Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti

by J. Krishnamurti

“This requires careful and detailed thought, but I think I am beginning to understand it. You lay emphasis on the individual, but not as a separate and antagonistic force within society. Now the second point. I have always worked for an ideal, and I don’t understand your denial of it. Would you mind going into this problem?” Our present morality is based on the past or the future, on the traditional, or the what ought to be. The what ought to be is the ideal in opposition to what has been, the future in conflict with the past. Nonviolence is the ideal, the what should be; and the what has been is violence. The what has been projects the what should be; the ideal is homemade, it is projected by its own opposite, the actual. The antithesis is an extension of the thesis; the opposite contains the element of its own opposite. Being violent, the mind projects its opposite, the ideal of nonviolence. It is said that the ideal helps to overcome its own opposite; but does it? Is not the ideal an avoidance, an escape from the what has been, or from what is? The conflict between the actual and the ideal is obviously a means of postponing the understanding of the actual, and this conflict only introduces another problem which helps to cover up the immediate problem. The ideal is a marvelous and respectable escape from the actual. The ideal of nonviolence, like the collective utopia, is fictitious; the ideal, the what should be, helps us to cover up and avoid what is. The pursuit of th...