The Book of Yourself Newsletter
Issue 38: January 2025
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Instead of improving, the current world situation seems to be getting worse. The populist right-wing leaders and their dictatorial friends seem to be bent on adding to the chaos. Their arbitrary and inept handling of the social, political and economic challenges is increasing the confusion, uncertainty and insecurity both in their own nations and for the world. The utter callousness being displayed by those in power is appalling. They show no empathy, no compassion, and an absolute disregard for the rule of law. The only thing they seem to care about is the promotion of unbridled capitalism and its vulgar displays of affluence and power. In such a climate, democracy degenerates into oligarchy and oligarchy into plutocracy. All that matters is personal wealth and not the common good. The State is then turned into a militaristic corporation intent on territorial and economic expansion. They want to emulate the success of the XIX century robber barons, for which purpose they seek to privatize and deregulate businesses, cancel or cut back on social welfare and aid programs at home and abroad, and to convert everything from prisons to hospitals to education and the army into for-profit private contractors. The good old bourgeois trinity of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity becomes a hollow slogan. There is no brotherhood, for it is every man for himself. Equality is gone because this is about personal aggrandizement, which is responsible for the glaring and widening disparity between the struggling masses and the obscene fortunes of the top one percent. And as for liberty, that’s also gone because the economic and political game is rigged by the moneyed class in its own favor, turning the whole country into their own fiefdom and everyone else into their indentured serfs. This sad situation is not only indicative of a regressive barbaric mentality but of a pervasive degeneration afflicting our time.
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“All over the world human beings are degenerating to a greater or lesser extent. When pleasure, personal or collective, becomes the dominant interest in life – the pleasure of sex, the pleasure of asserting one’s will, the pleasure of excitement, the pleasure of self-interest, the pleasure of power and status, the insistent demand to have one’s own pleasure fulfilled – there is degeneration. When human relationships become casual, based on pleasure, there is degeneration. When responsibility has lost its total meaning, when there is no care for another, or for the earth and the things of the sea, this disregard of heaven and earth is another form of degeneration. When there is hypocrisy in high places, when there is dishonesty in commerce, when lies are part of everyday speech, when there is the tyranny of the few, when only things predominate, there is the betrayal of life. Then killing becomes the only language of life. When love is taken as pleasure, then human beings have cut themselves off from beauty and the sacredness of life.”
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Letter 28, 15 October 1979, The Whole Movement of Life is Learning, pp. 106-107
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Although this statement dates back to 1979, it seems to depict the current situation quite accurately. K attributes our worldwide degeneration to the prevalent hedonism, to pleasure being the dominant interest in life, which leads us to treat our relationships casually, with a total lack of care for another and for all living things. This general irresponsibility towards the whole, this total disregard of heaven and earth, further manifests as hypocrisy in high places and dishonesty in commerce, in lies becoming part of everyday speech, dictatorial and oligarchical governments and rampant materialism. This list encompasses a great deal of what is currently taking place. The whole political discourse is riddled with lies and the only concern driving the socioeconomic elites is with things, not for their intrinsic worth but as status symbols. When such distorted values are the guide of individual and collective action, conflict is inevitable and, as K dramatically puts it, ‘killing becomes the only language of life’. All these wars are about things and about images, which are the product of thought as ambition and greed, thought itself being a material process. So that the image and the thing are the two sides of the same materialist coin of self-interest. And while we might say that love is the child of beauty, when thought turns it into pleasure through the pursuit of remembered sensation, it becomes a factor of dependence, attachment, possessiveness and domination, which leads to conflict and suffering. So there is no love in this and in the momentous drive for self-fulfillment through materialism we become blind to beauty and lose sight of the sacredness of life. Nothing is sacred in such a mindset, for everything is reduced to an instrument of personal gratification. And as for beauty, it becomes the ostentatious display of kitsch that is so dear to the ruling philistines. All of which amounts to corruption, which K attributes to all the sociopolitical systems in the world.
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“Whatever the existing system may be in various parts of the world it is corrupt, degenerate and wholly immoral. You have only to look around you to see this fact. Millions upon millions are spent on armaments throughout the world and all the politicians talk about peace while preparing for war. Religions have declared over and over again the sanctity of peace, but they have encouraged wars and subtle kinds of violence and torture. There are innumerable divisions and sects with their priests, rituals and all the nonsense that goes on in the name of god and religion. Where there is division there must be disorder, struggle, conflict – whether religious, political, economic. Our modern society is based on greed, envy and power. When you consider all this as it actually is – this overpowering commercialism – all this indicates degeneration and basic immorality. To radically change the pattern of our life, which is the basis of all society, is the educator’s responsibility. We are destroying the earth and all the things on it are being destroyed for our gratification.”
