Our Problems arise because we are Conditioned

QUESTION: Do you have a technique which I can learn from you, so that I, too, can carry your message to those who are full of sorrow?

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI : Sir, what do you mean by carrying a message? Do you mean repeating the words – propaganda? The very nature of propaganda is to condition the mind. Every form of propaganda – the Communist propaganda, the religious propaganda, and so on – is to condition the mind, is it not? If you learn a technique as you call it, a way, and you learn it by heart and repeat it, you will be a good propagandist; if you are keen, clever, if you are capable of using words, you will condition those that hear you in a new way instead of the old way, but it is still conditioning; it is still limited. And that is our problem, is it not?

Our problems arise because we are conditioned. Our education conditions us. Is it possible for the mind ever to be free from conditioning? You can only discover that state. You cannot say whether it is possible or not possible. When you ask, “Have you a technique?” what do you mean? Perhaps you mean a method, a system, which you learn like a schoolboy and repeat it. Sir, surely the problem is something much more fundamental, radically different, is it not? There is no technique to learn. You do not have to carry my message, what you carry is your message, not mine, sirs.

This existence, this misery, this confusion is your problem. If you understand it, if you can understand the experience of a conditioned mind and go beyond, then you will be the person who is teaching; then there will be no teacher and no disciple. But then, you have to understand yourself, not learn my technique or carry my message.

Sir, what is important is to understand that this is our world, that together we can build this world happily, that we – you and I – are related together, that what you do and what I do inwardly matters, that how we think is important, and that thought, which is always conditioned, will not solve our problem. What will solve our problem is to understand the ways of our thinking.

The moment we understand how we think, there will be a radical change inwardly; we will no longer be Hindus, Christians, Communists, socialists, or capitalists; we shall be human beings, human beings with passion, with love, with consideration. That cannot come about by merely learning a technique or carrying somebody’s message.

You cannot have love through technique. You can have sensation through a technique, but that is not love. Love is something that cannot be told, that cannot be carried across through newspapers or through techniques or through propaganda. It must be felt, it must be understood. But if you repeat love, love, love, it has no meaning. You will know of that love when the mind is quiet, when the mind is free from its conditioning, from its anxieties, from its fears. And it is that love which is the true revolution that will alter the whole process of our being.

Source – Jiddu Krishnamurti, First Talk in Bombay 1953