Theos-Talk Archives (December 1997 Message tl00041)

In ML to APS, there is a statement that leave your world and you have to
come to ours. Looks like what K talks about in the following excerpt a
friend e-mailed me. Worth thinking about.

mkr
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  Questioner:  You say that we should revolt against society, and at same
               time you say that we should not have ambition.  Is not the
               desire to improve society an ambition?

  Krishnamurti:  I have very carefully explained what I mean by revolt, but
  I shall use two different words to make it much clearer.  To revolt within
  society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain
  reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the
  prison walls;  and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny.  Do
  you see the difference?  Revolt within society is like the mutiny of
  prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison;  but
  revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society,
  and that is creative revolution.
    Now, if you as an individual break away from society, is that action
  motivated by ambition?  If it is, then you have not broken away at all, you
  are still within the prison, because the very basis of society is ambition,
  acquisitiveness, greed.  But if you understand all that and bring about a
  revolution in your own heart and mind, then you are no longer ambitious,
  you are no longer motivated by envy, greed, acquisitiveness, and therefore
  you will be entirely outside of a society which is based on those things.
  Then you are a creative individual and in your action there will be the
  seed of a different culture.
    So there is a vast difference between the action of creative revolution,
  and the action of revolt or mutiny within society.  As long as you are
  concerned with mere reform, with decorating the bars and walls of the
  prison, you are not creative.  Reformation always needs further reform, it
  only brings more misery, more destruction.  Whereas, the mind that
  understands this whole structure of acquisitiveness, of greed, of ambition
  and breaks away from it--such a mind is in constant revolution.  It is an
  expansive, a creative mind;  therefore, like a stone thrown into a pool of
  still water, its action produces waves, and those waves will form a
  different civilization altogether."
                       -- Krishnamurti, "Think On These Things", pp. 155-156