Introduction
During his visits to California in the nineteen sixties and seventies, Krishnamurti stayed in Malibu, in a house on the sea coast, and his hostess was Mary Zimbalist. In 1970 he held many small group discussions with guests who had been invited by Mary to her residence to participate in these discussions. This book is a compilation of eight discussions and they cover a range of concerns that deal with the condition of the human mind.
Krishnamurti probes deeply into the various questions raised by the participants. He explores the problems of living in constant comparison, the root of fragmentation of the mind, the notion of self-improvement, the demand for security, the need for order in daily life, and, finally, how one comes upon the sacred. He explains that thought is always the activity of comparison. Thought is the past and the past is always comparing - I am, I was; I am this today, I will be that tomorrow; I was unhappy yesterday, I will be happy today. He also poses many fundamental questions: 'When I put the question why I compare, am I listening to a verbal answer that will come out of the past? Or am I listening without the past?'
Krishnamurti denies the very notion of self-improvement. He points out that the 'me' is a bundle of anxieties, fears, despairs, and guilt. The refinement of that is only refined fear, refined anxiety, and refined butchery. Still this refinement is sought after as self-improvement. In fact, all such efforts we make towards self-improvement is only a constant battle, constant striving, constant adjustment, and constant conflict between what I am and what I should be. Division in any form inevitably brings about conflict whether it is brought about by opinion, by belief, by knowledge, or by experience. The 'me' itself is fragmented, and each fragment is opposed to another fragment within that 'me'. One fragment imposes what it considers improvement on other fragments. As a result, in any self-improvement activity there is only conflict and perpetuation of misery.
In any form of control, there is always fragmentation where one thought or fragment assumes the superior position as the censor and suppresses everything else. Krishnamurti questions whether the censor itself arises because we are not completely secure, both psychologically and physically. The innate demand of the mind, psychologically, is to be completely secure, and so it seeks security in relationship all the time. Therefore it becomes dependent on relationships and in that dependence, though there is pain, jealousy, anxiety, fear, apprehension, and guilt, it tries to find security. When the mind sees that it is caught in a trap of dependence and the total insecurity of such dependence, it breaks free.
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