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J. Krishnamurti
Chapter 12
Fragmentation and Unity
Chapter 12, from Beyond Violence, by J. Krishnamurti
[This chapter has been produced for online distribution and is not a facsimile of any published edition. For
reference purposes, please see an edition published in book form.]
12
FRAGMENTATION AND UNITY
Questioner: When I observe myself, I see a very rapid movement of thought and feeling and I
am unable to watch one thought to its conclusion.
KRISHNAMURTI: There is always a chain of events going on. What are you to
do? When you watch and try to understand one thought, go to its very end,
another arises; this goes on all the time. There is your problem: as you are
watching you are the multiplication of thoughts, and you cannot finish one
thought to its end. What are you to do? Put the question differently: why does
the mind endlessly chatter, why does this soliloquy go on? What happens if it
does not go on? Is the chattering the result of wanting to be occupied with
something? If you are not occupied, what takes place? If you are a housewife
you are occupied with housekeeping, or you are occupied as a businessman—
occupation has become a mania. Why is the mind demanding this occupation,
this chattering? What happens if it does not chatter, if it is not occupied? Is
there fear behind it? Fear of what?
KRISHNAMURTI: Naturally. So the question is: not so much how to stop the
increase of fear, but rather, can fear end?
What is fear? You may not feel fear as you are sitting here, so perhaps you
may not be able to take that and examine it and learn from it now. But you can
immediately perceive that you depend, can you not? You depend on your friend,
on your book, on your ideas, on your husband; psychological dependency is
there, constantly. Why do you depend? Is it because it gives you comfort, a
sense of security and of well-being, companionship? When that dependency fails
you become jealous, angry and all that follows. Or, you try to cultivate freedom
from dependency, to become independent. Why does the mind do all this? Is it
because in itself it is empty, dull, stupid, shallow? Through dependency it feels
that it is something more.
The mind chatters because it has to be occupied with something or other;
this occupation varies from the highest occupation of theå‘religious’ man to the
lowest occupation of the soldier and so on. The mind is obviously occupied
because otherwise it might discover something of which it is deeply afraid,
something which it may not be able to solve.
What is fear? Does it not relate to something I have done in the past, or
something that I imagine might happen in the future?—the past incident and
the future accident; the past illness and the future recurrence of the pain of it.
Now it is thought that creates this fear; thought breeds fear, just as thought
sustains and nourishes pleasure. Then can thought end? Can it come to an end
so that it no longer gives a continuity to fear or to pleasure? We want pleasure,
we want it to continue; but fear, let us put it away. We never see that the two go
together.
It is the machinery of thinking that is responsible, that gives the continuity
to pleasure and fear. Can this machinery stop? When you see the extraordinary
beauty of a sunset, see it; but do not qualify it with thought, saying, ‘I must
treasure it in the memory, or have it again.’ To see it and so end it is action.
Most of us live in inaction, therefore there is endless chattering.
Questioner: But when the chattering does go on, do you just observe it?