Question: In India today we see a growing disregard of all sensitive feeling and expression. Culturally we are a feeble, imitative country; our thinking is smug and superficial. Is there a way to break through and contact the source of creativity? Can we create a new culture?
Krishnamurti: Sir, this is not only a question for Indians, it is a human question; it is asked in America, in England, and elsewhere. How to bring about a new culture, a creativity that is explosive, abundant, so that the mind is not imitative? A poet, a painter longs for that, so let us inquire into it.
What is civilisation, what is culture as we know it now? It is the result of the collective will, is it not? The culture we know is the expression of many desires unified through religion, through a traditional moral code, through various forms of sanction. The civilisation in which we live is the result of the collective will, of many acquisitive desires and, therefore, we have a culture, a civilisation, which is also acquisitive. That is fairly clear.
Now, within this acquisitive society, which is the result of the collective will, we can have many reformations, and we do occasionally bring about a bloody revolution, but it is always within the pattern because our response to any challenge, which is always new, is limited by the culture in which we have been brought up. The culture of India is obviously imitative, traditional; it is made up of innumerable superstitions, of belief and dogma, the repetition of words, the worship of images made by the hand and by the mind. That is our culture, that is our society, broken up into various classes, all based on acquisitiveness; and if we do become non-acquisitive in this world, we are acquisitive in some other world, we want to acquire God, and so on. So our culture is essentially based on acquisitiveness, worldly and spiritual; and when occasionally there is an individual who breaks away from all acquisitiveness and knows what it is to be creative, we immediately idolise him, make him into our spiritual leader or teacher, thereby stifling ourselves.
As long as we belong to the collective culture, collective civilisation, there can be no creativeness. It is the man who understands this whole process of the collective, with all its sanctions and beliefs, and who ceases to be either positively or negatively acquisitive—it is only such a man who knows the meaning of creativeness, not the sannyasi who renounces the world and pursues God, which is merely his particular form of acquisitiveness. The man who realises the whole significance of the collective, and who breaks away from it because he knows what is true religion, is a creative individual, and it is such action that brings about a new culture. Surely, that is always the way it happens, is it not?
The truly religious man is not the one who practices so-called religion, who holds to certain dogmas and beliefs, who performs certain rituals or pursues knowledge, for he is merely seeking another form of gratification. The man who is truly religious is completely free from society, he has no responsibility toward society; he may establish a relationship with society, but society has no relationship with him. Society is organised religion, the economic and social structure, the whole environment in which we have been brought up, and does that society help man to find God, truth—it matters little what name you give it—or does the individual who is seeking God create a new society? That is, must not the individual break away from the existing society, culture, or civilisation? Surely, in the very breaking away he discovers what is truth, and it is that truth which creates the new society, the new culture.
I think this is an important question to ponder over. Can the man who belongs to society—it does not matter what society—ever find truth, God? Can society help the individual in that discovery, or must the individual, you and I, break away from society? Surely, it is in the very process of breaking away from society that there is the understanding of what is truth, and that truth then creates the ripples which become a new society, a new culture. The sannyasi, the monk, the hermit renounces the world, renounces society, but his whole pattern of thinking is still conditioned by society; he is still a Christian or a Hindu, pursuing the ideal of Christianity or of Hinduism. His meditations, his sacrifices, his practices, are all essentially conditioned and, therefore, what he discovers as truth, as God, as the absolute, is really his own conditioned reaction. Hence, society cannot help man to find out what is truth. Society’s function is to limit the individual, to hold him within the boundary of respectability. Only the man who understands this whole process, whose action is not a reaction, can find out what is truth, and it is the truth that creates a new culture, not the man who pursues truth.
I think this is fairly clear and simple; it sounds complicated, but it is not. Truth brings about its own action. But the man who is seeking truth and acting, however worthy and noble he may be, only creates further confusion and misery. He is like the reformer who is merely concerned with decorating the prison walls, with bringing more light, more lavatories, or what you will, into the prison, whereas, if you understand this whole problem of how the mind is conditioned by society, if you allow truth to act and do not act according to what you think is truth, then you will find that such action brings about its own culture, its own civilisation, a new world which is not based on acquisitiveness, on sorrow, on strife, on belief. It is the truth that will bring about a new society, not the communists, the Christians, the Hindus, the Buddhists, or the Muslims. To respond to any challenge according to one’s conditioning is merely to expand the prison, or to decorate its bars. It is only when the mind understands and is free from the conditioning influences which have been imposed upon it, or which it has created for itself, that there is the perception of truth, and it is the action of that truth which brings into being a new society, a new culture.
That is why it is very important for a country like this not to impose upon itself the superficial culture of the West nor, because it is confused, to return to the old, to the Puranas, to the Vedas. It is only a confused mind that wants to return to something dead, and the important thing is to understand why there is confusion. There is confusion, obviously, when the mind does not understand, when it does not respond totally, integrally to something new, to any given fact.
Take the fact of war, for example. If you respond to it as a Hindu who believes in ahimsa, you say, ‘I must practice nonviolence,’ and if you happen to be a nationalist, your response is nationalistic, whereas the man who sees the truth of war, which is the fact that war is destructive in itself, and who lets that truth act, does not respond in terms of any society, in terms of any theory or reform. Truth is neither yours nor mine, and as long as the mind interprets or translates that truth, we create confusion. That is what the reformers do, what all the saints have done who have tried to bring about a reformation in a certain social order. Because they translate truth to bring about a given reform, that reform breeds more misery and hence needs further reform.
To perceive what is truth there must be a total freedom from society, which means a complete cessation of acquisitiveness, of ambition, of envy, of this whole process of becoming. After all, our culture is based on becoming somebody, it is built on the hierarchical principle—the one who knows and the one who does not know, the one who has and the one who has not. The one who has not is everlastingly struggling to have, and the one who does not know is forever pushing to acquire more knowledge, whereas the man who does not belong to either, his mind is very quiet, completely still, and it is only such a mind that can perceive what is truth and allow that truth to act in its own way. Such a mind does not act according to a conditioned response; it does not say, ‘I must reform society.’ The truly religious man is not concerned with social reform, he is not concerned with improving the old, rotting society because it is truth and not reform that is going to create the new order. I think if one sees this very simply and very clearly, the revolution itself will take place.