Question: If you go to the end of conflict for yourself, must you then just accept the conflict which is in the world?

KRISHNAMURTI: Can you divide the world so very neatly and definitely from yourself? Is the world so very different from yourself? You see, sirs, I think, if I may say so, that there is something which has not been understood by us. For me, conflict is a very destructive thing, inwardly as well as outwardly, and I want to find out if there is a way of living without being in conflict. So I do not say to myself that it is inevitable, and I do not explain to myself that as long as I am acquisitive, there must be conflict. I want to understand it, to go through it, to see if I can shatter it, to see if it is possible to live without it. I am hungry to do that, and no amount of description, explanation is going to satisfy me—which means that I have to understand this whole process of consciousness, which is the ‘me’, and in understanding that, I am understanding the world. The two things are not separate. My hate is the hate of the world; my jealousy, acquisitiveness, my urge for success—all this belongs also to the world. So can my mind shatter all this? If I say, “Tell me the way to shatter it,” then I am merely using a method to conquer conflict, and that is not the understanding of conflict.

So I see that I must keep awake to conflict, be aware of it, watch every movement of it in my ambitions, my greed, my compulsive urges, and so on. And if I just watch them, perhaps I shall find out, but there is no guarantee. I feel I know very well what is essential if I would find out—namely, a passion, an intensity, a disregard for words and explanations so that the mind becomes very sharp, alert, observant of every form of conflict. That is the only way, surely, to go to the very end of conflict.

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti -Volume XII 1961: There Is No Thinker, Only Thought
Jiddu Krishnamurti

It means, really, going into the whole question of self-fulfillment and the conflict of the opposites, and to see if there is any reality for the thinker, the experiencer who is everlastingly craving for more experience, more sensation, wider horizons.

Is there only thinking and no thinker, only a state of experiencing and no experiencer? The moment the experiencer comes into being through memory, there must be conflict. I think that is fairly simple if you have thought about it. It is the very root of self-contradiction. With most of us the thinker has become all-important but not the thought, the experiencer but not the state of experiencing.

This really involves the question we were discussing the other day of what we mean by seeing. Do we see life, another person, a tree through ideas, opinions, memories? Or are we directly in communion with life, the person, or the tree? I think we see through ideas, memories, and judgments, and that therefore we never see. In the same way, do I see myself as I ‘actually am’, or do I see myself as what I ‘should be’, or what I ‘have been’? In other words, is consciousness divisible? We talk very easily about the unconscious and the conscious mind and the many different layers in them both. There are such layers, such divisions, and they are in opposition with each other. Have we to go through all these layers one by one and discard them or try to understand them—which is a very tiresome and ineffectual way of dealing with the problem—or is it possible to brush all the divisions, the whole thing aside and be aware of the total consciousness?

The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti -Volume XII 1961: There Is No Thinker, Only Thought
Jiddu Krishnamurti