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Letters to the Schools,Vol.I, pp. 33-34
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The fact that every nation on earth is spending a fortune on armaments is the clearest proof of the totally degenerate and immoral ways of humanity worldwide. Violence is thus not just accepted as part of life but institutionalized and incorporated as one of the pillars of society. Then the politicians talk of peace and the religious people talk of brotherly love, whereas the very divisive nature of their patriotic and sectarian activities inevitably leads to disorder and conflict. The social foundations of greed, envy and power, with their pervasive and overwhelming commercialism, feed the decadent forces of ambition and war. This is indeed the general pattern, which, a K points out, is leading to the destruction of the earth and all things on it. And what for? For the satisfaction of our desires and their attendant physical and conceptual pleasures, which are the expression of our sensate or sensual values.
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“How did this misery come about, this suffering, not only inwardly but outwardly, this fear and expectation of war, the third world war that is breaking out? What is the cause of it? Surely it indicates the collapse of all moral, spiritual values, and the glorification of all sensual values, of the value of things made by the hand or by the mind. What happens when we have no other values except the value of the things of the senses, the value of the products of the mind, of the hand or of the machine? The more significance we give to the sensual value of things, the greater the confusion, is it not? Again, this is not my theory. You do not have to quote books to find out that your values, your riches, your economic and social existence are based on things made by the hand or by the mind. So we live and function and have our being steeped in sensual values, which means that things, the things of the mind, the things of the hand and of the machine, have become important; and when things become important, belief becomes predominantly significant – which is exactly what is happening in the world, is it not?”
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The First and Last Freedom, pp. 23-24
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From K’s perspective, the misery and suffering we experience, with its haunting expectation of a third world war, is the necessary outcome of the abandonment of moral and spiritual values for the sensual value of things made by the hand, the machine or the mind. This gives the greatest importance to things, which is the whole foundation of our materialistic, hedonistic and consumerist world with all its glittering and ruthless self-worship. Strangely, when this stream of materialism becomes dominant in human affairs, belief experiences a revival, mostly, it would seem, to provide it with a veneer of respectability and to offer it some kind of ideological justification. (Maybe that’s why the most deluded of oligarchs think they have been chosen by god to restore the greatness and prosperity of their respective countries, whereas they are the glaring manifestation of their impending decline.) All such creeds and ideals actually do is to deepen the contradictions inherent to the materialist movement, which is based on self-interest and the pursuit of pride, profit and pleasure.
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K, however, is not content to leave the examination of human degeneration at the external sociopolitical level. For him the crisis is not primarily a matter of politics, economics, technology, climate change and war. These things are the result of the values we uphold and the way we think. The crisis, therefore, is in our consciousness and only when we understand it so deeply that it is radically changed will these problems be solved. Here, in the field of self-knowledge, is where he sees our greatest responsibility, for it is the only effective revolutionary action, not the sporadic and piecemeal protests and reforms. While the world at large might take such a proposal as the typically evasive and impractical navel gazing of the spiritually inclined, K is adamant that only in the understanding of the nature of consciousness will there be a lasting solution to all our problems, for the inner invariably overcomes the outer. This means paying close attention to thought, which K identifies as the key factor of disintegration.
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“It is thought that is the disintegrating factor; for thought has its roots in the known. A life based on thought and its activities, becomes mechanical; however smoothly it may run, it is still mechanical action. Action with motive dissipates energy and so disintegration sets in. All motives, conscious or unconscious, generate from the known. A life of the known, though projected into the future as the unknown, is decay; in that life there is no renewal. Thought can never bring about innocency and humility and yet it is innocency and humility that keep the mind young, sensitive, incorruptible. Freedom from the known is the ending of thought; to die to thought, from moment to moment, is to be free from the known. It is this death that puts an end to decay.”
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Krishnamurti’s Notebook, pg. 232
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How beautifully paradoxical that it is the death or ending of thought as the movement of the known that puts and end to decay, restores the mind’s innocence and humility and keeps it young, sensitive and incorruptible! To die to thought from moment to moment is to be free from the mechanical and disintegrating action of the known… This perception hardly figures in the general assessment of the deeper sources of our human decadence. It does not really mean that we stop thinking, for we need knowledge and thought for all kinds of actions, but it does mean that the ego, the core of self-concern, which is put together by thought, is dissolved. That is the revolution in consciousness and the end of the miserable and violent world we have created.
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Take care, amigos, and let’s see whether we can die to the known and its center of self-concern,
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Photos by J. Gómez Rodríguez: 1. View of the canal, Lelystad, NL; 2. View of an Amsterdam canal, Amsterdam, NL.
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