Violence, at its root, is the willful mental force exerted to close the (conceptual) gap between what is, and (a concept of) what should or could be. (Yes, I’ve seen this violence within me…) So, violence arises from the mind’s judgment of and aversion/resistance to what is. Peace is seeing and wholly living in what is. And then, what *must be* arises spontaneously. In such spontaneous arising, the concomitant physical action may have the appearance of resistance or change-making, but with no internal judgment, aversion or resistance, there is complete harmony and peace in heart, mind, body and action.
A few passages from a seminal book I’m revisiting after a decade:
“Is this problem of violence out there or here? Do you want to solve the problem in the outside world or are you questioning violence itself as it is in you? If you are free from violence in yourself the question arises, “How am I to live in a world full of violence, acquisitivenes, greed, envy, brutality?” That is the inevitable question which is invariably asked. When you ask such a question it seems to me you are not actually living peacefully. If you live peacefully you will have no problem at all.”
*****
“We are trying to understand violence as a fact, not as an idea, as a fact which exists in the human being, and the human being is myself. And to go into the problem I must be *completely* vulnerable, open, to it. I must expose myself to myself — not necessarily expose myself to you because you may not be interested — but I must be in a state of mind that demands to see this thing right to the end and at no point stops and says I will go no further.”
*****
“When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a (hu)man seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of (hu)mankind.”
*****
“Some of us, in order to rid ourselves of violence, have used a concept, an ideal, called non-violence, and we think by having an ideal of the opposite to violence, non-violence, we can get rid of the fact, the actual — but we cannot… If you want to understand the actual you must give your whole attention, all your energy, to it. That attention and energy are distracted when you create a fictitious, ideal world. So can you completely banish the ideal? The (hu)man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, what love is, has no concept at all. He only lives in *what is*.”
— J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
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