12 Aug One comes upon virtue; it cannot be cultivated any more than one can cultivate love, or humility (JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI)
We have created society and that society has conditioned us. Our minds are tortured and heavily conditioned by a morality which is not moral; the morality of society is immorality, because society admits and encourages violence, greed, competition, ambition and so on, which are essentially immoral. There is no love, consideration, affection, tenderness, and the “moral respectability” of society is utterly disorderly. A mind that has been trained for thousands of years to accept, to obey and conform, cannot possibly be highly sensitive and therefore highly virtuous. We are caught in this trap. So then, what is virtue? – because that is necessary.
Without the right foundation a mathematician does not go very far. In the same way, if one would understand and go beyond to something which is of a totally different dimension, one must lay the right foundation; and the right foundation is virtue, which is order – not the order of society which is disorder. Without order, how can the mind be sensitive, alive, free?
Virtue is obviously not the repetitive behaviour of conforming to a pattern which has become respectable, which the establishment, whether in this country or the rest of the world, accepts as morality. One must be very clear on this point as to what virtue is. One comes upon virtue; it cannot be cultivated any more than one can cultivate love, or humility. One comes upon it – the nature of virtue, its beauty, its orderliness – when one knows what it is not; through negation one finds out what is positive. One does not come upon virtue by defining the positive and then imitating it – that is not virtue at all. Cultivating various forms of “what should be”, which are called virtue – like non-violence – practising these day after day until they become mechanical, has no meaning.
Virtue, surely, is something from moment to moment, like beauty, like love – it is not something you have accumulated and from which you act. This is not just a verbal statement for acceptance or non-acceptance. There is disorder – not only in society but in ourselves, total disorder – but it is not that there is somewhere in us order and the rest of the field is in disorder; that is another duality and therefore contradiction, confusion and struggle. Where there is disorder there must be choice and conflict. It is only the mind that is confused that chooses, but for a mind that sees everything very clearly there is no choice. If I am confused, my actions will be confused.
A mind that sees things very clearly, without distortion, without a personal bias, has understood disorder and is free of it; such a mind is virtuous, orderly – not orderly according to the Communists, the Socialists or the Capitalists or any church, but orderly because it has understood the whole measure of disorder within itself. Order, inwardly, is akin to the absolute order of mathematics. Inwardly, the highest order is as an absolute; and it cannot come about through cultivation, not through practice, oppression, control, obedience and conformity. It is only a mind that is highly ordered that can be sensitive, intelligent.
One has to be aware of disorder within oneself, aware of the contradictions, the dualistic struggles, the opposing desires, aware of the ideological pursuits and their unreality. One has to observe “that which is” without condemnation, without judgment, without any evaluation. I see the microphone is the microphone – not as something I like or dislike, considering it good or bad – I see it as it is. In the same way one has to see oneself as one is, not calling what one sees bad, good – evaluating (which does not mean doing what one likes). Virtue is order; one cannot have a blueprint of it; if one does, and if one follows it, one has become immoral, disorderly.
You Are The World
Krishnamurti
