Beyond Violence
[ JK, 1973, KFI Books | Click here to read more about JK ]

"We have built a society which is violent", says JK, "and we, as human beings, are violent; the environment, the culture in which we live is the product of our endeavour, of our struggle, of our pain, of our appalling brutalities. So the most important question is : is it possible to end this tremendous violence in oneself?" This question is central to 'Beyond Violence'.

JK is the most maverick philosopher - if one may use that word. When he dissolved 'The Order of the Star' before a gathering of thousands, who had been ardently waiting for the making of the world teacher in him, he said, "truth is a pathless land." For a statement so emphatic, so shattering to those who rest their hopes in a 'leader' to open the doors of enlightenment for them, one has to go back 25 centuries in time - the message of Buddha - 'Be a light unto yourself.' For a man who earnestly believed this all his life, through thousands of lectures and discussions all over the world, the solution for any problem wasn't anywhere outside but in the problem itself. His focus wasn't on what to think, but how to think.

JK deals with facts. He has no comfortable words, no method or no foothold to offer. On the contrary, he always urged people to do away with them, to throw aside delusions, to reject authority of whatever kind. "If you are following anybody you are destroying yourself and the other", he says.

"Violence", Krishnamurti says, "is like a stone dropped in a lake: the waves spread and spread; at the centre is the 'me'. As long as the 'me' survives in any form, very subtly or grossly, there must be violence." The book contains authentic reports of talks and discussions in 1970 in Santa Monica, San Diego, London, Brockwood Park (England) and Rome.

Violence has always been understood only perfunctorily. In its subtle forms - which, in fact, are more harmful and are precursors to its gross forms as homicide or genocide - violence has always been rationalised or justified as 'natural.' Man never wanted to wholly give it up, he assumed some violence as natural and only wanted to modify the expression when society was involved.

It had always been met only through a veil called 'non-violence.' Non-violence - as it is understood and practised - isn't absence of violence but only suppression of violence. When the whole of individual is consumed by the flame of violence, a fragment - the one which has been taught about non-violence, or the one on whom it had been imposed as a virtue - takes over the control, assumes authority and suppresses all other fragments so that the resulting action comes out in a socially agreeable manner. And control itself is violence! Man never really realised his authority over himself could be as detrimental to his freedom as that of another individual's is over him. Never before has the hebetude and foolishness of our dealing with facts by an ideal been so bared.

Any sort of authority or control - either by an individual on himself or over others - is the very root of violence, in JK's perspective. So, his way isn't of dealing with the non-existent, imaginary opposites, but remaining wholly with the fact and going beyond it. Thus, negation is the most positive action. And, unlike most other thinkers, he doesn't introduce time as a factor. No wonder then, 'becoming' is one of those words which JK never had respect for.

At a time when mere names of gods or places can incite man to adorn the garb of barbarity and throw an entire nation into disorder, it calls for our looking at violence in a new way, more closely than we ever did before. And we may realise, our condemning the riots and killings notwithstanding, how violent we too are. And that realisation itself might end violence. So, the solution for violence is not in non-violence as an ideal, but in going beyond violence.

'Beyond Violence', simply, is a collection of talks and discussions, in the form of questions and answers, that can change your life. If you are serious.

- Vj

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