How are You Going to Meet Life

Coffee and questions with Jiddu Krishnamurti

The following is a transcript of Krishnamurti’s talk with college students, Brockwood Park - 24th June 1971.

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How are you going to meet life when you have passed through here and are so-called educated?

Do you want to be swallowed up by the society, the culture in which you live, or are you going to oppose it, revolt against it, which will be a reaction and not a total action? Are you going to step into the easy way of life, conform, imitate, adjust to the pattern, whatever that pattern be, whether it be the establishment, or an establishment of a different kind, and so on?

Or are you going to be a totally different human being, who is aware and knows he has to meet adversity and opposition, and that therefore there is no easy way of satisfaction? Because most of us want a life of ease, of comfort, without trouble, which is almost impossible; and if you do meet opposition will you run away from it?

"I don't like this place, these people, this job", so I move away, run away from it to do something else which will be satisfactory. Do you use others for your own satisfaction? And is love the use of others, either sexually, or as companionship, or for one's own satisfaction, not superficially but much more deeply?

How are you going to meet all this, which is what life is? The so-called educated people in the world, who have been to college, to university, have got a good job, fit into a place and stay there and advance there. They have their own troubles, their own adversities.

One may pass some exam and get a job, or one may have been educated technologically. But psychologically one doesn't know anything about oneself. One is unhappy, miserable because one can't get this or that, one quarrels with one's husband or wife - you know all that goes on. And they are all very educated people who read books, disregarding the whole field of life. And the non-educated people do the same.

You are going to be educated - I don't know why, but you are going to be - and then what? Lead a comfortable life? Not that one is against comfort, but if one is seeking comfort in life it becomes rather shoddy, rather shallow, and you have to conform to a tremendous extent to the structure of the culture in which you live. And if you revolt against the culture and join a group, which has its own pattern, you have to fit into that too.

Seeing that most human beings throughout the world want to be safe, secure, comfortable, lead a life of indulgence, a life in which they do not have too much opposition - where they conform superficially, but revolt against conforming, become superficially respectable but are inwardly rebellious, have a job, get married, have children and responsibility - but the mind wanting something much more than that, they are discontented, running from one thing to another.

Seeing all of it, not just one segment, one fraction of it, but the whole of the map - what are you all going to do?