraped by you on the road. It existed, nothing else. And beauty and love were in that existence.

You walked back into the wood. A few rain drops fell, and the wood was deserted. Spring had just come, but here in the north the trees had no leaves. They were dreary from the winter, from the waiting for sunshine and mild weather. A horseman went by and the horse was sweating. The horse, with its grace, its movement, was more than the man; the man, with his breeches, highly polished boots and riding-cap, looked insignificant. The horse had breeding, it held its head high. The man, although he rode the horse, was a stranger to the world of nature, but the horse seemed part of nature, which man was slowly destroying.

The trees were large - oaks, elms and beeches. They stood very silent. The ground was soft with winter's leaves, and here the earth seemed very old. There were few birds. The blackbird was calling, and the sky was clearing.

When yon went back in the evening the sky was very clear and the light on these huge trees was strange and full of silent movement.

Light is an extraordinary thing; the more you watch it the deeper and vaster it becomes; and in its movement the trees were caught. It was startling; no canvas could have caught the beauty of that light. It was more than the light of the setting sun; it was more than your eyes saw. It was as though love was on the land. You saw again that yellow patch of forsythia, and the earth rejoiced. She came with her two daughters but left them to play outside. She was a young woman, rather nice-looking and quite well dressed; she seemed rather impatient and capable. She said her husband worked in some kind of office, and life went by. She had a peculiar sadness which was covered up with a swift smile. She asked: "What is relationship? I have been married to my husband for some years now. I suppose we love each other - but there is something terribly lacking in it."

You really want to go into this deeply?

"Yes, I have come a long way to talk to you about it."

Your husband works in his office, and you work in your house, both of you with your ambitions, frustrations, agonies and fears. He wants to be a big executive and is afraid that he may not make it - that others may get there before him. He is enclosed in his ambition, his frustration, his search for fulfilment, and you in yours. He comes home tired, irritable, with fear in his heart, and brings home that tension. You also

are tired after your long day, with the children, and all the rest of it. You and he take a drink to ease your nerves, and fall into uneasy conversation. After some talk - food, and then the inevitable bed. This is what is called relationship - each one having in his own self-centred activity and meeting in bed; this is called love. Of course, there is a little tenderness, a little consideration, a pat or two on the head for the children. Then there will follow old age and death. This is what is called living. And you accept this way of life.

"What else can one do? We are brought up in it, educated for it. We want security, some of the good things of life. I don't see what else one can do."

Is it the desire for security that binds us? Or is it custom, the acceptance of the pattern of society - the idea of husband, wife and family? Surely in all this there is very little happiness? "There is some happiness, but there is too much to do, too many things to see to. There is so much to read if one is to be well-informed. There isn't much time to think. Obviously one is not really happy, but one just carries on."

All this is called living in relationship - but obviously there is no relationship at all. You may be physically together for a little while but each one is living in his own world of isolation, breeding his own miseries, and there is no actual coming together, not just physically, but at a much deeper and wider level. It is the fault of society, isn't it, of the culture in which we have been brought up and in which we so easily get caught? It is a rotten society, a corrupt and immoral society which human beings have created. It is this that must be changed, and it cannot be changed unless the human being who has built it changes himself.

"I may perhaps understand what you say, and maybe change, but what of him? It gives him great pleasure to strive, to achieve, to become somebody. He is not going to change, and so we are back again where we were - l, feebly attempting to break through my enclosure, and he more and more strengthening his narrow cell of life. What is the point of it all?"

There is no point in this kind of existence at all. We have

made this life, the everyday brutality and ugliness of it, with occasional flashes of delight; so we must die to it all. You know, madam, actually there is no tomorrow. Tomorrow is the invention of thought in order to achieve its shoddy ambitions and fulfilment. Thought builds the many tomorrows, but actually there is no tomorrow. To die tomorrow is to live completely today. When you do, the whole of existence changes. For love is not tomorrow, love is not a thing of thought, love has no past or future. When you live completely today there is a great intensity in it, and in its beauty - which is untouched by ambition, by jealousy or by time - there is relationship not only with man but with nature, with the flowers, the earth and the heavens. In that there is the intensity of innocence; living, then, has a wholly different meaning.