"Your consciousness is the consciousness of mankind.
If that is the truth to you, not an idea, then what takes place? One has
lived as an individual, fighting, struggling to express oneself,
demanding – you follow? – as a limited, contained, narrow individual. And
it is very, very difficult to see the truth that you are the rest of
mankind, that in you is the whole of man and therefore his fears, his
anxieties, his mischief, his arrogance, his pride, his violence, all
that, and his sorrow. And mankind has lived with this sorrow.
We have accepted sorrow as part of life, and if we don't accept it
we run away from it through every form of entertainment,
religious and otherwise. Or we personify this sorrow into an
image, which the Christians have done, and think they have solved this
problem.
You are the sorrow of mankind. Do you understand? What an enormous
perception that is, if you see it. That your sorrow is not yours. Then
you don't cry. Then you don't shed tears about your little wounds, your
little failures, your little anxieties, and so on. But when you realise
you are the representative of all mankind it brings about an enormous
sense of vitality, energy. It is only when you are thinking about
yourself, your sorrow, that vast energy is limited into a small little
channel, and it becomes rather dirty.
Now, is it possible for sorrow to end? If there is an ending in one human
being – please go with me for a little while – if there is the ending of
sorrow in one human being, who is the representative of all humanity,
that ending affects the consciousness of mankind. Do you understand?
Stalin has affected the whole consciousness of man; Hitler, and all the
rest of those world people – national people. Through the priest, the
idea of Jesus Christ has affected mankind. Right? You will accept that
more easily. So when there is a fundamental ending of sorrow in a human
being who is the representative of all humanity, then that brings about
an action in the totality of mankind – I wonder if I am making this
clear? Capito? Do you see the truth of this, the fact of this?"
J. Krishnamurti
Public Talk 6 – Saanen, Switzerland, 1978
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